I told him I wanted the same.
He said only Karen could give him a family.
I tried to tell him I understood, but instead I threw my elbow into his cheekbone and twisted atop him and strangled him.
But my heart just wasn’t in it, and I let up and he laughed it off. Told me to go sleep this one off, that I was drunk—asking me why I would come into his bedroom, naked, and attack him. Told me to go to my room.
I said, “OK, dad,” and did.
He laughed. He laughed and that laugh bounced down the hall after me like a hundred rubber balls.
I ducked and covered and pressed my ears closed until they had all passed.
Samuel was a good guy.
***
“Say ahhhh,” Harold lisps.
I awake to the taste of nickel and blood and a slight pressure on my tongue.
Behind me, Natasha claps and hops up and down, Harold’s personal cheerleader.
Harold’s got one hand on my bare shoulder, his other hand’s manipulating a pair of pliers, which are stuck inside my mouth, gripping my tongue. His face is shoved right in front of mine, and his eyes are big and wild, focused on my pulsating tongue.
I try to scream out but that only causes more pain and makes Harold apply more pressure on the pliers.
He’s twisting and turning those pliers, corkscrewing my tongue and I’m drooling a thick string of bloody spit down my bruised torso. My nipples are black and numb from all the matches they’ve held to them.
“Ah-ah-ah,” Harold warns when I try to pull my head back from him.
He just applies more pressure.
“Your tongue, Jacky Boy, was exactly the thing your sister worried about, wasn’t it?” he asks, staring into my gaping jaws.
“Were you a blabbermouth, Jack?” Karen asks from behind me. “Huh? Were you a big tattle-tale? Did you enjoy getting your sister into trouble?”
And I did. I told on her all the time when we were kids. Because I hated her. I had to share a room with the little shit and she was always following me around and telling on me every chance she got—every time she caught me smoking dope or jerking off into mom’s panties.
I was twelve. I didn’t really know what I was doing.
So, I always wanted to get back at her. In some sick fantasy, I hoped to get my parents angry enough at her to kill her. Or, at least send her to live with some long lost relative they never bothered to tell me about.
But they didn’t. And in the end, my sister always forgave me. And in the end, she always looked out for me.
“A fragile psyche” is what the doctors said I had when social services put us through all their examinations and evaluations before leaving Karen in my care since I was eighteen and technically an adult.
From then on, Karen always tried to handle me with kid gloves.
Right now, she’s nowhere to be found, however.
Gasps and croaking noises fill the room.
Behind Harold, the TV is playing that old video, again, of me choking Samuel’s mother to death.
I mean, of that actor that looks like my father strangling some old bat.
I’m pretty sure it’s just a scene from Dark Shadows or The Twilight Zone.
Harold’s got a good grip on the pliers now, and he’s holding them with both hands, slowly, ever-so slowly, pulling. My red, raw tongue slips past my front teeth, sandpapers over my lips, and is graced with a breeze of Harold’s salty martini breath. He’s breathing heavy, concentrating intensely, and grinning through squeaks of laughter.
Natasha skips circles around us, pounding her feet into the wood floor, twirling, clapping, and giggling in some demonic dance.
My tongue stretches like pink taffy as Harold pulls and pulls and I begin to consider biting down once, forcefully, in order to sever the offending appendage and be done with today’s bit of torture.
I’m sure I could soon sleep if I could just get my jaws to chomp down on that useless slab of muscle like it was a fat piece of sushi.
When my tongue is yanked impossibly far out of my mouth, and that pink string of flesh that tethers tongue to mouth is about to sever, Harold lets go and my tongue, like a cartoon, rolls back inside my mouth, feeling suddenly too large for my mouth.
I want to spit it out, this big, soft foreign object in my dry mouth.
And then I’m choking on it. Choking on my swollen tongue. Natasha and Harold standing over me, watching, emotionless.
For some unknown reason, I’m still not opening my eyes fully. I could make it all go away. My eyes are….
The edge of my vision warms and starts to collapse.
The veins in my forehead bulge and my ears plug up like I’m 35,000 feet in the air.
I’m panicked, but filled with hope.
I’m fine with dying. I’m fine with letting go of the world.
Just not the opening of my eyes.
You learn something new every day.
Just when my pinhole vision seems to be promising eternal darkness, Harold’s long, skinny fingers are rummaging around inside my mouth, tasting of olive juice and Natasha’s vaginal secretions and asshole.
He pulls my tongue out of the back of my throat and stands back from me, crossing his arms like a hero. Natasha leans down to me, her face close to mine, her eyes searching my narrowed eyes.
“Oh, thank goodness. We thought we were going to lose you there, Jacky,” she says with an actress’s dramatic flair.
There’s an odd sensation somewhere on my body and I realize it’s my shriveled, soft, lumpy cock and balls in Natasha’s hands. She’s gripping and grabbing and rolling them around like baker’s dough.
She leans into kiss me but I resist until she’s squeezing my balls so hard I have to open up. She takes my puffed up tongue in her mouth and sucks on it, grates her teeth on it, and pulls back, wiping her mouth.
I’m about to pass out, thankfully.
Before I do, I ask in the guttural, choked up voice of the deaf, “Why… why are you… doing this to me?”
My tongue’s too big for my mouth. The tip of it rests between my lips, like a puppy’s. I’m staring down at my exposed kneecap. At all the bouquets of black and blue confirming this body is still living, and real.
“Well, that’s obvious, isn’t it?” Natasha asks.
Saliva and blood spilling from my stretched lips, I lift my lolling head to meet Natasha’s stare as she stands next to a very serious-looking Harold.
“You killed my sister,” she says.
***
I come to in the bare, windowless room that’s furnished only with a single chair and portraits of my father on the wall. There’s a dozen different portraits of him. Three per wall. Some of them may be me. All of them may be me, in fact.
I don’t know.
The one without the head is probably him, though.
I’m lying on the floor, stretched out before the chair beneath the single hanging light bulb.
This can’t be the same room, though, as the one I’d gotten stuck in, because there’s a little black and white TV on in the corner, replaying something.
It’s footage from the security camera that’s stationed in the back corner of the house, aimed at the garage and a portion of the backyard.
I know it’s not live footage, because the tape is clearly sped up, the shadows and slight motions of the sunflowers in the breeze are quick and jarred and spastic.
Squinting, I focus, for no reason I can think of, directly on one sunflower, until it becomes only pixelated squares of greys.
I envision worms Slinkying into my ears, burrowing holes into my brain.
My brain is a wormhole.
From my mouth sprouts a giant, evil sunflower.
It stretches into the dark void of space, its stalk an extension of my esophagus.
Its roots gripping my brain, where the worms rest.
A strong, cosmic gust shakes the sunflower, and bits of pollen, seed, and fire fly from it.
S
omething called a solar system forms and swirls around it.
Orbits are established.
On the outskirts of that solar system, more galactic winds and explosions.
From my one sunflower, the universe expands, grows, and exists.
***
I find I haven’t moved, and I’m in the same room, when consciousness returns, like a cruel joke. The TV’s still playing the security footage in fast-forward. It’s the only light in the room now, the light bulb having burnt out. It fills the room with orbital flashes, like a capsule spinning in outer space, in Earth-orbit.
After a time, Karen enters the picture, quickly, speed-walking to the garage where she opens the garage door with the garage door opener.
Everything is black and white and herky-jerky. Almost like stop-animation.
Karen scurries into the garage and the garage door slides shut.
I wait for that garage door to open again and for her familiar Volvo 240 DL to back out onto the gravel driveway and exit the camera’s view.
I wait for Karen to come out of the door on the side of the garage with ho, trowel, or weeder in gloved hands, prepared for some gardening.
But she never comes out of the garage.
With some painful effort, I pull myself onto the chair in the middle of the room. I sit and watch the tape for hours, and she never comes out of the garage.
I must have been mistaken, I tell myself.
***
That windowless room exits out into the second floor hallway, deciding not to trap me in a loop of torturous rooms anymore since I can find torture elsewhere these days. Though part of me misses the company I found in that room of mirrors.
Summer light shadows the corridor.
At one end of the hall, in the stained glass, Saul is off his horse again and grabbing at his right shoulder, his face a portrait of anguish because Paul’s head has just begun to rip out of him. Soon Paul will emerge fully, shedding Saul and, like a python, swallow the discarded skin and bone.
Praise Jesus.
My mind is a wormhole.
My eyes are black holes.
Fortunately, someone’s bandaged up my knee and calf, and the swelling in my tongue has ebbed significantly.
My body’s still a map of bruises and burns, however.
And, predictably, Karen and—I mean, Natasha and Samuel—I mean, Harold and Natasha are downstairs, drunk and giggling. I hear meat sizzling on the stovetop, but can’t smell it as the stench of rot has yet to dissipate.
Taking a deep breath, I go downstairs to confront mom and dad.
It’s a long trip, of course, because all my muscles, all my joints have been twisted, poked, and torqued, turning me into the Tin Man in need of oil and the Witch’s head.
“You let that burn I’ll have your tongue!” Natasha yells as I come off the last stair and turn into the living room. She’s sprawled out on a chaise lounge beneath a Patrick Nagel, dressed only in a satin slip, one breast fallen out of it. She’s glistening with sweat and I realize how hot it is.
“I should kill you,” I say, under my breath, staring at her with my dark eyes roaming all over her glowing body, the curve of her slender hips and thighs, the mound of exposed breast and erect, dark red nipple.
“Oh, come now, Jacky. Don’t say things you do not mean,” she says, looking toward then away from. Then she grabs her drink from a nearby table and sips at it and stares off into the tiny bits of dust twirling in the afternoon light. Harold’s whistling from the kitchen in the other corner of the castle.
I want to fuck Natasha. I want to choke her and slap her and pound her cunt into an unrecognizable mass of bloodied, swollen, and red flesh sprouting tufts of dark fur.
Grinning, Natasha says, “Ha!” and points at my midsection.
I look to where she’s pointing and see that my erection is entirely visible within these flimsy pajamas they must have dressed me in while I was unconscious. More alarming is the growing billow of blood haloing the fabric around the tip of my confused, pulsating penis.
All I remember is wanting to sleep.
To sleep and to never wake up.
And here I am.
I leave Natasha laughing in the living room and walk into the kitchen and say, “Hey, Samuel, how about those White Sox,” knowing how that always got under his skin.
Grabbing a can of Old Style from the fridge, I pop it open, and shrug at Harold’s non-response, then spill the can of golden piss over my abused tongue and immediately choke, spewing beer all over the kitchen floor.
I don’t know how long it had been since I’d drank and didn’t realize how difficult it would be to start again.
Harold turns to me with a mother’s worry and guides me to the table where he sits me down with a fresh beer before twittering back to the kitchen. He quickly returns, placing a straw in my can of beer. He pats my head without a word and goes back to his cooking in the kitchen.
I suck my beer through the straw and stare out through the sliding glass doors at the sunflowers with my half-moon eyes.
There’s universes circling each, and I can’t see them.
It hurts so much. I start to cry. I sob and wail. The pathetic whimpering of a child who’s not gotten his way.
Harold and Natasha are around me, hands on shoulders, petting my head, shushing me gently, telling me not to cry, that it’ll all be OK.
“How?” I ask, hopeless.
“In the end, it’s always all OK, Jacky,” Natasha says, a bit of warmth in her usually icy tone.
Natasha takes her seat at the table, her tit still hanging out her slip, her skin still slick with sweat. Harold scurries back to the kitchen and plates the meals.
“Ladies first,” he lisps, placing a plate of bright green peas and a cow’s heart slathered in barbecue sauce in front of Natasha.
“Guests second,” he says upon his return, placing a plate of bull’s penis with a side of A1 and sour kraut on his own placemat.
“And liars last,” he says, giving me the cow’s tongue, this big, blue, goosepimpled lump of flesh. My side is a small mountain of salt.
I push the plate away and Harold frowns and pouts.
“I should go,” I say.
“So soon?” Natasha croons.
“But we only just got here, Jacky Boy,” Harold interjects. “And, obviously, it’d be very rude of us to stay in the house—this beautiful house—which we’ve grown to love if you’re not here with us.”
“I should go,” I repeat.
“You can’t go, Jacky. You just can’t. We’re not done,” Natasha tells me.
“Done with what?”
“Well—playing, stupid,” she says, carving into the heart.
“I should go.”
Again Natasha’s rage flashes and she bangs the table with her fist, startling Harold, even, and points the knife dripping with barbecue sauce and cow’s blood at me.
“You… you want to go so fucking bad? You really want to go so fucking bad, you fucking invalid! Here!” she spits, stabbing her knife into the cow’s heart and standing. She stomps over to the sliding glass door and flings it open, nearly hard enough to shatter it.
“Go!” she says, pointing outside.
Fresh air wafts in and covers the scent of rot and cooked cow organs.
“I really should go,” I say once more.
“Then fucking go, goddammit! Go!” she says, like a mother angry at her ungrateful teenage son.
“I really should…”
She stamps her feet into the ground and gestures again the direction I can go.
The open glass door—it’s just a blinding portal. Through the windows, through the glass, I can still see the backyard, the garage, the sunflowers, but where the glass door has slid open: blinding brightness.
Natasha snickers and finally lifts and pushes her exposed breast back into her slip.
“That’s what I thought, you fucking coward,” she sneers and sits back down.
Harold puts on
the airs of a mother in an abusive family, seeming disturbed and protective but mostly embarrassed and unwilling to say or do anything.
I cry over my plate of tongue while the light dies and the other two politely eat their dinners in silence.
***
A few days later and we’re like a family. I’ve accepted their forms of torture as expressions of love. When they bind me and adorn me with a crown of thorns, douse me in turpentine and stick dozens of toothpicks a millimeter deep between my ribs, I know it’s because they care. When they hold my head in a tub of ice and run candle flame along the bottoms of my feet, I know it’s because they want me to experience feelings again. When they put me in a noose and hang me, releasing me before I can black out, I know it’s because they want me to know I’m alive.
Every other night, I’m allowed to go to bed with one or the other, but it’s usually short-lived as I come minutes in. The rest of those nights is often spent cuddling and sweating, the air-conditioning still not working, though we have been getting some electricity for a while now.
Swaddled in oversized sweatpants and sweatshirts, while they continue to dress sharply in suits and slinky dresses, we sit around the dining room table and play games of Risk or Trouble or Uno in summer twilight shadows. If I start crying in between moves, they console me, wipe my tears away, and tell me the game must go on.
There’ve been times during this all where I’ve opened a window and nearly been blown apart from the solar winds.
Other times I’ve wandered off, opened a door, and barely escaped being disintegrated from the pure concentration of white light.
Now, they let me live in the broom closet under the stairs again, because I asked to sleep there. I can sleep standing or sitting up in between the ironing board and year’s supply of toilet paper.
Part of me knows this isn’t right.
The other part knows it is and is surprised a good majority of people in this world don’t feel they deserve the same.
***
“I didn’t kill your sister, mom,” I tell Natasha over the dinner table one night. She likes it when I call her mom. Mom or sister or lover or stranger. But, mostly, mom.
My Eyes Are Black Holes Page 9
