My Eyes Are Black Holes

by Logan Ryan Smith

  “Don’t be stupid,” she tells me, slurping at her gazpacho. “Of course you did, you idiot. You fucking idiot. You think we’d even be here, otherwise?”

  “I don’t know,” I tell her. “But I didn’t kill your sister.”

  “Uh, yeah, OK,” she says and rolls her eyes.

  ***

  Cradling me in her arms in the bed of one of the many guestrooms, stroking my throbbing cock, the circumcision they performed on me a couple weeks ago finally healed, Natasha tells me she loves me. She says she’ll protect me. She says this whole thing was Harold’s idea and she never really wanted a part of it.

  She fears, however, that Harold is also in love with me now.

  I’m conflicted, having been devoid of love for so long and now burdened by so much of it.

  “I don’t understand,” I tell her.

  “Of course you don’t, stupid,” she says, running a finger along my lips.

  “Why…” I hazard, my voice faltering. “Why can’t we just stay together… like a family?”

  “Because, dummy, we’ll tear you apart. We’ll rip you in half, literally, if we have to share you anymore. Love is brutal, Jacky. Love makes a victim and assailant of us all.”

  “Does it have to?”

  “Quit asking stupid questions,” she says, grabbing me by the head and pushing me down.

  ***

  Another night.

  I’m now cradled in Harold’s arms and he’s fast asleep. Our skins are sticky and pearly and wet. I’m awake with narrowed eyes, finding sleep hard to come by lately, feeling as though I slept the last million years away. Feeling as though I’ve slept all the sleep I can sleep. Most nights I sit up, awake in the broom closet, and just see how high I can count to before Natasha or Harold are flinging the door open and dragging me out to be with them.

  Right now, a long, slim devil’s silhouette stands in the doorway of this night’s guestroom.

  “Don’t you touch him! Don’t you touch him you fucking bastard! You slimy little faggot! You motherfucker, don’t you touch him! Get your hands off him!” Natasha screams.

  Her dark, fiery silhouette springs into the room and Harold’s barely awake, barely understanding what’s happening when I’m spritzed, sprayed, and splattered with his blood.

  The last swing of the hatchet lands directly in the middle of Harold’s beautiful face with a thunk and final few squirts of blood.

  The light from the hallway is merciful and doesn’t allow me to see the entirety of the damage Natasha has inflicted.

  Harold’s dead and that’s all I have to know.

  Half the love in this world left for me is gone.

  I’m in shock, but find myself kissing Natasha back, who’s stretched over the dead, hacked up body of her ex-lover. Or whoever he was. I’m kissing her and she’s licking the blood from my face and cooing and whispering assurances that everything’s going to be OK, that everything’s going to be better now.

  With Harold saturating the mattress in maroon, Natasha straddles me, slipping my blood-red cock inside her blood-red pussy, and pushing pushing pushing. She’s fucking me and kissing me and slapping me and stroking Harold’s dick at the same time, which is stiffened by rigor mortis.

  I’m crying in the dark so Natasha can’t see it and I’m trying desperately to come, but can’t, despite how quickly I’ve gotten there with these two before.

  And Natasha’s relentless, even forgetting, I think, that Harold is dead by her own hand. She keeps asking him to be more actively involved, telling him to “shove it down her throat” or “call me a whore, baby, call me a dirty dirty whore” while she slams her pussy down on me.

  But it doesn’t end until sunrise, Natasha not satisfied until she was sure I had come. And I had, somehow, exploding right inside of her, our bodies red and slick and pearly.

  In the morning light, she slips between myself and Harold’s quickly decomposing body and strokes my chest and sighs and says she wants to have my baby. The baby her sister should have had.

  ***

  The truth is, I hated Karen, the bitch. She has spent her whole life reminding me how hard I made things on dad, on mom. How my disabilities dragged everyone down. My father could have gotten us out of Calumet City and into a new town where he and mom could find meaningful work, instead of the menial factory jobs they went to everyday, which broke their backs, injured their pride, and annihilated their hope. But, no, they couldn’t leave those jobs because they had to keep me in special programs and pay for special medicines, just to keep me “close to normal, but not normal, and definitely not special” as Karen would often put it, coming home at fourteen from her fast food job, smelling of french fry grease and the filth of her pig-of-a-manager’s hands.

  I hated Karen because she thought all these things but never gave up on me, reminding me I’m always the child, always the helpless one.

  And there I always was, with no other options than to accept my sister’s goodwill, her caretaking and silent resentment.

  And, so, I may have, from time to time, taken some pleasure in destroying her life. If I destroyed hers, after all, perhaps I could destroy mine and finally be left to rot in the sun like the beetle-infested garbage pile I am.

  So, maybe I hoped Karen would never come back.

  I could be king of the castle for once.

  And, besides, I have Natasha now to look after me.

  And soon I’ll learn to hate her just as much.

  ***

  We spent the waning days of summer in this house of rot, lounging and drinking mojitos, which Natasha never failed to mention were not as good as Harold made them. Speaking of Harold, Natasha occasionally left the house to do some gardening, planting sunflower seeds where his eyes used to be. I’d watch her from the other side of the glass, blinded only when that door would open and her dark shape would enter this giant house.

  Natasha made sure I kept up on my medication and encouraged me to use the home gym.

  “Keep the body strong, keep the mind strong,” she’d tell me in her Yoda voice and we’d laugh and she’d tie me up to the laterals machine and whip me and attempt to twist my stiff cock right off of me before impaling herself and thrusting, calling me daddy and telling me, incessantly, to come inside her come inside her come inside her.

  She was desperate to stab her eggs with my insane sperm.

  But after this summer of abuse and madness, I’m sure I’m only firing off blanks.

  Either that or God is intervening, like an outfielder snatching away a homer at the very last second, just reaching up and over the wall to keep the ball from landing on the other side, making sure this baby never comes home.

  ***

  “I didn’t kill your sister,” I tell Natasha yet again as the fall comes on with its early shadows and the sky outside turns azure with wisps of ragged alabaster clouds. My eyes are mostly closed.

  Pulling away from me in bed, the scent of my come on her lips and body, she sighs and lights a cigarette at the end of her long cigarette holder.

  “My sister, my cousin, my lover—some woman I would sometimes run into at the grocery store and who I’d always stop to say hello to and discuss the best ways to make melon balls… WHO CARES!” she yells, clouds of blue smoke snaking throughout our shadowy room.

  We’ve been sleeping in a different room almost every night, but never the master bedroom. Never there. I won’t allow it and Natasha doesn’t seem to want to go near there, either.

  “If I killed someone,” I ask her, like a child, “why am I not in jail?”

  “You’re criminally insane, you moron,” she says, a red ember nearly a foot away from her face brightening, darkening, brightening, darkening. A dwarf star about to go supernova.

  “But… I never went to trial. I never went to jail,” I whine.

  “You…” she says, turning and poking me in the chest, which still somehow feels tender from my time on that torturous sawhorse, or maybe it still hurts from when I broke
my ribs as a kid. “You have shit for brains and a memory to back it up.”

  “My brain is a wormhole,” I tell her.

  “Oh, for the love of God, would you shut up! You spent time in a mental hospital until they deemed you fit enough to be put in the care of your poor, dear sister.”

  “Karen’s not your sister?” I ask.

  “God no. Are you sick? Do you know what that’d make us if Karen was my sister, idiot?”

  “Part of God’s plan?”

  She laughs at that and turns away from me, rolling over on her side and putting her cigarette out.

  The shadows grow longer and the light dimmer.

  “No,” she says, almost whispers. “The woman you killed—my sister, my cousin, my next door neighbor, some bitch I heard about on the news—you burned her up in the house you shared.”

  “I had a life before all of this,” I say, as if I’d just made some huge scientific discovery. As if I should have shouted Eureka! instead. “I had a life before all of this, where I was in control. That life lasted a minute.”

  I had a life before all of this.

  That life lasted a minute.

  I had a life…

  “So did she,” Natasha sighs and slips off to dream world.

  ***

  Natasha’s taken to sleeping a lot more lately. She puts morphine drops in her eyes and pours bottles of gin down her throat and just sleeps and sleeps and smokes and sleeps. She hardly has time for me anymore.

  She’s sleeping now, down the hall, in my old room where the portal in the wall is dark with dusk. Grey and pixelated.

  As Natasha’s taking all the sleep out of the air, it’s been hard to find sleep for myself. I’ve been awake for days, counting all the tiny red and green stars floating before my half-moon eyes and laughing at the universe that I can brush away with the back of my hand.

  It always floats back into space, however. All back into place.

  Such order, inherent in the very makeup of matter, of life.

  Everything has purpose and is meaningless at the same time.

  For the last hour or day or so, I’ve just been standing here, counting stars. Counting stars in front of the door to the master bedroom.

  I no longer smell the rot.

  Natasha no longer smells the rot.

  When you’re part of the rot, there’s nothing to smell.

  I reach out, brush the stars away, and poke the door open with two stiff fingers. Like a dam breaking, thick waves of sickly sweet air billow past me and rush to flood the hallway and the rest of the mansion.

  There’s a body turned to jelly and maggots in the center of the king-size bed. It has the comforter pulled up over it, and the entire bed is painted in dried, dark red and yellow. Flies constellate above it.

  “Samuel,” I say, and I remember.

  I remember standing here, in the doorway, like a child afraid of the dark and afraid to cross that magic threshold into mommy and daddy’s room. I stood there, my eyes heavy with drugs, my lungs tired from all the breathing I’ve had to do in this lifetime.

  I had heard my sister screaming. I had heard Samuel cry my name out.

  And I stood here and watched her hack Samuel to pieces with a hatchet, her motions manly, strong. Just like Natasha. They moved so similarly, and their wild, jealous screams were so alike, it’s hard to believe they aren’t sisters.

  Karen slammed that hatchet into Samuel’s face over and over and over, spurts of blood splattering her own face. She slammed the hatchet into his heart. She slammed it into his crotch.

  Samuel was dead a long time ago, but as she stood over him he still made gurgling sounds, passed little whispers of air between his bashed-up, swollen lips.

  Karen slipped into bed next to him, clutched his obliterated skull to her bloodied breasts and cried and apologized to him over and over.

  After a time, she saw me standing here, and I may as well have had a teddy bear dangling from one hand at my side.

  She calmly climbed out of the bed and strolled toward me, sobbing and smiling.

  “It’s not what you think,” she said. “You’re seeing things again,” she said. And she fell into me, weeping, and we collapsed in the threshold, her holding my head to her red chest, patting my hair down with bloodied hands, hushing me and telling me everything was going to be OK. Everything was going to be alright.

  She then walked me down the hall to the guest bathroom, her face dripping with tears, snot, spit, and blood. In the bathroom she peeled the sticky clothes from herself and undressed me and took me by the hand into the shower where she bathed herself and me, and we watched all the red swirl down the drain, like stardust forming a galaxy.

  Then she put me to bed and fed me medicines from bottles I don’t remember seeing before. She told me to sleep. Just sleep.

  I hadn’t even known I’d woken up.

  I don’t think either of us expected I ever would.

  ***

  Now, with the stars pushing back in front of my face and Samuel’s body melting into the very fabric of the bed, hidden beneath the covers, I cross that magic threshold and enter the forbidden room.

  It’s the corner room on the third floor, so it’s surrounded by dark portals. All around me are dark wavering spots, those rippling tears in reality I’ve been longing for.

  Voices escape them, many of which I cannot hear.

  Two I can.

  One says I cannot escape what’s real.

  The other says I cannot escape what my mind perceives as real.

  I reach out to touch the lump that is Samuel beneath the covers and my touch causes the lump to immediately shrink and deflate.

  I decide not to pull back the covers and see the puddle of liquefied skin, muscle, and pus that Samuel has become. Instead, I grab the sheet of paper left in plain view on the nightstand beside the bed.

  Dear Jack,

  You should be proud of yourself. You’ve proven something that science has yet to: Insanity is contagious. After years of taking care of you, of looking out for you, and covering for you, I couldn’t take it anymore. I can’t believe after what you did to your wife that I thought I could ever trust you or thought that you could be well again. And then what happened with Mrs. Cardenas. I mean, I know it was an accident, Jacky. I mean, I want to believe it was. But I covered for you, yet again, when I should have let them drag you to that padded room. I should have let them do it and throw away the key. I should have told them to do it the second mom and dad died. But I couldn’t, and I hate myself more than you for that. You let dad kill mom. You knew what was happening and you kept me from stopping it. You’ve taken my life, Jacky. You’ve taken almost every waking minute of it. And then you try to take my husband. I’ve lost my mind, Jack. It’s long gone. I don’t know what I’ve done or how I did it, but I can’t come back from this. I tried to take you away from it all first, with the drugs. All those damned drugs we shot right into your veins or convinced you to take willingly. I was hoping for a quiet death for you, or at least a very long coma you’d never wake from. But you just wouldn’t die. You actually seemed to just get crazier. Of course you did. And I’m going down that same path. And I don’t think you deserve a quiet death anymore, Jacky. I’m sorry. I don’t think you do. I’m leaving this note just so that you know what to do. I think that you know what to do. I’m going now. I can never come back. You’re so much like dad, Jacky. You’re in your room right now, sitting up in bed and talking to yourself about tears in the walls of reality and portals of light and darkness. There’s neither, Jack. Neither. You have only one way out of this. Mine is in the garage. I’m going in there, I’m closing the door, and I’m going to run that goddamned car and rev that goddamned engine and breathe. Just breathe. And sleep. I can’t come back from this. I don’t know how you can even walk around. You know what to do, Jack. I wish I could say what I’ve done, from the beginning of time until now, was done out of love. But I don’t know if that’s true. Goodbye, Jack. I think t
hat you know what to do.

  Your caretaker,

  Karen

  I open my eyes, completely. My leaded lids twitching from the effort, from the unfamiliar resistance to gravity, almost unwilling to retake their old station.

  But my will is strong.

  The house shakes.

  The house quivers.

  The house rattles like old film in the broken projector of my eyes.

  I stand still for a moment, not really thinking anything while my pupils dilate. I’m motionless, holding the note in one hand, and a pen in the other. I don’t recall picking this pen up. Looking back at the letter and scrutinizing the handwriting—the sharp W’s, the dipping capital J’s and sloppy G’s. Is that my handwriting?

  No.

  No. I put the note and pen down on the nightstand, stars parting and swirling in their wake. I put them where they can find it and I kneel down and reach under the bed, which is damp with rot. I reach under the bed and feel something metal, something cold, something long and heavy.

  I pull out the shotgun and stroke it, caress it. I don’t know why my sister has it. But then I notice my father’s initials JMM carved into the stock, and my sister’s, KRM, just below his. I turn the gun over, look for my initials next to my father’s, but I don’t see them. I don’t understand.

  JMM.

  KRM.

  Wait. Are those my initials? Does this gun belong to me and Karen? Is this our secret? I… don’t know. I… don’t care.

  The gun is clean of blood and Karen intends to have it cleaned of memory, as well.

  My eyes are collapsed suns.

  My brain is a trapdoor.

  A wavering ripple in reality is right beside me now. Karen said that’s not the way, but I put my left hand inside it, anyway. It disappears into the hole. My hand tingles, like it has fallen asleep. I pull it out and it’s covered in burn scars. Old. Like they’ve always been there.