by Garrett Cook
Kaz is alone with her vodka. She reads the label again and again as if it will change to something else. It doesn’t. Kaz is alone with her vodka. I could take her, break her, use her, end her but I don’t feel like it. She feels like she is losing control and I feel much the same. I almost want to feel her feeling the vodka because I can’t feel it myself. She thinks back to when she wanted to write books. She’d always loved books. Cervantes, Goethe, Shakespeare, Tolstoy. She had wanted to write novels but she’d wanted attention more and her parents told her she was pretty and never that she was smart, never.
Maybe she could still write books. Maybe there is enough of her left. She cannot find enough of herself in herself to answer this question. This is as good a reason as any to not be fond of alone. She always has me because I always have her. I must stop myself from being too proud of her as a possession, though one not quite in my hands yet. I will get indolent and greedy.
Leah is eating buttons. She has recently started eating buttons. She hasn’t choked yet but it seems inevitable to her that she will. But she can’t resist doing it. Food is unappealing, her body a fat, disgusting blob and all she wants to fill it with is buttons. She lifts up her shirt and takes comfort from the dotted lines she has drawn. The dotted lines are enough for now, the sentiment is enough for now. It won’t be forever. I hope the Closetsong won’t make her do it prematurely.
She hears a knock on the door, hides the buttons and slowly, tentatively she approaches and opens the door a crack, finding Kaz in the hallway, holding a bottle of vodka.
“I wanted to know if you’d like a drink. I forgot whether you drink or not. But I thought maybe I’d offer you one.”
Leah can see there is something very wrong with Kaz. There is always something very wrong with Kaz but she could have sworn she heard someone fleeing the house in a fit too.
“That sounds good,” says Leah, “I need a break. From studying. Maybe to just not study anymore tonight.”
Kaz sits down upon the bed, wonders why it is that it seems like Leah’s swimming in her sweatshirt and why the sleeves are wet with drool. She decides that is better not to bother asking. Leah is under a lot of stress, Leah might be fucked up somehow. She’s not going to judge her, not after what just happened. With what just happened, it seems like it would be awfully hard to find somebody who she could dare to judge.
Kaz feels something squirming in her stomach. From somewhere behind my precious walls, the Closetsong asks her to borrow a coathanger. I veto this request. Sneaky bitch of a thing. It will not do. Kaz ignores it and pours a shot of vodka. The time has not yet come to stop ignoring this. But she does stop herself.
“Should we get some juice? Something as a mixer?”
Leah shakes her head.
“No. Too much sugar. We’ll drink it straight.”
“Yeah,” says Kaz, “good point. Wouldn’t want any of those empty calories.”
She rubs what she believes to be an enlarged belly. Leah does not get the meaning of it. Of course, were she with child, it would be best for her to avoid going out and getting fucked by drug addicts or drinking straight vodka but this is much more complicated than simple live birth. This is a dead man’s child. This is alchemy, beautiful alchemy. She pours a shot for herself.
“Cheers.”
“Cheers.”
The two young women throw back their shot and they sit in the silence that exists between them. This is a forest of silence full of problems and beasts and things unsaid and unspeakable. This silence is a place where nothing can be known. There is so much these two women should know and so many ways they could support each other. They think they are completely different and that these differences cannot be reconciled. Each thinks the other hates them. Each would wear the other’s skin and each would know the joys of touching it. But instead they sit here in this silence. I worry that the closeness between people can take them away from me. I have never seen this happen but I see them slip away sometimes. In this silence, there does not seem to be danger of this.
“Brian sure spends a lot of time in that basement,” says Kaz.
“I like Brian,” says Leah.
“Yeah.”
“I’m not sure he’s one of us.”
“Yeah.”
Kaz pours another shot.
“I’m not sure we’re one of us.”
Leah downs it. Laughs.
“We’re not.”
Kaz pours herself one. Downs it. Laughs.
“Then who is?”
“Micah. Cytherea.”
“Are they the only people here then?”
Leah feels inclined to open up the button jar. Or to add Julie to the list. Julie is one of them, them being everyone. But Julie is dead and Leah is losing her mind and eating buttons and talking to dead girls and drawing circles on her chest, her big, ugly heaving chest. She’s not getting fatter at least. At least there’s that. But she wants to open up the button jar and sit and talk with Julie. Or invite Julie to talk tonight.
“Maybe they don’t have to be. They’re kind of assholes,” says Kaz.
“I feel like there’s something to lose, you know?”
Kaz nods.
“Yeah.”
“We should invite Brian up.”
They knock on Brian’s door. Brian emerges right away.
“Yeah?”
“We’re drinking vodka,” says Leah.
“I’ll drink vodka.”
She Will Never Be A Doctor
When the vodka is gone, Leah sits alone. She is wobbling, stumbling, about to simply faint. Her body is begging her for food, begging her to just eat a piece of fruit or some meat. Her body wants some sign that she wants it to live. She gives it none. She takes off the sweatshirt and traces the markered lines with her finger and she smiles. She’s relieved. The two big bags of fat aren’t gospel. This is not her body. This doesn’t have to be her body.
It takes some effort for her to grab a handful of fat from her belly since there is almost none. But almost none is still not none. The banana smells like rotten hamburger. And rotten meat is practically excrement. Will she shovel shit into herself to cover her body in more shit, more chaff and garbage? There’s simply too much of Leah. The two big lumps are signs that she cannot hide forever in her giant bulky sweatshirts. She’ll still know what’s underneath.
She opens up her drawer. Takes out the scalpel first, making a short feathery tickle along the place where she’d just run her hand. Come on now, you can do this. You can commit. Let me just get rid of this. Let me please get rid of this, let me just be small and thin and perfect enough, let me just be quiet and tiny enough to hide. But she doesn’t. She puts it down. Puts it back in the drawer and reaches for something else.
She’s been chewing hair and nails but that’s not enough. There needs to be something that isn’t part of her. Her body wants something in it but the banana is rotten meat and rotten meat is just a stinking pile of shit to pile more shit onto the blob of shit that has enveloped her, the one she can’t escape again. She pulls out a jar of buttons and unscrews the lid.
This is disgusting. You’re disgusting. But they look like little candies, so shiny, so colorful, so bright. She reaches in and takes out a handful of the things. She examines them hesitantly. This isn’t normal. This isn’t natural. It’s disgusting. You are disgusting. Can’t you just keep your fat, whorish mouth shut? Show some fucking self control. She’s tearing up.
“I’m all fucked up. I’m fat and weird and I’m never going to be a doctor.”
She takes a single delicate plastic pastiline and puts it into her mouth. It doesn’t taste like candy. It tastes like plastic. It tastes like not food at all and that is what’s appealing about it. She crunches down it hard and then again, until it shatters into several jagged pieces, which she gleefully gulps down. So seldom does she gleefully gulp anything down. She puts the jar away. She looks away from the mirror. She puts her shirt back on and opens up her book and goes back to
studying.
The words turn into ants and crawl about. She blinks, looks down again. The words have turned to ants and crawl about. She closes the book. She closes her eyes and counts to 100 again as she tried to do with Julie. But Julie was there and the ants are there. She puts the book down. And once again she stares intently at the drawer. There’s a jar in there of plastic pastilines and she is hungry.
The Rake's Progress
It has been far too long. I cannot remember the name that was the name I had when I was a man. It was long ago, across the ocean in England. I was the man that I was. I was young and I was wealthy, I was spoiled and I was happy. I was happy enough but I was never what you would call “satisfied.” Satisfaction is a thing hard won for any man be he rich or be he poor, weak or strong, I was rich and though I had riches, fine clothes and servants, rich foods and comfort, I had hungers like all men. They are nothing compared to the hungers I have now, but perhaps these were the hungers in their infancy.
Her name was Lisette. There was a her of course. A servant girl. Her hair was dark like Leah’s, dark as Leah’s. She was virtuous and kind and she adored me from afar, for I was finely dressed and healthy, my eyes were blue and clear and my hair was like spun gold. I looked perhaps like Micah’s people once looked though without the peasant stock that chiseled some of the refinement from his face. She tried not to look at me. I know she tried not to look at me and I know that she failed. I in turn could not stop looking at her. That black in her hair was the black of the empty that I could never fill. She teased me with opacity. She made me think I could point out the spots where there was nothing but need and boredom. Two hundred fifty years and I still don’t see them. I fill them best I can but I know nothing at all of their architecture.
At least I thought she had it in her to fill those parts. There is for every lack, every absence and every want, a soul to fill it. If there were not, then how could anyone call life fair? If the void cannot be filled and we are doomed to lack and absence, then the game is finished before it starts and there can be no reason for us to be born at all.
So one day I decided that I would speak my heart to her. As she sat by the river doing the wash, I joined her. I humbled myself to touch the garments of my family and the servants alike. And as I humbled my hands, I humbled my heart as well and told of her beauty and my want for her and even more my need and humbler still than that my desperation. I proclaimed my love with the skills I honed as a gentleman of letters and a poet. I was gifted with my words and brought tears to her eyes. And so we kissed. We embraced. And so I experienced the pleasures of the flesh and knew bliss. I could think of nothing so blissful as to be wed to my lovely Lisette. So I promised her we’d be wed.
We trysted often in my bed, in the woods, in the stables, anywhere we could get the privacy to explore our desires. It was all I needed. Until the day came as it always does when it no longer was. Her small flat bosoms felt inadequate in my hands. Her lips were no longer the softest and sweetest things I’d tasted. My love for Lisette was gone but my desire to better experience the deeper pleasures of the flesh was aflame. I went into town and I tried my luck and my poetry with other women. I began to ignore Lisette in favor of goldenhaired and redhaired women, women with great heaping tits and willing dripping innards.
Lisette became despondent and angry. She begged me to marry her as I had promised. She pleaded for me to love her again. When asked why she felt it was so urgent that I give my life to her again, she replied that she was pregnant with my child. Panic and disgust overcame me. The thought of caring and raising the weak and pasty whelp of some servant bitch that I no longer cared for drove me into a fit of rage. I slapped her in the face, I undressed her and not from love or lust but rage and hatred, I fucked her. I fucked her savagely, slapping her, biting her throat as hard as I could until I drew blood. I grew harder and hungrier for flesh than I ever had been and her cunt was sopping wet even as she begged for me to stop for the sake of my child.
I chomped down on her throat hard as I could but I didn’t stop there, I turned her around and raped her purpled ass. Blood in my mouth, blood on my cock, a servant I’d claimed to love with my child inside her begging and struggling for her life, I had never experienced such ecstasies and felt as if I could not have truly lived before having had this. By the end of my work, the bitch of course was dead.
If she hadn’t been dead when I ripped at her neck with my teeth, drawing my rapier and shoving it into her cunt would have done it. Rape and blood on my hands, the power to take a life, I felt for the first time ever what a splendid thing it was to be a man and to be the lord of one’s domain. And I could not get enough of this now. My wealth and my cunning covered up the deaths of servants and whores, bodies used to death and then taken by me even after death had wrenched their souls from them. I used them until they began to rot and reek.
I had license to do as I pleased and I certainly did so, yet once again, I found myself lacking contentment. This is when I started to seek out books of occult import, books on alchemy, magic, conjurations, transmutations of elements and communing with the dead, the works of Dee and Paracelsus and Cyprian and Alhazred and their ilk. With the aid of these books, the barriers that still stood between me and ultimate potential were becoming only illusions.
I read voraciously, performed magical experiments but I found my results quite unsatisfactory. So, I had to seek out tutelage. So, I journeyed to Spain, the occult capital of Europe at the time. I followed rumors and bribes and dead men, I came upon The Black Academy at Salamanca, the secret school of dark magic that gave rise to Europe’s foulest necromancers. I was a more than apt pupil at this place and had no trouble learning from them to commune with the dead, to influence men’s hearts and call forth and hold court with the hosts of Hell itself.
I returned to my ancestral home a formidable sorcerer. I used my magic and my influence alike to enforce my will upon the townsfolk. With my will and my magic and my cock and my knife and my money and my servants and my infernal thirst, I was as unjust and wicked a lord as ever lived. What I do now for the poor souls inside my walls is a tender mercy in comparison.
But the day came, as it often does for witches, that pious men gathered and beat down my door, knocked me out, manacled me and put me before a judge and sentenced me to burn. I did nothing to deny their accusations, as I took much pride in them and felt certain that my arcane benefactors would aid me in my last moments, swooping down and freeing me on demon wings and bearing me elsewhere. Of course, I had no reason to trust in demons as nobody should. My last sensations were nothing but agony. In spite of all I’d done, all I have done, you must pity wretched me.
The very flesh was melted from my bones, then the bones themselves were charred until they crumbled to dust. The demons did nothing for me but to let me feel and bear witness to this until at last I was done with being. With all the horrors and dark experiments I had witnessed at The Black Academy, still nothing compared to that feeling of my body and all I was melting away as gathered apostates laughed and jeered at the last moments of the witch that had plagued them. The last words I uttered, screamed as my very mouth faded from existence were a curse on the judge who had done this to me. The judge’s family fled to America and built this house, a house where I held dominion in the walls.
Of course, that story is a lie. I am not so transparent or giving with my mysteries. This is the dream and the hunch I send Brian. In his heart, he knows me as this warlock, though he has not put it together.
Though one part of the story is certainly true: when I am bored, I do terrible things.
Together
“I’m afraid,” says Micah, staring up at the ceiling. “I feel different sometimes lately. Like I’m not myself.”
Cytherea clasps his hand.
“Like you’re somebody else?”
Of course, that’s what he means you fucking cunty cow. Of course that’s what he fucking means. If he isn’t him, he’s clearly someone else.
She is concerned though. She is actually concerned, for some reason she’s concerned about him. She has felt the violence, she has felt the thing thrashing, she has felt the worst in her come climbing up as well, she has felt it. But of course it means he feels like someone else. He will be nobody. He will be mine. He is mine. He will be mine. I look in him and wonder what I value and I honestly can’t find it but the fact is that it doesn’t matter what. The Closetsong is out there and it wants to make me quiet.
“I keep having dreams,” he says, “and I never feel in control when I have these dreams. I’m someplace dark. I’m in the woods.”
“You’re someplace dark,” she says, making circles on his chest, “you’re in the woods.”
“Deeper. Darker. Not like in the literal woods. Like in some kind of you know, like astral woods. Like a Happy Hunting Ground or something. Like there’s one woods where everyone gets lost and I’ve stumbled away from civilization and I’m lost in those woods. Like Hansel and Gretel or Little Red Ridinghood. There are old faerie things in there. Maybe I’ve been whisked off to faerie. It could be. Maybe I’ve gotten too connected to this place, to the Earth.”
She kisses him, trying to suck the grief through his mouth, watching his eyes flutter. I can see it work. I want to burn the Earth just to snuff out the secrets of why. I will suck everything there is into my walls until I can tear it apart and see. What’s joy is not joy. What’s hope is not hope. Why must I walk in circles when I’ve eternity to roam? Does the Closetsong know? Can I suck it from the marrow in its spirit?
“You are powerful,” she says, “you are attuned. And you are beautiful.”
She kisses his chest, draws his nipples into her mouth, toying with them in her teeth, hardening them as he so often draws hers out. Maddy wants her to bite down, shred them, spurt out blood. I agree with Maddy. It seems like a good idea. But I can’t. Maybe I just won’t. What is being done to me? What is being done to this space? Shall I open my toybox and yank off limbs until someone knows the answer? Someone knows? Doctorpuppet must be plotting. Maddy and I are getting along. Antonia seems so innocent. It could be Antonia. She has some power over me, over them. Ungrateful little cunt—it must be her. I want to rip it open and see what makes me treasure it. I would mock them for their dull quaint notions of value.
