Shattergirl: Hyr Testimony

by Alex S. Johnson

  And, not that it’s personal, but in a way, for me.

  2. SKULLFUCK OMEGA!!! (STAINS)

  Let me tell you where I got these STAINS.

  Number One Stain: It’s complicated.

  Number Two Stain: Say what?

  Number Three Stain: ARE YOU PAYING ATTENTION?

  NUMBER FOUR STAIN HAS NOT ENTERED THE THEATER; THEREFORE, IT CANNOT EXIT; THUS, THE GAPING HOLE IN THE NARRATIVE.

  AND SPEAKING OF GAPING HOLES…

  Let me tell you about just one.

  Actually and swear to God and all that shit, it was me mum.

  I was her experiment. Her guinea pig. Pin cushion. She was a dame with a build like a granite bomb shelter; no, she was not noir. Hang on—other phone. Ok, we’re back. Sorry? Yes. Mom.

  MOTHER…

  Her name was Samantha Goodens. She’d already been married once when she married my dad, Francis Morgan, but she’d gone back to her maiden name. Her stains were innies, not outies. She was always such a good girl, a careful girl, staying clear of the minefields, walking through the dust-storm with a wet handkerchief pasted to her nose and mouth, coloring inside the lines. That was Sam’s protective covering. And yeah, she was more comfortable with Sam than her full girlie name, because the field she wanted to enter, that she did enter with great success, was very much a man’s domain. Not that there weren’t female psychiatrists. Just that mental health is decidedly cast in a patriarchal mold. Did you know the origin of the term “hysteria” is

  hyster

  which is Greek for womb? Hysterical people are those with crazy wombs. It’s not far from there to the myth of twats with teeth and nothing but cocks to eat. Sam grew up on a farm in Alabama and even now, the culture is different from the rest of the country. Backwoods preachers still dip their flock in JIZZUS and it’s not incest if JIZZUS says it’s ok. You have no idea what I’m going on about. But that is why so many women are hysterical, have scary razor pussies. We’ve internalized the myths about us and our bodies. STOP WIGGLING.

  MOTHER became Samantha Morgan. She and Francis met at med school. She looked up to him, even though he was only one year ahead of her. He had a certain way about him, a certain solidity, that she admired. Respected. His broad shoulders. He was all clean lines; she felt shapeless, soft. And in the end that’s what she became.

  MUSH.

  Mom and Pop moved west. They found jobs in California. Dad was a GP, Mom specialized in troubled youth. She had an office that occupied one entire wing of our ranch style house, which sat at the top of a long driveway and was barricaded against the scary people of different colors. A lot of tall, fat hedges and sycamores in a row dividing the driveway, an electric fence. I think Mom was much less prejudiced than Pop, but going back to her training, she walled off that part of her which rebelled against intolerance. A product of her place and time. And her practice thrived. When she took me out of school, the authorities couldn’t contest it. Not that she needed qualifications to home school me, much less a medical degree. I think they were happy to have me off their hands. Because I had become

  trouble

  which was located literally right here in River City.

  You want to know the really funny part? I was terrified of the bullies at school, but they were benign compared to MOM. I would have undergone any amount of toilet-dunking for the security of Thomas Jefferson Junior High. Seriously. But Mom was clever. More clever than most tyrants you may encounter in your day-to-day.

  I had one brother, who came two years after me. He’s off in Alaska now working with the Iñupiat Indians. A noble character, is Broderick. He still has no idea what MOM and DAD and JIZZUS wreaked on me in terms of havoc. He’s never seen SHATTERGIRL. And I for one am glad of it. Our relationship is all the better knowing his ignorance. We sometimes send each other smoke signals.

  Mom prepared me to be taken. I use that word deliberately. Taken. I was, what, twelve years old? My moms had this yellow van she would use for her forays into River City, never discussed at home. Was she scouting clients? Possibly. Anyway. Even though normally I would pee my pants if the van showed up without notice—as it had several times before—Mom worked me for a week beforehand. She was extra special nice. And the cookies, my goodness, were extra special yummy. Loaded as they were with drugs that made me very, very drowsy. As I went off to sleep on the sofa, Mom infused my head with vaporous words. Kind words. I was going to be very happy at home, with just her and me. She took a silver comb to my kinky dark locks and working out the tangles with such delicacy, not tugging the knots out by force the way I did. She made me feel loved, even beautiful. Even though my stomach still sent signals that mom was bad, wrong and crazy, she alternated the scary shit with these tranquil moments. We had a compact, she and I, an implicit arrangement. She would shield me from the storm, from the terrible people who used their words like weapons. And let’s face it, I was just a kid, a very disturbed young lady, and Mom was my first point of contact with the world.

  I didn’t trust her, but I trusted her. You know? I’ve met so many people since then, so many people from different walks of life, yet that ambiguity she sowed in my heart has never stopped seeding.

  I think only people who’ve been through this kind of ordeal truly understand what it’s like.

  I used to send smoke signals to my future self. You’re going to be all right. You are strong, powerful. Everything that seems to affect you so strongly now will become part of your armor. Your shield against the fools and fuckholes that malign you. And in a way, I did receive those smoke signals. But they were blurred by time, and when I got them, they looked like sigils of death.

  So. Lena.

  You may tell me about yourself. How did you and your mom get along?

  That well?

  JIZZUS.

  Do you want to know how I got these CUM STAINS?

  Okey doke.

  Daddy was my favorite person for a long time, mainly because he was never around. He had a small practice and was popular with old people. They liked his style. There was one patient, Mrs. Saunderson, who really liked him. She used to tell him about her faith. Reminded him of what he’d left behind. And that was when things started to change for me. The changes were gradual until they were sudden.

  Dr. Morgan began to take breaks from his practice. He wanted to see how his daughter was growing up. He had no idea what Mom was doing to me, meanwhile.

  Let me show you something.

  Charlie Morgan, epic crazy lady and pure nucking futzball, undoes her studded belt and peels down her tight-fitting black denim jeans that hug her curves so well, showing Lena the wide patch of scar tissue right over her ass cheeks. Lena doesn’t want to look. Charlie insists. There’s a struggle. Finally Charlie is forced to use severe measures. Administers megadose of meth and pins open Lena’s eyelids Argento-style. Wets eyeballs with dropper. Keep a bitch moist and she’ll always cum back for more.

  Those are burn scars, lady. Created by my loving Daddy in the name of JIZZUS.

  You know, it’s funny, but I think my parents had some kind of weird rivalry over their methods of control. A pact of silence and denial between them. Mommy by day, Daddy by night, they took turns. Mommy never really bought the whole JIZZUS mythology, but Daddy was sold. I think it was the pain and torture aspect he really dug special.

  I didn’t understand the allure at the time, but I’ve changed.

  Daddy loved my compliance. My obedience. He didn’t know I was waiting.

  Patience, Lena. It’s golden.

  Please work with me.

  Ok, so I obviously don’t have CUM STAINS. Except the ones that were burnt into my skin with an iron. Except the ones that were spliced with my heartstrings. Except the ones that made me a little, well…

  MAD.

  Do you remember what the Cheshire Cat told Alice?

  Same rules.

  Jesus was up there in the vapor somewheres. He was all right with me. I used to read the red letter parts after
Daddy’s quality times with daughter and I couldn’t figure it out. Then I realized that Jesus was even more helpless than I was. I understood that HIS Daddy sacrificed him for crazy. For control. For reasons we will never understand, because his are mysterious. I saw it wasn’t Jesus in whose name Daddy was acting. It couldn’t be. Real Jesus was all about the love and peace and tolerance.

  I thought about the sound of the name. Jesus. And then what Daddy was doing to us both. Me and mom. He would

  JIZZ US.

  Oh come on, it’s kind of funny.

  Humorless much?

  Whether you get the memo or not, I am the best friend you’ll ever have.

  Let me make this really, really simple for you to grasp.

  Ken has got to go.

  It’s not my call. It’s yours. You must decide whether you want to live with his bullshit, his affairs, his lies…and be his DEAD FUCK.

  What do I mean by that?

  Well, let me tell you about this neighborhood bar. It’s kind of a dive. For some it’s more comfortable than a gentlemen’s club. The girls aren’t as attractive. They’ve got issues. They’re drunks and addicts in various states of recovery. Bikers and blue collar workers like Murphy’s. You’d be surprised how witty and intelligent the conversations get there. Working people ain’t stupid. So in walk some dudes. They’re professionals, slumming it.

  A guy named Ken. He’s an attorney. Ken and his buddies belly up to the bar and order drinks. They get dirty looks from some of the regulars. The rest ignore the Yuppie invasion. It happens every once in awhile. Ken & Pals have no idea how close they have come to having their throats slashed in the men’s room, as one of the patrons recognizes the guy who put him away for 18 months for having a few ounces of weed. The coke is what they nabbed him on, but wonder of wonders, he was sentenced and convicted for the MJ. He mutters blackly to his friends. They tell him it’s not worth it. They buy him some more drinks. He’s glowering at Ken, who doesn’t notice because he’s too busy regaling his pals with a story about his wife.

  You.

  Meanwhile you were baking cookies for the PTA meeting and had absolutely zero knowledge. How would you ever know what your husband actually thought of you? And how do I know all this?

  I was there.

  I told you, I clone like a motherfucker. So well. I was sitting at the end of the bar, quiet-like, working on my vodka rocks. Just another piece of white trash ass. Buy a lady a drink? Yes, maybe, after enough rounds. And this is what I heard, verbatim:

  “How’s my marriage? Well, shit. Yeah, she’s hot, but sometimes I think I’d be better off with a quickie at the morgue downtown. You know? At least those girls are verified dead. My wife, she walks around, she babbles about her projects and the greeting card business she runs—there’s no profit in it, by the way, I think she has, like, a hundred customers and she makes in a month what I do in an hour. So I want to support her, for the kids’ sake, and I do what I can. But it’s tough. When we’re together, she’s somewhere else. I wish she’d just tell me what she wants. What she really wants. But she’s locked herself away.” Yes, Ken is capable of reflection. He’s a deep guy, as you know. Beneath that Superwhiteman exterior is a thinker. And Ken wants to keep the marriage alive, I know he does, but like the man says, it’s not easy when his wife is a

  DEAD FUCK.

  His words, not mine.

  Now maybe you’re starting to grasp the gravity of the situation.

  I’m going to leave you alone now. Your next feeding is in an hour. Use your time wisely. Make it count.

  3. LENA HARRINGTON

  Oh fuck my life.

  God, please help me. I’ve never asked you for anything before. I know I’ve been bad. Or whatever. Jesus. Please.

  This woman isn’t just crazy. I think I could handle crazy. But it’s worse. She’s like a worm, pushing her way through my skull. And if this keeps up any longer, I’ll be crazy like her.

  She’s right. I’m not strong. But I never needed to be. DAMN IT. Strength was never a requirement. Obedience was.

  The right schools, check. The right wardrobe, check. The right friends, check. Check check check. Everything lined up on ledger paper, the appropriate boxes checked. And beyond the boxes? More boxes. More sheets of ledger paper.

  So here I am, divided from the streets of River City by concrete and steel and crumbling red brick, locked up in a tiny cell—I think maybe this used to be a jail, back in the Gold Rush times—and all I have to keep me going is the paper. The boxes. Which does fuck all to help in this specific test situation.

  Next door, as Charlie informs me, the girls of Madame Soska’s plied their trade. How many dudes got all liquored up and sailed on a rum boat from the hoosegow to the boudoir and back?

  I reach out and touch the walls of my cell, and retrieve a palm full of dust. Red dust, like rust, like an old blood stain.

  It makes me think. I think about all the lost lives and lost souls buried here. Like so many layers of strata. To raise the city, they jacked up the buildings and brought in mountains of dirt, packed the spaces between the new sidewalk and the old ground floors, and created these pockets. That much I knew, but it never occurred to me once that shopping at the mall would bring me down here, in direct contact with…whatever lies beneath. In the intermittent darkness I have too much time to think, and seeing her face—that oddly beautiful face, like a mask, like a Chinese mask, with eyes like pinwheels buried in earth—is always a relief before it’s a menace to my sanity. I’m starting to understand how people become brainwashed. How prisoners lose their sense of identity, of what makes them unique. How they might begin to lose heart. How this anguish grows—dark, burning, malevolent, unkind—and the anger builds.

  God I hate this Charlie bitch.

  It’s a violation at so many levels. And I need to be angry, for my husband, for my children. She gets their names wrong on purpose. She goes on and on and on, ranting and raving. She reminds me of some of the coffee house poets I used to go see during my short-lived Bohemian period. Only they went through my ears the way the latte went out with my pee. Charlie is different. I don’t know if it’s because I’m stuck here with her and she’s the only voice, besides my own, that I hear…but she makes more sense than those hipsters in their black turtlenecks working in record stores going for their MFA’s which will qualify them to do…nothing. BUT when I’ve listened to her for a while…before my brain just shuts down…she knows when this happens…I start to wonder, in this void. I start to wonder, not whether she’s right…ok, that too, but it’s more complicated. I need to make my peace, I think, first. God, how do you do it? I’m so sorry, I never…well, it’s not like I didn’t believe in you. I believed in something. It was so easy. It’s always been easy. I was smart, hot, popular. People liked me. I was a killer athlete. I sailed through my studies and when graduation came, it didn’t matter I was already pregnant. I thought I could go back to school after the baby was grown. But then came another. And I love them. I love them. Nobody has the right to take that away from me.

  Nobody has the right to separate me from my family!

  But then, what’s a right?

  Sometimes I think a right is something you are allowed to exercise by people who are more powerful than you. Even temporarily. Here, it’s the power of your mind, your will, your spirit that counts. Just that I’m not Nelson Mandela. I’m a soccer mom. A proud mother and wife and friend. I could have done anything with my life, but I chose to marry Ken and settle down. I wanted his pink, ugly, beautiful babies. Man, I would go through teething and potty training again if that’s what it took—if I had to, to see them again, to hold them. Hear those weird gurgling noises when words are just sounds and the baby world is the entire universe. A world where I am a goddess and the earth and they are my creation. Ken and I make the arc of the known world over them. An arch, like the entrances to these storefronts—mostly filled in, but the tunnels go on and on. The hollow sidewalks. And the meat inside.
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  I have fantasies about a SWAT team coming down here and just shooting the fuck out of this woman. I’d like to see the red dot on her chest. I’d like to see her head explode like an over ripe watermelon thrown from a tall building.

  When I dream, I dream about Ken, my husband. His strong arms. His protection. He would know what to do. But how can I reach him? I don’t even know how far these tunnels go. And even if Charlie took off the chains, I’d be scared to investigate.

  I cannot allow this to happen.

  As long as I have breath, as long as my lungs pull in oxygen, I’ll fight. There was no way to prepare myself. I don’t think anybody would be prepared for this. You never expect the Spanish Inquisition, right?

  Be anger. Be FUCKING MAD.

  Lena. Damn you.

  No. Damn her.

  Ok, to priorities.

  First, keep self alive.

  Contiguous with second, look for escape routes.

  She blindfolded me on the freight elevator, so for however many days have passed…two, three? I’ve only known these four walls. Although I sometimes think I hear voices next door.

  Shit.

  Be MORE FUCKING MAD. Don’t go to sleep in the snow. Fight it.

  Fight for your children. Fight for your man. Don’t let crazy bitch win this.

  I miss his smell, his scent. Like musty mint plucked fresh from the earth. Burrowing up under the covers after making love. I miss crawling out of bed after a sleep-in Saturday and realizing the kids either made their own breakfast or are playing video games, reading, watching TV or a movie. Or both. Checking in with them and seeing the mess they’ve made in the kitchen, the spilled milk and cereal. I love spilled milk.

  I will not let her see me cry.

  It’s hard to keep track of time in here.

  What she says about Ken is NOT TRUE. She’s trying to fuck with my mind. He would never in a million years say what Charlie tells me he said. She’s a liar, a compulsive liar, a well of pure poison. He wouldn’t say those things. He would never call me a DEAD FUCK. That hurts so bad. He’s not what she says he is.