Needles & Sins

by John Everson

  Joseph nodded and pointed at Mary. He accepted their gifts of gold, frankincense and myrrh and placed each in his saddlebags. Then he collected the babe and smiled crazily as one by one the three kings dropped their robes and joined Mary in the hay.

  From his cradle in the sheep’s manger, the baby watched and listened to the crying, moaning play, and the powerful amber of his endless eyes soon lit to life for the first time. His gaze filled the stable with a heavenly light and Joseph smiled dimly in the corner as he watched the bodies in the hay, musing at the glorious play of music in his head that there was a harpist nearby, perhaps. With the help of the rising light and its strangely comforting heat, Mary and the three kings gripped tighter and harder; fingers traced wet slides of pleasure and pain in the hay and the orgy of celebration brought its own flavor to scent the already thick air of the stable.

  Afterwards, the men rose, dripping and dirty from the wreck of the hay to stand bewildered by source of the orgasmic light—the halo of the babe. Each knelt naked before him, holding hands trembling with fear and wonder and want and whispering, they each proclaimed, “Blessed be thy name.”

  — | — | —

  GREEN GREEN GRASS

  The grass moves ahead of me in waves, each knee-high stalk shaking and shimmering in the dying light of a summer afternoon. My feet are bare, each step tentative, negotiating with the ground rather than dominating it. I’d already gouged my soles on rocks and barbed sticks lying hidden beneath the amber sea. A sea that seemed to go on forever all around me. To my left, the golden-green-flecked ocean slid without breaking into the cobalt edge of the sky. To my right, the horizon lightened as it faded into the fiery glow of a sunset. Only I hadn’t seen the sun today. The sky above was unbroken blue, and to the right, it was simply red. Sunset without the sun; a murder scene without the body—but rich in blood.

  There’s no way of telling what direction I’m headed, but I trudge forward anyway, trying to keep to a straight line. Sooner or later, I have to come to something, if I don’t double back on myself. In the far distance, it seems as if the drought-burned field must meet a body of water of some kind; there’s a hint of green ahead. I glance over my shoulder and there’s no trace in the grass that I’ve disturbed it. It’s as if I’ve never been anywhere but in this one spot, a lone man in the midst of forever.

  I keep walking.

  The blades of dry, brittle grass slip against my thighs, sometimes tickling me like the tip of a feather, other times drawing across my legs like the paper thin edge of a razor, slicing and stinging me with a thousand tiny cuts. Slice and caress, caress and slice. Pleasure leading to pain, like the dance of love. I could stop, but then I would still be lost in the middle of an endless field. A field I don’t remember driving to. Or walking in. Before today.

  I woke up this morning naked on a mound of grass. Didn’t know where I was or how I got here. After that, what could I do but start to walk?

  The sweat runs down my back, and my legs are smeared with blood. I’ve walked for hours and the view never seems to change. Sheaves and sheaves of grass. Dead brown. My stomach rumbles with hunger, and my lips are parched with thirst. I have to find my way out of this field.

  Ahead, the sea of parched death seems to thin, a hint of green showing through. Maybe I am near a river. An oasis of some kind. I step up my pace, hopeful for respite, at last.

  Something bites me.

  Stabs me in the foot.

  I jump back, crying out, and balancing on one leg, hold my ankle in my hands to get a look at the already throbbing slash in the bottom of the sole of my foot. Blood sluices across my hand and I’m helpless to staunch the flow. Crimson drips across my thigh and smears the pale head of my naked cock, and I look away into the frozen sky, injured and confused in the midst of a silent, endless stand of grass. I look down at the ground, my body swaying uncertainly from side to side, and finally see the villain. The sharp edge of a green bottle extrudes from the dark ground. I know the logo, half broken as it was.

  Rolling Rock. I haven’t touched a Rolling Rock in years. Not since Amy.

  I can still see the shard of glass, hanging like a green tear from her eye. A tear that slid out of her socket, lay close to her cheek and transubstantiated a communion of fatal blood from its jagged edge. It didn’t mar her porcelain white beauty too badly, and in an instant, my sanity slid from my soul along with my jeans. In that brutal haze of blood and lust, I dropped my jeans quickly, before she got cold. If I was gonna pay for killing her, I might as well enjoy it.

  Amy had been a good time girl ‘til I told her about the bottle. Let’s face it, you don’t know where a groupie tramp’s been, and a little alcohol is always a safe sterilizer. I didn’t want the carpet wet and Jack, our bassist, had been in the bathroom with a brunette who barely looked sixteen, let alone legal, for the last hour. So I gave her the Rolling Rock and told her to douche on the balcony before we went to bed.

  Amy laughed at first, and shook her waist-long mane of peroxide blond at me, no way. I didn’t laugh, and her previously endearing doe eyes took on a slant I didn’t like one bit as it dawned on her that this was no joke, this fuckin’ creep was serious as hell and she either stuck a fizzing bottle up her crack and made it act like an angry soda pop or she wasn’t going to get fucked by the rock star.

  The rock star, that was me. Jamie Turret. Singer of Serenading Sonia. I had more hair than she did back then, and I flipped it over my shoulder and gave one of those trademark half-sad grins and shrugged. “Fizz or fly,” I said. “Your choice.

  That’s when she made her mistake. Her fatal mistake, as it were.

  She punched me. Actually slammed both hands into my chest and then suckered me in the gut. I’d had groupies walk before, but they’d never laid a hand on me. I shoved her right back, and she stumbled in those two-inch fuck-me heels until her shoulders were perpendicular to the concrete walk by the pool below and her ribs were getting bruised by the iron of the rail. There was nobody below us in the electric blue reflection at that point, just the oscillating waves of the pump jets, water shivering back and forth across the pool, nervously waiting for a diver.

  She bent backwards, hair flying in the midnight breeze and hissed “fuck you, asshole.”

  That’s when I took the bottle out of her hand and slapped her across the face. Part of me hoped she’d go over the edge and be out of my life, now. She didn’t. It probably still would have ended there, me half drunk in my bed five minutes later and her staggering down the street outside the hotel looking for a cab, except that she didn’t stop there. She kneed me in the groin and shoved me back into the room.

  A white hot tire iron shot up my belly and my stomach threatened to lose its load of beer, but I was more pissed than hurt. “You bitch,” I screamed, and slammed the bottle against the desk for emphasis. Its end shattered, a million tiny emerald blades flying up to cut the air. But I didn’t stop there.

  No. I had to bring my arm forward to club her with the bottle, in my drunken haze not yet realizing that its lower half had disintegrated around us.

  She hardly made a sound after the makeshift emerald knife slipped past that beautiful baby blue eyeball, and lodged in the back of her brain, permanently severing any synaptic intelligence. Something between a squeak and a grunt came from her throat and then, as the blood began to stream down the glass in rhythm with the shocked final pounding of her heart, her entire body spasmed, her knees buckled and she fell to the floor. She twitched a few times, and there was a low moaning gurgle. Then she was still.

  All I’d wanted was a few minutes in the sack. Now she was a sack. A dead bag of human lust, ripe to disintegrate into a life sentence of vengeance.

  I stared at her, my brain a buzz of alcohol and barbituates. I could almost see her skin shimmer as her spirit took flight, and the warmth promised by her heavy lips faded like the sunset in Hawaii. Quick, silent and beautiful. Live fast, get killed young.

  My pants hit the floor without a co
nscious thought, and I took what I thought was mine. It was difficult to maintain my concentration as that bottle waved back and forth from the ruptured hole that once was her beautiful blue eye, blood leaking out in time with my motions against her body. I plunged the life out of her, and I got what she came for, though without any fireworks to mark the momentous nature of the event. There should have been something more than that, I thought, as I wiped myself off and wondered if that was the last fuck I’d ever have with a woman. Tomorrow, I thought, as I staggered to the bed, I’d be arrested.

  But I wasn’t.

  Jack found me in the morning, huddled by the body, sobbing more in fear of consequence than for the loss of the groupie’s life. I’d always been a self-centered bastard. Came with the territory of lead singer, and if it got bad the more famous we got, it got worse when we slipped back into obscurity. Looking back, I have to admit that maybe that was the cause of our ultimate decline.

  We wrapped her in a sheet, stuffed her in a canvas keyboard case, and simply walked out of the hotel with her. After driving a couple hours out of the city, we pulled over, Nick and I, and took the body into a deserted stretch of prairie land. We dug a hole in the middle of a grassy field and buried her in the case, figuring that its enclosure would keep the body from stinking up the field and drawing animals. Nick looked at me a couple times as I tore at the earth with a new Ace Hardware spade bought just for Amy, but never said a word.

  After she was six feet under, we got back in the car and headed back the way we’d come, three hours now behind the band and the bus, but plenty of time to make our gig that night in Des Moines. We never spoke of it again.

  And I never drank Rolling Rock again.

  So it made a cruel bit of sense that I was lost somewhere, in the middle of a field, being bitten by the teeth of a green bottle. I wiped more of the wet blood off my hand and onto my thigh, and gingerly put my toes back to the ground, limping forward slowly, and peering more intently at the ground between the dead shoots of grass.

  It was well that I did…just a couple feet away, I narrowly missed planting my heel on another broken green bottle. And then just beyond that, I saw another just in time. I could feel a warm slick of blood cover my heel, leaving a trail on the ground as I navigated a crooked path between the bottles, expecting the maze of glass to diminish once the remains of the frat boy or high school delinquent party was behind, but instead, the teeth of glass only grew more frequent. My eyes now fixated soley on the ground, as I played a cruel game of twister to avoid a growing mash of jagged, angry glass.

  The ground became easier and easier to see, and then it occurred to me that the grass had completely stopped its incessant slicing and itching against my bare thighs, and I looked up to see before me, not a field, but a sea of liquid green.

  Glass.

  As far as I could see, the ground overflowed with bottles, white labels jeering at me like vampiric teeth, begging me to walk this way. And they weren’t just lying about on the ground. They were stacked on each other, deep and dangerous as the eye could see. The bones of my sin. A narrow dirt path continued from the edge of the field through the maze of broken bottles.

  I stood still, looking around me for the first time in an hour, and taking in the change in scenery. Ahead of me, the ground glittered in the waiting fangs of Rolling Rock; behind me stemmed suffocating sheaves of death. To my right, the meeting line of death and murder, weaved an uneven, but mostly barren path through the glass.

  I walked on.

  It was surreal, I thought. The stillness. It seemed as if I hadn’t heard a noise in hours. Not even a whisper of breeze across the endless expanses of grass and glass. I tried to remember how I’d come to be here, but nothing came. The past few days were a foggy blur of rowdy concerts at falling down dive bars and late night after show parties. I shook my head to clear the cobwebs, but there was no clarity. And oddly, no hangover.

  The trail led crookedly up one hill and down the next. At each peak I prayed to find a new scene on the other side—a valley. A river. Something. But every hill seemed to lead into another vista filled with broken green glass. And the thin dirt path through the center. My foot throbbed, and I didn’t dare to look at how much mud I’d ground into the wound. There’d be time for disinfectant later. Now, I just needed to find water. And food. My stomach strangled in pain, and my legs felt heavier with every step. Everything seemed to have taken on the sickening emerald green sheen of Rolling Rock. The glass stretched to the horizon, and even the stagnant blue of the sky seemed to be leaching its color.

  Alex is going to be pissed, I thought, imagining our tour manager going from hotel room to hotel room and asking the guys where I was. Unless he was in on it. Maybe the bunch of them had drugged me and dropped me here. And the path was my only way out…I’d kill them.

  A flash of Amy’s face at that thought, green dagger twisting out of her ruined eyeball, mouth hanging open in shock at my betrayal, blood coating the purity of that soft face…

  I shook my head and staggered on, determined not to think of her. I had managed to almost forget about that night, at times. A steady diet of alcohol helped. Still, her ghost whispered in my lyrics and what could I do about that? She haunted my soul and always would. I couldn’t deny my damnation, so I celebrated it, flaunted it in song. And the hits kept coming…for awhile.

  Another hill and I weaved up its face, careful not to step off the steep path and gouge another wound in my aching feet. My body felt light, almost ethereal. I’d stopped sweating. I was walking on air. I was probably about to collapse, I thought.

  And then I reached the top. I looked out over the next valley, and gasped.

  In the distance, I could see a town. Or, more specifically, the entry to a street lined with buildings. I let out a cheer, but nothing broke the stillness of the landscape. I was so dry and worn that I couldn’t utter a sound. I staggered down the path towards this oasis, almost falling down the far side of the hill before staggering to an abrupt stop.

  The path was interrupted.

  It simply stopped at the bottom of the hill, and picked up again at the beginning of the next, where it led to the street above.

  In between were thousands of broken bottles, stacked one on top of the other, all of them leering at me, jagged ends pointing toward the sky.

  All of them green. Without a trace of earth to be seen.

  I fell to the ground, but no tears came. I was too dehydrated to cry.

  After awhile, I stood again, and stared out across the deadly sea of glass. It was only 15 or 20 yards to the other side, but it looked like a mile. How could I cross it? I had no clothes to bind my feet in, and nothing around for miles that I could use to create steppingstones through the abyss. I couldn’t go back; I wasn’t sure I had the strength left to climb the hill ahead to the town, let alone walk for hours back to the middle-of-nowhere place I’d awoken, only to begin a trek in the other direction that could prove equally as endless.

  I had only two choices: Step gingerly across the glass, letting each blade sink slowly into my feet as I crossed. Or take a running start and hurl myself across the glass, with each step gouging rougher, deeper wounds. But I would probably have to take fewer steps that way.

  My shoulders shook in empty cries with the horror of my choices. If I lost my balance from the pain, my entire body would be slashed and I might not be able to get back up. If I ran, the worst pain would be over sooner, but my feet might be shredded beyond repair. If I didn’t run, they still might be ruined, unless I could find a path across stepping only on the most shallow of pieces.

  I forced myself to stop thinking about it and walked back the way I had come. I wouldn’t think about it. I wouldn’t imagine the blood blossoming from my feet, the green knives hungrily puncturing my skin, skewering my entire foot until the razor tips peeked through the other side, drenched in shavings of bone and awash in my blood. I wouldn’t…

  I turned and ran full force at the glass, stretchin
g my legs to long strides, leaping at the very edge of the boundary between grey baked earth and broken blades of deadly glass.

  The pain exploded through my right foot, and then the white-hot stabbing took my left. I screamed, opening my mouth in a cry to heaven that echoed like an explosion in my brain, but made no sound. The world remained strangely silent, and I was a hurtling body of unheard pain. I couldn’t look down, but forced myself to lift and stomp my right foot again, my knees threatening to buckle beneath me in fear rather than move again. I could feel the glass slicing easily through the soft soles of my feet, first as a warm burst of slippery heat, then as an excruciating stab. It was worst when I lifted my foot off the blade, feeling the jagged glass slip out, leaving a screaming vacuum in its wake that vomited blood and torn flesh.

  The first steps were bad, but with the fourth and fifth time, my feet came down on knives that chewed and tore the skin and muscle relentlessly. I was in agony. My mouth opened in a silent, ghastly scream that I couldn’t stop and I thrust my arms forward, yearning for the other side.

  I closed my eyes in pain and forced myself to lift my left foot again, and felt a shard of glass snap, leaving a piece of itself lodged in the ball of my foot. When I set my foot down, glass ground against glass against bone and I choked in horror. The pain shot up and down my calves, and I stumbled at last, falling to impale my thigh and left hand on broken bottles. Darts of fire pained every inch of the left side of my body.

  “Why?” I cried as the green glass slipped out through the back of my hand, and the pain swam wetly through my belly like a shark’s bite. Something hot spread across my ribs and side, and I could feel more teeth sinking into my thigh and calf, but I didn’t look down.

  I stared at my hand; the green glass looked surreal married to the sickly pale caste of my skin. Strange how there was no blood. No blood at all. I was a sculpture of flesh and bone and glass. A twisted crucifixion of man and bottle. I swam above the pain for a moment, marveling.