Gods & Monsters

by Saffron A Kent

  “Thanks a lot, douchebag. I haven’t talked to my friend in ages. I never should’ve told you about the treehouse.”

  When I’m tired from all the running around, I go to her favorite spots. She loves anything with colors and crowds: Times Square, Union Square, Fifth Avenue. She also loves Central Park. She loves taking her shoes off and dipping her toes in the grass. Or simply lying down and looking at the sky. She loves people watching, says she’s collecting stories.

  Strangely, I don’t remember her writing anything after we moved here.

  She’d even stopped reading when it used to be almost impossible to tear her away from a book. It makes me uneasy. It makes me think that it’s my fault. Because of me she doesn’t write anymore.

  Is that why she ran away? Because my – our – anger somehow destroyed her desire to write?

  Tonight, I call her up and tell her that she’s free to do anything she wants to do.

  “Pixie, you can write as many stories as you want. You don’t even have to work. I’ll pick up extra shifts. I’ll… I’ll work all day, all night so you can be the best writer you can be. Come back. Please, come back. I’ll do anything you want me to do.”

  Today’s the sixth day I’ve come to the park — Central Park, Pixie’s favorite place in the city. Also, today, I’ve officially worked with this construction crew for a week. They invited me out for a drink but I refused.

  I need to do something for Pixie.

  I told her I’d do anything for her to come back, anything for her to be the best writer she can be, and I’m fulfilling my promise.

  Or at least, trying to.

  After talking to her voicemail, I had an idea. A light bulb moment. What if I collect stories for her? The only way I know how.

  Camera.

  She told me once that I stop time so I’ll stop time for her. I’ll take pictures for her. Of the people, of the buildings, the streets, the grass, the sky, the birds. That should show her that I’m committed to this thing. Committed and supportive.

  Only I can’t.

  I haven’t been able to take one fucking snap and I’ve been trying for six days. Every time I pick up my camera — the one she bought for me with her parents’ money — I freeze up. My fingers don’t move. I feel nauseated, breathless.

  I feel suffocated.

  What the fuck does that mean?

  I’ve always been able to work the camera. In fact, it’s saved me so many, many times. Back when I found out about my parents, I wanted to disappear. I kept thinking about how we’d make fun of Jackson Campbell and his crush on his cute cousin. How gross we all found it. How cheesy, but my parents were no different. Even their names were a lie.

  I withdrew from my friends after that. Only had my camera for company. It made me feel invisible. Like I didn’t exist. No one notices the guy behind the lens and I was fine with it.

  Then, years later when I fell in love with Pixie but couldn’t see her, my camera saved me again. I’d take pictures of her. Outside, on the fields, around the town, in the bedroom. I groan every time I think of it. My dick doesn’t go down for hours. Fuck. She’s the most beautiful sight my eyes — any eyes — have ever seen. Beautiful, pure, irresistible. Sexy.

  I’d started drawing her sketches, the ones she saw on prom night when everything else failed me. Internet, magazines… nothing gave me relief. The stuff was bland so I took to my imagination. I never thought she’d let me photograph her naked on that night. No matter what happened after, I’ll never regret getting to touch her fleeting beauty.

  What wouldn’t I give to capture her again? She is a whole fucking universe: yellow hair like the sun; blue eyes like the sky; shiny, smooth skin like silk; sharp dips and curves like valleys.

  But for now, I just want to work the camera again without throwing up. I wanna collect stories for her.

  Doesn’t happen though. It doesn’t work. So, I throw it on the ground. What use is it if I can’t help Pixie? But throwing it is not enough, so I stomp on it, kick it repeatedly.

  Fucking useless piece of shit.

  I kick it, stomp on it, shatter it with my feet. I want to break it into a million pieces; maybe her dad was really onto something when he did the same months ago. People around me give me weird glances but it’s nothing new.

  Once the lens is cracked right in the middle, I breathe.

  Somehow, it comes easy, my breaths.

  This morning I woke up with an urge to draw Pixie’s face.

  It’s been a long time since I’ve picked up a pencil. My sketches are rough and riddled with errors. I’m much better with a camera or at least I think so, but it’s gone now. Been gone for days.

  Besides, Pixie isn’t anywhere around me so I need to create her myself.

  I like the weight of pencil in my hands. I like how easily I slip back into sketching.

  Right now, I need a fuck ton of easy so I’ll take it.

  “Hey, you’re not gonna believe what happened to me today.” I laugh into the phone, the ever-silent phone. “A guy at work, he saw me sketching and told me he knows someone at a gallery downtown. They do portraits and he thinks he can hook me up. Maybe even have them carry some of my stuff.”

  I laugh again. It’s self-conscious. “I mean, it’s fucking crazy, right? I’m not a professional. Never wanted to be but…” I sigh. “What if I can be? I know you say I can do it but… it feels too good to be true. So, what do you think, Pixie? Should I check it out?”

  Obviously, I don’t get any answer.

  But what if I did? What if she picked up on my next try? What if they really carried my pieces? Mine. Something I made with my own hands.

  What if...

  I come back home after looking for her.

  At nine PM sharp, I shut myself in our room and dial her number. My heart bangs in my chest as it usually does in the first few seconds but then, my hope dashes when a click sounds, alerting me to the fact that she’s not going to pick up. Again.

  I’m getting ready to leave a message when every part of my body stills, freezes. I hear her voice on the other side; her automated outgoing message has been changed.

  “Hi, this is Pixie. Leave me a message.”

  I found us a new apartment.

  It’s not much, only a studio in Chinatown but it’s ours and I’m proud of it. It’s the first thing that I’ve bought for myself, for us.

  I don’t know when a woman feels like she’s become a wife, but I guess a man becomes a husband when he knows he’s provided for his woman. I wish I had built a house for her with my own bare hands, and maybe one day I will. But for now, I’m satisfied knowing that I’ve done everything I can to give her something to call her own.

  I haven’t said anything to Pixie yet. I wanted to move in first and call her out of our new apartment to tell her the good news. I know she’d be ecstatic. I know that as I know the lines on my palm. I’ve got three big ones and a few smaller ones, broken and scratched.

  Pixie loves my hands. When she was with me, she loved fingering those lines that supposedly decide destiny, fate. She used to say that it made her sleep, tracing them over and over, tracing my future, thinking about our stories.

  I know she still does. She still thinks about our stories and she’ll come back to me one day.

  No, she hasn’t picked up my call yet. But that recorded message was the light I was looking for at the end of the tunnel. It was a sign. I know it. I feel it.

  She’d said Pixie.

  Hi, this is Pixie.

  She took back the name I gave her after she rejected it out of anger, on Nick and Blu’s balcony. That counts for something. That counts for everything.

  I didn’t believe Pixie when she told me to stop looking for her. I mapped out the entire city on my legs. I looked for her everywhere. Sometimes I’d run faster than New York and sometimes New York ran faster than me. No matter what, I was always out of sync. My rhythm was off.

  It still is. I don’t think I’ll get back my rhy
thm or my breath until Pixie is with me. But I’m okay now.

  I have faith.

  Maybe this is why people chase God. They chase something higher, bigger than themselves because it’s peaceful. It’s relieving. It gives them time to live their life in the moment and not in the past or in the future. It’s an act of courage to put your faith in something like that. Maybe that’s what religion is.

  I might never get to a stage where I’m comfortable with a higher power, but I believe in Pixie. She asked me to trust her and I am trusting her. I haven’t looked for her in days now.

  All I do is go to work in the morning, come home and sketch in the evening because I’ve been commissioned to make a few pieces for the gallery. Yeah, they liked me. They liked my stuff. They said it was a little rough but they liked the character it lent to my art.

  My art.

  I can’t fucking believe it. Can’t fucking believe that Pixie was right. I can be an artist if I want to. Well, I shouldn’t have been surprised. My Pixie is the smartest of all.

  I’m digging out clothes from my backpack — I don’t have many — and stowing them away in the new closet, when my hand closes around the video camera.

  After I smashed my other camera, I haven’t had the courage to look at the footage of our camcorder. Sure, I’ve thought about it. I’ve captured Pixie on it. It’s the easiest fucking way to look at her face when she isn’t here. Instead, I’ve chosen to draw her, perfect the lines of her cheeks and curve of her lips.

  Something about a camera or rather this camera makes me uneasy. Maybe it’s the lens, the separation from the real world or the coldness of the object. I can’t put my finger on it, but I feel it in my gut.

  I want to look at it today, though. I wanna be brave and look at our past, the way I’ve captured it. Well, it’s mostly sex but still. Swallowing, I take the memory card from the camera and put it in my computer. I sit at the newly-purchased bar stool, take a deep breath and play the first clip.

  The screen fills with her shy smile. She’s blushing. Her hair is fanned out on the pillow and she’s trying to hide her face. She’s wearing her sunflower nightshirt and her skin glows, so do her eyes.

  Jesus Christ, she’s beautiful.

  Nah, not beautiful. She’s stunning. Ethereal. An angel. A goddess.

  A goddess who used to be mine before I blew it.

  “Abel, stop. You’re an ass,” she says, her gaze touching me through the camera, and I lose all carefully-constructed control of my emotions.

  With trembling, heated fingers, I reach out and touch her smile on screen. It’s fucking cruel how disappointing it is. To touch the cold screen when I wanna touch her. Her warmth, her flesh, her silky hair. I wanna feel her breaths on my skin, tickling my throat when she sleeps beside me. I wanna smell her first thing in the morning when she’s all warm and sleepy.

  I want the real Pixie.

  My wife. The girl who loves chocolates, who gave me a hard time when I told her I loved apples. The girl who told me that I stop time, that I can never be invisible because I was too talented. The girl who left everything for me.

  The girl who called our love a legend.

  “Pixie,” I whisper or try to. But no sound comes out. The air is as silent as ever around me. On screen, she hides her face with her hands and the camera shakes as I tickle her ribs.

  “Come on, Pixie. You can’t hide from me,” I tell her as I make her laugh, mercilessly.

  “Abel, stop. Oh my God,” she gasps, her cheeks red and water clinging to her lashes.

  We tussle innocently for a few minutes before things turn sexual. They always do. We were insatiable. Always hungry. Always horny.

  Then, I’m fucking her. The screen-me didn’t even wait to take all of her clothes off; he was that desperate. I hate that. I hate that I didn’t even take the time to worship her body when she was right there with me. I hate that I didn’t kiss every inch of her pink, warm skin.

  I was an asshole.

  Even so, when her moans fill the room, my dick wakes up. It begins leaking from the tip as things progress, as I hear myself say how pretty she is, how pretty her pussy looks, how obscenely it’s stretching over my cock. That makes her come and she shivers, undulates on the bed, her face scrunched up in an erotic frown.

  Jesus, I’m gonna come in my pants, but somehow, I control myself.

  I don’t stop after that. I can’t. I watch video after video. Until her happy smiles turn into vulnerable ones. Until her needy eyes turn into sad ones.

  In one video she holds out her arms, staring at me with such love that in this moment, I’m pierced with it.

  “Abel, hug me?” she asks.

  Her sweet voice stirs my heart, fucks up my breathing. I ache with the need to bust through the screen and hug her, fulfill her wish. Fulfill all her wishes.

  But the jackass in front of me says something completely different, completely bullshit.

  “Jesus, Pixie. You look so fucking sexy like this. I can’t mess up this shot, baby.”

  I say something else but I can’t hear. I’ve lost the capability. All I know is that I didn’t hug her when she wanted me to. I didn’t give her what she wanted. I was too lost inside my head.

  How could I be there with her and not really be there?

  It’s like I’m watching myself make the biggest mistake of my life. I’m watching myself jump off the cliff, but I can’t do anything about it. I’m doomed to fall. I’m doomed to slip over the edge no matter how many times I pause the video, rewind it and watch it again.

  Dread is seeping into my soul but I have to do this. I have to watch my complete and utter destruction. I can’t look away. I don’t want to look away. I deserve to watch this.

  I open the internet browser and search for the Skins website. I hunt down our videos and watch them one by one. Like a madman, I watch them over and over. I watch Pixie, and then, I go back to the beginning and watch myself.

  I watch my face, my body, my expressions. I watch how tight my muscles look. With anger. How mean my expression seems. Again, with anger. How black my eyes are. It appears as if I’m running a fever; my flesh is so flushed and sweaty. I hear my words. Obscene, rude, mean words, asking Pixie to look in the camera, asking her to tell me how much she loves me, asking her to tell her parents how much she loves fucking me. They’re not spoken with an erotic intent, no. I’m not trying to create a fantasy like I did that first time we went to that room. I’m not trying to get her hot. I’m trying to vent.

  I’m venting my anger.

  This isn’t a fantasy anymore. It’s reality. It’s my reality. My anger. My loss of control.

  And she’s taking it all, my Pixie.

  You’ve lost all control.

  You’re so angry, Abel.

  Stop running. No one’s chasing you.

  Everything makes sense now. Everything is clear. I know why I have started to hate the camera. I know why I never had the courage to look at these videos, even when she was with me.

  It’s because of me. It’s because they tell the story of how I truly became a monster.

  As Pixie climaxes on screen, I throw up.

  I haven’t spoken to Pixie or rather her voicemail in two days.

  All I’ve done in the last forty-eight hours is throw up in my new toilet. I thought I was going to die. I didn’t though.

  I’m alive. Because I want to suffer. Every single second for the rest of my life, I want to burn but I don’t wanna die. I wanna come back to life every day, so I can burn again.

  You see, when two people fall in love, the other seven billion don’t matter. It’s not the world that tears them apart, it’s them. Only they have the power.

  It never could’ve been her parents, my parents, or the town, because none of that ever mattered.

  It was me. I broke us.

  And the cruelest thing is that I can watch it happen with my own eyes. I captured it all, the demise of my control, the demise of our relationship.


  Standing at the window of our new apartment and watching the slowly waking street below, I dial her number again. For the last time.

  She won’t pick up; she shouldn’t. In fact, she should change her number so I can never bother her again. She should…

  A click sounds, making me frown, and then the sweetest sound God’s ever created echoes in my ear.

  “Abel?”

  I’m stunned for a second. Am I hallucinating? Maybe I’ve been more dehydrated than I thought. Should I say something? But if this is a hallucination, it won’t matter.

  Jesus, fuck. I’ve lost my mind.

  “Hello? Abel?” Her voice rises in pitch. “You there? Are you okay?”

  “Pixie,” I breathe out because what the fuck does it matter if it’s a hallucination or not. She’s talking to me.

  “Oh, thank God. I thought…” I hear her gulp. “I-I thought something happened to you when you didn’t call. I didn’t know what to do. I—”

  “You picked up. You… I…” I press a fist on the glass of the window, trying to ground myself. “Are you real? I can’t tell.”

  There’s a rush of air and when she speaks, I can hear a slight smile in her voice. “I’m pretty sure I’m real.”

  “It’s okay if you’re not. I’m not afraid of losing my mind.”

  Her intake of breath tells me that my Pixie is real, and I shouldn’t have said that. I don’t deserve to say these things now.

  But she’s real.

  She picked up my call.

  I’m afraid to move, afraid to spook her. Afraid to do anything but listen to her breathe.

  “I was worried when you didn’t call,” she says. “You always call.”

  “Yeah. I don’t ever leave you alone, do I?”

  “You don’t.”

  My body feels weak and my head hangs. The only reason I’m standing upright, instead of falling to the floor is because I need to tell her. I need to confess my sins, and until I do, I don’t deserve relief.