Sinners Circle

by Sims, Karina

  XIV

  “That chick.” Alison is pointing at a group of people bobbing their heads at a table. I crane my neck, I don’t see anything except wig hair and black clothing. She pulls me next to her, aiming her arm like a rifle. “That one, that chick right there.”

  “Ok.”

  “You see her?”

  She’s pointing at a tired looking thirty something, slug lips and low tits. Bad sweater, cheap jeans. “Sure.”

  She doesn’t lower her flesh rifle, just keeps on pointing it straight at cheap jeans. “She looks like Octomom. Except, minus the sort of looking like Angelina Jolie part.”

  I laugh, peel the label off my beer and scatter the shreds of paper across my lap, her lap. “I saw a dyke down here once who looked like Dan Aykroyd.”

  “Gross.”

  Carl and some scrawny wired looking fag sit down, I take a shot glass from him and he rolls his eyes, digs in his pocket for baggies of meth.

  “Yeah it was gross.”

  Carl wraps an arms around Alison and scratches his nose. “What was gross?”

  “I was telling her about the Aykroyd dyke. The time we saw that big…”

  He laughs and whips the edge of the table with his finger tips. “Oh shit yeah! She was—it was—sitting all alone, looking sad and nervous... kept fucking around with her medical bracelet. Like twisting it around and shit. So pathetic, hunched on a stool at the bar drinking wine, by the end of the night I wanted to slap her. I mean fuck, having to follow her up those stairs to the street, I was like ‘some of us have people to actually take home and have sex with, move loser.’ They shouldn’t let those things in here.”

  The skinny fag, he’s pulling out little paper envelopes, tiny plastic bags, turning them upside down in his palm and then tossing them on the floor. After a full minute of watching him do this I poke him in the arm, “You got a name?”

  He looks at me like I’ve slapped his baby. “Don’t fucking touch me! I don`t wanna drop this shit.” He even shakes his hand a little for emphasis.

  Carl points a beer bottle at him, “Oh Amanda this is...”

  I roll a wad of phlegm from the back of my throat and launch a perfect gob onto this skinny fucker’s cheek. “You got a name?”

  Even with a ball of spit and throat gunk dripping down his cheek, he doesn’t move, just keeps pulling out flaps of meth, coke, who knows what he’s got pinched in there. Whatever it is, it’s probably so cut it’s more cupcake mix than drugs. He just stares in his hand, dumping empty little bags and throwing them at his shoes. “Ronnie.”

  Alison shakes her head and tosses Ronnie a napkin. He doesn’t touch it but flinches as it lands by his hand.

  Carl looks over at the table, the one where Octomom is, or was. “Where’s that cunty waitress? The blonde one... the one with the...” He cups an invisible tit.

  I shrug. Ronnie doesn’t do anything, he’s dumping more baggies into a small mountain of powder growing in his palm. Thing is though, he’s sweating almost as fast as the mound is growing, salty perspirant quickly dissolving his drugs into goop. I’d say something, but I am sort of curious to see if the chemicals will absorb into his system through his skin.

  Alison looks at me, then at Ronnie, then at me, then at Carl. Her eyes wide, her mouth pulled down, she doesn’t look very attractive. “You guys are fucking kidding me!”

  She does the look around thing again. I just keep shrugging and Carl doesn’t even notice she’s mad until she punches him in the arm, hard. “You fucks! She was murdered! It was on the news and everything. Last night was some fund raiser where half the profit from drinks went to her family...”

  Ronnie slams a palm of wet drugs into his mouth and licks white slime dripping down his wrist. Carl looks at Alison, Carl looks at me, Alison looks at me. Alison says, “Amanda, didn’t you fuck her or something?”

  Ronnie is licking pigeon shit amphetamines from between his fingers, his eyes rolling like goddamn pool balls between us. I crack my neck, brush some of the peeled beer label scraps off my lap, “Well, I...”

  “Oh my... fuck...” Ronnie, his whole face goes beat red, then totally pale and then hits the table, white drool pooling out the side of his mouth, it looks like an unending stream of semen. From the way his body isn’t moving, the rim of his lips tight and grey, eyes locked open you don’t need to be a doctor to know he’s having a heart attack.

  Carl plays hero, he tells everyone to call an ambulance, he says he’s a nurse and helps a drag queen, who flashes his MD ID around, save Ronnie’s worthless life. The ambulance comes, takes Ronnie away, Carl goes with Dr. Drag, and when the lights turn back off and the music starts up again, it’s just me and Alison. We do shots at the bar and I try talking about movies I’ve seen lately, but Alison won’t talk about anything except Lilly and Ronnie and then eventually how much I should give Trisha a call.

  “She likes you, she really likes you.” She’s got tears in her eyes and her hand never leaves my leg when she’s saying all this. Every time she says ‘likes you’ her fingers get tense and it makes me really wet when she’s crying on my shoulder in the taxi home because I can feel her breath on my ear. When we’re just about at my house, she puts an arm across my stomach and swallows my earlobe.

  And when I take her home and fuck her, it’s not because I’m a bad friend, it’s because I’m a bad person. And I don`t even think about Carl across the city, breathing life into some gay stranger as I take off all of his girlfriend’s clothes, keeping my mouth moving over hers so she can’t voice any second thoughts. I don’t think about our long standing friendships because Alison has this really tight pussy and she doesn’t tell me to stop when I can tell it’s hurting her.

  I fall asleep as the sun rises and when I wake up, Alison is standing over me half naked and wearing that jogger’s University of Oklahoma sweat shirt. She’s holding a plate of toast and scrambled eggs. She kisses my forehead, sits down on the bed and hands me the plate but not the fork, because she’s drumming it on her bare knees. “Look, I don’t regret last night or anything but, let’s just keep this between us, OK?”

  I smile. “Yeah, OK.”

  “Thanks.”

  XV

  Whenever it comes down to women, it always comes down to me. It’s not a hatred I have, some deep grudge bubbling to the surface, some underlying anger with females or the fact I’m trying to cope with the loss of my mother. Because when the opportunity of selection comes, I’m really collecting symptoms of myself.

  When I see a girl with black hair enter the room, I’m looking her up and down, trying to see which part of her I’d like to ingest.

  Memories of days past, the thought of cribs and trailers, my dark haired mother pressing us together cheek to cheek in the mirror, “We’re twins, Amanda,”—it didn’t really occur to me until I lost her, how completely empty I was. The more I grew and the more I was faced with having to mingle among others, communicate in socially appropriate ways, these were just emotions and pleasantries I’d learned to copy cat. Because really, I had no opinion on current events, no attachments to sporting events, interests in books, television or media, no comment on the weather.

  I’d sort of just use television as a method of learning what to talk about when confronted with the burden of friendship. In my teens a lot of girls where cutting themselves. I’d be sitting in the bathroom stall eating my lunch, listening to the Goths talk about being needing cigarettes and being molested, while they gouged their wrists with push pins, glazing their arms with razor blades they swiped from wood shop class. So I tried that too. I went home and dragged a razor blade across both thighs, I still have the scars, but I didn’t feel anything and there wasn’t any release for me.

  I’d lay in bed, in the same basement bedroom I live in still, not thinking about anything except my mom’s face against mine, her bright lipstick, her white teeth, her voice “We’re so beautiful...” in my ear. And then I’d fall asleep and that face of hers would melt away, tearing
off completely, her teeth broken, her body tied to some awful chair in Mexico while children danced around her, pulling her body apart.

  Until I started dreaming about Gina and being in the bathtub, drinking Coke with her out on the lawn and busting her face in with a brick, pulling out her guts and eating her skin, I felt nothing.

  Around sixteen girls my age were falling in love with ‘Pretty in Pink,’ but I was falling head over heels for zombie films. I fell in love with the idea that I was a living zombie. I’d spend all class drawing this monster I’d imagined. It was like a zombie, but it consumed human beings entirely, it’s skin would rot and fall off, so it had to pull pieces of flesh off the corpses it killed, patch itself up. It would swallow hearts for its own and guts and everything like a normal person would have. In my mind, the creature grew; soon it would need two hearts, then three, then four to survive. Eventually it would consume entire communities, towns and even cities. When everyone wanted to be Cyndi Lauper, swarmed with adoring crowds and MTV coverage, I ached to become this big lumbering beast tramping through the streets slaughtering everything in its path, slapping strips of skin onto my boney back, blood running through my teeth.

  This big dumb monster consuming all of humanity until it keeled over and died, the beast with a billion hearts, a billion brains and all the brawn on the planet, just lying there after everything is totally gone. Pumping to a stop, collapsing into the ocean and just rotting away into the water, I called this thing ‘Slaughter Geek.’

  Starting off with what looked like it, what it felt like it was, finding those people and swallowing them until it really didn’t matter anymore what you looked like because anyone would do.

  The problem with imaginations is there aren’t real bullets and there aren’t real bars. These are things that exist only within reality, and sometimes if our imaginations carry us away, we wind up with one of these things in front of us—bullets in the head, surrounded by prison bars. So if you’re going to dream, keep it real, or you’ll lose it all and everything that you’ve worked for will come crashing down, and you’ll have to sit in a prison lunch room eating peas instead of people.

  I’ve long since realized that if you’re going to be a monster you have to hide it until you are powerful enough to come creeping out of the shadows and into reality.

  XVI

  “She developed an allergy to cats when she was young, but she always loved them.” Carl is cradling one of those Fur Real cats, you know, those toys moms buy for their kids when they get bored of their real living, breathing, shitting house pets. He’s petting the robot kitten, flicking the flaps of fabric sewn to its scalp as ears. In some spots the fur has been trimmed right down to the plastic body. What used to be white hair is now all gray. One of the back legs is busted and there’s gum stuck to the underbelly, keeping the battery case in place. “She spent all day winding these fuckers up or pluggin’ in batteries to keep ‘em going. She had about six dozen of these...” He pokes the eye, grabs a calico and lifts the tail looking for the crotch. “... Yup, at least that many.”

  I lean against the desk, the one with all the FUCK YOUs cut into it. “What brought her in here?”

  He laughs, tosses me the bubble gum bellied kitty. “Neighbors. Apparently she was busted breaking into the little girl next door’s bedroom one night. Tore a Hello Kitty sleeping bag right off the little girl lying in bed. Kid screamed so the parents called the cops, naturally.”

  “What?”

  He shrugs. “Yeah, she’d cut half her own ear off that night as well. Blood all over the place.” He finger snips his earlobe. “To be like one of these things.” He prods the plastic ribs of the calico, Velcro stomach opened up. This cat must’ve been one of those toys that came pregnant in the box, kittens sold separately. Kids could play and replay the joys of pregnancy until they got bored with the miracle of life and those tiny cloth kittens with retractable eyelids wound up in the garbage can or lost in some dark and forgotten corner of the house. “When they brought her in here, she was saying she didn’t think they’d catch her, because she was invisible.”

  I put the cat back on the desk. Carl drags a hand down its back. “True story.”

  “What’s that?” I point at a deflated blow up doll on the bottom shelf.

  He turns around, smiles, and hikes a thumb behind him. “Oh that’s the Queen. Dennis, you know the ‘King of France’ in here, yeah, that’s his lady. That’s La Reine.”

  “Hot.”

  He laughs, small bits of spit flying off his lips and landing on my arm. “Yeah, what a fucker.”

  I crack my knuckles, trace a finger along the obscenities carved into the table.

  Carl looks at his watch. “Oh shit, I gotta go, Amanda, I’ll catch you later.”

  We walk down that awful hallway, this time the screaming is coming from the rooms on the other side, while total silence weighs on the other. Carl pats my back in the main lobby and waves a hand over his shoulder. “See ya later.”

  I go over to the apple box library and dig through the Archies until I find a water damaged digest featuring Cherry Blossom. I sit down on that awful couch and move my eyes back and forth from Cherry’s tits to the nurse’s station. One of the cool things about Carl is he’s a Sabrina man, you know, that white haired teenage witch bitch. I’m a Cherry Blossom girl. Neither of us are Betty and Veronica people, and that’s rarer than you’d think. It’s these small differences that really matter.

  Cherry is half way to the mall when out of the corner of my eye that big lug from the porn store, the one whose pockets looked like huge swaying tumors from all the shit he was trying to steal, appears out of nowhere and sits down beside me. He’s thumbing a dog eared Bible and I’m not even kidding when I say he’s got dish towels stitched together and safety pinned to the back of his Goldberg t-shirt. He opens the book but stares at me from the corner of his eye.

  The lumpy pad of comic pulp in my hands shows Cherry laughing at a pair of boots. I turn to the big tumor thief and smack my lips together, “Hi. I’m Amanda.”

  He looks up from the Bible he’s pretending to read. “I’m Dennis...”

  “Hi Dennis.”

  He looks down at the carpet, tucks his slippered feet tight into the couch then closes his eyes and asks, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal savio...”

  “Are you a rapist?”

  His eyes snap open, breath caught in his throat.

  I look him in the eye and smile. “It’s not like she ever said no... but that doll you’re fucking, it never really said yes either did it? I mean, masturbation is a sin, too. And if you’ve accepted Christ...” I point at his Bible. “And you’re still doing it… I’m sorry, Dennis, but…” I lean in a little bit. “You’re going to hell.”

  His face does this funny little dance between screwing up into tears, getting angry, back to crying, then straight to tomato red. He jumps up, that half destroyed Bible flying to the ceiling and like all great things, falling to the floor faster than it rose. “Blasphemy! Satan! Satan! Satan!” When he shouts like this, I can see all the veins in his neck and forehead. “Do you know who I am?”

  While a nurse shoos him off for shots and straight coats, I slip in the coma ward and wander around until I find Lilly’s room.

  She’s lying in bed, hooked up to all sorts of breathing machines and tubes running fluids into her. I’m sort of moved when I see the blankets are tucked in at her arm pits.

  The clipboard swinging at the edge of her bed tell me this is Lilith Amber Wahlund DOB: Feburary 21st 1994.

  Upon arrival she had severe internal bleeding, ecchymosis of the liver, multiple cigarette burns to the left foot and calf, damage to the Achilles tendon, possibility of temporal brain damage. Condition: unconscious/responsive to heat.

  At the bottom of the page is a signature from RN Sophia Harris. Says here Sophia checked on Lilly twenty minutes ago. I pull up a chair beside Lilly’s bed and pet her head. I kiss her fingernails and watch her breathe fo
r a few minutes. I stand, press my fingertips into the glass pane and pull them in towards my palm so there’s a streak that looks like a flower; I drag a finger down each center, stemming the posy. The sun comes out behind a sky scraper, shining directly into my eyes so that I’m forced to look away. I turn back to Lilly and bend to kiss her eyelids. As I pull away, I gently bite a strand of her hair and chew it as I walk back down the hall and out into the world.

  XVII

  “There’s more twos over there. You missed them.” She slaps my hand away before my brush touches the cardboard. “Different brush please!”

  I drop my brush in a glass, purple bleeding into the warm water making it look like My Little Pony took a piss test. Marcy waves a few fingers over to the palette of acrylic paint smeared onto a dinner plate. “Pass me the orange.”

  I pass her the plate, get a new brush and swirl the tip into some robin’s egg blue. “Are you even allowed to be getting help with these?”

  She rolls her eyes, “As long as it’s me telling you what to do and you are here with me I don’t see how I can get disqualified.”

  A brass plaque commending her victory in the 1997 state Paint by Numbers Contest hangs beside the framed Last Supper paint by numbers picture, which hangs beside a ribbon for participation in the 2004 county competition.

  This year the painting requirement for the competition is Mother Mary. Judges will look at all five hundred paint by number portraits, eventually presenting a plaque to the winner and pinning ribbons to the chests of the losers.

  Marcy is the most militant paint by numbers artist on the planet. If the colors go outside the thin black lines of the assigned number, she’s prone to emotional collapse. So far, we’ve had to start over twice.