Cartoons in the Suicide Forest

by Leza Cantoral

I squeal again, terror rising, as I run in circles. He chases me and the crowd roars with laughter, cheering, and clapping. My screams are caught in my throat. Only this guttural sound comes out. My eyes have narrowed and colors gone blurry melty glass. The man with the whip is chasing. Run faster. Faster. Clompety clomp. Grunt. Squeak. Grunt.

  Animal me I am free. I forgot. I forgot. I am hungry.

  Suicide Pig

  Gut that cow. Fuck it. Slice it. Her flesh is smooth. The knife slides through her tattooed abdomen like butter. You cut a mermaid tail in half. Mermaid sushi. Suicide pig. Die, piggy, die. She has no power over you. You ejaculate on her face, blinding her little piggy eyes.

  “You little cumslut you know you fucking love it!”

  She licks the cum from her snout, snorting and grunting.

  “It’s your last meal, bitch, I hope you enjoy it.”

  The crowd cheers wildly as you bash in her skull with a hammer. She falls forward, her legs shake, falter, and quake as she tries to run, her eyes black and dumb with terror. You look up at the high seats in the ancient opera house. It is a full house of the robed elite sipping on martinis and champagne, anonymous, behind paper mache animal masks.

  Gold chipped angels hang over the suicide pigs, gutted and bleeding in their corral.

  They cheer for you and you bow, hammer in one hand, bloody blade in the other. Toreador of the pig women. Butcher angel killer. The pleasure bringer, the life taker. You are the stealer of hearts. You make them wet and you make them dead.

  The pigs lay in piles at your feet. You stand upon the growing pool of blood. You walk on water, just like Jesus. Heaven is for the weak. Earth is for the strong. This is the way of the beast.

  You’ve brought down the house. The curtain closes. The hot blood rises, steaming through the rafters. You trudge through the blood and excrement. You need a trophy and you know which one you want. Blue baby your heart was true. She wore a blue tattoo. Blue as the blue blue sky. It was her, the one that wanted you. She knew how you touched her that she knew your heart and you knew her body.

  In the bloody chamber of your heart you massacre her again and again.

  LAST DANCE WITH HEROIN

  Anal sex on heroin is very relaxing. You don’t even notice how hard he is pounding you. He is not a sensitive lover but you don’t care. He does not make love to you, he fucks you hard.

  You are barely there anyway. His mom walks in on you guys cause he lives in his parents’ basement and he yells at his mother and you feel mortified. She is a nice Irish Catholic woman and she is naïve beyond belief. She talks to you about Jesus and how she knows her son will find Jesus one day when you go up for breakfast and apologize to her for him. She is like a tiny angel in this dark passage. She reminds you that there is a world of people who are not shooting heroin and playing video games all day. That the daylight world keeps on keeping on despite the darkness, despite the disappointment, despite the despair.

  Her faith is both tragic and inspiring.

  You like being in his house because his mom is so nice and you like that she always has plenty of muffins on the kitchen counter. She explains to you that she always has Bran muffins to keep her ‘regular.’ It takes you a moment to realize she is talking about pooping and you try to delete the visual of her pooping from your mind. You nod and say that’s great and you eat her muffins and then you go back down to the basement and watch him play Call of Duty for six hours. You get high and watch The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones. You do heroin with him because you have run out of energy to fuck or things to talk about and you realize you are dating a zombie.

  He talks big of being a drummer and he does have a drum set that he bangs on occasionally. He tells you he thinks you’re amazing and that he wants you to be the lead singer of his nonexistent band. You guys go in and out of his back door for smoke breaks. Outside the night is black and the air is icy cold. It is the middle of February. He keeps trying to convince you to shoot up but you are terrified of needles so you never do. He tells you how much better it is; how the high hits you harder and faster. You are snorting heroin and you feel high enough.

  You see him laid bare now, as he drools with the needle in his arm, when he screams at the videogame he is playing, when he screams unintelligibly at you. He feels nothing. You tell him he is hurting you and scaring you and he doesn’t care. He screams, he cries, you make up, and he does it all over again. You watch him nodding off. You watch him puke in the big trash can by the door and you puke in it too.

  The illusion has been shattered. There is nothing to do but move on after nights spent curled up in a ball, shaking and crying in terror at his brutality. His paranoia gets worse when he is high. He barely trusts you. He won’t give back your videotapes. They are tapes full of you blowing him, getting fucked by him, doing drugs, dancing around half-naked. They are in his special box and he won’t tell you where it is. You are scared he will use them against you.

  He hides them because he knows on some level that you want to leave. He knows you are just there for the drugs and not for him and he wants to punish you by keeping you there so he can keep on using you as you keep on using him. It is his only hold on you and it has been working up until now. You look through his room for the tapes as he sleeps and you can’t find them.

  You are leaving anyway. Because he is starting to realize that you don’t love him or even like him and that you actually probably hate him. You don’t know how much longer you can fake it. You are scared of coming off heroin but you are more scared of what he might do to you if you stay. Your survival instincts have finally kicked in.

  You want to live. You want to be in the world. This is your last dance with heroin and so you watch The Twilight Zone all night as he snores and sleeps deep like a dragon curled up in his red velvet cave full of skull candles and ICP posters on the walls. This dragon’s treasures are pills and video games. He keeps you like you are his property. You feel your personhood slipping away every day you spend in this sweaty cave of self-deception.

  He is not a rock star and you are not a superstar. This is the culmination of avoidance.

  You are doing lines of heroin off your silver makeup mirror with skulls etched upon it. You’ve got your razor blade and your straw. You do a line every twenty minutes. The heroin cost you ten dollars. Heroin makes you feel dead and alive at the same time—like a walking calavera.

  You like how it makes you float.

  Watching The Twilight Zone, doing the last of your drugs, you already feel free. Free from him. Free from fear. Free from running away from yourself. The b&w looks thick, like pudding. Everyone is made of pudding. It looks like ice cream.

  You eat Twilight Zone ice cream with sprinkles of self-loathing dusted on top.

  You are preparing to re-enter reality tomorrow. You have to go back home because you have to finish college so that you don’t stay stuck in dead end jobs with dead end boyfriends doing dead end drugs.

  In the early morning you grab all your shit and sneak out. His parents know you are breaking up with him without you even having to say anything. They see it in your body language. You look beaten and hollowed out, like you have nothing left to give. If love is a battlefield he won and you don’t care. You rat him out to his mom about the heroin, right before you walk out the door, admitting no guilt yourself. She is sad but not surprised. He has already been to rehab and the hospital for drug-related seizures. He probably is already brain damaged due to an alcohol-related coma, and not even thirty years old yet.

  You emerge from your heroin cave like a haggard Bin Laden. His dad drives you home on his way to work. There is a sadness between you. He hates his son more than you do. He seems relieved for you. He tells you that you are a smart girl and that you’ll be fine. You gaze at the dead world around you. Mid-winter freeze.

  The world is frozen just like you.

  You go home and sequester yourself in your bedroom. You are sick for two weeks. You tell your parents that you have a bad co
ld. All the heroin in your nose has it producing a Niagara Falls of bloody mucous that just won’t quit. But this feels so much worse than a common cold or even a really bad cold. You get the chills and the fever and you shake and writhe on your futon and no one has any idea as your poisoned sweat clings to your skin like slime.

  Your mom brings you chicken soup like a good Jewish mother. You almost want to call his mother. You miss her and you feel bad about leaving her without telling her the whole truth. You want to let her know you are ok and for her to tell you she is ok. You know that she would not judge you.

  You feel more alone than you ever have. This is the thing you cannot talk about. You cannot tell your parents. This is not the kind of story you can break out at parties for a laugh. There is nothing funny or cool about the three months you spent getting high in some guy’s basement, being his sex toy, just because you wanted his drugs to coat your heart like Pepto-Bismol. You were daring the bull with your red flag. Waving that red flag at him to come at you, to fuck you harder. Waving that red flag at heroin to come and break you.

  You brought a tiny stash with you so you could wean yourself off gradually for a few days. For three days you do a line in the morning, noon and night, just to feel normal. You ration it like water in the desert. That heroin is like white gold. Those little slivers of the high make you feel sane. You do a line and you feel like you can conquer the day with a clear head.

  On the fourth and fifth days you lick your heroin mirror. This is your junkie moment and you see yourself as if watching a reality show about someone that you would never be.

  Someone you would feel sorry for.

  You lick the cracks in the rusty corners where the glass does not meet the metal edges and you feel pathetic but you do it anyway until there truly is not another speck of the magic powder and you are alone again with yourself.

  When you run out, the panic is like no panic before. It is panic for sanity and sustenance, like your body and your mind are disintegrating and shutting down. The sunlight could explode you into a million pieces. You are ashes. The heroin is your mother’s milk. It is the glue that holds you together. The heroin is your last hold on happiness, and it is all gone.

  It all feels so cold and harsh. Soft haze evaporated in the saltwater churn. Your fever fades and the numbness of the drug is replaced by the sharp return of your five senses. Colors and smells, sounds, the hard edges of life jab at you like a million little knives.

  You are born again.

  Reality is pain. Reality is you. Reality is being in it.

  You are suffocating. There is nowhere to run. The water is cold.

  You take a deep breath and you dive in.

  STAR POWER

  She wished that the men would look her in the eye when they were pounding away at her. She wished the lights were not so bright. She wished she knew who they were talking to when they called her sweetheart as they pulled her hair.

  When the workday was done, she’d lie in her tiny room in her bed with eggshell satin sheets and dream with her eyes open.

  Through her only window she could sometimes see stars after a rainstorm. Usually though, the smog was so thick that she could only see the greenish neon lights from the seedy motel across the street.

  Sometimes she’d feel a pulsing heat radiating from her chest. Sometimes she felt a tingling in her fingers and toes and the tip of her nose.

  She never drank or took the pills that were the bread and butter of her co-workers. She did her job without complaining. She was grateful for her new family even if she felt like a prop for some arcane tableau beyond her comprehension most of the time.

  Today’s shoot is particularly long and complicated but she never gets tired. She balances on three erect cocks like an acrobat. She sways like a dancer in Swan Lake.

  She bends like a licorice whip.

  “Take five everybody!” yells the voice beyond the lights and the halo of sweat that mists the air above her. Someone wipes her down with a cool moist cloth. The men snack on the various dips and fried sausages at the buffet. The meat and Vaseline and KY make an interesting olfactory marriage on the set.

  The lights are back on. She can barely see but she knows what to do. She feels her way around the living, breathing body maze. The pounding resumes full force and after only about a minute there is a sudden and resounding snap. Something’s wrong. Two cocks collide between her tailbone and her urethra and smack sloppily into each other. The men scream. The boom operator screams and flings his mic which lands squarely on the head of the man who had his cock in her mouth. The force of impact causes her jaw to clamp down in his member.

  Panic fills the air as the men, covered in sweat and oil, stumble and scramble over each other in attempt to extricate themselves from her.

  “I’m stuck!” screams the one who had entered her from behind, tears welling up in his eyes.

  “Where did you say you got his bitch from?” screeches the familiar voice beyond the lights.

  “Told you. I got a good deal. Some dude on e-bay. He had all kinds of cool shit.”

  “You’re fucking fired man. Good luck working in this town again. Get this clown off my set!”

  The insulted prop man lunges at the director. The on-set fluffer, who feels great loyalty for the man who had been the first director to allow her all the mineral water and mouthwash she could ever want, expertly blocks him with one impressive leap and punch to the face, singlehandedly dislocating his jaw as well as knocking over a huge stage light. The disgraced and injured prop man falls to the ground, crying, wailing and blubbering in a fetal position.

  The light sways like a palm tree as the wind whips up before a heat storm. At first only side to side slowly. Everybody stops what they are doing. Even the men struggling to free their trapped penises from their co-star stop scrambling for a second to look up at the swaying light that is hovering right above them.

  “Run!” screams the director.

  “We can’t!” moan the men.

  The tall light teeters for an instant that seems like a century and then it falls like a redwood, crashing smack centerstage, followed in quick domino succession by its neighboring lights. The light bulbs explode like a carnival of firecrackers, merrily going off in a cacophony of deafening pops and multicolored smoke.

  The set is suddenly engulfed in flames and the entire crew is shoving each other in a mad panic, trying to squeeze their bodies through the narrow passageway leading out to the safety of the alley outside, ignoring the screaming men, doomed to die in coitus with their huge porn cocks trapped inside of their plastic fantastic lover.

  The Fortune Teller

  The day was bright and sunny. The fair was packed with loud smelly kids, creepy old men, teenage girls trying to get attention and guys lookin’ to score. People came and went, dropping quarters in the box that encased her. Then he came. He smiled at her like she was a person and said, “What is a pretty girl like you doing trapped in that stupid old box?”

  “What else would I do? I don’t have a body.”

  “Oh, little lady, that can be remedied.”

  He flashed her a black business card with gold lettering.

  “I fix up dolls like you for a living. I’m also an agent. With that pretty face of yours and the killer body I could whip up, you’ll be a star in no time!”

  She smiled.

  “Just nod and we’ve got an agreement. Of course, I get a cut, though.”

  Not knowing what ‘a cut’ meant and not really caring, she nodded. She could taste the freedom on her lips and the wind blowing through her hair already. If she’d had a heart it would have been beating like a frantic rabbit at the prospect of a real life among the living.

  Weeks of labor followed. Chemicals were pumped into her, a lower torso was crafted with pleasurable penetration in mind, and her new career began.

  And now, as she gazes into the flames that are finally starting to melt away her body in sheets of black fizzing bubbles, she feels awa
ke. The warmth spreads throughout her body, her limbs tingle and the fire in her chest and in her head explodes with an orgasmic supernova blast into the fiery heat of that tiny studio in the warehouse behind the alley across the street from the dingy motel with the green neon sign.

  A star is born.

  Eating Candy

  Candy Cane was burning like a marshmallow. Her exterior was a charred crisp and her insides were becoming a hot mess of molted polyurethane goo.

  Her face was bubbling like a celluloid film strip jammed in the projector. Images of her brief oeuvre flashed across her screaming brain. The endless hours of spinning like a rotisserie chicken between two huge, well lubricated cocks, the heavy breathing, the hair pulling, the slapping, the thousand cum shots from every angle, the director yelling, encouraging the men to fuck her longer, harder, and amidst it all, the growing fear balled up in her stomach that she would break in two one day.

  And then it finally happened, and here she was, cracked down the middle, like a discarded Barbie doll who’d had one coked-out night too many with her pals Ken and GI Joe.

  An oily blue black substance was leaking out of from the crack between her legs. She could feel the warmth trickling down the inside of her thighs. It ate her flesh like acid, steaming and hissing all the way down to her titanium femurs.

  The flow thickened and she involuntarily flinched as an intense cramping began to squeeze her abdomen like a vice. She gritted her teeth and lifted her hips off the floor as well as she could to ease the grinding pain swirling inside her like a carnival of torture. Little devils were poking her from the inside, running their razorblade fingernails all up and down her shattered sex.

  Candy screamed for the first time in her semi-animate life as her seared breasts melted off her body. A huge baby blue Easter egg popped out of her cracked vagina as the final gut-wrenching contraction shot through her like a knife.

  It was smooth and covered in tiny delicate golden stars.

  Candy collapsed in utter pain and exhaustion. After about a minute, Candy heard a slight rocking, back and forth, back and forth. She turned her titanium skull towards the noise. The egg was moving. The taps grew louder and louder until a throng of tiny fiberglass spiders cracked their way through the egg and swarmed towards her.