by T. Styles
He exhales. “You got it.”
When he ends the call, he steps out of the jeans which hold his ankles hostage and kicks them across the room. “Go run me a bath, Antoinette.”
She wipes the corners of her mouth. “In there?” She points at the bathroom.
“You heard me.”
Antoinette tromps to the bathroom. She was in there for five minutes before coming back out and throwing up in the bedroom trashcan and carpet. “Your water is ready.” She wipes her mouth with the back of her hand.
Kali saunters toward the bathroom. “Clean that shit up. And when I’m done, you get in after me. I want that pussy clean before we go at it again.”
When he walks into the bathroom, he steps over the married couple that he hog-tied and murdered on the floor. They were the real owners of the house that he and Antoinette took over. After getting undressed, like they weren’t even in the room he slides into the water and goes to sleep.
MADJESTY
AT ANY COST
I hate white walls. Cream ones too. Even though they’re bright, they never seem to make me feel any better. Sitting on the floor in my room, inside of the mental institution, I hold something in my hand I’d just taken. I remember how my life was almost stolen from me. Had it not been for a doctor walking into the room, instead of one of Jace’s goons, I would’ve been dead. God knows the nurse whose office I busted into would not have cared less. When the cops got there Jace’s men made an exit. I gotta get out of here. I can’t take a chance of them getting at me again but they took everything I owned. Plus I need to talk to my sister. I need to apologize for doing what I did to her.
Standing up, my toes press against the cold hardwood floor. I increase my height by rising on my toes to look out of the door’s window. I gotta get out of here. I need something to drink, to stop my mind from moving around. And then I remember, I’m carrying some kid in my belly. Why would he want to be in me? Using a dog’s womb would’ve been a better choice of entering the world.
When I look out of the window, across the way I see a family. Looks like a father, a mother and their son. He looks a little younger than me in the face, even though we’re about the same height and build. I wonder who is crazy in their family and did they still love them?
When one of the nurses walk over to the family, the mother and father hand their son a portable video game and walk away. I open the door, look both ways and walk over to him. The air rushes through the back of my white gown and I remember I’m wearing nothing but panties and a t-shirt. I hate panties but they won’t give me boxers. They think if I wear them I’ll not want to be a boy. Stupid idiots.
I’m standing in front of him for thirty seconds but he doesn’t notice me. He’s too busy with the game. “Hey, what game you got?” He doesn’t answer. I take the seat next to him. “You here to see somebody?”
He looks at me. He seems sad. Then he looks at a door to the left, I guess it’s where his peoples went into. “I hate that bitch.” He tells me before focusing back on the game.
I laugh. “I feel you. Who you came to see though?”
“My sister, she use to cut my dick with my mama’s pussy razor. She keeps it in the medicine cabinet.” What the fuck? “She only does it when I’m asleep. Said she had to take the skin off of it so it wouldn’t eat me.” He examines my gown. “She wears one of those. Are you crazy, too?”
“Do I look like it?” I smile. I feel fake. I hate feeling fake.
“No, but neither do my sister.”
I stand up and walk toward my room. “You wanna hang out in here with me?”
He shrugs and stands up quickly. “I ain’t doing nothing right now.” When he walks into my room, he looks at my bed. “My mother had one of those beds in the house. She use to strap my sister down so the devil wouldn’t get her. I think the devil fucks her too because in the middle of the night she always screams his name.” This kid is sick. He should be in here with me. “My sister would cry when she’s been in there for too long and mama would let her out.”
“If she lets her out when the devil comes for her, why she strap her down? So she couldn’t kill herself?”
“So she couldn’t kill us.” He pauses and looks at me again. “Does it move up and down? The one in our house did. I use to get on it all the time when my sister didn’t use it. I wish they hadn’t sold it for mommy’s candy.”
“Candy?”
“Yeah, she puts it in her candy cane and pulls. Smoke comes out and everything.”
Oh. The bitch is on crack.
He walks closer to my bed. “Can I sit on it?”
“Go for it.” He’s on his way but I stop him before he jumps on it. “But you gotta take your clothes off because I don’t want my bed dirty.” I slide out of the gown I’m wearing. He eyes my baggie panties and the white t-shirt covering my scarred up flat chest. I throw the gown at him and it smacks him in the face and falls to the floor. “You gotta put this on though. To make it real.”
The kid must’ve been pretty bored because he wastes no time coming out of his clothes and putting on my gown. His blue jeans and yellow Star Wars t-shirt lay in a puddle on the floor. I tried to pretend like they didn’t interest me. Like I walk around in my t-shirt and panties everyday on a natural. “Thirsty?” I walk over to the juice in the cream container on my dresser. “It’s fruit punch.”
“I guess.”
I pour him some. Out of his view I pop the pills in it. The thing is, I really like him. Sounds like he comes from an addict mother like me. It makes us brothers. Which is why I feel bad stealing his clothes after giving him the medicine I swiped from a nurse who thought I was cute. While she was in my ear telling me I had swag, I was fingering her pussy and in her pocket grabbing meds.
It wasn’t like he didn’t have fun before he passed out. I activated every function on the bed for him while he acted like he was on a ride at an amusement park. By the time his parents would find him, he’d be sound asleep in my room. Dressed like me.
****
After leaving the hospital and jumping out of a cab, I ended up over Bernie’s house. Although she wasn’t a good grandmother, she was the only one I had. I guess I didn’t know where else to go. The last time she saw me she learned that I was her granddaughter and that she’d been fucking her own son. I think about that wild shit all the time. How can you look your son in the face and not know it’s him? I mean how high does a mothafucka have to be? That could never be me. Ever. I would always recognize my child.
There’s no guarantee that she would help me, or no guarantee that she would let me stay but I have to try. I would’ve called my friends but I didn’t want them to see me pregnant. It took them forever to accept me as I am. This kind of thing would set our friendship back ten years. So with nowhere else to go I knock on my grandmother’s door, hoping she’ll accept me.
It doesn’t take long for a light-skin woman with a short Afro and gums for teeth to answer the door. A cloud of smoke escapes from behind her and brushes my face. It smells stinky sweet. Not like weed. I see a pipe on the table and know what’s up. They too old for this shit. Aren’t they?
Mrs. Afro wears a serious look on her face. Stabbing her fist into her pudgy waist she says, “Either you’re the first boy to ever get pregnant or I’m high. You tell me…which one is it?”
“Arizona, what you hollering about? And who the fuck is at my door?” Before she can answer, my grandmother appears. She looks harder than she did the last time I saw her. And the gold wig she always wears looks extra crunchy. I want to turn around and bounce but I don’t have no place to go. “What the fuck are you doing at my house, nigga? I don’t want you around here.” She looks behind me.
“Pops ain’t with me.”
I don’t think she believes me. “Then what do you want?”
“I came to see you. I…” I couldn’t finish my sentence because she slaps me. It wasn’t as strong as Harmony’s strike but it cut me just as deep. “Get the fuck aw
ay from here before I put my hands on you!”
Wait…if she didn’t just put her hands on me, what the fuck was that? I don’t budge. I can’t move.
“Get on from around here, dyke.” She points to the left, away from her house. “And I never want to see you around here again because if you come back, I’m shootin’ to kill. You hear what I’m saying? Tell your father that too.”
I feel angrier than I have in a long time.
“Neicy, why did you just hit that child?” She points at my belly. “She’s pregnant! Look at her.”
She looks at my stomach in the yellow Star Wars shirt I’m wearing. My belly pokes out a little but the rest of me is slim. How could she know I was pregnant? I didn’t.
“Arizona, if you got a problem with anything I’m doing in my house, get the fuck out of my house!” Her attention focuses back on me she says, “Leave, now! And never come back here again. I’m not fucking around with you.”
My last hope is gone. Nobody ever did anything for me just to be doing it. I’m starting to really hate the world around me. Like really, really hate it. I didn’t know I was walking away at first because I was moving backwards. I was in my head, trying to figure out what the fuck I would do now. Tears fill up in my eyes and I hate myself for thinking she would want me. Thinking she would help me. I’m almost out of her walkway, when I spot a brick next to her mailbox. I pick it up and smile. She’s too busy fussing with Arizona to see me approaching at the fastest speed I can. When I’m close enough, I lunge it at my grandmother’s dome. I aim for blood. A red swirl moves over her head but she ducks just in time. The look on her face is priceless.
“Bitch, are you that fucking crazy that you would throw something at me?”
My fists ball up in knots and I feel like hurting both of them. “I don’t have anywhere else to go!” I cry. “I don’t have anybody else to help me! I’m pregnant by a man who raped me. And because I hated my body when he was done with me, they threw me in a fucking mental institution.” I move closer to her. “You were a bad mother! I know something about that because I had one just like you who raised me. But it don’t have to be that way now.” I’m probably making things worse instead of better. “Since you couldn’t help my father in his life, the least you can do is help me! Please.”
Arizona walks inside the house shaking her head. I don’t know if what I said got to her, or if she’s more interested in finishing up her high. Before my grandmother follows, she looks at me with hate in her eyes. But she pushes the door open wider before disappearing inside. She doesn’t invite me in but I take it as an invitation anyway. Besides, where else could I fucking go?
JAYDEN
HEAR NO EVIL
I’m standing in the window, looking at the world. I can’t hear it the same. No matter how different my life is right now, there’s one person I need to see A.S.A.P. and he’s doing his best to dodge me. I pick up the phone and make a call. I look at the .9 mili on my dresser my father gave me for protection and pick it up. When my call is answered I say, “Shaggy, where have you been?”
“Around.”
I know that mothafucka. “I really want to meet up with you okay? How come you not trying to come over?” He’s talking low and I can’t hear him. “Can you speak a little louder?”
“I said, I’m not going to lie, I want to come see you but you don’t sound right. It’s like you mad at me. Is there something I should know? Just keep it real with me.”
I sit on the edge of my bed and try to disguise the hate in my voice. “Why you say that, baby? I mean, it’s been almost two weeks since I’ve seen you and you may hear my anxiousness.” I lick the barrel of the gun. “If I’m wrong for wanting to be with my man call the sheriff. Now come over here…please.”
He laughs. “I wish I could believe you, babes. I really do. But if my father taught me nothing else before he was murdered, he taught me to sense danger. And right now the feeling is off the charts.”
I laugh. I’m tired of playing games with him anyway. “You want to know what’s up?” I put the gun on my dresser. “I know you raped my sister and when I see you I’m gonna make you pay for that shit. It’s gonna be nice and slow too, just like I know you like it.”
“What, bitch?”
“You heard me,” I pause, “and just so you know, the reason your father is dead is because of what you did to Madjesty. You not going to be able to hide forever, Shaggy. I’m gonna see you hogtied and in the back of a trunk if it’s the last thing I do. Think about that while you’re still breathing, nigga.”
I hang up, throw myself on my bed and look up at the ceiling again. I don’t come out of the room much unless I’m getting something to eat or sleep. It’s not like the house is busy. I’m mostly alone since my aunts Ramona and Laura were arrested for stabbing my mother and she’s still at the hospital recovering. It doesn’t help that the mental institution keeps calling to say Madjesty has escaped. After the fifth call, I pretended to be my mother and told them she was here and that I would complete the paperwork to release her since my mother committed her voluntarily initially. I gave them to my mother to take care of. This shit is getting ridiculous.
When I feel a strange vibration, I look over and see the other cellphone on my dresser moving slowly. It’s the phone I used for Thirteen Flavors when I was running my business. Even though I haven’t been fucking with it, that doesn’t stop it from blowing up. I hate that perverted ass men call the line all hours of the night wanting something. They don’t give a fuck that my life is about to change probably for the worse. I could give it to Passion and them but I don’t want them to have it either. They were blowing my phone up for work but I wasn’t in the mood. After awhile I’m so irritated with it going off, that I open my window and toss it outside.
I’m tired of being helpless, so yesterday I had my father bring me over some books. Books with large letters and big pictures so I can teach myself to read. If I’m going to go to school, and get my life together, I need to be smarter than I was. Since I couldn’t hear, I had to be smarter than everybody around me.
I know what I need. Easing out of my jeans, I stand in the middle of the bedroom with my red silk panties. Then I ease onto the edge of the bed, open my legs and place two fingers inside of my pussy. From the mirror across my room, I can see my pink center and the cream spilling over my nails.
Hornier than ever, my tongue runs over my lips as I move my fingers in and out of my cave. For the first time ever, I want dick. I want the touch of a man on me and inside of me. When my mind flashes to Madjesty I feel my stomach churn. She was the last person to touch me and sooner or later, I will need somebody to come behind her to erase that memory. The way I was craving sex lately I wonder if this is how my mother feels. If it is, the late night fuck sessions we watched in Texas make sense.
Trying to take my mind off of things even more, I lean back, place a pillow over my face and press my fingers deeper inside of me. I push my hips toward my wrist until I can feel the unevenness of my flesh. After five more presses, it doesn’t take long to reach an orgasm. Needing some air, I throw the pillow on the floor. When I rise I see my father in my room.
“Daddy,” I grab my jeans and cover my pussy. “What are you doing in here?” He’s talking low but I can’t hear him clearly. I focus on his lips but I’m so nervous about what he saw, or what he may be thinking of me, that it isn’t working. “I’m sorry, daddy. I didn’t hear you come in.”
“What are you doing?” His voice is loud and filled with disgust.
My heart does the ‘Stanky Leg’ in my chest. “I was taking a nap. And I…didn’t know…”
“You’re going to be like your mother aren’t you?” He says it in a way to make it clear that he hates me. “A fucking whore!”
“Daddy, I’m so sorry. So fucking sorry.” Tears roll down my face but I can’t move from my bed. I know I look like a slut and I feel terrible that he has to see me like this.
“I got the car for you.
” He’s still angry because his eyes never produce the warm look he usually gives when he first sees my face. “Hurry up and come down stairs.” He coughs a few times, grabs a piece of the Kleenex on my dresser and covers his mouth. It turns red in his hand. I leap in my jeans and rush toward him.
When I reach him, he extends a hand to keep me from touching him. He hates me. “Daddy, are you okay?”
“Be downstairs in a few minutes…” He turns and leaves.
My life keeps getting shittier. I grab a black plain Polo t-shirt that hugs my upper body, revealing just a little of my belly, Then I slide on my flip-flops. When I’m done, I grab my purse and run downstairs. When I get to the bottom of the steps, I see the back of a woman. She slender and her long brown hair is swept over her shoulder. When she turns around to look at me, I finally see my father’s legs on the floor. My chest tightens and I find it hard to breathe.
“W-what’s going on?” I ask her. “Why is he down there?” She ignores me so I walk around and see his eyes shut and blood oozing out of his mouth and nose. It takes everything in me to stay conscious.
****
The hospital room is packed with some people I know and others I’ve never seen before. At first everyone was talking until the outsider walked in…the doctor. My father is hooked up to a respirator and he looks bad. In the brief time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him look like this. Whatever is going on with him, I hope he’d hurry up and get well. I think I’m losing my mind and I won’t be able to take more of this. First my mother and now my father.
Right next to him is the woman who was at my house earlier. Her light skin looks flushed and her eyes very dark. She’s beautiful. I think she’s about thirty something but she might be older. To her right is Kreshon and he looks like he’s been crying and my heartaches. His tall body hangs over her shorter one and his hands rest on her shoulders. Were they together? For some reason I didn’t want them to be. He always looks so good whenever I see him, like his clothes were made out of one hundred dollar bills. The only thing is, he acts like he never notices me. So I open a few buttons on my shirt, now he’s looking.
