Lullabies for Suffering

by Caroline Kepnes et al.

  A city I had to escape.

  Soon as Amy’s smack-filled blood had been cleansed from my flesh, my own blood started to boil. Something was wrong. I sensed it, smelled it. My gut swirled, my breath turned foul, and my head pulsated. I could feel the tiny capillaries in my brain cells expand from the surge.

  Another seizure was coming.

  An intense vomit.

  The angry girl was triggered. She grew from a seed inside my womb to a raging little beast ready to unleash her wrath.

  It pulled me out of the shower. My skin was so hot the water sizzled and dried as if on a grill. I put my clothes on over flesh turned to scar tissue. Tornado sirens were shouting in my head, turning to words.

  CHECK THE BASEMENT. SHE BETRAYED YOU. CHECK THE BASEMENT.

  My legs weren’t my own. They moved me to the kitchen, and I watched my hands pull the largest knife out of the butcher block. Joshua was sitting at our kitchen table, doing his artwork. A dozen Piper-Pippens were spread about the table with their arms stretching, reaching outside of the pages and into reality, just skinny metallic tentacles, sharp as my knife. Their faces were smiling as if they’d just heard some dark secret, and their eyes swirled in tiny barbed wire twists, hypnotizing, Joshua’s eyes transfixed just the same. The flock of Piper-Pippens and their creator bore witness as I left them to walk the stairs to the depths below.

  There I found her, the person I used to know as Becca, heroin works lying by her side. My fingers clenched the plastic handle of the knife. My head screamed for me to use it.

  SHE BETRAYED YOU.

  No. She just had a slip.

  SHE’S NOT FIT TO BE A PARENT. CUT HER UP.

  It's my fault. I burdened her with too much weight.

  CUT FREE FROM YOUR ANCHOR AND LEAVE WITH THE BOY. HURRY. THE POLICE WILL BE HERE SOON.

  Becca’s pupils had retreated into tiny dots. She knelt before me like a helpless sacrifice victim, trembling in fear before a brutal god. I could smell the heroin in her veins, reeking out her pores. The same scent from my childhood home that stuck to the walls, that hung thick in the air while I ate cold SpaghettiOs, praying my parents would wake up while I went to bed alone. The whispers from my closet I used to listen to for comfort had now turned to screams of rage and were in full control.

  SHE BETRAYED YOU. TAKE CARE OF HER.

  How could she?

  KILL HER.

  I couldn’t refuse the commands any longer, and the butcher knife slashed down upon Becca’s head. She screamed. The blade cut into the side of her scalp. A perfect incision just above the ear. We had matching wounds.

  Her blood dripped from the cut. I cocked the knife back for another strike. She held her hands up in defense, and I struck again, right into her palm. A stigmata wound with more blood—a deeper, richer red, as if I was chopping into the sticky sap of a tree. Primordial ooze seeped from her screams, from her tears. Chemicals exploding. I felt Becca’s spirit like never before, like I hit a secret spot of her soul that was leaking into my own.

  FINISH HER. WE HAVE TO LEAVE.

  Becca was crying like a bloody newborn. A fresh coat of red paint covered the side of her head and her palms. Her plasma hung in the humid basement air, soaked into me, coated my lungs, my veins, letting me know for an instant what it was like to be her, living with the beast of addiction, then being slaughtered by the one who was supposed to love you.

  She’s been sliced up like this her whole life.

  FINISH HER.

  I can’t do it.

  THEN LEAVE HER TO BLEED TO DEATH. THEY WON’T CHECK THE BASEMENT.

  Don’t check the basement.

  My mom and dad died in a tomb just like this. I felt their presence inside Becca’s blood, coming into my soul through osmosis, the consciousness of all addicts penetrating my skin, all of them victims as much as villains, seeking love, comfort, understanding same as I did as a child, but being hurt instead. Seduced by a sweet lullaby full of promises but finding only suffering.

  KILL HER. SHE BETRAYED YOU. LIED TO YOU. SHE’S NOT FIT TO COME ALONG.

  I'M NOT KILLING HER! I shouted back. I summoned a collage of memories with Becca; nights in bed, twirled up in white sheets, eating mint chocolate chip ice cream. Watching her pick up her five-year sobriety chip, a glorious golden moment. Kissing the flesh of her neck, her blood beating just inches from my lips, nourishing us both with love and tenderness that I couldn’t live without. How could I even consider this?

  My skin stopped burning. I felt the scar tissue retreating. The angry girl returned to her place in the pit of my soul, nestled in some spiritual womb, a seed I would not feed any longer.

  I had fought back the Whisperer. I had beaten her back to retreat.

  I fell to my knees. I dropped the knife. My empty hands cooled with relief. I embraced Becca for all that she was, fearful at first she’d reject me, but she succumbed to my touch. I hugged her. We swayed to music that only we could hear. She apologized in my ear, I apologized back. We shared fluids and blood-soaked lives and became one.

  I was holding what I needed. She understood what came over me, that it wasn’t really who I was, just something hidden deep in my cellar. It was time to retreat to our safe room, the garden of our new Eden at the secluded cabin in Canada. Her cut would heal; we’d have our scars. We’d parent Joshua as if he was the first boy ever born.

  But we were not alone in the basement.

  The presence of cold metal snaked up my skin. A spider-like shadow dashed across the floor. My eyes caught sight of a tentacle growing like a barbed wire weed beside me.

  It was an arm. First one, and then two. Skinny arms. Too skinny to poke a needle into and attached to a child with metal twists for eyes. Each strand of his wiry hair seemed to hiss, ready to strike.

  “SHE CAN’T COME WITH US.”

  The voice came from some dark place in Joshua’s heart, the murky depths where screams deferred got locked inside, waiting for their release. Joshua had transformed into Piper-Pippen. The cold metal, cartoon monster, who was his comforting light in the darkest of times, now controlled his creator’s heart, and the beast refused to let Joshua be hurt by heroin any longer. Only one mom was fit, the other rejected.

  “NEVER AGAIN,” he said, and the basement shook.

  He wrapped his razor-sharp, barbed wire arms around Becca's neck and squeezed. She gasped for air. Blood dotted her neck. Her fingers tugged at the metal noose cutting through flesh, threatening to sever her head right off.

  I screamed loud enough to wake both God and Devil, begging Joshua to understand, that Becca can fight this war and win, don’t kill her for losing one battle.

  His metal twists of eyes had grown too cold. All he could understand was the rage and hurt he’d held in so long. The trapped scream in his heart was finally exploding. He squeezed tighter, his arms a barbed wire python cutting off the oxygen to her brain. Becca’s face changed color. She had no air to breathe, no air to scream. Her eyes screamed for me to help her in the language of the dying. Save me Lizard, save me from him.

  I begged, I pleaded. I yanked at his arms until my fingers grew bloody again, but the ball of rage that was Piper-Pippen wouldn’t give. He only squeezed harder, and smiled his maniacal, cartoon grin.

  I grabbed the butcher knife from the ground. It was all that was left. It was either let Becca be killed or put the knife into Piper-Pippen's heart. I had to do something. I had to decide if I should kill again. One of them needed to die. I couldn’t take them both.

  About the Author

  Mark Matthews is a graduate of the University of Michigan and a licensed professional counselor who has worked in behavioral health for over 20 years. He is the author of On the Lips of Children, Body of Christ, All Smoke Rises, Milk-Blood and the editor of Garden of Fiends: Tales of Addiction Horror. He lives near Detroit with his wife and two daughters. Reach him at WickedRunPress@gmail.com

  The Melting Point of Meat

  by

  John F.D. Taf
f

  The Melting Point of Meat

  John F.D. Taff

  The knife, it’s a zipper, right? It lets me open up and share the things that are inside me. Things that I’m too embarrassed or repressed to share.

  Yeah, that’s what I believed at first.

  It lets me feel things that I am too numbed to feel.

  Stupid now, huh?

  Too many nights spent with teenage girlfriends, alone in my upstairs bedroom. While my parents snored away obliviously downstairs, we listened to My Chemical Romance or Death Cab for Cutie, talked about who was lame at school and who was lamer, huffed model glue or cans of air we lifted from Staples. You know, the kind that you use to blow crud from your computer keyboard. Blew our minds better than boys or music…or, fuck, even each other.

  With a pocket knife that used to belong to my grandfather, we cut ourselves. Tentative, whisper-thin streaks down our arms, not vicious or deep like the boys we knew who also did this, who would then stand around and watch the blood patter around their feet. No, just enough to break the skin, to draw a red hairline. Just enough for the long-sleeve T-shirts we favored to cover. We winced as we did it, but we giggled just as much.

  It was something to do, right? Something to share. Something that made us feel liked we understood each other when we really didn’t even understand ourselves.

  I mean, how could we?

  But it also opened something within me.

  When I did it, for a few seconds after, in the hazy adrenaline high of the pain, I would close my eyes—but I could still see.

  Patterns, like some abstract thing close up, the details of it sharp and clear as if my eyes were open and pressed too close to clearly make it out. Like waking up hungover, sprawled across someone’s cheap-ass Ikea throw rug, my eyes fluttering open onto its weave of coarse fibers twisted together with cat fur and curls of pubic hair.

  I couldn’t tell what it was, but each time I cut, each time I rode the blissful waves of pain, I saw it. Saw a little more clearly.

  And like the endorphins that coursed through me each time, I wanted more.

  To see more.

  #

  When was the first time I realized that pain brought pleasure?

  In other words, when was the first hit I took, the first buzz I felt?

  No, it wasn’t in college or even high school. It was far earlier than that, in grade school. Can’t remember exactly how old I was, probably six or seven, but I was out riding in our little cul-de-sac. It was a beautiful summer morning, all sun shining and birds chirping. Dogs barking in the distance. The static of cicadas providing background white noise.

  That was back when parents would let their children, even little ones like I was, play outdoors out of sight. I think my mom was in the backyard hanging clothes on the line. Or more than likely on the phone with one of her cronies, seated at the kitchen table, twirling the cord and smoking Pall Malls one after the other, crushing them out in the chipped Lake of the Ozarks ashtray, bitching about my dad or having to deal with me during the summer break.

  So there I was, racing all by myself. Don’t remember having any friends with me that day. Round and round the center island of our little pocket street, on a bike or tricycle maybe. I can't precisely remember. Probably a Big Wheel, you know, the pink Barbie version my parents bought for me instead of the regular model with the red body, yellow fork and black wheel. Pink wheels? Yeah, whatever.

  So I was out riding and took the curve too sharp and too fast, ended up wiping out spectacularly. Spilled ass over teakettle into the street, sliding across the concrete on my belly as if I’d just successfully stolen a base.

  My little top protected my belly, but my short pants (probably a matching Garanimals outfit, knowing my mom) didn’t offer much protection for my bare legs.

  I lay there for a minute, dazed. When I rolled over, I saw the Big Wheel canted up onto the curb like a shipwreck, one of the rear wheels still turning slowly. Then I looked at my legs.

  From shin to slightly above my knees, they were scraped by the rough concrete, the skin rucked up like pills on a favorite sweater, exposing raw flesh underneath, blood already beading there.

  I remember staring at it for a long time, trying to make sense of it. Not what had happened, I knew that. I wrecked, wiped out. No, I mean the why of what I saw there, my scraped legs stretched before me.

  I could already feel the pain, the hot stinging of all that abraded skin.

  But I also felt, over it or under it, pleasure, the tingling of something warm and enjoyable… enjoyable, yeah. Something that felt distinctly good, like my mother brushing my hair out or lazing in the sun by the side of a pool. It was comforting, and I lay back staring at the blood on my legs and had that feeling, that epiphany you don’t get very often in life of putting two things together and getting the larger picture.

  Right there, sprawled in the middle of the street, I acted on that. I wanted more, with the same ache I felt when my mother snapped the television off mid-cartoon. And it was all good until I heard something that I eventually realized was my mother screaming.

  She found me there, lying belly down on the street, in that sort of upward dog yoga pose (not that anyone had heard of that back then), dragging my body across the rough concrete, sanding the skin away, leaving a pale line of blood in my wake.

  As she tells the story, my eyes were closed, my face almost transported into rapture.

  She thought (still thinks) it was something sexual, unseemly precocious in nature. Me humping the concrete and leaving what looked like a smear of menstrual blood. And in front of the neighbors and all.

  It was nothing of the sort, though it was entirely about pleasure.

  And that indistinct, wholly malleable line between pleasure and pain.

  But mostly about my need for both.

  #

  There were no sororities for me in college, no ma’am, even though my mother was a legacy at one of the biggest on campus. I crushed my mom in a whole lot of ways, I’m sure, but I never saw her more defeated than when I told her there was no way I’d be rushing her sorority. There'd be no dressing in whatever passed as the latest "in" fashion, no batting my eyes at the frat guys trying to ply me with beer to get into my panties, no sitting around having tea parties with flowery cups and linen doilies.

  Whatever.

  I obviously had no idea what went on in sororities and still don’t and don’t care.

  My mom was disappointed, though, and I carried that in a backpack of other disappointments I lugged with me all the time, everywhere.

  No, no sororities. I went into the dorms, where I settled in with a roommate from Missouri who introduced me to her profound sleep apnea. I, in turn, introduced her to my own brand of casual bisexuality. Within a month or so, we had our own little band of gurrls, kind of like our own sorority. We hung out, listened to Nine Inch Nails and Azar Swan. We dyed our hair ombres of dark turquoise and violet and garish pink, painted our nails black, wore ripped fishnet stockings and skirts that barely covered our asses.

  And we cut ourselves.

  As with all the other stuff, I showed them how. None of them had ever done it before. None of them had ever eaten pussy, either, but I showed them that, too.

  By then, though, I had stopped believing that the knife was a zipper. I had changed the focus of why I did what I did.

  My belief then was that we are balloons, and that our skin is a thin layer of material, like latex, holding all the swollen things within—the rush of blood, the twist of sinews, the slick conviviality of organs. A flick of the blade against the thin barrier that held this in, and it could be exposed for all to see. Nothing quite like sitting around in your dorm room naked with a few of your best buds, high AF, sliding a thin boning knife down your inner thigh, its miniscule, icily sharp tip leaving a furrow in your skin, like a boat skimming across a red sea.

  Where before there had been little pain in my knife’s meanderings, now it was more definit
e. I scored my flesh more deeply in college than in high school, deep enough for the little tip to disappear beneath my tight, white flesh, blood beading from the pores behind it.

  The first time I had been brave enough to do this, Little Miss Missouri gasped, turned her head and yakked in the trash can her parents had given her, the one that sat beside her bed, the word Princess bedazzled across its pink steel side. The smell of her cheap wine vomit momentarily blotted out the sugar cookie scent of her Yankee candle, whose flame was the only light in the room.

  As she freaked, I climbed into her bed, my skin sliding against hers. She thought I was trying to comfort her, and maybe I was. But as one hand went to her face to caress her cheeks and brush the tears away, to shush her trembling so that no one would batter at our door wondering what was wrong, the other slid the knife slowly, gently along the side of her breast.

  She might have gasped as I did this, thinking it was just me, just my finger toying with the side of her firm, corn-fed tit. That I might trip a finger across her hardened nipple, before I…before…

  I lowered my face to that bloody tit, sucked powerfully, then darted my lips to hers.

  I saw her powerful confusion as she tasted herself on my tongue. She wept as she came, and we lay there bleeding, together.

  Hello, my name is Livy, and I am addicted to pain.

  #

  The first hundred or so times I cut, felt the pain coursing through me, I didn’t pay much attention to what my eyes showed me.

  It was freaky, sure. But I was more caught up in the moment, in the trill of my nerve endings firing, transporting me to a place where there were no worries, no stresses, no concerns.