At bedtime they tucked Sophia in; taping her mouth shut & tieing her arms to the sides of the crib. Janice sang a small song to Sophia who bid Clellum and Janice goodnight with her stricken eyes. Hand in hand they walked out of the nursery into the family area.
On the wall above their crucifix next to the tv hung a family portrait: all had smiles, some pink bows, & a knot for a tie. Sinking into the couch Clellum asks her to retrieve for him some tonic water & his customary grapefruit; which she does, a lope in her gate from the wound on her left foot.
He says, smelling the newly minted plastic of the tape, "This should be a good one."
"I can't hear you. The windows open on the freeway, you know I can't hear you when i'm in the kitchen."
He says again, "This should be a good one."
She nods agreement, singing softly under breath some vague liturgical drama from her childhood. She moves about the kitchen. Puts the fiberglass floral topped tray on the counter. Places the salt for his grapefruit & his favorite spoon next to her yogurt on the tray. Carefully slices the grapefruit.
He yells from the kitchen, his voice turning into an announcer's, "This evening will be some highly acclaimed program on the forced march of some aboriginal peoples. All the most highly favored voiceovers will be there."
While in the kitchen getting the salt she notices the clock & wonders what time it is. Outside the window, small & square above the sink, the night lillies gulp for air motionless against the silhouette of the laundry room. Their white curled mouths coiled in asphixiation.
The clock on the vcr has been freshly set, & she licks her upper lip in the grey snow glow of the monitor light. The white horizontals of her shirt stripes an incandescence in his peripheral eye. He watches without looking as she pulls the heavy cotton over her head, sparks in his eyes, he sees the buddha by the table where she throws the top. It covers the buddha's head before they both fall to the floor. The jade buddha protected from its fall by her sweater giving off sparks on the carpet. She settles, slinking into the couch all leathered so as to stick to her skin, with a sound so like that of her childhood. After she clicks the brassierre between her breast the straps relax & free, she shucks the apparatus from her body.
He has already divested himself of his trousers & his shorts, his genitals still covered by the bottom of his dress shirt. That jerry garcia tie she bought him for his mother's birthday resting just at the top of his stalk, she notes, with an intake from her rib cage. She rests her right hand on his crotch over his shirt knowing that as soon as some topless fruit breasted native parades across the screen he will grow to fill her downturned palm. She intends to be there to receive the reward. She will catch his pitch and fade leaving him here awake to watch the ladies in his depleted state.
On stage the young girls ladies old and alike strut with baskets on their heads across the screen, beads glistening & dropping from their colored & huge tangerine flesh. In her palm his member swellings to be raised into the glorious light from their vision. Some weight to counterbalance the pressure of her palm sweating as it does when she rests it there.
"As they move through the canopied forest stepping surely between the mangrove roots their multicolored beadwork reflects beautifully the rainbow of colors on the jungle floor." With a deft flick of her tongue she scoops him into her mouth while he casually shifts his right cheek.
"Let's all be silent now and watch how the young girl negotiates this crossing of the river. Notice the lack of help she receives from her family. Her lack of beadwork, loincloth, & other normal coverings symbolize the journey she is making as though she were a new born babe being born into a completely different world. Once she crosses the river she will be formally not a member of her family, she will have made her own private sojourn, she will then be part of the household & tribe of her betrothed." The obscure naturalist with the British accent stares absently out from the screen as he says, "Mind if I pause the tape while you give me a lick."
Cellum pauses the tape. The girl on the screen stopped in midstep on the log over the treacherous river. Her family standing impassively by while Janice reaches over to press the power button.
In this darkness, with Janice swallowing Clellum, now illumined only by the flashing of headlights from the freeway moving quickly along the wall above their heads, the groaning begins. A pressure pushing sound up from below gaining irresistable strength as she tickles flicker with her tongue. His little sigh & popping eyes to be faltered by the rattle exploding all around like a freight train heaving a thunder from the ground, and she with panic, holding him tight nails in his side teeth fastened to his nob. His screams fading in a strangle while the building, driven by some mad mechanic out of control over washboards on busy backwoods road, the high center line all covered with grass to flattened as they pass, collapses down. Glass shattering, falling from walls waving as palm trees in a quaint old fashioned storm maybe gilligan's island even some disaster. Being ripped up by the roots as a foundation is prone to do. After 45 seconds, a vivid sprouting of orgasm within her, the building heaved twisted, sighing before it screams its metal muscalature out. Drywall dust filling the space; sparing no mucous, no lining, no protection.
Above the stars shine. The city has been extinguished, and for the first time in its history the stars are here looking down, as though they never left, never abandoned the city's hulking frame. Her jaw clamped so tight locked to him unwilling to relax. She tastes the sweet metal of blood. He's passed out. Like she's some monkey with a jewel in her fist; she can't let go, her jaw frozen. Panic pulling unwilling to release even enough to free him she strains finding his face, scratching its slacken surface imploring him please, please wake up.
Sophia should be crying, even screeching in this silence, rending Janice's skull with a wedge of fear stronger every second. Another tremor, he falls, sliding his torso down till he's crumpled into the end pillows. His breath shallow. She hears a woman screaming. A tumolt of grief down on her knees her thin & bony fingers splayed out helplessly watching her life fall down around her watching her family like a wreck lost at sea. Sophia could still be alive. She thinks, Sophia still could be alive.
"Is there anybody there?" A light flashes through the dust swirling about there prone forms. She hears a crunching in the vicinity some footsteps in the rubble. Some other child yelling for her mother. Another coughing, sirens sounding.
"Is there anybody there?"
She moans through her teeth, the flesh in her mouth.
"Don't worry we'll find you."
Clellum begins to stir. Moans her name. She touches his face, his skin yielding to her fingers. He moves his hand to hers; his blood wet on her skin. He's awake, she thinks. Please be awake.
"Clellum, Clellum are you guys okay?"
She searches for something to make a noise with. The carpet is full of rubble and dust. Suddenly light abounds, the illumination hurting her eyes.
"Oh, my God, Janice are you okay?" It's Mitchell, his voice a worry. "This is a bad time, huh. Where's Sophia? Janice we gotta get you out a here. Is Clellum alright? He's out cold. Janice," he touches her face his flashlight shining in her left eye, "Tom, she's over here, she's trapped, she's freaking out. It's okay, Janice here's my coat it'll help keep you warm. Tom we need to get'em out of here."
With the coat she becomes aware of how cold she is.
"Hey Mitch, Margaret says the phones are down."
Not Tom, not Tom too.
"Tom get over here. We gotta get them outta here."
"How in the hell we gonna do that, what we gonna do drag him along the ground and she's just gonna hold on for the ride. Janice, let go of Clellum's dick so we can get you out of this shit."
"Her jaws locked." Mitchell tenderly explores the area around her mouth trying to extricate the two. His fingers are like feathers.
In Janice's dream she rode on the back of a huge white snake. His fur chafing the inside of her thighs.
Sophia, Sophia, Sophia
So the apartment was flattened. The sun coming up lighting the birds, thoese wild parrots she imagined talked to Sophia when she walked her. Clellum held her hand. Both stared into the rubble watching the men working on her bedroom. Their uniforms reflecting in bands off the beams from the flash lights still being used to peer under the segments of the top floor piled onto her crib.
The whole apartment had collapsed down in a spiral around the axis of Sophia's room leaving the kitchen & tv room exposed. The whole apartment. There were sobs & vague hollow poundings coming from the ruins the men furiously digging. Clellum held her hand, said, "We'll get her out."
The apartment collapsed in a spiral like that bone white house on the prairie north of town where Clellum & her grew up. Its sagging accordion frame picked up & twisted in the opposite direction by the tornado that summer; telling all the adults they wouldn't go there wouldn't investigate the stuff they found uncovered by the twister. Wouldn't mention that summer they discovered each others bodies on the peeled & sagging floor of the house or the bones beneath the kitchen floor the femurs in the wall the blade Clellum found snagged in the flue. The one he had in his pocket even now.
She couldn't tell him now. Now would not be the time.
"She'll be fine." His knuckles trembling on her hand, a weakness she's never seen. His quivered voice no soothing sound right now. Her neck with its knots and bands so tight she can hardly see. Smell of freshly cut grass among the ruins.
Clellum puts some water in her hand tells her to drink it, but her jaw is too painful to move. Some woman she knows mouths something at her then moves off. Her pink slippers soaked by the dew.
With the sun overhead like this it's too hot her throat dry & caught. A constant clearing & shivers in that shade. Towards the afternoon some men found her body, extracted her from the rubble it's slanting planes making Janice sick as though she were on a boat. High seas with a gash in the prow and Sophia lost in the depths. When the uniformed men had her out, Clellum, still trembling his face of chalk, some putty before the day, stood quard over the ruin his dusty blue white striped coveralls now a uniform as well. The men's faces all ashen they deposit Sophia's body on the sidewalk. The trembling freeway hurtles past its sirens all aglow and though she tried to push her way through the gathered bodies she could not make it near. They would not let her touch Sophia. They would not let her near. All that she could hear was Clellums wail and all that she could see was her beautiful face lying twitched on the ground. A spasm still locked in her jaw.
She could not tell. Now would not be the time.
At the end of that summer her mother read Janice's diary. When she saw those lines, those words she screamed at her for days and spit at Janice's feet. Tied her hands down for the first time. Then Clellum came mocking her from out the window in the humid summer evening with crickets playing songs of longing until the far off morning came. His face pressed against the screen whispering to her while a sea of grass lay before him under the full of a remote moon. She told him that the dark tasted of metal. That she could smell the corridors of school on the breeze. And with that he stopped his taunts at the window; his voice getting calmer in the day, his arm around her shoulders when they walked through the shade.
The summer before that, in the bushes by the creek with the little forest south of town, she had showed him the paperweight. Her mama was at work at the Tastee-Freeze so she wasn't too worried about getting caught. Still she held it with reverence. She wanted to show him this relic. But Clellum would not look at it. He threatened to throw it into the creek but they both knew he wouldn't do that, the price was too high. She didn't explain about the heater, she didn't have too. It's brand was on her palm.
It didn't matter now. Bolted to the pale yellow wall the tv blared its litany of exercise; women walking in place on steps going nowhere. Lines of mouths open in the air. Sophia's eyes on every face. Even the food here a mush just a moments boil away from the texture and taste of the meals she'd make for Sophia her little pudgy arms waving wildly a grin on her face as she slapped the carrots into her high chair tray. Confusion and delight in her eyes as the mush ran down her hands.
When she was sick in her cell she was left alone & that's how it felt too - the walls all with feral intentions, some soap opera calling from the rec room. The clicking of balls on felt. Lysol.
Clellum had liquidated their house fund to pay for the funeral & leverage a bail for the two of them. As they walked out of the place hand in hand he led her gently through the crowd. She didn't mind the cameras. He told her he missed his grapefruit. She smiled.
They both had lost their jobs but scraped together the first month / last month and got a room in a walkup run by an old lady who didn't believe in the tv, radio, or newspapers (not that she could see or hear), & started to look for something else. At night Janice would sing Sophia's song and they would do everything they could to avoid each other's eyes.
This went on for a while.
One night Clellum asked her, no he begged her to stop singing that song as it plucked out his strength made the walls veer in too close. Janice looked him in the eyes, her green eyes like the boughs of the tree they used to climb in near the tornado house, her face flushing with light, even her straw blond hair seeming to glow. He felt as thoug he were drowned in the blacks of her pupils. In the mirror over the sink he could see her shoulder blade protruding from her top. In her hand she held the paperweight, hefted it up to see his eyes, so he could see its fine workmanship, its heat stroked, multicolored surface.
This time he looked at it.
"Things will be okay," she said & put the weight in his hands. Lifting open her throat like some beautiful plumed bird she sings a new song, its cadence pounding in her chest. Shedding her clothes, she opens the bedroom window to let the curious breeze blow in. She took his hand and led him to the bed to lay his head on her womb.
I am on top,legs coil locked for leverage, she purrs deep within a rough stretched sound. We move slowly, left to right hands clasped tight, pulling over our heads.
musk moves tendrils in our nose. Nailmarks on skin so slow, so very slow. My member bent friction on that spot. Sound gasp gushes wet. Bellies joined with heat glue of sweat.
Sounds churn churn within her chest.
Slow. Bent just slow.
Hand finds warmth wet moving penis in sheath. Labia listens finds groping fingers pearls. Anus she pushes out wet with mucus. Spiral fingers round opening listening to moans. Groans starting pressure slowly losing control. Finger finds slides slowly into her hole. Penis as felt through a wall of flesh, shudder & shivver, fall on us both. Banshee screams tear out of our throats. Coming over over again
Full the screams slowly die away, the wind whips picks up our sounds. It screams through the open window clawing at our soaked sweat quivers. Papers fly off the table, the candle falls, curtains moving in out dancing in the tempest. Our alarm jerks out the window to plummet, yanked away by the wind. Second hand revolving turning time for the four floor drop. Crashes into concrete smashing time smooth and stopped. Next to a womin dead, blue skin grey diffused naked beaten long black hair straight straggled with mud. Her breasts firm ungiving to the little girl clinging. Her cold flesh wide eyed silent mouth taped with grey strong tape. Her naked body shivering with cold she holds her mother's flesh. Her dark unlooking eyes, always looking eyes.
What is this supposed to be about?
Posted by: j | January 05, 2004 at 04:42 PM
huh?
Posted by: djdiva | January 12, 2004 at 03:41 PM
why didn't the writer put this piece through spell-check? there is bad grammar in this piece.
Is this story about child abuse?????
Posted by: nancydrew | January 17, 2004 at 11:27 PM
That is some f***ed up stuff... I have no idea what the point in that was. Child abuse? terrorism? bad sex? really... was there a point, cuz it flew right over my head!
Posted by: Taylor | February 17, 2004 at 11:48 AM
thats nasty f**ked up shit and who ever wrote that is f*cked up in the head nasty f*ckers
Posted by: nicole | March 20, 2004 at 08:23 AM
waht the heck was that suposed to be it made no sence and confused me
Posted by: pussy kat | April 14, 2004 at 06:32 PM
Deep Story I tad confusing but the detail and descriptions are cool. i was absorbed right untill the end and then the ending left me cold.
very, very dark.
Posted by: Tiana | September 21, 2004 at 02:22 PM
Cleverly written with child sex molestation between both parents on their child bound and gagged in her bed. They proceed to have their way with her in every possible manner until the little girl is ravaged by her parents. Rest of story is vague and ends with little girl finding revenge and one parent expired. Hard story to trump up and most likely most of what has transpired really happened. Unfortunately, for the little girl, conclusion came to a sad ending and she is left with terrible memories. Most of story is far out and included to make reader confused as intended. In conclusion, a young life has been brutally introduce to sex and she will probably find solace in repetition of the heinous acts committed upon her at a very young age. In any case, it will lead to notably to a life of
.promiscuity and or prostitution. The writer does not indicate her age of time of sexual encounters and I sense age to be prior to puberty. Hopefully, she will eventually cope with sexual happenings on her young body and will use them to her advantage.
Posted by: Louis | October 22, 2004 at 11:35 AM
ideally yes, she will cope, however this is an all to familiar story where the daughter ends up killing her family. if not she will have children through a double life then snap oneday only to "accidentally" murder her children, leaving her innocent husband empty and confused. ultimately she would have ruined his life and he will take it only after writing a brief description of the events leading up to his death. his parents will receive no insurance package because insurance does not cover suicide. the mother will come back into the scene only to end it by fellow inmates raping and hanging her. randomly a cannibal will gouge out her eyes and save them for an after dinner snack. they won't taste right, so she'll throw them across the way pegging a very large dike in the head. the cannibal will laugh and fall asleep peacefully.
Posted by: ed | February 07, 2005 at 04:07 AM