Mean Streak

Your words rain down like a shattered sheet of glass, embedded in my skin like tiny crystal bullets. Tiny drops of blood, like little red teardrops. I wash away the remnants of my pain but little pieces stay lodged under my skin, where you live.

LETTING GO

LETTING GO

The only thing that was constant and stable was the pain, and the only thing that could take the edge off of it was love. The love brought it’s own pain, it had begun as a safe spot – soft and warm, a sense of security and feeling matched with another soul. The distance of the thing, and the constraints of the external things that began to invade that initial haze of togetherness had created sharp edges and small crises of faith, that then ballooned into anxiety-ridden breaks in rationality.

The pain became a companion, maybe as addictive as the love, and after a while even the bitter taste of Xanax stopped providing the comfort of numbness. Waiting in endless cycles for a text, a call, a token of love that doesn't come, turns your mind inside out; the unknown and cryptic nature of a love that grows in the soil of intangibility, and the toxic mix of insecurity and fear. The dark thoughts creep in, the bogeyman under the bed we all feared as children, becomes real, he’s a shadow stalker and you can hear him whispering quietly in your ear that the thing you fear the most is preordained and then you wait for that first tentacle of fear to wrap itself around what’s left of you, and it starts to be a comfort – the idea of nothingness becomes appealing, a secret place, an escape plan, a resolute end that can't be dictated by external forces.

Laying in bed, you look at the bottles lined up, battalions of pills to ward away the dark place, and the bogeyman who inhabits it. The fleeting thought of the comfort they could bring, the last boundary between pain and peace… No more twisted feelings of dread and guilt for things already done, or things still undefined; the rejection you expect with a numb sense of helplessness and finality, no more heavy, painful heartbeats that pulse against the band of tightness in your chest. One last clear breath, release, and the freedom of nothingness.

Reclining in a bath or floating in a pool turns into a delightful sensory deprivation chamber, you lay into the water and hear your breaths in an echoing cadence, your heart beats faint and steady, and you close your eyes and curse the fact that your brain will never let you sink three inches below the surface and inhale the water, pushing the last bit of oxygen out of your body while your soul floats away in an invisible swirl of stars.

So many tempting thoughts, a place to rest and be untouched by the ugliness of the world you created for yourself. No sense of dread or fear, being out of step with things everyone else seems to take for granted, living in isolation but somehow surrounded by people who ultimately see you as a burden, an obligation, or an object of curiosity. A creature that lives in the shell of a human body, but that has no connection to humanity – just grief and fear and pain, as pleasure and hope become ghosts of someone you once you knew.

People pass judgements on actions and decisions you make, never knowing anything about you. Cruelty comes from directions you don't expect, and the unintentional cruelty is the worst because it underlines how detached you are from the human race, like they are throwing a rock at a stray dog, or stepping over a homeless beggar in the street. They don't see past you, they just don't see you at all because you’ve become transparent, inconsequential. A thing.

You start to wonder, when does the equation stop making sense? When does the math and logic point to an unsalvageable resolution. Cutting away from a place that you don't belong in anymore, and replacing an intuitive will to live, with the acceptance of a failure that can't be undone.

There are people who probably shouldn't be here, a Russian roulette of DNA, and we evolve into people who always seem to be living in a state of delay. Little pieces of our brains are missing, and the wistful wish to belong and to be wanted grows into a chasm of unrealized love, accomplishments, confidence, and feeling at home in the world.

I contemplate the idea of cessation, not suicide because I suspect I am already more dead than alive, but my greatest comfort comes in the idea of receding into a soft, dark place, with no light to feed into false hopes, and no noise to distract me from the relief of finally giving in or giving up.

I am tired. I am tired in my bones and muscles. I am tired of thinking. I am tired of feeling tired.

I am going to stop looking for hope, I don't believe it in any more. It makes it easier to let go when lock away your expectations.

Spider

Awiti Moss was a block of a woman with a dusty cast, and great rolling brown eyes spinning in an abundant expanse of white sclera shot with silken threads of red.  She had thick ambitious black brows that pulled across her egg-shaped forehead, and underscored the fine dusting of hair scattered over her skin.  Her uneven braids were pulled tightly into a headscarf, and glistened with heavy-scented oil.

Her mouth was a constantly churning verbal kiln reeking of teeth in the early stages of decay, and the nascent tang of last night’s cock-sucking in the tin-sided shantytown shack; her knees still bore the muddy crust of kneeling on the hard dirt-packed floor, while Inacio leaned back against the car-seat makeshift couch and thrust his pungent phallus into her tooth-crammed maw.

Awiti was a shape shifter, a changeling, a Jill of all trades – she wasn’t fully formed and her interior landscape was as hard and chilled as the dirt floor of Inacio’s mother’s garishly painted tin hut.  She felt oddly at home there, almost peaceful; as far as she was from her original state she always found a way to return through the reassuring portals of poverty and her artful way of mixing fact and fantasy.  She was a spiritual spider, an Araneae Fabulist – a poisonous little arthropod with wildly grasping legs and chelicerae that greedily devoured the flesh of other people’s lives, while injecting them with a small pocket of her toxic venom.

Awiti Moss was a dead woman, encased in living flesh and walking the earth in shrouds of half-realized dreams, trailing musty gossamer wisps of failure and spiritual decay behind her.  In the fetid waft of Awiti’s wake, a wall of words was her only foundation for a life increasingly lived in the purgatory of other people’s perceptions.

As Inacio pumped his hot white seed into Awiti’s arid womb, he felt a shiver of primordial fear – somehow he knew as he pulled himself away, shriveled and spent, that he had crossed the line from making a conquest into much darker terra infirma; the lust-haze cleared and he saw the dark form heaving beside him in the night take on a strange shape, and as she lazily reached over to touch his cheek, he felt with growing horror the unmistakable sensation of a spider’s dry scritch pulling lightly at his skin.

What at first appeared to be a generously endowed hourglass torso was a body pinched into two halves; and the sharp, pointed nipples of only moments before began to spin out fine silken threads of titanium that wrapped around him silently and inexorably, squeezing each labored breath out of his chest until all movement stopped, and his eyes clouded over in terror and relief.

With the first damp light of morning, Awiti wrenched the remnants of the titanium threads from her arms and sniffed the air.  She placed her hands on the curve of her belly, and smiled.  Inacio wasn’t going anywhere; what was left of him, the only part that mattered, was feeding the hungry little egg inside her, her spider baby.

Awiti walked through the morning chaos of the shantytown, smiling condescendingly as the mothers bargained in the alleys for the overripe fruit they would feed their children.  She was satiated, and temporarily fattened from her protein infusion to the extent that her skin looked hard and shiny as it stretched over her plump limbs.

She was moving past the Caribbean ghettos, she needed to find a nest for her hatchling spider, a place both cool and dark; a place that she could retreat into the half-light and bring the spider baby forth in her exact image.  The spider baby would be a hybrid and would serve as her living mirror, unhesitatingly speaking the words all spider-mothers consumed like fly flesh: “You, dear mother, are the fairest and smartest in all the land.”

Awiti’s every cell thrummed in anticipation of the hatchling’s exodus from her womb, and as was in her spider nature, she rode a stream of hot air up and away from the teaming slums and brackish rivers of the islands and sped for the comforting environs of a colder slum built with solid walls.

Awiti watched her body bloat with the life growing inside her, and she noticed all the mirrors seemed dimmer and her reflection began to fade.  As cold, icy rain slapped at the windowpanes, and tendrils of frigid air snaked through chinks in the battered casing and under doorjambs she felt the niggling sensation of regret.  What good would the spider baby serve if her reflection were muted?  What if the spider baby was pulling the vibrancy and color from her image and absorbing it into it’s own life force?

Awiti lapsed into a melancholy state, and her mind drifted back to thoughts of warm tropical rain, and heated lovemaking on the makeshift car-seat couch.  When she felt the steady hum of the spider baby growing inside her she wondered if the part that was leeching her vibrancy and stealing her reflection was the part of Inacio that recognized her inhumanity in the last moments before she consumed him with her carnivorous web of deceit.  She wondered if her hybrid mirror was a Trojan horse, and would invade her fragile psyche and shatter her image altogether. Now when she rested her hands on the curve of her belly she saw the husks of her nails turn brittle and yellow, and her bones ached as they shifted to hold the ever-bigger spider child.  She no longer cradled her stomach in a gentle embrace; she gripped the sides in a barely subconscious desire to contain it and suppressing the wild urge to pound her fists into the hard flesh and scream in primal rage.

Awiti realized as her time drew near that she had badly miscalculated the endgame of spider mothering.  She withdrew into her madness and created an alternative reality, even as her reflection faded into sepia-toned obscurity and the silken titanium threads gathered thick coats of dust, her words began to take on literal shape and mass – she could recreate her reflection by crafting an Awiti of uber-proportions.  As the words flowed from her virtual pen, she began to look for higher ground.  When the spider-baby came she needed to feed her reflection or the mirror would shatter and she would be left staring into Inacio’s eyes again, only the horror that dawned in them and dimmed his life force would now belong to her.

Just as the ferocious bite of Arctic air began to dissipate and the cleansing breezes of spring washed over the ghetto, Awiti felt the sharp cramps of childbirth as her baby began its descent into the world.   She screamed as the baby slid out of her, and the doctors quickly gave her morphine to dull the pain; but she was screaming in fury and fear and the morphine couldn’t really take the edge off of that.  As they brought the baby to her she glimpsed the soft bronze skin and satin curls, the hungry little mouth already knowing how to feed off of her.  Her heart sank as she offered her breast to the tiny orifice that was devouring her, and she realized her reflection could only survive in the shadow territory of her false words.