(real life influence: my personal life)

CHP 1. Naimlis

     

      The fool, he sits. He leaves his scent on his seat and it wafts, up the wall, across the ceiling and up the stairs. The remote he clicks makes the TV spit its obscenities across his face and he smiles, for a while, and then he clicks again. The fool, he sinks deep within the cushion and the carpet runs across his toes. The blanket, he died across the fool’s lap and most of the pillows escaped to the other couch or to the floor. The fool, the domesticated fool, he asks the TV the same question a million times. Fool, he echoes but does not understand.

      Dark, oily grass grows from the bottom of his memories. It grows to his waist and whips across in the lukewarm wind. The sky above is a white bright enough to shy away from. He sits here too, in the warm grass this time, gazing at the sky. It is not a blank canvas memory forgot to fill but a sky that could be no other color but a furious white. The green black leaves rub their oil on him and he, too, turns dark. He almost becomes the grass in blurred vision. It is black grass, white sky, and green.  She had given it to him, this place. This place he had painted once, never having touched the medium in his life. He would look at it daily and thought of her. The others were impressed with his work.

      She had given him this place. She glides tall above the grass here. Oil does not taint her skin dark but leaves it white as the sky yet shadowed so it is pleasant to look at. Her hair and coat are black yet green as the grass. This place had born her, and she had given it to him. The two embrace and then the memory disappears.

      The memory disappears to a schizophrenic television, an annoyed remote, and a dead blanket. He clicks the remote a million more times and sits a while more. It is all to the soundtrack of “fool”-ish whispers.

      He hears the footsteps come down the stairs.

      Once upon a time…

      And then, he cries.

 

      We went to the beach at night often. “There’s a blinking light in the distance. Wow.” “Hey, it looks like we’re looking into oblivion…except with a blinking light.” “Remember how you said oblivion was in your belly button?”

      Right.

      I think I would like to write a story about love, if only it didn’t sound so stupid.

 

      He cries. He doesn’t just cry-- he hears old memories talk to themselves in his head. You look very nice today. Did you shave? Do you want to go shopping? That was a funny movie. I love you. Feel like roller blading?  How about the beach? It is very nice at night at the beach. I love you too. It is crazy dissonance in his head. His mind sometimes breaks through the noise with a single image of her, smiling or something else, and he erupts anew with choking coughs and hot tears.

      Yes, I love you too.

      The footsteps coming down the stairs are mine.   It doesn’t look like me, at least not as he remembered me to be. I am not smiling, not laughing, no “I love yous", not naked, not the freckled, pixie-cut sweetheart of his pleasant days. Where had I gone? For weeks he had not seen me.

      My footsteps left deep creases in the carpet. A white coat with a high mandarin collar draped down from broad shoulders to white boots. It was large and unshapely and dull, as though it created its own shadow on itself. White hair tapped across her marble face and rested lightly on bulky shoulders. Her meaning my. I have chosen hair unnatural and unreal –white—because black is too natural and like all dark colors, recedes into the background. White.

      I do not even have to pry my fingers into his chest and roll my claws around. His crying has stopped and he has thrown himself on the other end of the couch. He grips an unwilling pillow against his chest.

      A smile, trapped behind white eyes, ribbons itself in my brain. I think it grows out of my head, but I know it is not on my lips. Things sinister always come with a smile. I am not enraged, nor vengeful-- a smile should be on my lips. Sinister smiles have long, lean teeth – too many teeth -- and razor lips scrape across them. I am here on sinister business. Even though he tries not to look at me, I know he looks. I do not think he has ever had an enemy before.

      And then, I just disappear to god knows where. I am very sorry that I miss his reaction, but I cannot be there and not be there at the same time. At least, not tonight. Tonight, I am in the mood to be victimized. The screams, the dark street, hold me down, beat me up, the whole thing. Maybe I’ll be lucky and get a serial killer rapist man. Let my heels be too high, my skirt too short, my hair too long, my expression too confused. Let the street be too dark, the alleyway too deserted, the night too cold, the police too busy. Let him find me alone, let him stalk me, lead me, I will stand on this corner and wait for him.

        Normally a woman sitting alone in a tavern could not finish her drink unmolested, however none touched Zona. Perhaps they could sense something eerie about her that even the alcohol could not mist. Perhaps the clawed gauntlets warned of something more evil, a truth that her black peasant dress tried unsuccessfully to conceal. Or, perhaps, it is that this particular woman actually welcomed strangers and brutes. A malicious smile welcomes every ambush. Most heed the obvious warnings Zona does not bother to conceal, however a complete drunken fool always comes to her, much to her delight.

       I find him looking across the street, eyeing the hurrying passersby. All of them innocent, just going home from a long day at whatever people do. Work, probably. I should probably get a job someday-- a real job. I don’t think the others do the nine to five thing. The others? I can’t believe I thought about them today.

       I surprise the man at a perpendicular angle with a confident “Hello!”

        “Yer in my seat,” a man shouts above all the other brawls.

      “Am I, now?” Zona says, in conversational tone, its cool confidence cutting through the noise.

      He draws a little blade and greets her with it. “I’ll use it, don’t think I won’t.”

      “I’m sure you’ll use it-- to cut your steak.”

      In fury, he stabs the oak table the way all of them do.

      “That only dulls your blade, you know,” Zona comments.

      “How about you fight me, missy! You won’t be so bold when I am done with you. Right here, now” he yells, his voice never quite going over the crowds.

      “We will do things on my terms, not yours.” Her voice cuts easily though the noise again.

      “Coward! She’s a coward!” his voice is swallowed by a brawl in the next table.

      “Of course I am,” she smiles, “I never enter a battle unless I know for sure I will win.”

      “Coward! She backs down!”

      “Behind the tavern, in the alley, alone together—that is how I will fight you. I challenge you because I know I will win. We fight to the death,” she challenges.

      The other looks around him and realizes no one is listening or cares about the two. Oh, what a sorry man he was.

      The man is kind of gangsta looking, but not black or Latino. He must be a mulatto mix of all the crazy races in this world. The evil looking neon lights of all the bars shine on his pleather jacket but not on his eyes, for I see them turn my way. They look at my long legs and my halter and my unfastened mink coat. Eighty-dollar cornrows line my head and a full acrylic set -- complete with nail jewelry-- tap across the night air. The only “rock” I wear is a fist-sized pearl, which hangs oddly on the center of my collar bone. It is big and black.

      The man doesn’t say anything, so I go on. “Say, I am kinda lost. I am looking for a bar to get drunk and wasted at.”

      The man steps a little away from me. I try the local colloquialism. “My heels “be” hurting me. I can’t walk – or run-- in them… “fo” shit. For “shizzle,” I mean, I think. So, can I get into your “wheels” my “nigga”?”

      The man looks at me, wide-eyed, and chuckles a little. I take off my coat a little, showing my shoulder. He is still chuckling when he shakes his head and walks off a little.

            Fuck it. I’ll kill the bastard anyway.

            “Wait man!” I yell. It sounds too nice, as if I said “Please sir, stall a moment so that I may kill you?”

            The man stumbles around in the blackness, at first timidly walking, feeling for anything familiar. He then starts running, hoping to run into something, but he finds nothing but panic. Could this be a Labyrinth of some sort, one with the walls miles apart? Could it be just too much drinking? Could he possibly be dead? He stumbles frantically on all fours, clawing at the ground. Where is the woman? he cries.

      A cold fist grabs his wrist, dragging him against the ground. He wriggles all he can, but cannot break free. He feels the ground below him disappear and is suspended painfully over an abyss he cannot see.

      “Mercy,” he cries.

      Oh, how many have died in this way, their bodies forgotten in this alternate reality. She lets his arm slip away.

            I wait for him to turn around and look at me. My acrylic set taps across the Pearl. Nothing sinister here, just a wide grin on my face. The man shrugs and turns back away from me. I time it so that when I disappear from his vision, his world becomes a black oblivion.

            “Remember how you said oblivion was in your belly button?”

            The man, he was mulatto or something, I think he tried to rape me. Sigh. “Oblivion” used to be such a cool word, before it got stupid. It is a horrible, deadly, lonely place. It is not in my belly button.

             No, he doesn’t try to rape or kill me. He just kind of stumbles around in complete darkness like someone who has lost their glasses. 

      She kind of just holds the axe. She, meaning I – I hold the axe. I can’t see it too well, but I remember how the diamond blade would sparkle in the sunlight. My armor was the most fearsome, I remember. I cannot see it now, but I can feel its weight on my skin. It was the darkest gray with nightmarish spikes and wild looking carvings of dragons and horrible things on it. My face was an angular helm with narrow, angular slits for eyes.

      The man’s stumbling slows a bit. I sigh and the helm just sends the moisture back to my face.

     “Ok man, you have insulted my honor. Yea….the time for mercy has passed,” my rumbling voice sounds so exhausted. “You must perish…under, under the heavy blade of the warlock’s axe.”

            The man will be wiped off the face of his earth. If he is an only child, his mother would have had miscarriage after miscarriage. He would have been one of them. If he has a brother or sister, that sibling would have lived their lives as an only child.  Whatever mark on the world he has made, will be erased. This man looks around, trying to find the voice.

            “Hello?” he says, finally. The first word all night.

             “Yes, hi. I am going to kill you now.”

            “What! Why? Oh my lord Jesus…” the man yells. He continues to yell all sorts of silly things, but I stop paying attention. I have died a thousand horrible deaths during my lifetime – torture, execution, burning, dismembering, betrayal, horrible diseases, I think there was a poisoning in there, too – but I have never compromised my dignity with futile pleas. I suppose that is why he is not a knight and I was. 

            He annoys me. I wave him and his oblivion off, and find myself back on the street, alone. I think I’ll just walk home. The city streets are wet and shiny for some reason. I don’t remember any rain. Actually, now that I think about it, I don’t ever remember the streets being dry. The puddles in the cracks of the sidewalk reflect the neon lights of the stores and bars so that the street has strange, surreal glowing creases in it. I notice there is a hole in my shoe somewhere. The city water has leaked its way into my shoe. It is grainy and sands my foot down a little every step I take. I didn’t bother to wear socks so my foot slips from toe to heel each step I take. Why would the water be grainy? There is no sand anywhere near this place. We went to the beach at night a lot. I wonder if the beach has come to him tonight as it has come to me.

            I have read books about knights and magic. Why is it none of them have sand and slime in their shoes, ever? Actually, now that I think about it, I never have had that problem before. Especially not in the old days. I suppose the cobblers have slacked on their skills or have disappeared altogether. It is an inferior magic that makes my shoes now.