| Self-Destruction Dreams by Vito Capobianco |
| When we reached the end of the hallway you stopped in front of a door. You did turn to face me and once again with your dead-eye stare informed me that we were about to ascend the stairway that did and still does lead to your mothers room. The door knob clicked and rattled as you pulled back the door. A foul wind like none I had ever had the extreme displeasure of smelling then invaded my nasal passage, for it was the filthy rotten stench of death and decay that did befoul our course. The only thing I could remember that smelt anything close to that was the mouse traps in the crawl spaces in my family home. I stumbled back with the force of it, feeling my mouth sting and water and the bitter acid revulsion in my stomach. My head reeling, you pulled on my shirt. �Come on now, it�s just up these stairs.� How could you not smell it? I wondered. I was in disbelief that you could stand it. �No� I said. Leaning back against the wall with what little force the foul stench left in me. You persisted, finally winning you pulled me at a staggered pace through the doorway. Through the dazzled buzz in my brain I could hear the faint sound of your bare feet stepping through a puddle. Splish splish. Still tethered to you I had only a moment�s glance but I�m sure the puddle was blood. You seemed undeterred and I was too weak to speak up so on we went. The stairs creaked and croaked in methodic timing to our steps, combined with the unending buzz of what could only be flies dive bombing a corpse; I felt nearly in a trance. We did climb the stairway quickly; the drone of a thousand flies set the sound track to the greatest horror show of my life. I felt likely to vomit as you did drag me across the threshold like reverse newly weds. The scene was that off a horror movie set, it was that grotesque. I stood in a hardened pool of blood that was quickly becoming a sort of jell-o mold, and surveyed the surroundings as you advanced towards the phone. The bed being the first thing I noticed was in total chaos; a homemaker�s nightmare, sheets twisted, slashed and dyed brown with dried blood. The ridged sheets were covered in a blanket of flies and maggots. I could feel the saliva preparing my mouth for vomit that I felt would surely erupt from my quaking bowels. It seemed as if someone had been murdered on the bed, in there sleep, the bed was torn. Several dozen entry points in the mattress and headboard alike gave evidence to a stabbing. Surely your parents had been stabbed in their sleep, but not only their sleep. Bloodied hand prints streaked the walls where more stab points seemed to chase them in some cruel game the killer must have played. �Gordon. Here you go.� You stood next to the nightstand, a cloud of flies filled in the distance between us, holding a severed receiver out to me. The cord had been cut and you seemed not to notice. I rocked on my heels. �Dear God.� I mumbled, sputtering spittle all over my chin. My brain throbbed in discontent. You laughed hard in a violent way that I could hear scratching your throat. Your hand was white in its grip on the telephone. You quivered with a rage that, had it not been focused on me, would have turned me on; your laughter made you twitch and jerk like stop-motion. Quickly I began to suspect that you had been the one to commit this atrocity. You shook your head and once again, like in the field the first day we met, your vision seemed to clear up. You glanced around briefly, and a quick sharp pain stung your eyes red. I looked to the phone, sans receiver, sitting on the nightstand. It was covered in blood and a disembodied finger lay next to a copy of the Holy Bible. After the stabbing and dismemberment of the dialing finger on the first victim, she (judging by the length of the fingernail) must have been dragged onto the floor where she was finished off with a quick thrust in the eyes or throat because by this time surely the second victim had awakened. I turned to my right; in watching you depart I wonder how it is that I am not afraid. How I can still feel such a powerful attraction to you. To my right there is a dresser complete with shattered vanity mirror. It is my guess that the man, presumably your father came running around the bed in a panic shouting something along the lines of �Dacia, Dacia! What is it that has happened?� and getting close being the last mistake he would ever make. Immediately you would have stuck the fool in the belly. In bending over your shoulder from the momentum of his run, he would have coughed blood onto the mirror. Then you turned and threw him into said mirror, shattering it into a thousand bloodied pieces. A thousand bloodied pieces of a broken mirror, each one reflecting a savage face standing over two lifeless bodies. A scene frozen forever in your mind, I�m sure, for it would be in mine. A strange sort of guilt that would lay heavy and choke me until the point I�m sure I would disappear into myself. Disappear from here and live always in a place of quiet contentment. A place where there is no rain and the sun shines always undeterred. A cold shudder rippled through my flesh. You opened a door that is opposite the one we entered through, it leads to a stairway; it leads as you had said, to your mother. There are more streaks on these stairs; it seemed as if you did drag each body in opposite direction. Why, I have no idea. To what end did you do the things you did? For that matter, to what end do I envision in doing the things I will do? To what end is a question too often over looked. It seems that we as a people live and act in ways that have such great consequences on not only the present but the future, and in doing these things we think not of what affect they will have but only of what we will gain from said act. This truly is the mark of the capitalist. My, I did sound somewhat like you there didn�t I�well I should be on with the story I suppose. You won�t stay in hiding forever, eventually you�ll make your run and the final chase of our lives will begin. Yes maybe that�s what I�ll do, stand in the peak of the roof where I can see the entire yard and wait until I see your ghostly white form wrapped in your tattered yellow dress bolt-streak across the pooling blackness of the night, a shock of light in the darkness, bright fluorescent white partially covered by neon yellow. That�s the way my mind pictures it, so vivid, more alive then anything I have ever seen and probably ever will, your fear making you that extra kind of bright. It�s that delicious sort of glow. Yes, I remember that day so well. My head swimming and my knees weak with a fearful anticipation, my ears filled with the drowning sound of flies and my stomach sick with the scent of death on my tongue, truly an assault of great proportion on my senses. We climbed the stairs at a disquietingly slow pace. Every step you took was deliberate and steady, mine were quick, choppy and stiff with a stutter and jerk I hadn�t ever felt in my footing before. I attribute it to the foul setting and strange swollen feeling of my brain. You stopped somewhere in between the beginning and the end of the stairs. Standing there in silence I stared into the curve of your back while bloated flies bounced off my skin. Bulging with the spoils of death, fattened on the bloodied remains not yet carted away. Flies, so filthy, I could almost see the germs and disease left on my bare skin. My brain throbbed with my quickened pulse. Dizzied I did lift a hand to the wall to steady myself; it lightly dragged across the faded wallpaper, I could feel every ripple in the paper rub across my fingertips sending a feverish chill through my spine. My hand falls to land flaccid at my side. �Dacia.� I started out as if to say something, soon though I lost all thought of what to say and I stood there in silence as you turned to me. The look you bore was that of the truly tormented; the look of the haunted and fearful. �Gordon.� A soft laugh coughs out of you. The sort of laugh brought out not by good humor. No, it was a laugh more along the lines of some sort of twisted irony, a joke that shouldn�t ever be. Laughter no one should feel. A sick sort feeling, the laughter of the hopeless, a cough. �Gordon?� �Yes.� �Tell me, what do you know of the Arctic Salmon?� I almost laughed. Had the setting not been so dire I believe I would have laughed in your face. Sorry dearest but it�s the truth. �Nothing. Dacia, I don�t believe I know a thing about the Arctic Salmon.� You nodded, as if you had expected nothing more than that. �Well, let me tell you something of them. Won�t you Gordon?� Your voice croaked; you rolled your head around on the wall, smearing a blood stain into your hair. I thought this quite the rhetorical question so I did not respond. We both wavered in dazzled states, each waiting for the other to speak. �The Arctic Salmon, as you have no doubt gathered from the name, spend a great deal of their time in the arctic. It is their natural habitat, their feeding grounds. But every year, during the spawning season, they come to the mainland, or rather lakes in the mainland, to bare their eggs and spread their seeds on them.� You said all this with a look of great distaste. �Your thinking right now, �so�, well Gordon the thing is they die soon after. And you know what else they leave behind beside their offspring?� �No.� �PCPs, Gordon. They collect PCPs from the ocean and deposit them in the lakes. PCPs, Gordon, are pollutants. Poisons.� �But wouldn�t that mean-� �Exactly Gordon. Now you see don�t you. The salmon are poisoning their young. By polluting the lakes they breed in, they doom their children to live lesser lives then they themselves have led. Leaving these PCPs in the waters after they pass on they stain the waters and lake beds, they taint the lives of their children. Causing birth defects shortened life spans and unnatural behaviors.� Your gaze shot through me, that distant look stealing your face again. �Does that remind you of anything Gordon?� Before I could answer you merely continued along the way. The conversation had left a deep sunken feeling in my guts, that terrible quivering bowel sensation. At the top of the stairs there was no door to open and close on the threshold. Only an empty space where light cut in on an angle and particles of dust float and fell as oppressive as some sort of force field, it was the presence death in the other room. It was a swollen feeling that took the entire span of the attic, and as we crossed the threshold I could feel my attention immediately drawn to the window where I had first seen your mother watching us in the field. As my eyes fell on her silent form my throat did constrict and all that was in my bowels quickly flushed through me. You made a sound of distaste and shot me a scornful eye. �Mother is very sensitive to the functions of young men�s bodies Gordon. You do want to make a pleasant impression do you not?� We moved closer as if on a conveyer belt, in static little jerks your mother�s end of the room got closer and I shook and quivered. The terrible reek of death turned every breath into a cough as eyes streamed tears to fight the terrible burn of the air. In prophecy to vomiting my mouth felt a sting and quickly welled with spit that I swallowed to ease an aching throat. You floated further in front of me, pulling on my bandaged arm, which oddly enough did not seem broken. I didn�t want to be any closer but to resist you seemed an unfathomable thing, an action that could not be taken. |