"The Visitor" #Fridayflash

Yet more from my 27 WIP: 
Previous chunks found first here and here. - CC

Tiffany had her kit out and looked like she was about to shoot up anyway. She was still in a towel and Nine Inch Nails was still playing even though that album was from ’eighty-nine. It was my CD. I guess now it was hers. Just like anything else within her reach. My sister was supposed to have all of this stuff. Maybe she didn’t want it. Maybe she hadn’t been contacted yet.

She snapped off the tourniquet and lay back against the sofa, her gaze looking somewhere into outer space. She licked her lips and swallowed. Curious, I went to stand in front of her. Her gaze shifted to meet mine and a small smile crossed her lips.

“Well, hello there…” she drawled.

I shook my head. Of course she would see me all fucked up. “You’re in my house.”

“Uh huh.” She closed her eyes and rolled her head around on her neck. “This is what I need.”

“What happened, Tiffany?” I crouched beside her and she peeked one eye at me. 

“Pretty easy…you OD’d. Pills, whatever, man. I tried to help you. I put you on your side and you vomited and bled, and I was fucked up too, baby.”

What about the sex we had after? And then she was looking into my fridge. I stood again. She was zoned out. I wouldn’t get anything else out of her, but at least I knew how to make her see me. It was always said drugs opened our minds. I guess that included eyes too.  

There was a knock at the door. I peered through the peephole. It was the creepy guy from the cemetery, Stein. He grinned, and the door swung open. I had to step back out of the way.

 “Mind if I come in? Of course you don’t.” He stepped forward and shook my hand in greeting. His skin was hot, like a stovetop when the oven was on. He even sported a little scruff on his chin and no tie. He indicated the dinette set and pulled a chair out for me. “Sit.”

I did as requested and he took a chair across from me. We regarded one another for a few moments before he spoke. 

“I’ve put this off for a day to think on what I want to do with you.”

I sat back in my chair and rested my palms on the tops of my thighs. “Who are you, exactly?”

Stein smiled and pulled a pack of cigarettes from the inside of his jacket. He tossed them on the table. I glanced from the pack to him in question.

“Go ahead. I know you smoked. May as well stay comfortable. I don’t think they’ll kill you again.” He chuckled softly.

A book of matches was tucked in the cellophane. I slid it out, pulled out a slim, white cigarette and struck one of the blue-tipped matches to produce an equally blue flame. Stein slid a heavy glass ashtray my direction. 

“Now, let me get to why I’m here. About a week ago, you died en route to the hospital in the back of an ambulance. A shot was administered to your heart to try to jumpstart you, but you were already on the outside looking in by that time. Do you remember?”

“Sorta.”

“See, my main aspirations are hot hookers and blow, sometimes at the same time.” He laughed. “But my job is to make sure you get where you need to be now.”

“So you’re an angel.”

“Wrong. Angels can’t interfere with the free will of humans. Or just drop down to earth without a damned good reason. No, son, I’m the one that every man, woman and child, and any variation thereof waits for.”

“Death.” The cigarette didn’t taste like it used to, but the simple familiarity of holding it between my fingers and breathing out the smoke was comforting.

“Close. I’m the fellow that shows up along with. I get confused with Big D, but no, I’m nothing that grand, although I have a comprehensive benefits package.”

“Grim Reaper?” I couldn’t help but laugh. “I expected a faceless figure…”

“In a robe? With a big fucking scythe?” Stein mimicked holding the weapon and covered his face. He laid his hands on the table again, only to lace his fingers. “Too passé. Times have changed, and so have I.”

“So what’s this got to do with me?” I crushed my cigarette into the ashtray to extinguish it.

“Keep the pack.” Stein nodded at my hand covering the box. His gaze returned to meet mine. His eyes were dark, like they’d been at the gravesite. “I’d love to take you, Ren, but the truth is you might be somebody else’s. Point is, you have to stay here for a little while longer. Try not to haunt too many folks, eh son?”

“And do what? Just hang around?”

Stein shrugged. “Whatever comes to mind. Need a job? Look around you. There’s plenty to do. Just remember the rules of the dead.”

I frowned. “Rules?”

Stein laughed and waved a hand at me dismissively. “Everything has rules, you know that. Our rules are a little stricter than most because instead of fining you a fee, we’ll just send your ass straight to Gehenna.”

"64 Degrees" #Fridayflash

 A few weeks ago, I posted 27. Here is Ren once again... thanks for reading. - CC

Photo credit: click from morguefile.com

Far away, there was a siren fast approaching. The sound swelled in volume until it was all I could hear, like it was coming from inside me. I dropped the cigarette to the floor to cover my ears. Hands took hold of my wrists and held me down.
I opened my eyes.

I was in a moving vehicle and my body was a bag of sand. The stretcher poked the sides of my arms, but I couldn’t move. The sway of the ambulance increased the roll in my gut and vomit spewed up, unbidden. A woman of indeterminate age held a bag to the side of my face and turned my head. Her gloved hands waved close enough to my face to poke me in the eyes. I wouldn’t react. The siren stopped and so did we. So did I.

I stood close to the curb under the eaves of the Mother of Mercy hospital and watched as EMTs unloaded a covered body on a stretcher. The scene wasn’t frightening or panic-inducing. Not after being that jacked-up. Speaking of which, I’d need to get more. Now that I wasn’t clean anymore. Strangely enough, the thought of not getting more didn’t launch me into a cascade of worry. I slid my hands into my pockets, the swish of the automatic doors stuck on repeat in my brain.

Lights progressed overhead, swoosh-swoosh-swoosh like dotted lines on a road, blinding and sweet.

We got him?

Negative. Try again.

Lightning zig-zagged in my chest cavity. The pierce of a needle straight through the sternum. I hated needles, with their shiny points and oozing fluids, like sharp dicks. Like…

Thunder rolled on the horizon. Trees shimmied overhead. I was standing in a grove. What the fuck was happening? A dream, nothing more.

Renalt had a dream, damnit.

Nate called me Renalt. Nobody called me that but family and family didn’t come around.

“It’s Ren, asshole. Ren!”

A hand appeared on my shoulder, hot. Blazing. My skin wanted to shy away from that touch.

“I’d say Renalt was a fine name, just fine as the day is long.” His voice had a slow, Southern drawl, white Republican. Cheap sports jacket, lemonade-sipping, Tetley tea Southern.

I turned to look at him. I expected a policeman or maybe a security guard, but he was young, not young like me but couldn’t have been more than thirty-five. Sandy-blonde hair with a pronounced widow’s peak above an arched Jack-Nicholson eyebrow. A girl would call him handsome, but there was something about his eyes. The nothing there. Shine of sun on nothingness, to return a bead of white among the black, so deep it swallowed his irises. He smiled, exposing a row of pearly whites too perfect to be anything but caps. I knew caps, I had them myself.

“Rock musicians have to have good teeth, son.” His smile never wavered and seemed genuine.

A cloud blotted out the sun, exposing my flesh to the prickle of cold air. “I never said anything.”

“Why are you standing here? I’d be over there.” He raised his hand, finger extended to redirect my attention to what I recognized was a memorial service. “It’s the last time you’ll be the center of attention. Might as well enjoy it.”

Sunshine beamed down on my head again as the cloud conveniently wisped away, burned through grey wool. It was a beautiful day. And this man had just told me something that was important. My mind ticked away at the sentence. Last time. Center of attention. I liked attention. Once. Very long ago, only but a few years but at my age, twenty seven, a few years was forever. Forever. A trickle of realization oozed down my spine like an oiled snake.

The gentleman smiled again. Sun beat down on our shoulders, he in all black, hands clasped in front of his equally-black buttons as if he ought to be clutching a bible and giving the Last Rites. My Last Rites. I was dead. Dead, and about to be laid to rest in the ground. My mouth dropped open and I turned to the small crowd in slow-motion, mouthing the negative word like a supervillain about to watch his empire crumple in oversaturated and pronounced superdust.

The grass did not crisp under my feet, my shadow did not run ahead of me as it had ever since the day I first poked one pudgy baby toe against the solid earth, no I was air; an angry wind that fluttered the Xeroxed fliers clasped in my family’s and friends’ hands. A sudden breeze that whipped black skirts against black stockings and blew my aunt into my sister.

The man from over there stood over here. He wore a smile that made a tiny dimple in the right side of chin appear and fade depending on the light. “Nice try, son. But you don’t have a leg to stand on now, do you?” His hearty laugh stopped me in my non-existent tracks. I glared at him over the gloss of my black coffin, of course it’d be black, everything else was black out here in the cheery, laughing sunshine, it made so much sense.

“You’re a piece of work, Renalt.”

I jabbed a finger in his direction. “Don’t fucking call me that!”

The man shrugged and held his hands palms turned out, as if in resignation. “Suits you fine, I’d say. Have it your way, son. Ren.”

“Who are you?” I was clenching my teeth so tight, it felt like they would crack from the pressure. “Who the fuck are you?”

The man laughed again. “I’ve got a few names that folks call me, some new, some old, but you can call me Stein. And Renalt?” He arched a brow. “Try living with Cristein all your life.”

“We’re dead.”

“Some would say that, yes.”

Throughout the ordeal, my coffin had been lowered into the grave. The rectangle looked to be a hole into eternity, except if I stepped to the edge. My coffin with its spray of ivory lilies and I don’t know what else gleamed up as the first clod of dirt struck the lid.

“You might not want to watch this part.” Stein stood at my side, peering down in the hole with me. He was just an inch or two taller than me. He squinted his black eyes—not beady, but they still reminded me of a crow’s—at the sun. “Coffee or liquor? It won’t make you sicker.”

“What?” I glanced down at my outstretched arms. White. Whole. I felt real to me. I turned away from the sounds the clods of earth made as the people I’d known buried me.

Beyond the flat, green lawn, a long black car hulked on the shoulder of the narrow cemetery road. I looked from it to Stein. “This is really happening, isn’t it?”

“Depends on your point of view, Ren. Not everything you experience ever really happens now, does it?” His smile gave me a chill.

“Why can’t they see me?”

Stein shook his head and stepped back from the scene at my grave. I followed him half way to the car, which seemed to be his.

“Because you’re not really here.”

I blinked. “What? What’s that supposed to mean? Of course I’m here.”

Stein gave a little snort. “Well, you are, and you aren’t. You-you is over there, about to become wormdirt. What’s left of you is up for grabs. You see son, you did a naughty thing, and as for all naughty things, there’s gonna be consequences.” He grinned.

"27" #Fridayflash

Photo credit: mconnors from morguefile.com

It wasn’t like I told her I’d love her forever. Or any at all. The posts she wrote about me on the public band forums were unforgiving, at the very least. I carried on with my life, hoping she’d give up, find someone else to obsess over but after fourteen months, I couldn’t take it anymore.

She’d taken the very thing I held most dear and destroyed my faith in it. The music in me was dead. My guitar sulked under a thin coating of dust. My curtains remained drawn to the day, as if I was some kind of nocturnal inhuman creature. I shied away from cameras while out and about, when before I’d embraced them.

She’d broken my trust in her. The things I’d told her that I’d never admitted to anyone. She’d poured my secret thoughts into the ear of anyone with more than five minutes to listen. My private fears, dripped out of her non-stop mouth. My voice died. The stage stood empty in my mind. There was no melody to draw life out of my slumped and lanky form.

My wrist bones stood pronounced, my cheekbones so sharp they could cut paper. Sunken hollows lay in half-circles under my eyes. I was frozen; an effigy of what was once great and powerful. The women had once ran their fingers through my blond hair. Now it flooded down my back like a road of static. I knew I was bad. I was fully aware of what the shit I was on would do. I just didn’t care. I didn’t want to want anything anymore, and I had plenty of money to get it.

I lay prone on the ratty couch, with the old dust cover haphazard, fingers brushing the raised rubbery buttons of the remote. I watched TV with one eye open, the other buried in a pillow of tears of regret. I had to pee. My stomach rumbled, pissed off that it’d been three days without solid food. A half-glass of water and a bottle of pills beckoned from the low coffee table.

It’d be so easy.

The thought hit me like a fully-loaded semi hauler. I didn’t have to go through day after day. I could give myself over to the great beyond. Past the tunnel and the blinding light. I knew there wasn’t a light. I’d nearly died twice while on the road in Europe because of a deadly booze and drugs one-two punch. Not the same booze. Not the same drugs. I was desensitized to danger but I wasn’t completely stupid. Just ignorant of the fact I was still mortal, just like every single one of my fans. The people out on the street. The callers, pushers, hookers, and kids that came up to my knee.

I don’t think I did it because of her. I did it because of her. That she’d happened, and that I’d let it. The case with her shit magnified my self-loathing to high definition. Bile rose in my throat, looking at those pills in that cautionary orange bottle. They were in arm’s reach. Mistake? Or solution?

I was irrational. I growled into the faded fabric and bit the cushion. My heart pounded in my chest like a fist on an oak door. The urge to pee became more insistent. I pushed up off the couch and swung my lowered head in the bathroom’s direction. I let forward momentum carry me there, slamming against the jutted ceramic sink. One of the twin faucets never stopped dripping. I’d taken pliers to it once;  I could see the rings of effort still around the narrow chrome.

Pee. Right. I positioned myself in front of the toilet, unzipped my fly and braced myself against the wall with one hand as I held my dick with the other. Her pink-handled razor was still on the shelf at eye-level. I glared at it until my eyes swam out of focus then swatted it into the bathtub. The clatter was loud in that small room. After I zipped up, I turned on the cold water and let it flow over my fingers.

I was a waste.

I dried my hands on a towel, avoiding my reflection in the mirror. I was afraid of seeing myself worse than I already pictured in my mind. My body had nearly atrophied in my year of seclusion and self-abuse. I resembled Jesus on the cross, just give me a cloth diaper and a crown of thorns.

I didn’t believe in God. If there was one, he was an asshole. Or a bitch. Yeah, that was probably it. A vengeful bitch that took particular pleasure in tormenting those guys that would try to rise to the top. I just liked singing.

Another woman had called me songbird once. I think I was fifteen. I gave her the finger. Literally. I was lucky. I always looked older than my real age. She thought I was eighteen. I may as well been. I never finished school. I didn’t need to. I’d been taken under Precocious’ wing by that time. He was the first gay man I’d ever encountered. Offers were made and declined. I was only interested in pussy. Including when I was obliterated.

I put my hands on the doorsill and rested my head on them. My knees trembled. Why was I thinking of my benefactor when he was gone eight years already? Sweat beaded on my brow. Great, I was probably getting sick. It didn’t matter. None of it did.

I’d eat, but only to make my stomach shut up. The growling was reverb in my ears and I whimpered against my skin. It was over. All of it was gone. I couldn’t reach out for my star any more than I could reach for that bottle of pills. But they would be there.

I staggered back into the den and glared at the telephone blinking stupidly with unanswered messages. My manager, my friends, wrong number. I knew what they would be already. We have a contract, we miss you, can I speak to Fernando?

I didn’t have a cellphone. I didn’t text or Tweet, or Facebook like everybody else on the planet. I was old-fashioned in that way even though I wasn’t old, despite the deep objection in my bones. It was just a setback, I’d told my manager Mindy. She’d said she was waiting on new material. I told her I was working on it.

I was a fucking liar. My name was Ren.

"The Bath" #Fridayflash

Photo credit: fieryn from morguefile.com

She’s drinking gin and tonic, even though it’s not a girl drink. The blinds are closed, but splashes of red and blue still bleed through. A low hum of glass-bell silence in the house points an accusing finger towards the hall, up the stairs and to the bath. Signs, written in psychic hues of purple. Cryptic warnings. Don’t Go Upstairs. Her hand shakes, tinkling the ice in her drink. It hasn’t been said, but she’s getting talked to. She doesn’t want to get talked to.

Her fingers fidget for a cigarette. This ancient house usually feels warm, but the front door stands wide open, like a mouth, falling into a dark throat of frozen midnight. It’s always midnight when bad things happen, but maybe this one doesn’t count because she took a nap. Fatigue had etched away at her consciousness; the book she’d been reading, fell to the floor, where the cat could sniff and tear at the pages. Sleep is a thief. The night is its witness.

Dirty snow is left to perish on the Berber carpet.

If it happened while she was asleep, that makes it a dream. It feels like one. She takes another sip, and raises the glass to look at it. It looks like water but smells like hell, and that matches her mood.

A uniformed man stands over her. Not looking at her, but keeping watch as others like him file in and out of the door. They bring tools and bags. Soon, it’ll be time to move from the sofa. She licks her lips, numb from the alcohol and stained with nicotine. She’d ran out of cigarettes an hour ago. 

"Karma" #Fridayflash

Not that she wasn’t pretty. Her eyes and lips told a different story. Leaning there against the door frame, smoking a cigarette with her arm over her head. Wide-set doe eyes, and balanced precariously on twig-thin heels. Beaded bracelets slid down her wrist, drawing attention to how delicate her bones were.

“And then, he just turned…dark.” She pulled hard from her cigarette, and released a plume of smoke in her words. “I never saw it coming.”

I shifted my weight to relieve the pressure of the holster against my hip. The page in my notepad was almost full. For someone who had nothing to say, she had plenty. It must’ve been the drugs. I’d have to arrest her. I felt like a criminal.

She slid a foot from one of her shoes and propped it against the wall. Her hair was bleached almost white, and made her red mouth look like a bloodstain in her pale face. Track marks pocked the inside of her left elbow. Which made her right-handed.

I looked at my watch. “Anything else, Mrs…”

“Smith.” The th in the word brought out her slur. “No, that’s it. Can I go now?” Her pupils were pinpoint, tiny holes of nothingness.

I shook my head. “I’m afraid not.” I expected her to cry, but there were no tears, only indifference. Maybe she was too high to care.

Crime Scene came in, interrupting us. “We need to take the body.” Nice boys. Stevo and Kieran.

“Look, Mrs. Smith, you’re a prime suspect in this murder case.”

 I felt sorry for the clean-up crew. They’d need a mop to pick up what was left of him. Prime suspect was the understatement of the year. She must’ve showered and gotten dressed before making the call. A chill snaked down my spine.

Her smile was coy, but her stare was icy. “Karma’s a bitch.”

I blinked first.

Photo credit: jdurham from morguefile.com

"Geetar" #Fridayflash

Momma don’t stop me from playing the geetar out on the front porch. I sit and fiddle with them tuning pegs, twistin’ this way an’ that ’til I get the sound just right to my ear. I don’t need nobody to tell me how, I just know when I hear the right sound.

The neighbors walk by an’ stop to hear me play. Sometime they smile, sometime they frown and shake they head. I don’t mind none, just keep on picking them strings, humming under my breath ‘til them words break out like sun from behind a gray cloud.

Miss Johnson from three houses down bring her kids by sometime; they like hearing me play. Miss Johnson say I’m gonna be a big star someday but I don’t believe it. I just like to play. My fingers get itchy without strings under ’em, so I scratch them by playin’ songs out here on the front porch.

I don’t know where the words come from, they just roll out of my head onto my tongue and drip from my lips into the air. I get loud sometimes, an’ Momma come out and tell me to hush it down now, baby’s ’sleep. But the baby like my songs, he giggle and coos like he havin’ a ball. Sometime he claps his little hands and to me, it’s better than any ol’ big audience.

I look out from my chair and there’s a few folks out there, all lookin’ up at me. I stare at the dusty planks on the porch, I don’t know how to keep eye contact an’ all ’cause it sometime make me nervous. When I finish my song, they all clapping for me and I kinda shrug, mumble a word of thank’n and go on to the next one. An’ it is just fine. Right as rain. I smile for the people gathered out there at the gate, an’ I go on to the next song.

I play for awhile, ’til my head get tired and I feel out of breath ’cause I singing loud again, only Momma don’t stop me. She see that everybody just fine with me a playin’. An’ so is she.

(Photo credit: gianni from morguefile.com)

"Five Minutes Alone" #Fridayflash

Photo credit: western4uk from morguefile.com

There’s broken glass on the floor. I feel it. Shards, digging up through the soles of my feet, letting the blood seep through the little holes to make the slick. It’s there. In the shadows. I can’t see it except out of the corner of my eyes, ‘cause when I turn around it hides. It’s a sneaky bastard, slim and dank, reeking of mold and poisonous spores.

I spin around, bark out a little laugh. Ha. Got you.

No. No I don’t.

Bricks form walls on all four sides and I rush one and pound on it. There’s no goddamn door. No way out. Nothing but me and it.

How long has it been? Years. Days?

Five minutes. Fuck, it’s been five minutes.

There. Jerk my head to the right. No. There. Glance to the left. Easy. Easy. Where is it? What is it? I’m pissed now, and punch the bricks, which is heinously stupid. Idiot. My knuckles are bleeding like my feet. A twisted stigmata. Clumsy shit. I think I broke something. Not really bone, just deep down inside, where black is something even bleaker; where the splash of the trunk in the well isn’t heard for hours. Weeks.

Five fucking minutes.

I can’t take this…this not-knowing. That thing is in here with me, with icy breath drifting over my neck and shoulders. I reach back in one swift motion and clamp my fingers around its neck. It’s growling and clawing at my back, shredding my shirt to dig its talons deep into my skin. Screams everywhere and it’s just me, echoing off the walls.

Let me out…get this thing off me. Getitoffgetitoffgetitoff!

I sink to my knees. Consciousness is growing dim. A ring of brown, deepening to gray. Gray to…

____

“How long did you say it was before you sedated him?” Dr. Masinchino glanced up from his tablet. To his right, two aides were receiving treatment from the patient’s attack.

“About five minutes, doctor.” She was a pretty thing, not too old, not too young. Doctors couldn’t date nurses, but he’d imagined. Those legs looked like they went all the way up.

“Any idea what caused this?”

“None, doctor. He just showed up in the waiting room and began shouting after about a half-hour.”

“Any records on him?” The doctor looked over at the nurse again. “Anything at all? We don’t even have an ID on him.”

She shook her head.

Dr. Masinchino sighed through his nose, slipped his stylus into his breast pocket, and waved for them to unlock the door.