1st draft

2004-09-14T08:55:00.000-07:00

The weekend had been white-glazed in vodka promises and the unsatisfactory new age flavours of wheatgrass shots. They left vegetation juices, green and spiky, to seed gardens in my belly. Just another few spoiled nights of alcoholic splendour, famous slurred cliches and lost Gen-X'ers all out for some shining new moment they'd never attain. Theirs was a murderous ambition like a modern, gothic Holy Grail, more worthwhile in the back of the throat than a prized fluid in a carpenter's mouldy goblet.
I had played the christmas tree ornament, shining bright like a luminous trinket and luring all the best boys away from the best girls. Trying to come down from the sorcery of my brand new crazy parading, where I was the planet around which all the other stones in the universe orbitted, was a fanciful and tough charade. It was more time consuming, and required more effort than it took to climb the pedestal initially. Staircase steep vertigo crimped the blood, pulse macabre and greying from impatience.
It was just another mad weekend. There were neither long, golden trumpets gallavanting cartoon style around the streets with metallic funnel mouths heralding the end of it, nor a visceral public display of sympathy for me to ward off a new working week, which I would avoid like the damnedest, newest plague on the Earth.
It was a beautiful end to a weekend, though. The sun dizzied my yellow-mellow eyes and kissed my hunched, sweaty neck.
"Pretty sun, come be my son, be my sunshine mine!"
I sang and trundled across the dry garden to the front door, stepping on green earthlings willy nilly like an alcoholic Santa stomping the tinfoil presents of spoilt children.
It was a mad night where all sorts of bizarre behavior went unnoticed and none of the club crowd seemed even to care.

Chiminey my imaginary companion echoed some psuedo-intellectual political rant in my ear as I switched on the bathroom light and let fluorescent bulbs crank up facial blemishes in the usual fashion.
Chiminey's voice was lilting and goaded me like a treasured nemesis - full of enthusiastic advice, pharmaceutical orders and holier-than-thou intimacies.
I ignored him and undressed with my pale-boned shoulders blanking out the mirror's unkindly messages.
A perfect Sunday morning steam bath, hot porcelain, salt waters to rinse grimy pores and soak away hours of putrid indulgence.
Unshed from outerwear and all else cotton, stark nudity seemed barely significant alone in the caffeine-gold hours of the morning.
Good morning, tits.
In skin unmasked, I flipped the fat lids of my fleshy breasts, feeling their familiar weight, flattened the mounds hard into a well-runged ribcage, then kneaded them up again, greeting their sensitivity with vague, thoughtless palms.
Time for bed soon, then to sleep much of the day away and wake again - as is the usual plan - refreshed and rejuvenated for a night's treasure of flippant, inelegant abandonment.
Good morning, shadows.
Haggard raccoon bags dumped their grainy meat presence under youth-proud eyes. Reflections in night-old mirrors are seldom reassuring and hardly ever produce wanted results. I wished the bags under my nineteen years of eyelids would one day dislocate from my flesh and become light, smooth and padded with fresh vitality.
Toes and ankles gulped up the scorched and perfumed tap water, I gasped as my thigh backs and hard spine were gradually spoiled by warm fluid gloves.
Good morning, cunt.
Sticky and shy slip of flesh. I filled up with comfort and sank like boiled, velvet milk into delusional dreaming.
As rain fell like a buzzing trumpet on the windows, bath noises took hold of the house and I warmed myself in a tub of drain-burnt tap water. The unfashionable hyperbole that hit me threatened to force emotion out of me. It continued shamelessly, on its own accord, as I languished. Justled between a frothy, ornamental jiggling of bubbles, my nine-to-five shoulders cruised away, unhinged and melting, and I closed my eyes.
Like a wax moon. Dripping into silence.

The water was hot and grilled me like foreign cuisine, flavours so bright they flashed in white, floral shapes behind my eyelids. I pretended to be able to feel the strumming pressure of rain on the roof. Jittery, clear pebbles of cloud crud coming down in threaded beads and making sounds like happy, breathy newborn babies. I strained my ears to try to hear it and thought for a moment I could.
Creamy soap filmed up from friction between my palms, white slime burying itself in the little lifelines, head and heart lines on each hand, turning them into strange patterns like art. I wondered if children trapped in international warzones saw the same spangled patterns in their palms - but instead of inked by pristine white soap, were they stained by dirt or blood from the carnage carnival of a blistering war they didn't start.
I rubbed at my wrist. It was tiring to be there like that, obsessing over of those sorts of politics. I wasn't used to having to concern myself with such melancholy. My conscience hadn't been formed by years of struggle or poverty, and it was uncomfortable. I felt uncomfortable in my own skin most of the time, but now especially that war had been declared.
Independence was a luxury, darling, didn't you know?
This bath you're soaking your delicate little figure inside, somebody's fighting for it right now.
Chiminey knocked on the bathroom door. It broke the thought in my head and gave me an excuse to not think about children with wounded bodies or the grot of an insane battle. He poked his head through and smiled.
"Inside?"
"Sure."
He sat on the side of the bath, his place in my world always an erotic perching like a fidgety bird. For a while he played with the leaves in his tall, imaginery hat. Then he looked at me under clown-caked eyes and leaned in to rub my shoulder.
"You're somewhat unrosy today, monkey petal!" He exclaimed.
"Jesus I'm defeated."
"What's that? By what?"
He talked like an elderly, deaf man sometimes. Sometimes unable to understand my language. If he hadn't been so invisible to everybody else, I might have wondered if he was real.
"The world. The world is a cunt."
He made a noise of disgust and fingered the shiny water with a splash. I had used the "c" word he didn't approve of. When he tipped his fingers into the water, his gloves soaked up some of the liquid and left the tips soggy. He used the wetness to dampen the felt in his dearly beloved bizarre, insanely Autumnal hat.
"It is. Do you know why it is? Because we turned it into one. Fucking mankind. We're a plague."
"Do you want me to rub your pussy?"
I was appalled and pushed his hand away. It was moist when it emerged from the water and he wiped it on his pants, leaving a wet handprint smear on the cotton fabric.
"Don't," I snarled.
He took the rejection with a natural ease and good humour. It was early in the morning. I'd only just got home. There was global terror and war talk on the news. He might try again after midday, when I was too sun-drenched and sleepy with Valium to notice. Then again in the evening. It was the way of things - our routine - and we were both used to it.
I sighed and looked up at him, instantly apologetic. He was my creation - why would I reject him so often in so many ways? Neither of us really understood, but he stood and walked out to leave me alone again with my thoughts.
I stretched my legs out, placing the soles of my feet against the cold, tiled wall. The water trilled as it fell over my ankles. Chiminey made me smile, it was why he was still around. Smiling gave me something nice to do, it was a nice, ordinary movement of my face, something that other folk, normal non-oddball folk tend to do to while away a moment or two.
A gentle, appreciated silence turned the bathroom into a sanctuary after he left the room.
The world could be good. In lazy, fleeting moments, it could be a sensual charm. The bath smelled like aloe vera soap and raspberry fizz, and that alone convinced me that the world could be good.
.....................

Croydon had been standing by the window for nearly half an hour. His arm was bent at the elbow, gaunt and reached out toward the glass in a hovering, haunted gesture he seemed unable or unwilling to control. His fingers were also bent, their spidery frames shallow at the knuckle, shivering in the humid air that looked out over the garden.
There were gardens in heaven, but none as wild and untamed as the one below him. He had lived there for the first fifteen years of his life, and the garden even then had been filled with the vine crops of thistles and thorns. Sparkling, sharp plant life that curled and twisted around the shadow of trees, other plants and a floral decay. It was the first time in nearly eighteen years he'd seen the garden and it seemed more jungle rife than ever. The helixes of leaves wound around themselves, curling and burrowing into the ground of its own foundation.
He could almost smell the earth, rotting and decaying as it tumbled, gnarled and crumpled in its own filth.
The smell never overwhelmed that of the ocean, only a few minutes walk from the front path, but it seemed to commingle, flavourful and with salty stabbing tangs, with the seaweed and fishy sea.
"You should come away from the window," came a voice from behind him.
"Why should I?"
There was no answer.
He continued fondling the glass, jittery and nervous as he stroked it. He heard a sigh from the corner of the room.
"I don't like you standing there," the voice added.
"Does it make you tense?"
"Just come away from there."
Still he lingered, blinking slowly as the sun began to dodge bullet clouds and sink behind the rooftops into a decadent, rich pink hue.
The moon would be out soon, and he would have to turn and face the voice in the corner with a heavy heart, and make certain plans he had troubles facing.
"I wish you'd tell me how long you were planning to stay."
"As long as it takes."
"Well that fills me with a certain dread."
He turned to face her.
"I'm sorry."
"No, I'm sorry. I wish it was easier for both of us."
Croydon's mother glanced past him for a moment to the window, and the impending darkness. Eventually there was nothing left for either of them to see through the window and she knew she would have to also face up to plans she didn't want to make. The blueprints for her future, her funeral and the day death claimed her needed to be made. Thom's face echoed her own heavy heart, and she tried to give him a smile.
"It will be alright," She promised, "We will work this out together. I'm glad you're here."
"You should drink your milk. It will help you sleep."
Croydon walked over to where she was propped up in bed. The newly starched pillows were fleshy and massive behind her shoulders and gave her frail spine a smidgen of strength and dimension she would not have had ordinarily.
"I don't need it. I don't sleep much these days. Milk never helps."
"Perhaps we should get you some medication."
"I refuse to see a doctor."
"I wish you would. For my sake, for all our sakes."
"I refuse to let a doctor into my house, so he can poke and prod at me with his simpleton hands. No. I simply wont allow it."
In the distance the sound of the waves crashing to shore spilled out into the air and the breezes from the ocean depths carried the noise through the street to the window. Sometimes she thought she could even see the glittering pastels of the sea lights from her place in bed. The colours of aqua blue, green, darkest navy and sometimes grey-smoke ricocheted in her head - from the frothy foamy wave tips to her bedside - where they played manic games with her memories and vision.
"You're so stubborn."
He couldn't help but smile as he sat down on the bed beside her, "I guess I never had to wonder where I got that from."
"I was always a obstinate old cow," she agreed happily, "Your father was driven half-mad by my disagreeable nature."
Croydon reached out to take her hand. She was still relatively youthful, with smooth, unaltered skin. She was too young to be leaving him and his family for the promise of something better.
There were gardens in heaven, but none as untamed and wicked as the one downstairs. He hoped she'd let that reality in, and hoped it might change her ideas about her own health. Instead she had ignored the problems until they had become crippling. The Cancer had built up in her stomach and lymph nodes so hard and fast that she was blindsided by it.
Croydon wasn't sure what sort of beginning this would be for his new life: the premature death of his middle aged mother and the senility of his already-mourning father.
He had just begun a new job. He'd moved from being an overworked receptionist for a small psychiatric practice that had earned him a nice nest egg, to an equally overworked job by the Harbour, in a large hospital in the middle of the city. He had his own small office with a slither of a view, more money than he knew what to do with, and a new outlook on life.
"It goes by too fast," he said in a melancholy tone.
"Life?"
"Mmm."
"Darling, you shouldn't let it upset you. I've had a good innings. I've done things I only dreamt of as a girl. I've known true love. I've been the queen of my own life story. It's fitting that now I'm cut down in my prime by this devastating disease. It's fitting that I go out with such drama."
He didn't like hearing her talk like that, but agreed to let her speak her mind. There was usually no stopping her anyway and he liked to hear her voice wafting through the stale air of her bedroom, lifting the atmosphere with her lilting tones.
There was so much about her Croydon wanted to hold onto, treasure, keep and remember. Now that she was going, he wanted more than ever to get to know her, and find out what really made her tick. Death had made her philosophical and he wanted to know as much as he could about her situation before it was too late.
He was silent, letting her speak.
"When I met your father, I was all of eighteen. He was so much older than me, and I thought to myself how wonderful an adventure to be with him! My mother hated Paul - vehemently. It was almost amusing to see her so flushed with rage after she came into contact with him. He was always so charming, so endearing - and wealthy too, as you know. So when we were married she didn't even turn up for the wedding. But it was all right. I was alright with that."
Thom had ideas about his mother, what she was like when she was younger, how crazy and impetuous she had been. Even he, as a young boy growing up, was confused over the age difference between her and his father.
"So I've led a good story," She added, "One of passion and adventure. I could write a book about it!" She exclaimed, "If only I could remember half of it."
"That's mostly my problem, too," Croydon replied, "I never remember anything that happened more than a year or so ago. It just fades out of the memory bank like I'm an old, senile idiot."
"You should write some of it down."
"Actually, I lie. I haven't had any adventures yet I would consider worthy of recording," he shrugged.
"You should -" She patted his hand, "You should have an adventure."
Croydon shook his head firmly, "Mmm, no. I have other things to worry about."
"Oh Croy. You're only in your early 30's. You should be having adventures regularly!"
He laughed, "Maybe one day."
They talked on until early in the night. The moon began to unfold its opal skirts, shedding dusky flakes of moonlight into the blackened sky.
As they spent time together, the more they discussed her life, her impending death, the future, the past and everything in between he began to feel calmer about the reality they were both expected to face.
She expressed details about her funeral, which normally would have set his jittery nerves into overdrive from the abnormal and morbid scene laid out before him. Tonight, instead, the details were soothing. If he knew how she wanted her departing to go, then he could at least begin to work towards making her wishes come true.
"No lilac. No violet or musky pink!" she demanded. "I want bright colours: red, and deep pink roses. Perhaps some white sea daisies scattered around the coffin: something alluring and elegant."
He grabbed a paper and pen and began writing down a list as she talked.
"I don't want an old lady's memorial. I want fresh flowers, The Rolling Stones, and plates piled high with the best hand made chocolates in the country."
He grinned, "I think I can handle that."
"I trust you will do my memory justice, Croydon. I have no qualms about leaving you in charge."

.....................

It was a scattered night, the kind which makes super heroes out of ordinary cops and gangsters from little boys. Dark corners sucked up all sorts of hazards and tingled with threats and seductive dangers, the way cocaine stings the sinuses. Girls swapped venereal diseases with all the pretty charm of ancient goddesses; stalling strangers, softly stroking tar-stained elderly fingers, husky whining for money and a two hour bed stop.
It was all imagination. The scenery of city life no longer bothered my senses. I had relocated so far out of the city that it took nearly fifteen minutes to walk into the main centre.
These days when I stepped outside, it was tree shapes and empty plants who begged me to come closer. It was the parading showbusiness set of little red ants fondling the garden beds like a thousand, pesky fingers. They crawled on as multiple individuals and yet caressed the earth like one, long centipede stroke.
The night turned their journey invisible. Though I couldn't see them, I knew they were there and that if I was to lie down flat on my back, concrete driveway as my mattress, then they would start nesting and climbing the ladder rungs of my badly-beaten hair strings.
My neck trilled audibly inside my head when I lifted eyes upward and looked upon the stars. They were crisp, flickering and tiny beats of life. Gods and fussy, artistic aliens had turned up the sharpness so that each star, clear and delicate, were weapons, marked for use against me. Sharper spokes appeared around the edges of each one, becoming silver bullets ready to be fired. One constellation gathered enemy forces, preparing to come at me with a premeditated, sudden attack.
I shifted my bare feet.
The concrete driveway was cool under the scratched heels of well-worn soles. I waited. One solitary star began bucking and snorting in its black field.
It charged down.
Fast, clean and murderous it drew a perfect line from it to me and sank itself into me like a razor tooth.
Then another followed, on the heels of its stellar commander.
I backed up, beginning to feel a slight tang of fear as the star spun and hurtled toward me, speeding up in velocity and rage.
A pinprick of light, a rhinestone animal shot itself directly towards me, hitting my eye with full force and throwing my body backwards so that I fell, damaged.
The second star hit even harder, stabbing my neck with needle accuracy, popping through the throat like exploding blisters.
Paralysis cramped the muscular skeletal system, ice-cold pinpricks shuddered deep into the throttled nervous system. Rays of light like thin, streams of comet air bounced back outward toward the intimate gathering of stars as if like a radar. The echo of starlight extracted energy from my soul, from inside my skull.
It pierced and I thought I might die outside and alone, killed by stars. Murderous celestial lights that had been shot down like unfriendly nanomachines, alive and living with logic, a real unusual kind of intelligence and determination.
Suddenly a third star beam thwacked into my belly and a fourth into my left palm.
Four stars, like remote, laser beams hissed and spat as my innards boiled from the sensation.
The night was a mass swarm of spiders, leaping and spraying me from space - imprinting on me, sucking me dry, filling me up - there were no clues as to the reason, I was the target, the prey for their driven ambitions.
In a blinding instant I became connected to the world, the darkness, the energy of life. I was claimed and made clean, spread out like a raped, violated child.
Crawling in inches on the ground and tasting wet, Autumn leaves on my breath, I managed to slither past the front garden to the front door where I was then untangled from the star weave. Panting, coughing up dust and phlegm, I fell onto the door and closed my wounded eyes.
.....................
As soon as the sun was up, by about 6AM and my nightmarish companions Mr and Mrs Treegum were relit by a malleable, turtley sunrise, I was pretty much over my little adventure in the driveway.
There remained a hearty residual numbness, not unlike the smoky anesthetic used by dentists to work surgery on mouths. It lingered mostly in the centre of my palm and through the cornea of my left eye, and I was glad to be pain-free.
The whole scenario could have been a hallucination. Or it could have been the work of one of many imaginary companions I have a tendency to share my life with, pickling with my already too-pickled brain. Tossing weirdness through me despite the honorable fact that I'm not a fucking Caesar Salad. In any case, I chalked it down as a forgettable somnambulism unworthy of too much thought.
In a kinder world, daylight would have made dull the memory and my usual 10AM siesta would have easily slipped its hand in, rubbed a little comfort through cranky bones, and midday dreams would become my soft husband.
However, in this world, where kittens chew happily on butterflies and what is cliche is often dominant, in this world I had already been too altered by my starlight assault to muster enough ability to sleep.
The bedroom curtains were heavy and clean printed with Calico roses. The sole purpose of the blinds was as a sun block. Half of my gothic wannabe existence played out under a cool, still blanket of moonlight and - in the city - social phobias, the threat of criminal activity and a cloudier pollution than the regulatory Sun normally allows.
Smog is an extinct creature between midnight and 5AM - in my experience moon shadows chase the dirty landscapes away into darker places where I don't tread. Streetlights shimmer against dim, cracked tapestries, boys are louder, swagger more and become luminous with a thriving alcohol. I answered to no-one and preferred to sleep behind the cushion of floral calico, all still and mottled and full of discernible portraits only I could see.
The light, which normally went on its merry way to illuminate the lives of others, was for some reason really taking a considerable shine to my bedroom curtains. It seemed to struggle to find slither breaks between folds of material and squeeze itself worm-like through tiny imperfections in the knit.
A toy plush monkey came to my rescue. I covered my eyes with his silken, manufactured tan fur.
A long night of street carousing awaited me and yet for once, I failed miserably at killing my enemy daylight.
Chiminey thought it was all so very amusing. He sat with his brown legged trousers on my bed and made soft whistling sounds like laughter through pearly, gapped teeth. His figure cut a fine, lanky frame in my failed sanctuary. When he chirped, baltic timber eyes glinted my way, crackling audibly whenever he blinked.
Chiminey was a dreamtime magnet. Turn him on like an electric light and he blends the ambience of insomnia into a creamy, dazed Valium. Slow-motion doodling clouds that hang in a talcum powder midday sky have nothing on the man Chiminey likes to pretend he is.
"Go to bed," I ordered, and rolled over.
When I turned back, he was gone and I tried to get a few moth-eaten hours of shut eye.
It is an empty life. The worm metamorphosis took place when I was the only attendee at a party celebrating my own mental breakdown four years earlier.
I sleep between the frantic paced nine to five to avoid a chaos I can't enjoy. When I wake, it's breakfast oils at 7PM, lunch at midnight and round the clock I stumble, half-dead and melted wax brain content bulging in the way lava lamps dance.

.....................
(Drawing Submitted by Annabelle Fry of Chiminey, 1999 (age 15))

.....................
Medicine lists, phone lists, admission forms, scribble pads and doodled notes. His desk was littered with all types of emails, charts, graphs and outlines - none of them terribly important in his daily ritual.
He sat in his comfortable leather office recliner, swinging lightly as he pressed his head back against the chair, then turning to face the window. The view was a constant source of inspiration for him. There were buildings, windows, more buildings that choked the panorama, but then through a narrow slit between skyscrapers, the bluest Harbour in the world. It sparkled at him, winking suggestively through a pattern of beautiful waves. Light waves that lapped the boat bodies like a thousand hungry, rolling whale tongues.
From his position he could see three of four boats sailing on the water, and a large chunk of land beyond as well as a couple of architectural marvels that sat at the foot of the Harbour. The sky was fluffy kitten grey powder blue, and a little smoggy with a few treasure clouds that wafted through.
Dr. Jason Wright, his immediate boss, walked in carrying his mobile phone and some papers.
"Croydon, how are you?"
"Good, mate, you?"
"Back at work. You know. You can't get any better than this."
Jason sat down in the opposing chair by the window, placing his papers and phone on the desk.
Croydon laughed, "Right."
"I'd rather be out there on the Harbour, sailing in the 'Charmed Pretty' than stuck in the office all day. Have you seen the water today? Fucking beautiful."
"Your beauty of a boat is going to waste on a day like this."
"When are you going to get a boat of your own? It's about time you grew up and made some important investments. Like a boat, a new car - "
"A new apartment."
"A new fucking apartment. The place you're in at the moment is beneath you. Time to upgrade."
"Unfortunately I don't seem to have the time these days."
He meant it as a hint to his boss, that he was overworked. He'd only been there a few months and already he was exhausted by the dramas and special demands his job required from him. The doctor quickly picked up on the hint and nodded.
"Take some time off. I'll talk to Glenn about you getting some days to yourself later this week if you like. I heard about your mother, we'll all support you through this mate."
"Thanks Jason, I appreciate it."
"You're more than a night nurse to us here, mate. You're a good friend, an intelligent guy. You've made it this far, only a little way further to becoming a fully fledged doctor."
Croydon wanted to heave at the idea of it. He liked being in the lower ranks, socialising with the patients, getting to know their intimate thoughts and ideas, their idiosynchracies.
"Frannie and I are having drinks at the Marriot this Friday night - are you up for it?"
"Sure, I'll see how I go."
"It'll be a late night, mate. Better watch out," The doctor laughed. "Mate, these reports on my patients, these papers, can you sort through them and get them edited and filed?"
"Sure."
"Cheers buddy. I'll be back at lunchtime. We'll go for a few drinks at the pub."
Jason left the tiny office, shutting the door behind him. Croydon didn't touch the papers he'd left. Instead he turned again to face the window, looking out.
There was always something better to look at through a window - something more alluring and desirable. He had to admit the idea of buying a yacht appealed to him. He didn't have a clue how to charter it, but he could get someone in to captain it for him. Croydon knew what he'd call the boat. He'd name it after his mother: "The Sea Daisy".
Later, when he told her, he found himself surprised to be so excited about the intention.
"I'm think I'm going to buy a boat!" He exclaimed to his mother as he laid out some blankets around her legs.
"But you don't know how to sail."
"I'll learn."
Dianna held her hands out, and grinned.
"I think it's a marvellous idea. All those adventures I said you should be having. Well, perhaps this is the start of something special."
"Yeah, I think I might actually do it."
"Croy, will you get Elise to give me a call sometime soon? I'd like to catch up with her."
Elise and Croydon had been in pre-engagement form for a while, and he knew it was one of his mother's wishes to see them marry before she died. In short, he figured it was the right thing to do, but the terrors that trembled like tiny demons in his heart couldn't even imagine the scenario bringing him even the most remote amount of happiness. Marrying the self-obsessed photographer, settling down with her in the perfect apartment, with the perfect family, even in his new perfect boat - none of it fit his long term life plan. There had to be something more scintillating out there, somebody whose touch could make him tremble. Someone who would change his every concept of what reality was.
"Okay, will you be alright? I have to get over to boss' house. He's having drinks and I'm already late."
"Alright," She patted his hand, "I'll be fine. You have a wonderful night."

...........................

Can't sleep. In the motherfucker bathroom again.
<>
The windows were grinding together again. A wooden copulation goaded by an earthy, Westerly dust storm that whipped up the air and made the morning lights of the outer city glow a weird yellow froth. It was almost morning and I let the breeze in, preferring the motion as it croaked around the bathroom uneasily. Anything was better than sitting silently in a still, stagnant sweat, caged like a sickly bird.
Insomnia was never my forte, nor a friend of mine. I didn't know it well enough to be able to intimately accept it - against my will, and in the bed where sleep was the norm. With arms and shoulders meaty tired from three days of broken rest, nothing would have caressed the stress from me like a good coma, but it just wasn't to be. The bath was a way of continuing a pleasant routine that had been interrupted earlier that night, and a way of bypassing the possibility of wide-open eyes flat against the ceiling.
"Do you know the way to San Jose ...?"
In the silence there was a gentle humming. It was a noise that was easily unheard, dumb and charged with life. I wanted to be lulled by the Earth's humming as it turned and vividly choked the air. Like an audible numbness it plumped up every living cell and microscopic sphere and every piece of this churned in my head and fumbled like casualties through a carnival. It was too easy to question whether other people heard the humming, whether they listened or took half a glance around to find out where the flurry was coming from. Some of it might have been Chiminey snoring deliberately loudly in the next room to annoy me, or from the wafting grain of steam and mildew fogging up the bathroom, but much of it was gravity's magnetic hymn.
It hovered and felt us up every moment of our lives.
My sleepy throat murmured; "I've been away so long."
I quite liked the humming. It reminded me of the billions of other people in the world and I didn't feel so alone. The bath water plopped under my armpits. I didn't hear Chin leave the house, but by the time my head hit the pillow at 5AM, it took a few minutes to realise the bed was empty.

.....................

By the time white walls become pallid and haunted, too many years have washed lousy-level fits and psychodramas across them. By then it is too late to try and alter what is inevitable.
She will come and go: all sized girls. Rhinoceros framed beasts with freckled, chubby cheeks some of them, the others fragile, delicate and limp. She will be Eloise or Flora, Kelly or Dana. She will eat too much or not enough. She will be a sad caged wilder beast and too weak to seek out those ideals of freedom and self-esteem that by all rights belong to her.
He's seen it dozens of times. When he watches from safe, clean distances, the desire to step nearer and offer her freedom, intervention, chocolates, is strong.
Croydon flips pages in his work books, tries to keep insane and curious eyes out of harms reach and breaks multiple friendships before they go too far. Croydon is a nice man. They use his large blue eyes for insightful dramas. They piano key their fingers along his desk, minxing for favours, fluttering lips motioning swanlike into greedy, innocent little grins.
Croydon is a kind man, his bones made from good foundations. His heart is strong enough so that when they scream and rant about television privileges, slamming doors and grabbing chairs as weapons, he is calm and keeps himself protected behind terse, unbreakable glass. The administrative work keeps a bearable buffer zone between psychotic little princesses and his employment of choice.

.....................

The television had been cloudy for days and four girls watching it were becoming rowdy.
Croydon had already called management to arrange for someone to come in and fix the decade-old junk box but the girls refused to wait patiently.
Caroline suggested they rip it from its hinges and arm themselves with it.
"We'll fucking break out!"
"We'd get about as far as Riley Park, asshole."
"It's better than sitting here. We're a bunch of useless ghosts."
"I'll fucking ghost your ass."
Croydon knocked on the glass to get their attention and waved at them to quiet down. All they did was wave back at him, blissed out, blessful smiles on their beautiful, pale, bitched up faces. The longer they're in there, the harder their faces turn and marbled eyes are no longer beautiful to look into.
The telephone rang. A voice announced a new arrival waiting downstairs.
There was a new nut in the cookie jar and she was on her way in.
.....................

It wasn't me, if that's what you're thinking. I was perched like a wild bird in Riley Park the next night, eerily close to Davaren Ridge Psychiatric Hospital, but there was nobody left in my life willing to escort me through the doors. I had nobody left to witness what was inevitably to become my great and final Life Venture.
Riley park was, to the normal eye, a typical council-built spot for the local community to gather and while away the hours. To me it was a place of Gods and Goddesses who hummed like wasps, stiff and Summery in drowsy swarms. Invisible to the greater public, they crowded the graveyard and milled like parishioners around the tombs of body mortals.
Riley Park had been segmented by efficient town planners into three main areas. The Cemetery, the children's play area full of brightly painted climbing equipment and exciting gravity defying swing sets - and thirdly, a peaceful lake where grandparents would feed bloated ducks with stale bread leftover from Sunday afternoons with reluctant relatives.
My method of defence against the cold wizardry of angry Gods was to sit very still, huddled into a fleeced cardigan and hope the icy wind moved around me, not through. Those hopes were dashed pretty fast and I was already shivering uncontrollably. It was morning in my world, dusk in the real world. My body was still experiencing a weak dulling of the senses. It was all I could do to sit alone for a while and hope for a perfect dark descent.
Great clouds passed overhead. They looked uncomfortable among so many radiant colours of sunset, but it was just a gunshot beginning to a new, classic game show evening. Orange jewel sirens heralded what might end up being an unusually fine evening. Dusk raked leaves and spilled them across a rippled lake, creating makeshift boats.
Chiminey selectively picked out only the choicest, yellowest leaves as soggy additions to his hat.
"Perhaps a new pair of gloves!" He yelled out to me.
I ignored his excited ramblings and continued to shiver, waiting for moonlight.
In the past I had manipulated photographs of myself into other images to provide some sort of enviable lifestyle.
I had pasted the perfect shot of me, in a series of photo albums dressed up to the nines in a satin black dress and pearl choker, into a looming snowstorm; standing close to the camera in the desert; smiling gleefully amid a crowd at the funeral procession of Princess Diana and other obscure landscapes.
I had altered my appearance using digital software, painting hieroglyphs onto my skin, inserted fiery cigarettes into my clean, minty fresh mouth, drawn ill-shapen butterfly wings against bare, fleshy shoulder blades and allowed my photo to travel the world in all varieties of transport.
It was a way to pass the time, and for a while I let myself believe it had been real.
So when he stepped out from the building and crossed the road, rugged up against an imagined or predicted storm front, and when my eyes lifted and I saw him, I thought perhaps it was too sensational and charismatic to be taking place. I assumed it was just me pasted into a picture perfect postcard, out of synch and of inaccurate perception like my fake photo galleries.
It is easy to get lost in the details and I often do - the sensations of obscure touches like ghost hands on my head and strobing fingers caressing my bare arms.
Nothing ever happens to me.
I experience no narrative plotlines worthy of repeating, no excursions to foreign exotics. My journey is an inner one. I don't like to leave the house in case the world catches a glimpse of my eccentricities and deems me abnormal - or even worse, boring.
Only at night do I become a voyager and only then do I let myself become externally stimulated by some warped blotch of reality.
However, it was barely 7PM, I was hardly awake and yet here came a series of significant mistakes or coincidences that led me towards a predicament of open chested love. An ordinary stranger, plainly clothed and so similar to all the others inhabiting the planet, strolled like the most illuminated saint across my path.
Black, heavy shoes, denim jeans, rough black coat: black, blue, black, beautiful. I was stunned as he meandered through the park, canvas bag slung over his shoulder, head and eyes cast down so that I couldn't make out the curves or shapes of his face.
"I am in a movie. The world is watching me falling in love!"
Hidden cameras taped to tree-top branches captured every expression on my face as my heart begins to break from passion. I was sure of it. I could see the dark shadows of their shell-boxes taped to the trunks of each tree, and the subsequent thinner nests.
Chiminey overheard my babbling and stopped lurching around in the lake to swash buckle over to where I was sweaty and seated under the footpath lamp. He dripped his lake drops on my knees.
"Who is it?" He asked.
"I don't know. I don't know. I've never seen him before."
The man climbed a small dividing wall constructed from jagged rocks. Nimble-footed archangel. I forgot to breathe and my heart slowed right down, but each pump came louder in my chest and ears.
Chiminey pushed me and I suddenly blurted out something stupid.
"Excuse me?"
The man, whoever he was, angel, saint, sailor, soldier, turned in a surprised twist, to face me.
"Hello."
"Hi," he said. His voice curled beautifully from curiosity.
"What's your name?" I barked, impolitely, my voice higher pitched than usual.
"Croydon."
I smiled. What a perfect fucking name!
"Yours?" He grinned.
"Annabelle!"
"Have a great night, Annabelle!" he called as he continued his trek to the other side of the park.
I watched him cross the road and hail a taxi. I watched with bated breath as the taxi disappeared through the churning traffic.
Chiminey put his hand on my shoulder, "Croydon," he said. "That's your future husband you know."
My little veins were throbbing, fingertips tingling, ovaries gnawing away at my insides. I nodded at my imaginary friend.
"I know."
.....................
Independently the human form can't fly. It's too heavy. After the jump it doesn't hover in mid-air, it just follows the gravity dance and plunges down toward whatever obstacle it first meets. Dazed and expressionless, I liked to pretend I would jump. Step down onto the railings, perched like a white, skinny gargoyle precariously against the roof brick. Suspended out of my usual comfort zone.
I carried it in my mind that I would out-end one foot one day and step off. Fall like a sack of refried beans, gurgling and spinning to the cement. Dallied up in flight, an eagle without wings; an unflapping demon soaring in one direction: toward infinite possibility. From the spectacular reunion with God's shining milkflesh, to fancy ways to splatter yourself in a Pollock-esque diagram -- see your body? Now it's art.
As a peculiar medication, suicide moves the body from a fresh and untorn sculpture into being torn and no more than flesh.
A pigeon snuffled it's way along the mouldy grout, digging in for mites. It was a much better way to start the morning; initiating a new healthy regime of sun, life, and isolation. But we all knew why I was up there. To solicit the attentions of whoever cared.
The sun had barely jimmied its way up over the building tops, and not even a quarter of humanity had their eyes open to it. My sublime new routine went primarily unnoticed in the city. I was too high for anyone to see unless they were using the clean sky as an early caffeine fix, which was unlikely in a city always so grouchy with drunkards.
I was alone and unseen up there, where it was still and eerie, smokey and clear. There was a different smell up there. The odour of the Earth seemed to hover just over my Valium'd head, and it was tart, gangly and cured with a steamy hint of modernism.
This was my new routine, I owned it. Nobody else I knew would carry through with this kind of stunt. It made me unique. For the past week, every morning before 5AM I'd climb the rails, venture further than possums could in their wildest ambitions, and perch like a victorious crow in rubber-soled hiking boots.
I was one of a kind: The Roof Dweller. You couldn't get me down if you tried.
The superhero status wasn't yet promoted as well as it should have been, but I was considering having a Tshirt printed up with a logo; maybe even a Web site.
"What's it like up there, RD?" My league of fans would ask.
"Ethereal and polluted," I'd say, handing out logo'd-up badges for the masses.
I smiled and tapped my foot on the plumbing under my heel. It clunked and wavered.
I picked at my ear, rolled and flicked off the grainy waxed up residue, finding a delighted distraction from the hot-white sky.
Some clouds maneuvered their way past slowly, but none took offence to my unique voyeurism. The logic was trapped from being so high. It was a vacuum and fell on deaf ears. Soft, dewey, casual and smokey, the clouds might leave my hand slightly tarnished had I tried to take a swipe at them - which I didn't, not yet.
Instead I stood on the slither of railing, turned shakily and climbed back onto the solid paved roof floor.
Death in the morning. Resurrection by 2PM. It was the beginning of another unnatural day.
.....................

The television wouldn't let up. It spat out warnings on international travel, particularly to Asian and Middle Eastern parts, high-pitched grunting and ammunition fire breaking up the machine's solid electric voice. The president shouted poetries about war, vengeance, danger and hatred. The spark in his eye resusitated him to life and made him appear more animated than he'd been in years. He was a stranger, uninvited in the house, a voice in the background, a nuisance eating the energy he had no right to consume.
Scattered around my desk were various articles that in one sweeping display appeared as little more than a jumbled mass of junk, but as separate pieces each represented a facet of my past. Also of the future, my personality and habits. The rose quartz crystal that lay like a shiny, dead, pink corpse beside my well-loved, over-flicked zippo lighter, the paper angel card, a Snagglepuss PEZ dispenser, beaded friendship bracelet, two half-chewed boxes of asprin and a half-empty bottle of beer that should have been thrown out days earlier. A heap of other multicoloured trinket junk lay scattered, and meant so little in the long narrative.
I stopped typing for a moment to crack my knuckles and collect my thoughts, trying to make sense of the past few weeks. My neck was on a slant so that the scrunched nest of my hair stuck out unusually erect. I licked my lips. They were smooth but sore.
He stood at my shoulder.
Bypassing him on the way out to the fridge, I pulled out the remnants of a pre-cracked cauliflower, collected a few branches of the raw, white vegetable, and took it back to the computer to gnaw on. He never followed me on the short journeys - from desk to bookcase, from desk to toilet, or from kitchen to television - unless it was for a reason. When I sat in the chair again, I felt him behind me.
"You have to do it," He reminded me.
"Shut up."
"It's the only way in."
"I know that. Will you please shut up?" I snapped.
Chiminey came and sat on my desk, fanning out papers under his bony, woollen ass.
"Why don't you just do it now? You've waited so long," he whined as he plopped his thumb into my ear.
"Fuck!" I yelled, jumping to my feet, "Fuck fuck! Cunthead! Will you shut the fuck up!"
"Will you jump today?"
"Yes! If it will shut you up, today I will jump!"
Chiminey smiled merrily, satiated by the news that today my routine would end and I would start afresh with a new one.
.....................

Most of the people in my world wouldn't understand if they knew what was going on with me, so it was all kept very hush-hush. My strange little secret world exhausted and preoccupied most of my waking hours.
By the first twinge of dawn I found myself on the back step of the building, staring at the early morning sky, feeding my throat the warm smoke of a cigar.
The view beyond the house should have been clean, struck full of clarity and broad with a thick, warm blue. Instead it buzzed with a swarm of invisible bugs. They clawed and writhed in the landscape, in every click of the clock and every inch of nature that I could see. They were insects that only I, and the delusional, could see. They hovered, moving yet not moving with the restless current of breeze.
I saw an expanse of folded layers, grunge blankets, bevelled oceans and patches of extensive earth fields - my warped late night vision causing a demented hallucination that made the eyelids sore and my head even sorer.
In that environment any unclaimed identity could become tangible. It was a sad permanence to realise such games and illusions would be my future.
My soul was the never-found; the lost soldier in a garden of corpses. I could be the original Five Worlds Girl: mislaid poet, junkie, business woman, hermit and spiritualist, encased between a number of worlds. Caught somewhere between a sad, socialite's lifestyle, sipping too-dry martinis and cocktails on harbour boats or skulking the street corners of mad streets trying to drum up cash to buy enough Whatever I Could Find to get me through another week. Though I hadn't been there for nearly a year the memory still played hard and colourful in my head.
Sometimes I was the late-night-owl poet, too scared to leave the house to even check the mail. It bothered me that I had to feel everything too severely, and at my wretched fulltime job I had overworked myself into an ulcerated stomach that hurt on days I didn't eat.
The final note, the singular most important piece of information, was that I was, above all else, alone. Alone with him in a universe of unseen spirits.
The windows snapped again as the untamed wind clapped against them - a bride knocking herself around voluntarily to make her groom more festive. The crash ricocheted out through the roof and its all-encompassing galvanised surface that let the rain whip out, curling like a waterfall snake around the house.
If there was a moon, she was invisible amid the teeming salted clouds that were silver and valium-slow against the black set. If there were stars, they had been extinguished for the night by a sultry chill, asphyxiated and diluted by the sheer pressure of a contrary breeze. The display was a ploy to inspire awe, and mastered by the hands of the seasons.
Dirt-dressed men stopped not to read the newspapers that served as their bed sheets. Street kids and bottle-guzzling drunks were hiding from the open terrain as if the cold weather were the enemy in a war they did not have the energy to win. Only a triplet of whores careened the footpaths, make-up ruined due to trimmings of rain and allergins.
The place was ghoulish, cloud and wind trapping woman and phantom together in a zoo to which neither belonged. For the night, in any case, they would have to exist side by side, and keep the peace behind their shared prison bars. The night was a raging howler monkey rubbing itself up against the city in a seductive exhibition of smut and pollution.
But then, it was only one night and in the morning, there would be a sunrise, and humanity could return to their segregated ablutions with little or no thought for the afterlife or the ghouls they had so willingly bunked with during the storm.
I sat through it alone - alone with Chiminey - smoking the morning through until sunrise. The colours initiated a pastel jangle so obscene and transparent that I huffed my way back inside, leaving the door unlocked, knowing that I'd soon be the minxy crow, claws dug into the concrete roof of the hospital, waiting to fly, preparing to jump. And hopefully into his arms.
.....................
The girl had her hair parted in the middle. It was flat and oily at the roots and grey-blonde. Split-dry at the ends, they frizzed out like teddy bear fluff, nearly curled if it wasn’t so harshly brushed. She was thin, no curves, no breasts, no ass, just a lean line dressed in painted-on black tights and a boob tube. She smoked a cigarette, retaining the used syringe in her hand. She was leaning against the wall, drowsily. Some guy rubbed her arm, talking to her in a gentle Valium tone. I pretended in my mind that I could smell the drug as it began to lick inside her veins. Fragranced sweet like honey flesh ready for the sucking; liquid candy, delightful and deadly. I watched, leaning up against the garage door that had "Hope St." painted on it in bulbous, pale blue peel. I watched, scratching my itchy neck.
I was way too far into the city. I could feel it throbbing out to greet me again, like a raucous Vampire, rowdy and eager in its salutation.
I swallowed down another energy drink and threw the green can in the bin before stepping away from the edge of the bricked wall behind me. I swallowed hard and lingered a couple of metres from Dope-girl who noticed the lingering and began to watch me in return, her drugged eyes glassy. She saw nothing, yet could read my mind in a singular heart thud. She gave me a look and smiled, closing her eyes, the expression on her pockmarked face assured me without lifting her lids that it was untainted stuff.
"Do you have any left?" I asked throatily under my breath and poured under a weighty guilt.
The man barely nodded and they both turned away from the doorway into the belly of the bestial building, ushering me to follow them in silence. A car drove by with the radio so loud I could hear the shivering of the speakers in my supersonic ears. Switched on to automatic pilot, I found myself standing in a small, darkened room with six or seven mattresses frumped and tossed carelessly into corners. The girl was already semi-slumped into one. I went to sit with her because it was with her I felt more comfortable.
The man was deliberately bald. He was white, cheesy and looked unnervingly rotten from the inside out. He grabbed a spoon from the corner and began a cooking ritual for my benefit.
Survival was the last thing on my mind as Cheddar chum handed me a black string of well-used pantyhose to tighten around the core of my upper arm. He motioned for me to clutch my left hand into a fist, working the vein up to the tip of the skin. I patted the flesh lightly at first, then thwacked it a little, feeling for a blue branch beneath. I tapped until the skin was red and he reached over in a desolate silence to stop me, then with a piece of wet cloth he daubed some meth over my arm. It was ice cold. He pressed the finger into my arm and tipped the needle prick against my flesh. I grit my polished teeth. I hated needles. Injections. Medication. Hospitals.
The angels stood over and watched I as I sat in the degraded hovel, stained mattresses under my, one arm outstretched. I appeared well-groomed but with savagely trimmed hair, large bulbous, shadowy eyes, fat mouth, gaunt face. I watched too as I looked up into Cheddar chum’s Parmesan eyes with an expression of dislocated desperation once unfamiliar to my face.
I watched with disgust as I let myself - as I allowed me to let him - pierce my vein and penetrate my body with it. I watched my face soften. The eyes blinked slower, unfocused on the floor, lips parted slightly against my own sigh. My bony hand reached up to touch my numb forehead and Cheddar pushed me gently down on the mattress.
I didn’t recognize myself. Faux crumpet yuppie heroin junkie; wasn’t even sure how I had become addicted. All I knew is that the swashbuckling stuff was making raucous plans in my body. Summer holiday plans; surfing the white cloud swine soul inside me. I lay on the dirtied mattress and smiled, uplifted and saved, for hours.
.....................
"Jump."
There was smoke from a funnel in the roof.
"Jump in the line, on the line, out of the line, just jump."
The sky was mood indigo, with pastels for shadows.
"Jump jump jump!"
"You're breaking my concentration," I slurred dopily at Chiminey.
"You're not supposed to concentrate," He replied wisely.
"Jumping..."
I grabbed hold of a piece of metal and looked down on the street below me.
"If I jump from here I will die," I reasoned.
"You're immortal," he reminded me.
"Oh. That's right."
A slither of white light punched me in the head. I fell back against the railing as a door opened somewhere.
"Hello?"
A night-smoker out for a ciggie. I could smell the smoke before I could even focus on the silhouette in the darkness with the light behind him.
"Hello?" He asked again.
"Get fucked you crazy bicycle!" I roared, angry that I'd been found.
I slipped.
The figure came at me and I nearly toppled over the edge of the roof.
Inwardly, I fell. The hit on the skull from the concrete slab wall danced me into unconsciousness. Swirly patterns, LSD-esque sounds and smells hit me, ehtereal conjurations trinkled in my brain.
"Oooh. Pretty," I whispered, and went blank.

.....................
It smelled like pine needles, medicine, metallic blood, money and ego.
We stepped into the walls with all the skill of two ghosts, made our way through a throng of nurses, incidentally without being noticed. I glided, the wind under my feet softly padding without sound.
White soldiers came to get me, uniforms tight against bleach-sheen knees. Men and women dressed in white for God, small icons embroidered on their clothes. They came to get me and put her in a room with a bed and two chairs and not much else besides.
I became wet and sweat-peppered, shaking lightly. They took my clothes and spoke in tongues around me, told my saviour in other languages that I could not decipher about the legalities they thought he should be aware of. They took my purse, stole my money and put it away, brushed the crud from my hair, wiped my face, cleaned me down like a horse just fallen into mud. I was given a room, though the hospital staff seemed irritatingly reluctant to let me sleep off the heroin dosage once they came to realise I would get through it with little fuss. Once I was sober, I would be asked to leave.
That was all the sense I could make of those moments. Of course, none of it was real. I had very real injuries from little surgeries I'd performed on myself, and bruises and marks even the most resourceful White-coater couldn't make sense of.
Bored already with the whole shebang, and wondering when he might come back for me, I fell asleep for a while.

.....................
My arm still bore the marks of a junkie, a few small bruised scar marks with one severely recent, still-red bite. It was enough to tell him it was a professional hit, which meant I knew enough people to know where to go to get what I needed.
Croydon wondered if I had been confused and alone on the roof and just in need of friendship. He also wondered what traumatic event had startled me back into an obviously imbecilic addiction. Also, surely, someone else must have whipped a shining, silver scalpel over the parts in my palm and eye and belly that had been extracted. He knew it wasn't his job to ask, so he took me from the wheelchair, lifted me under his arm and carried me to room 13.
I murmured something slurringly under the presence of a dazed subconscious. I'm sure it was something romantic.
He could smell the sickly scent of smack in my hair.
The splashing essence of high flight cream was dizzying as Croydon tried to drive me over to the bed. I couldn’t think, my brain a slippery coil - oiled and greased on a tackle in my skull. I slid through the sheets, plonked against the passenger's bed at 0.4 m/ph, though the engine I tried to control raced nearly three times slower. The driver was a slow and heavy rapist, cleverly pulverizing all logic with an insidious repetition and absurd vocal veneration. Croydon placed me as gently as he could against the pillow, though I fell forward against his lap, my slack jawed mouth open against a smooth denim bulge in his crotch.
It was with more stumbling that we managed to stagger together from the door to the bed, then into the bed. There were two other hunters seeking aid in the room with me: him and a black-haired girl. The steel and glass doors were half open and letting in some of the cold night air but I liked it. The paint on the walls of the building was white and fastidiously clean.
I was dreaming.
My eyes closed again.
I grinned at my own reflection in the empty ceiling through the lids of thin, luminous skin.
When I opened them again, I turned my head like a wooden cuckoo in a handmade timepiece, soft and motorized like robotic clockwork. I touched his hand, seeing a blonde angel above me, tending to my wrist with some plastic bracelet.
His skin was shiny warm pastel, the flesh round and smooth, the scent heated and delicious. I saw, felt and sensed every innate dispersion in his moving form and my drug-tweaked body was a ripened berry, lusting and ready to be peeled.
Slipping from consciousness again, I think I pulled his head down to mine. With a widening mouth against his strangely thin lips, I kissed him openly. There was a deadline, it had to be quick and severe. The pebbles in my skull would let loose eventually, the cream would dry up and I'd be left in a lucid haze I might not be able to manipulate so assertively.
His tongue was cool and thin against mine, but I worked it up into a swollen, hot erection, massaging it softly and passionately, turning him into an uncaged animal let loose in my dreams. He could smell the painkillers and sleep inducers on my breath. I kissed with an open mouth, licking his tongue like a monster in search of germs.
"Good morning," I whispered, "It's nice to really meet you."
Then I blacked out.
And all else is dark.
.....................
(NOTICE OF ADMITTANCE TO DAVAREN RIDGE PSYCHIATRIC HOSPITAL)
.....................

It was a comfortable bed, as hospital beds go. It was a single mattress on sturdy springs, whinnying high and cranky, the way a poorly horse might complain of a broken back.
The girl in the other bed dangled a bracelet of multicoloured charms over her own face.
"She's the Hemingway of high kite fliers," the Nurse attendant said, speaking to me loud enough so that my room mate could hear. "That means she kills brain cells with shotgun needles and boasts about pride and suicide."
My new night nurse was a pill popper herself and often came in dazzled by all sorts of wondrous new heights. I could see it in her eyes when she doled out the meds to all the patients. The little white pills especially turned her body heat up a new notches. When she spoke it was in a drug-curdled tongue, fantasy-rich and cheaply poetic but the other nurses just thought she was an eccentric spinster.
I nodded and took the tablets, swallowing with a mouthful of apple juice that came in a dispensible plastic shotcup.
"When does Croydon start?" I asked.
"8PM. In about half an hour."
Clicking my teeth with excitement, I wandered out into the hall to wait for his arrival.
I'd only been in the ward two nights, but he didn't work weekends, so I had only caught painfully short glimpses of him on the Friday night - and couldn't get closer considering I was barely conscious after ingesting so many Diazepam, and being so high on premium grade Heroin.
Bloodied fingers, belly, forehead, eyebrow and hands were healing quickly, which was something to be pleased about. I didn't want him laying eyes on a histrionic, beaten-up nut. The surgeries had been tiny superficial incisions but because I had removed tissue samples, veins and other meaty material, they had taken it seriously. Suicide is one thing - a serious mental instability is something else entirely.
It was all done for the benefit of Mr.Love. I was in love and needed to slip in through the cracks of his life so that he might notice me. I needed to get cosy with my future if I was to be able to play any sort of conscious part in it whatsoever.
There would be plans and blueprints, action taken when action was needed but most of all, I would be his patient and fuse myself into his heart with eleven brilliant layers of charm, feathery soft femininity, subtle intelligence and most wickedly, the solid fact and reality that he belonged to me and I was his and the world would bring us, like delighted gypsies, together.
.....................
Coydon had a nervous anticipation about the Monday night shift.
Firstly, an overload of paperwork needed a pristine, efficient resolution and he expected to be the only one willing to tackle it.
Then there was Annabelle - the girl they'd admitted to the Emergency Psych ward on Friday.
Her personality was unlike any he'd seen before. She was almost demonic and possessed, emanating a raw, toxic progeny.
He was obsessed with her progress, calling up a few times during the weekend to gather more information about her intricate patterns of unusual vehavior, the clear quartz concentration of intelligence she hid behind stark, grey eyes.
Repulsed a little by her wounds, Croydon had kept his distance but word had already spread to tell him that she was up and about, lucid now and logical. There was a sinister core to her suspiciously easy recovery, and he wasn't sure he fully believed she was delusional or psychotic. He wanted to see her for himself, speak to her, obtain a personal confirmation that she was the same Annabelle as the girl in Riley Park near the Lake and Fountain of St.Michael the Archangel.
.....................
I'd been in for nearly 14 days and spent most of my time puppying him around the ward in an indifferent and unaffected nonchalance so as not to alert him to my infatuation. I invited him to my room to play cards and he had accepted.
Caroline my room-mate had been given permission to stay at her parent's house for the night so I was going to take all sorts of sublime advantages of the secluded intimacy a hospital room can bear. It was the first night he'd spent in my room, but it was also destined to be one of the most memorable.
"Introduce yourself."
"In what way?"
"Personal ad way," He grinned at his own ingenious stupidity.
I laughed.
"Annabelle Fry. 19. .... okay, 23. Single. Heterosexual - when sexual, that is. Which, lately, is rare. Or often. Depending on my mood. Which changes like sweeping shades of season. I am lazy. Whatever squalor the Universe selects for me is the one I choose. I don't cook very well, I don't cook at all. I don't clean. I refuse to own an animal in case I get some sort of disgusting disease. But I think one day I'd love to get a puppy."
I kept my voice down. It was getting late. He should be working, and I was only volunteering information to keep him from leaving the room.
"No friends or family. All of my friends have gone overseas, procured babies and spouses or found viable employment and forgotten about me. Or vanished into thin air, which wouldn't surprise me considering what I put them through. My mother got sick and moved interstate. My dad married some chick who he met on the Internet and he moved to London. My brother, who I haven't seen in what, five years? He's walkabout somewhere on the other side of the planet. I don't know what to say without it sounding melancholy and full of self-pity but everyone leaves. " I don't think there's been one person who's been interested in me enough to want to stick around and find out what's behind the glass face of the ticking clock."
He sat silently, listening to my diatribe like a professional journalist. I continued, only to fill in the empty, uncomfortable space of silence.
"I was the black sheep. Not just the black sheep, I was the black sheep with toxic wool that nobody wanted to shear. I am the strange, diseased one who scribbles otherworldly dialogues on her arms and legs so it all makes some sense, like blueprints. I am in a movie. The world is watching, but from a distance, so when I hide the presence of ten other people come along like strangers watching daily train disasters. Even in isolation I am never alone. I tend to bloom with mystical forces like giant, throbbing flowers. Immortal, like a Vampire. There's rarely enough blood for it to be a final sacrifice, no matter how many packets of pills I ingest, I always wake up unharmed. The world wants to punish me for my negative thinking by killing me slowly instead."
I wanted to stop. Listening to my own voice disturbed me, listening to the thoughts becoming words aloud in the air. I was terrified he would think me abnormal or too unusual to befriend, or too repulsive to accept. I didn't stop, though. It needed to be out there in the cosmos for the gods and goddesses, the seraphs, the angels, the demons to hear.
"If that's a personal ad, I'll shit in my shoes."
"Well. I just live this bizarre life. If anybody had any real idea they'd tie me up and leave me to die on lonely rock bridges in the iciest Winter. Some days, most days, I'm not fit to exist on this planet. Other days, I'm the only one alive and nothing else matters. Except you. Nothing else matters except you."
There. I'd done it.
Terror buzzed in the air between my ears. He didn't move and neither did I. There was suddenly an elephant prouncing about the room with us and it sucked all the air dry from the space. Croydon was mute with an indistinguishable expression and I was shocked into silence by my own admission of admiration.
"Your turn," I whispered.
When he blinked, the blue glaze disappeared under silky white lids for a moment and I wondered if he'd stick around and continue playing the awful truth game. The blue stars came back and I smiled finally when he rolled his eyes.
"Me. Uhh. Croydon Barr. Born Chrichton Barr, but I changed my name as soon as I was old enough."
"Why?"
"Mostly vanity. I prefer Croydon. Uh, 31. Straight. Girlfriend. Middle son of two loving parents, Joan and Bill. Two brothers, Daniel and William. William lives in Europe and works for an ecommerce company, Daniel is a vet and works with kids and animals," He joked.
The joke fell flat on devastated ears.
"Girlfriend..."
"Elise. She's a painter."
The floor came up to greet me.
Hello floor.
Hello linolium.
Momentarily catatonic on the bed, I could only stare at it while he told me the rest. None of it really went into my brain.
After the girlfriend remark it was all I could do not to vomit. So he continued to rant and rave about his stupid existence and I tried to get over the idea that he was already taken, in love wholly and solely with somebody else. After a while, he realised I wasn't listening.
"Want to do something else?" He asked.
I shrugged.
"Want to play cards?"
A hazy glow, bland with medicine-tints swam around my bed from the hallway. I imagined it was a dozen, flickering, dusky candles and that my bed was unhygenic from our rushed, passionate lovemaking that hadn't yet occurred. At that moment, with the unexpected news of a girlfriend in the midst, there were doubts it ever would take place.
My hair was unkempt from all the finger crawls I threw in it, nervous twitches and flurried gestures of anticipation of sweet, sweet romance. What should I care he had a girlfriend on the other side of those walls? He was there with me, sacrificing himself and his work for me. He liked me, I could tell. The girlfriend had become smoke in a fiery, burning building. I had become the fire: able to burn and bite. Far brighter and more magnificent. That his body sat with me in that room made me a shining phosphorescent bauble and she an insignificant, lowly, grey pebble.
I watched his hands as they held the cards loosely. I laughed at him, cackling loudly once then quietening myself so as not to disturb anyone. My laugh infected him and he put on an easy, wide grin.
"Three?"
"Nope!" I bounced enthusiastically on the bed and it creaked woefully, "Eight?"
"Nup!"
We laughed for no reason.
That night we conjured up names for each other. Little nicknames. He was Crow. I was Bellabee. I loved the sound of the name in my ears, jingling like expensive diamond jewelery. When he spoke it aloud, the thumping in my neck, my pulse, quickened.
Somehow, with a magic thrust of his voice, he turned me into something beautiful, something luminous.
"Have you got an Ace?" He asked.
"Fuck!"
He laughed at me and stole my Ace of Spades.

.....................

(HAND-WRITTEN NOTE TO CROW FROM BELLA)
"Today I live with meaning,
Yesterday there was only
Little yellow ants making
nests in my awful hair..."
.....................

That night as I tried to sleep, the visions were beyond frustrating. I saw a white, giant ball of light moving in the corner nearest the bathroom. A large, rubbery ghost, a fat pillow-shaped spirit coming to haunt me with its feathers. The scent of burning plastic and naked mimes trying to dance in the dark with their white-painted masks, all flopping and gritty with a myriad of horseshit facades. I heard shuffling, the carpet moving upon itself, giving birth to dustbunnies, howling up nuggets of man-made furballs.
The drugs they had me on caused some minor psychological wars but none too savage to handle. I was a storm trooper, dressed up in white and black metals carrying handguns and speaking in robotic tones.
When the door to my room opened and an argent, diffused light edged through for a moment I thought it was just the right side of my head blossoming away like Springtime daffodils, the way my thoughts sometimes do.
"We're half-asleep," I murmured to the invisible ghosts, meaning myself and my room-mate.
Something came in closer, figure tall and framed like one of my male archangels without a halo to share.
"Bellabee," hushed Croydon in a gentle tone that nobody had ever used on me before, "I want you to know you mean something to me, too."
There was barely a breath in my lungs. I was almost comatose with sleeping aids when a faint smoothness in the shape of a kiss fit my parted mouth snugly. Mirage kisses, phantom lips, shapes and shadows in the seductive form of lies. I was desolate with the knowledge my body was paralysed from sleep and I couldn't call after him.
Beautiful man. You critical mass in the shape of a human male. You bastard for stealing my one, perfect first-kiss moment. Softly collapsing, I dreamed of dust storms and tidal waves and that there was nobody there to save me.

.....................

The weather outside had begun to alert even the most supreme government bodies. Hot, dry summer winds caused chaos to asthmatics. More sand storms trucked and trilled on the sturdy football scoreboards like weighty, bowed shocks.
I ate old pizza Crow had smuggled in for me and drank red water with a slinky sugar flavour. The sudden extremes of temperature had little effect on my mood. I was no environmentalist. The world was a snide and unappreciative ruler, bumbling about on a universal throne, belly too full of its own sense of self-worth. She grunted at her subjects for incompetence but lacked the wisdom to teach us any better. She tolerated the madness just as favourably, if not more, than sobriety. The world had more patience for lunatics and cruelty than for the ordinary and easygoing. I knew this because she tolerated me with such a curious amusement, letting me fake havoc with all my ridiculous demands and expectations, unhinging all sorts of nice, ordinary realities, worthy of nice, ordinary human beings. She let me get closer to Croydon when we all knew I shouldn't have even been a blip on his radar.
Graceless and cavorting around the other planets like a divine strumpet on her last night out, this stupid world tumbled and thrilled in low, fat, slow motions. She twirled the choking neon smoke that staggered like a thousand tendrils around her bulbous skirt as she danced.
And the activists loved her. They adulated over how she allowed so much crime to go on unpunished. They swilled in the gutter she let us build against her lopsided spine. They knelt against the soft green moss of her several beards, yielded to the mysterious rules we are all expected to obey. When I was a child, all I loved was the way she could move up against the sun in such a gesture that it made spectres of light pierce a cold day. I think I would have forgiven her anything for those dances. She was our manipulator, awesome and supreme back then.
These days the hallways of trees are grey and snickering with charcoal graves and fumes. The world no longer exists as it used to. Several bombs that were detonated pockmarked her already vulnerable flesh, lining the strange earthly cellulite with human bodies. Toxic smog congested in her large lungs and she met the taste of tobacco and car exhausts with a reluctant breath. We had turned her into a nicotine addict. We liked her better that way- torn down, laid to waste, a servant to the desires of mankind.
It was only when Crow came in, his hair windtorn and dusty, that I even noticed that perhaps the weird Summer drought storms were real.
"Jesus. I went out for a smoke. All hell's breaking loose out there."
"You mean the real world?" I asked.
He took the pizza away from my whining mouth in order to hide it quickly before the head nurse did her rounds.
"You will be out of here this time next week, so you'll soon be back there in that real world."
He reminded me and left with the garlicky, cheesy pie which, even though it was cold, still had been my weekly reward for being good and sane.
"He has such a thing for you," Caroline chimed in from her window-side bed. "The way he looks at you, it's like he's in love or something, which is so entirely not right being your nurse and all."
"He's not my nurse."
I folded my knees down under the sheets and contemplated going to sleep in order to while away the next few hours. He was about to end his shift, so the world would be devoid of the classy, spectacular entertainment he sang into my life.
"If you want I can crash out in the TV room one night so you can bonk for a few hours. He's pretty cute."
I closed my eyes. She had no value in my world and I possessed no desire to hear her speak but she continued as if her words had some iota of worth and relevance.
"...I wouldn't mind."
I yelled out, suddenly, furiously, to Croydon though he'd already left the room.
"What's the mattter?" Caroline asked.
"Croydon!"
He wandered in.
"What?"
"Give me a single room."
"Join the queue."
"If you don't get me a single room I'm going to do her some serious injury."
He eyed us both up tiredly and with shoulders slumped he rolled his big, dark blue eyes.
"I'll see what I can do."
She didn't say one more word to me for the rest of the week.

.....................................................

I was the last one in the TV room, and boredom made jittery my already kittenish nerves. Chiminey had already abandoned me for something more amusing and entertaining - perhaps he was ghosting some poor deluded boy in his hospital bed, tweaking earlobes and blowing whispers of breath into the kid's already blocked nostrils. The chairs in the TV room had been fashioned specially to be uncomfortable, I had decided, so got up, turned the box off and went to bed.
Croydon saw me through the glass and got up to talk to me. He stopped me in the hallway. Touched my arm like an angel.
"What are you up to?" He hushed.
"I thought it would be a good time to go to bed," I whispered back.
He shook his head, "It's still early."
I looked at the clock on the wall: 2:45AM. Everybody else was asleep and there was only one other nurse working. I fell silent, wondering whether he would make a move. A subtle, sinewy discomfort grew like germs between the space wedged under his fingers and the crick of my elbow.
"Would you like to watch a DVD?" He asked.
DVDs weren't so rare that it was a miraculous event, but when the nurse staff made an offer, it was proper to jump at the chance. That it was him, I almost wet my pants.
"Sure."
He and I retired to the TV room to watch some terrible movie about fake animal doctors, fake diseases and fake gorillas in the jungles of Borneo. The picture was crisply clear, the colours bright and digital, but it was all I could do not to look at him and my vision was blurred by distraction.
The atmosphere was dense, as if a strange fog had settled in. I hoped the same intoxicating fog would keep the other nurse and patients in their post-midnight stupor, leaving us alone for the first time since I'd been admitted.
He spoke up finally.
"This movie is a shocker,"
I laughed.
"It's a crime that I chose it over The Breakfast Club, I think."
I laughed, "It's fine."
"It gives us something to do."
"That's true," I smiled.
I found myself becoming easygoing in his presence. I wanted him to think I wasn't opinionated, aggressive or overly confident. I didn't like the way I suddenly had a tendency to smile too much, be too likable, too friendly. He looked at me in such a way when I smiled that I couldn't help doing it again. And again.
And then stopping suddenly when I realised I was doing it.
All of the indelicate parts of my personality dissipated between him and the television as it flickered. It was the only light in the room and granted me opportunities to watch him from the corner of my eye.
Pictures flashed in my head, right before my eyes. I saw myself leaning over and unbuttoning his jeans to give him a blowjob. I wanted to reach out and touch his boot. I wondered if the grey suede would be soft on my fingertip. I wanted to kiss the boot and run my kisses up to his legs, between his knees.
"Should I turn it off?" He asked, meaning the movie.
"No, it's fine," I repeated.
We sat in an uneasy quiet some more. My smile lingered even longer as the silence betrayed all of my thinking, as if every ounce of brain matter I had, every thought, became a speech read from a personal journal. I imagined he could hear me when I told him telepathically I thought he was the best thing I'd seen since Star Wars. The movie barely masked the full air that wedged between us like a stick of goopy caramel.
Then something happened.
He heard me.
I know he heard me because in the darkness he lifted my skirt and rested the five tips of his hand on my knee.
It was the sort of remarkable occurance that took place in romance novels and I wasn't sure how to react. Grand Anna would have smoothly pushed his hand up further, urging him on, but Grand Anna was out in the real world, trigger-happy on all sorts of stimulatory drugs and caffeine. Tender, fragile Anna would have to do all the work and she didn't know how to take a soft seduction the same way she didn't know how to eat the porridge they served with skim milk at breakfast.
He started to stroke my upper leg in rounded rectangular shapes and I felt every single spiral on his fingertips. The dizziness swept over me. I was suddenly stoned. From the unexpectedness of the caress and the thick, unyielding tension hovering between our two chairs, it felt like a low grade, horrible Valium.
Tender Anna parted her legs for him, welcoming the invasion. He felt the gesture and it was a pair of velvet hot, svelte bony fingers that eagerly flickered up to the cotton fabric of the hem of my stupid skirt that I hated, moved it aside easily and he began to stroke the slit lips of my longtime untouched cunt.
I made sure he could hear me breathing.
I let him know he was King and could do anything to me he wanted. He opened me up wider, struggling and threading his touch like a genius through my swollen labia.
It was a voluntary step through the doorway between bizarre and surreal. I closed my eyes, rested the nape of my neck back against the plump corderouy sofa cushions. The heat was unbearable.
He moved his fingers around every piece of me, then inside me. I could hear the tingling in my bones, the humming came in solid strokes. Like a pulse, I pulsed.
A light flickered on behind us, blinding us momentarily. In an instant his hand flew from its nest where it had delved and swirled through new juices back to his side, and we both took the white shot of light as a second's worth of time to adjust ourselves.
The nurse, Karine, stood at the back of the television room looking at the movie screen. "I've seen this one a dozen times, it's not worth the hassle," she snapped, folding her arms unhappily.
Ugly disappointment buzzed and frightened and bickering thoughts swatted the back of my head like a disciplinarian father.
Croydon quickly turned the movie off, though it was barely finished, and left the room with her. He left me alone with a snow-crumpled television screen and a pulsing, bursting pussy. I raced to the bathroom and locked the door, sitting on the toilet to consider what had just occurred.
I pictured him creeping in to the bathroom cubicle, shutting the heavy, locked door behind him. I felt strange and frightened being half naked in full light, in full view had he come in, which he didn't.
As I pissed, I felt a spasm of concern run through my body. I felt embarrassed for doing what I was doing, with my legs spread, my wet cunt open to the world. I wanted him to be there, watching me, but he wasn't. I wiped, flushed and pulled my skirt down again, leaning over the sink to stare at myself in the mirror.
The bathroom was cold. I leaned against the olive green tiles, the ceramic coolness reducing the heat in my face and neck. I imagined the germs invading my pores, my flesh, my hair, getting into my skin like tiny microscopic enemy armies. For once, I let them come and attack. I needed something to wipe away the fresh, bright and vivid steam of blushing that was turning red every inch of my sudden, ridiculous innocence.
Something had passed between us. An intimate encounter against which all other intimate encounters would forever be compared to. Something supernatural.

.....................

"What is your girlfriend's name again?"
"Why?"
"You know why."
His body fell silent for a while as he shuffled the cards, "I'm so reluctant to tell you anything."
"You don't trust me?"
"What in the world gave you the impression I trusted you? You're a fucking psycho."
"Yes, and you love me."
I was becoming brash in his presence and he seemed to thrive on it. Croydon loved that I was able to state such simple, unimaginable lies with little or no stutter. He was opening himself up to the stark, naked beauty of my brutality. I was liberating him. When I said he loved me, he didn't even try to argue the matter because he, I and the world knew it was true. His silence turned my deceit into reality. I relied heavily on that silence he exuded, it gave me all kinds of terrible permissions to do and say things normal people wouldn't.
"Elise," He replied finally, "Elise Pitt."
"Pfft," I laughed at the name.
Dealing the cards with nimble fingers, we each received half of the pack so we could play a rampant, excitable game of snap!
Chattering about nothing in particular as we played, each hand grew tireder and slower until we were both too sleepy to continue. It was almost 4AM. There was only one other nurse on duty and it was a dead night full of empty duties she could handle on her own. She didn't even bother to come in and check on her workmate, leaving him to his own devices.
I finally muttered something reluctantly about going to bed.
"Tomorrow I have a big, full day of freedom!"
"Tomorrow I will miss you," he gave me a deliberately angelic pout.
"Tomorrow I will masturbate constantly until I have you out of my system!"
I slapped his arm playfully and turned to go to bed. The room was quiet again, the only sounds were from the night nurse on the telephone three or four rooms away. It was virtually inaudible.
"Why wait until tomorrow?"
At first I was certain it had only been a voice in my head, but when I turned around he was looking at me in such a way that I thought my heart might choke my throat. My whisper was a hush, was a croaky, funky, phglegmy creak.
".. What?"
"Get into bed."
Breathless and childish like a misbehaving demon, I giggled.
With Crow, giggling like a real girl felt natural, as if a tinkling, delighted peal of laughter laid lullabies up from my belly and out of my throat.
It was vaguely innocent. He did nothing but remove his jeans. I was quickly in my underwear and under the covers.
The scene was a minefield of sexual gestures but I was careful and genuinely discreet. The caution emerged in the darkness as affection and a raw tenderness. He lay down on the bed on his stomach, his arms crimped up beneath his neck and chest, face turned to mine. Our noses were close. When he breathed, the air went through my lips. I deliberately tried to breathe in his exhale.
The dimness played mirages with the shape of his face, the colour and texture of his skin and the flip-cut of his hair. Croydon stared at me as I stared back at him and I gave him some of my inner power. It buzzed through us both like electricity.
He whispered little sharp sentences in muffled tones that were scarcely audible as if they were dreaded taboo confessions..
"I feel alive."
"You are," I approved.
"Never before now," Crow admitted, "Now I am a conduit."
Eyes scanned over his smooth forehead.
"Just be careful," I warned.
I didn't want him being overwhelmed by me. I could damage him with all my well-meaning psychoses. There was a chance I might turn him inside out too often and leave him wounded for life. Upping the cautious ambience my arm methodically slipped out from under the hospital bed sheets and crawled down like an ebbing centipede to the back of his thighs where I stroked ever so softly. He closed his eyes and we were both so quiet that I could hear him breathing thicker, shorter, like little bursts of visceral gulping.
The room was alive in the silence. The soft breathing awoke the walls and the bricks beyond began to hum, flashing lightly with grainy motions. The floor became alive in the white noise, waiting for the feverish whispers. The lights imatiently crackled in anticipation for the change in atmosphere. My hospital room was a hypnotised witness to Crow's and my union, and the building was a whore to us like I was a slave to the temptation of being with him.
"I am careful."
He rolled over onto his left shoulder and bought one arm out, loosely slinging across my body like dry wings, hung and draped over my shoulders. We were both limp and exhausted like cotton dolls dressed in faded Tolstoy pages. There was no music as a soundless break shuffled in. The room dragged around it's well dressed trail of lust, a heavy fellow companion for the last night we'd have together in my psychiatric prison.
"Will you be my husband?" I begged quietly, "Just tonight?"
"I will be your husband. The crow will eat the bee."
In my head I imagined a large, oily black crow swallowing back a fat, luscious bumble bee. It stung the crow's throat and insides until the crow was paralysed and dying in the grass.
"Just bite my wings off," I asked, "Don't let me get too far inside."
It ached when he put his hand between my legs. All the muscles in my body tensed up then when he touched, slithered his finger between parts of me that were plump and sliced apart.
I turned to weak, formless goop. I giggled again, surprised at my own sensitivity.
Burying my face in his neck, I began to babble.
"You love me, don't you? This isn't just a goodbye? You want me in the way I want you. From the second... at the lake, the fountain. Outside, in the night, in the cold, when I first.... oohhh..." I moaned.
He said nothing now, but every motion his fingers and lips made told me things through vague, muffled tones. White-light blinded, I was under the omnipotence of a thumping orgasm, orchestrated by a divine composer who I was convinced loved my every part.

..................................

I was seven when I experienced my first orgasm. It was under the weighty, plump hand of my Uncle, his finger playing where it should not. My little red lips, forced downward-turning into a glum andfrightened frown, pressed reluctantly into his polyester shirt sleeve. He was well over six feet tall, a large, balding man with Summer heat flesh. His shiny face, reddened by chasing me, was caught in a mutant grin-grimace as he held me tightly. He was acting as if he wasn't sure he should be enjoying the feel of a virgin clitoris and unused hole. He gruffed as he weighted me down with his shoulder, his other hand rubbing himself to distraction.
I felt a powerful, gutteral helplessness under the pressure of his body, and as he stroked and tickled me, then kissed my mouth with open lips and a slippery, sponge-tongue, I began enjoying the sensation he was forcing through me.
Through a deadline desperation, I managed to struggle out from under his manipulations and started crawling on my belly on the bed to get away from him, but he lurched onto from me, pinning me down on my stomach. My face was crushed into the soft, quilted bed linen as he pried his fingers between my legs again and continued pleasuring me. My body experienced a surge of temperature and breathlessness as he quickened the motions of his index finger and I tried to cry out but he put his hand over my mouth so that my Aunt and cousin in the next room couldn't hear me.
The room was small, with the golden Autumn evening light threading its lions breath over the neutral decor and perfectly painted cream brick walls. From where I lay wedged beneath him on the single guest bed, I could see a mirror that reflected a pastel landscape print on the opposite wall. I stared at it and began to drift away just as the smallest pulse of climax wove up from my toes, through my feet and ankles, to my thighs which involuntarily parted for him, then finally settling in my belly. Like a beautiful cramp it fondled through my chest and heart, strangling my neck so that I could feel the heavy beat of my own heart which I hadn't known existed before. I was ashamed and blissed out all at once. He knew just what to do, where to touch and how. My childlike resisting only seemed to spur on my own pleasure.
At age seven I was smart enough to figure out that struggling against him made us both feel intense pleasure. I pushed down on his hand, in my mind figuring it would maybe make him realise I wanted to be free from him, but in the motion of pushing I pushed myself into the first orgasm of my life.
I cried out silently into the bed, tasting fake silk on my tongue and catching it against the sharp edges of my front teeth. I squeezed my eyes shut tight and urinated suddenly on his bed, the pleasure much too much for me to bear.
My Uncle didn't seem to mind. He kissed my cheek and licked my earlobe. It tickled. He continued touching me but the whopping, crazy ecstasy for me had ended. I was tired and tingling with pins and needles all over my body. His hand lifted my skirt right up so that my panties and bottom were exposed and he urinated little droplets onto me. It was only until I was thirteen that I learned what it really was that he had done to my back and panties.
He called to my Aunt in the other room, that I'd "had an accident" on the bed. She came into the room curiously.
He was already zipped up and standing by the window, looking at the stain on the bed. I was sitting on the edge of the mattress, tears beginning to flush my eyes in embarrasment. She hugged me, cooing and hushing my whimperings, embracing my face into her hip and brushing my hair with her fingers telling me it was alright.
"We'll clean it up," she shushed me, "It's alright sweetie, we'll clean it up. No tears. None of this."
I watched my Uncle watching us for a moment, then he left the room.

Despite the initial shame, I couldn't stop thinking about the sensations I'd experienced on the bed, under his weight. I was ashamed and embarrassed that my Aunt had thought I'd messed myself on her guest bed, but I was under his thumb, under his control too.
The pleasure I had experienced was boldly electrocuted into my conscious memories and even into my subconscious and he quickly became my favourite relative.
I found myself wanting to be near him whenever I could. I asked that we go visit as often as we could. I followed him around, puppying his ankles, tugging annoyingly on his shirt, asking him to take me for walks so that he could give me the orgasms I was addicted to. He complied happily, but there would be a greater expectation of give and take. To earn my orgasm I had to do things to him, for him. In return, my orgasms grew longer and more intense.
Sometimes he used his mouth and tongue, and I tried to hold in the wetness that came out of me, but I couldn't. His face would drip with it when he finished, but he would smile and tell me how beautiful and special I was.
"You're my favourite girl," He'd say. "Such a beautiful little sexy slut." And we'd kiss in our open-mouthed, tongue way, and I'd feel warmer in the knowledge that I was his sexy little slut. At the age of eight, I didn't know what the word slut meant. Just that it was good, and felt good.
He had blue eyes, my Uncle. His hair was almost dark blonde but with enough grey straggled through it to make him look old. He wore spectacles, real old-style spectacles, whenever he watched television or read the newspaper.
He walked with a slight limp. I never knew from what. I would watch him, stare at him a lot. People would think it was cute.
"Isn't she adorable? She's so focused. Look at her concentration levels. She's so aware of her surroundings!"
I would smile sweetly and blink, and tune back into the conversation.
I manipulated a friendship with my older cousin Barb so that she would invite me over for the night. My mind never stopped conjuring ways I could spend time with my Uncle.
At first he enjoyed it. He liked meeting in the darkness of midnight in the bathroom where we could lock the door and have as many orgasms as we could manage. He taught me how to roll my lips back over my teeth when I put his cock in his mouth so that my teeth wouldn't bite him. He taught me to hold my screams in when I orgasmed. He told me to slow down my breathing, but it was difficult.
While my 13 year old cousin slept in her bedroom, I was sitting on the bathroom sink, my legs wrapped around her father's head, pushing him deeper into me and in psychotic little whispers urging him on with words I didn't know the meaning of.
After some time, I began manipulating him in ways to get what I wanted, in the same fashion I suckered my mother into buying me te sugary drinks I liked.
"If you don't come with me to the bathroom, I'll tell Aunty Jade and Barb that you like to fuck me," I warned, not even knowing that we weren't remotely near to fucking yet.
"You can't tell them, Anna. Please promise me that you won't say a word about what we do."
He was getting nervous, developing a stutter.
By my ninth birthday, I had learnt how to glare emotionless at him, take his hand defiantly and lead him to the bathroom or the guest bedroom, where he could pleasure me, and I him. I learnt the art of taking what I wanted, the skill, and inevitable success of obtaining that which is destined to belong to me, and the albeit fleeting rewards of an all-encompassing obsession.
My early sexual experience was the first nail that would eventually seal my coffin of madness.
I became predatory in nature. I developed crushes on boys when I was ten, and though not even in high school yet, recess in the school yard usually saw me giving blowjobs to 11 year old boys. All they had to do was ask and I would be as submissive as their pre-pubescent expectations demanded.

....................

His mother lay unmoving in the bed, barely able to brush her own hair.
"My face is changing," she said, gazingly listlessly into the mirror.
The puckered cheek folded into the haggard flesh which seemed to write unwanted stories on a slitted, shiny mouth. Ageism castrated every fiber of her being. The soul's self-worth no longer buyable on the big market, in her eyes. Her arms had gone so long without the murmur of a kiss. Dismay and disillusionment covetted the stranglehold of loneliness for company.
"Oh, don't be silly. You're still beautiful," Croydon said.
"When did I get so old?"
"You didn't. You're still young."
"I've decided," She spoke through a garbled lisp, "I don't want to die."
He didn't know what to say to her, how to tell her he didn't want to see her die either. It was a given. Even the most hated of children don't want to see someone dying in front of their eyes. His mother, though often indifferent to him, thoroughly selfish and cool-hearted at times, wouldn't have been better off on the other side of life. An unkindly ghost she would made, but a ghost nonetheless, he realised.
He wanted to grab hold of her hand, but didn't. She left it hanging low and loose across her tiny stomach. He wondered if he should tell her about me. The possibility that one day she might have grandchildren could have pulled her out of her angelic delusions.
"Remember how bright I was," She growled beautifully.
He didn't want to hear it any more. He wanted to be out of there, away from the house, away from the beach where he'd walked with his young lover. It was too much for him to deal with. In his head, he was still a young man, but having Elise tugging on his sleeve, me grinding my perverted ways into his life, and his mother dying in his arms was all just too much.
"You can't leave now. Not now," Croydon replied.
It was too soon, there were things he wanted to tell her: about his job, about the possibility of leaving Elise, about me - all the truths he had yet to face properly, but his mother was on her death bed, struggling to hold back the pain, struggling to breathe. It would have been cruel to change her ideals, to bring a new reality to the table as in some unpleasant poker game.
"Oh. But I'm so close..." Dianna whispered to her son, "Can you hear them murmuring?"
She breathed.
He could almost hear the whispers in the air, shimmering out of the solid objects in the room, like ghostly promises.
"Can you hear them singing?"
Dianna's voice had taken on another tone as she felt them touching her hair into the fragile swirls of tangled, old twine.
"I'm so close," She gasped lightly, invoking the presence of the angels.
"No. Please don't."
Croydon was about to start crying.
"There's too much I have to tell you before -"
But Dianna wasn't listening. She began to understand the meaning behind growing old. Age was a starvation, a beautiful preparation to enter the whirling turret of the Universe, and she needed to be light, pale, soft and mild so they could lift her and help her dance again.
"It's time."
She finally grasped his hand in return, with her clammy, thin fingers. She held on tightly for a moment, then let her grip slither out again, leaving him lost for a moment as she closed her eyes.
And it was silence that claimed her. A stunned, restful silence.

.....................

In the library, several older people were prowling the fiction collections. Instead I found the crime section, chose a few interesting titles and sat down in a cubicle in the corner so that I could be alone. The library was a cell of man-made heat and silence. It was soothing.
I thumbed the glossy pages. A series of aged black and white photographs were spattered throughout the book. An image of a decade-old crime scene caught my eye. The photographer had developed the picture in too low contrast and it had a fine film of light across it, making discernation of body parts difficult.
How odd.
It seemed as if faces had been cleverly sewn into the fabric of the little girl's perfect little folded dress, yet there were no seams or evidence of embroidery. The child's skin tones were bruised apple red and cherry flesh, with shadows licking the mouths and snakelike shadows in her dark, ruffled hair. With what seemed to be an endless array of facial expressions in the outfit - from a grimace of horror, to blissed out silent reverie, the entities fashioned into the material gloated loudly. I could hear them running in my head with a long, drawn out series of splashing motions, trying to distract me from the gruesome crime scene. The girl's dress had been printed with images that startled me, spoke to me. I tried very hard not to notice the details. Those superfluous, strange details always distracted me.
I wondered whether angels really did reside among the freshly polished shelves, aisle upon aisle, and if they did, why didn't they want to talk to me the way my other hallucinations did?
Chiminey was dancing on the tables, kicking pencils in tins around and generally causing a noisy hullaballoo to try to get my attention. I remained unbaited, knowing that it was only I who could hear him and he was unable to bother anybody else.
I took three books with me, using the stolen library card to steal them. I wouldn't be taking them back anytime soon and somebody else could pay for any overdue accounts.
Outside the streets were becoming bare as zombie worker bees went home to oven-cooked meals and frightfully loud children's embraces. I strolled the walkway with my books under arm, considering all sorts of delicious, awful philosophical ideals.
Living on the beach, collecting shells as a hobby. Breeding puppies and experiencing all varieties of joy and frustration. Meeting someone - any old failure of a man would do - and raising ordinary children to fill my days. I could be anything I wanted. I could go back to school, get a diploma, become an astronaut - a real one who officially leaves our atmosphere, not the way I do it, with drugs and hallucinations.
It started raining as I walked home. The rain was like treacle. I sipped at it, licking at the cold, wet flesh of my own freckled cheeks to taste the rain.
.....................

Retrograde fit into the vacuous slot of my existence more succinctly than, say, a regression would. I was not withdrawing into negativity, but instead turning backwards in the sky like a planet gone haywire. A star upsetting its own, bruised apple cart constellation.
I had been stuck in my new apartment for what seemed like years. Any wounds I may have made in the past in order to get into Davaren Ridge Psychiatric had healed but the scars had hardened like
Though I was certain a year had passed, the calendar told me only a little over a month had gone by since I'd been evicted from the institution and had become self-imprisoned behind my own closed rental windows and locked doors. To try to forget him, I didn't leave the house. Hermit-like, I relied solely on home deliveries for my food and groceries.
It had been a month of extreme highs and lows. Teetering on the poverty line, the food I ate was designed to fill my belly rather than seduce bored taste buds, and mostly consisted of potatoes. The walls had developed a thin layer of potato silt from the steam of boiling them.
The apartment was infested with roaches but I barely noticed. They scuttled and fled when I stepped into the kitchen to rattle the increasing piles of unwashed dishes. The indestructible bugs trickled around the bathroom faucets, sipping at the droplets of water from my bi-weekly baths.
The roaches and I had made an agreement, developing a mutual pact between us not to get in the way of each other. As expected, they often broke the rules, but I didn't care much. Every now and then I'd smash one or two of the bigger ones under foot to hear and feel the crunch.

.....................
Hunt
(Submission of drawing by Annabelle Fry, 1999)
.....................

Elise Pitt was on the television.
Elise Pitt was Croydon's significant other. Her presence in his life had made mine redundant, and there she was - on my television screen, flaunting and parading like a twittering mouse.
She wore an olive green scarf around angular shoulders, hiding her neck under fleecy cotton and long, flat strands of chocolate truffle hair. Her hair was dyed, and the green eyes that flickered like cactus spikes was accentuated with contact lenses. Lies and manipulation was her art, not the calculated trail of frames that hung on the wall behind her.
Elise was showcasing a selection of her paintings, highlights from a series of portraits that were being exhibited in a local art gallery.
She hovered her hands around the frames, not touching the glass or the images as if they contained a sacred mystery. Elise fondled her expensive olive green scarfe lightly, nervous of the studio lights and cameras, but essentially proud of her work.
The portraits were subdued at best. The people she had selected to paint were safe, comfortable figures dressed in modern costumes and finely shaded. They were delicate enough to be pretty crafts - but it was not art.
Art is an emotive stench, a reactive masterpiece which can enlighten or engross or impel. Her designs were sweet but not memorable. There wasn't enough profundity or profanity in the work to make it marketable. Despite these shortcomings, she was selling herself like a confident whore, sunbathing pallid skin under an ego where there was no evidence of value or worth.
Few things are as vile as arrogance without the quality to back it up.
As she flashed her poetic privates on the screen, I wanted her to go away. She didn't deserve to keep trying to sell her work, she didn't deserve the public acclaim. A sickly feeling drooled into my stomach. Elise Pitt barely flinched, as if she wasn't even aware I was watching.
My head was zinging. Humming like peppercorn sherbet, wild and frothy. There was a shrill, cavernous sensation in my scalp as if my head was a circle of rock, hollow with trilling clumps of bees inside. I felt the light brimming out over my brain, shapes and colours floundering through my thoughts. It was like a kind of euphoria, where the sky turned brighter, more luminous and the world around me, the natural state of things became beautiful, alive.
Before I was even aware of it, I was already outside. The trees were active human figures reaching out to me as I walked through their frames. Leaves tickled the air like giggling children. Pebbles rolled along the street, bypassing my boots in cursive alphabets, leading me like wise mentors into the outskirts of the city.
After an hour, I found myself in his front yard. The garden was drought-stricken, with yellowing grasses. Flowering weeds pockmarked the uniformed fence and a jumbling, tumbling few wasps swayed above pungent blooms, wary of settling down into the pollen. A few trees grew untethered and massive, uprooting the pavement and spreading their feet around the house like giants. It was an artist's garden: neglected and untamed.
Slipping between trees, making my way up to the side of the house, I saw him sitting in his front room, mute and engrossed in Elise's latest canvas, already half smeared in red-orange, sultry fire oil paints.
I watched for a while, wedging myself between the window and the thick trunk of the goliath gum tree which crushed in against the brick wall. My excitement was a burbling, restless lustre that poured out of my eyes and fingers like streams of lasers.
I couldn't contain it and needed some kind of grounding to keep me from lifting off of the ground.
In her, I saw a part of myself. When she moved her arm, it was as if she was a connection of me, and I could control her limbs. I was the puppeteer. We had a connection.
When I stole in through the back door, the kitchen light had been left on . It was bright daylight outside and I thought 'What a waste of electricity', turning the light off and making a light clicking sound. The house was silent otherwise - she was too engrossed in her art to hear me.
The knives on the kitchen table didn't go unnoticed. I saw them, considered taking one, but I didn't want to use them. Like a live wire, I craved to be grounded, tranquilized to dispel the agitation that forced through me like a brutal assault on my senses.
I moved - flew like a lit-up, neon firefly - through the hallway at the other end of the house. My feet barely touched the carpet and the numbness in my head throbbed heavily like chaotic, trembling music breathing through thickened, smoky lungs. I was shaking but solid, dead and unbreathing.
Like a zombie, I cruised through the house. The bland dimness of dusk crawled over the street slowly as I lingered in the house. I touched nothing as I wandered through each room deliberately.The silence was sweet and lyrical. It fed my anxious thoughts, soothed away all of the nervousness and noise that I couldn't bear.
Croydon walked out of the study and saw me.
I stopped and looked at him.
"Hey..."
My sheepish nod punctuated the remark he had made.
"What're you doing here?" He asked.
"I guess .. ? I needed to see you?"
The tension was macheted by our own, heavy stares.
"Why didn't you ring?"
"My phone's been cut off," I lied.
We stood there for a long moment. I could tell he was trying to sum me up, figure out what I was doing in his house sneaking around like a burglar. When he stared it sparkled inside me. The shared silence thrust me right back into the thick of my adoration, our union, our past life craziness.
I had forgotten the clarity of his blue-pearl eyes and being there, pulsing near him like a massive, white heart, exposed and fleshy in the daylight, made me remember our mutual intimacies.
He must have decided I was safe enough and smiled lightly. "Anna, you shouldn't be coming in here without knocking first."
I forgot all about Elise when he smiled. His remarkable eyes clicked like lens shutters. I could hear his heart beating. The connection between us was intensely raw. The smell of him drifted over to me and I stepped closer.
"I knocked..." I whispered.
"Come into the kitchen," He said, trying to remove me from the proximity of Elise's study.
We went into the top room together, he with his hand outstretched behind him as if to reach for mine but I didn't take it.
Confusion taunted my thoughts. Did he love me? Was he in love with me the way I adored and worshipped him?
Watching him from behind was a new level of stalking from a fresh perspective. The pockets of his denim jeans, the curve of his ass, the backs of his legs which he had let me stroke.
He made two steaming, spicy mugs of tea. The kettle screamed at us like a child. Our child. In mine, I poured a small dollop of cream. In his, nothing. I didn't even drink tea, but for him I wanted to. We sat at his table. It was warm, subdued, calming. He asked me how I was getting along.
He said, "You look good. You look better."
"I am better," I lied.
We talked for about five minutes before Elise realised there was company in the house and she came down from her work station to join in.
For a moment she pretended she didn't notice me, but then finally looked right at me as if I was really there. She looked surprised and confused, recognising me as the girl from the mental institution, though we'd never met. (Never spoken. Exchanged smiles or handshakes. Killed each other for the one man we both loved.)
"Hello..."
I said nothing. I didn't want to talk to her, or have her hear my voice. I suppose I must have seemed threatening, being female, so easily sitting with her lover in their kitchen and talking in intimate hushed tones. She nervously wiped oil paint from her palms onto a dirty towel.
"I should get going," I told Croydon who had altered his outward appearance and voice slightly now that she stood there. Politely he stood and showed me to the door.
"We'll meet for drinks sometime next week, ok Annabelle?"
I nodded and considered kissing his soft, white cheek. Instead I turned and left the house through the rear yard, stepping back out into the street, unsatisfied and still clinging to some addictive optimism that he would one day come with me, follow me down the footpath and take hold of my wrist, silently calling me back.
Misery gutted my belly.
I went home.

.....................

It took Elise Pitt three days to track me down.
I was impressed. It takes some skill to be able to find someone - even in this day and age of the Internet and super-spy television inspirations - and she'd done it so quickly it got my attention.
She knocked on my front door and I entertained the notion of not letting her in. I suppose a part of my brain was telling me not to, I could not be trusted with her alone. There were damaged electrodes flitting about inside my skull and they were unstable, irrational. She might not enjoy getting to know me.
Elise stood at the front door, garbled sunlight at her back, making cocoa colours from her twine-like hair.
"I don't think you should be here," I warned her.
It would be the only warning I'd give her. If she chose to step inside, that would be the sign I needed that her fate belonged to me, rested in my clenchable fingers.
She came in anyway. She found a chair to sit in and began asking me all sorts of questions.
"Do you live alone?"
"Are you renting?"
"How well do you know Croydon?"
"Do you really think you should be visiting him? You're not exactly friends."
"I feel perhaps you're overstepping your boundaries, don't you?"
I finally had to shut her up.
"You shouldn't be here," I repeated.
"You shouldn't have been at my house, breaking into my house, sneaking around after my boyfriend like a fucking stalker!"
I smiled slightly at her annoyance.
"Are you angry?"
"You don't belong in our lives. You're just an ex-patient he took care of, that's all. He's just being polite."
"That's not all."
"It is all. You're making this up, this dream you have in your head that perhaps maybe he might find you attractive and ... whatever."
I was eerily calm. There was a torrid anger inside, but it was hidden so well that she thought I was being deliberately provocative.
"Croydon and I have plans. A future that doesn't involve fucked up psychos like you. We're buying a boat. We're getting engaged. We're going to have a family. You don't belong in his life."
"You can't bear the idea that the man you think loves you could be in love with someone else," I replied simply.
"In love with you!?" She laughed.
"Crow loves me."
There would be no boat, no wedding, no children for her. I knew what Croydon's future held and I knew she would not - could not - be a part of it.
"He thinks you're a sick fuckwhore!" She squealed.
The sound of her voice gushed like quicksilver into my head and I answered with a launched attack. On legs that floated in mid-air I was airborne like a perfectly constructed paper airplane, lunging at her.
There was a struggle as I tried to find my footing and grab at Elise's extended wrists and arms. At first she escaped the lock of hands around her neck but then I found a good grip and pulled her underneath me so that I could wrench the curve of her neck easier. I threw her from the chair so that she was bent uncomfortably beneath my stronger, more powerful frame, neck angular against the foot of the chair.
My mind went dark.
A grey swirling mass crept into my eyes, blurring and distorting my vision. As I squeezed the neck in my hands it was like someone was taking the pressure off of my skull, oozing the cerebral cortex through a slow, winding puzzle in order to eventually let it loose.
She couldn't speak, but the noise of her breathing sparkled in the distance between her face and mine. It was the stroking sound of dense, humid breath, selective and rhythmic like the drawn-out thwack of windscreen wipers dragged over dirty glass.
At first I thought there was no way I could pull this off. In an eerie, subconscious sense, I knew what I was doing was killing her, but consciously I was only trying to shut her up, get rid of her. Throw her from the planet as if she was no more substantial than a dirty cloud. I squeezed tight, but had to weigh her down at the same time, and she was fitting, flailing and throwing herself around as if a seizure was upon her and giving her a physical strength which would have normally eluded her.
My heart raced in my chest, pounding too quickly and I had to blink several times in quick succession to focus. I swallowed because she couldn't. When she tried, I felt the rippled, fist-sized muscles in her throat failing to force past my knuckles.
Her scissoring feet tripped up and we fell. She collapsed on her hip and cried out lightly in shock from the impact. I clenched my hands tighter until my fingers groaned and my wrists hurt. Finally there was the satisfying crack of her neck and she slumped between my feet on the floor. My fingers were in such pain from the clenching, the knuckles sore and raw from an inhuman battle. I could barely breathe.
The light inside her flickered.
Then gusts of air came into me. I let go. Smooth rhythms built up like ebbing tides in my system. I could finally breathe again, as if a plug had been removed and a stream of air washed into my body.
Levity swished around inside of me and I stroked her hair. Breaking her neck, killing her, took no time at all. I had been gifted with magical powers, superhuman strength that let me give her the sleep.
I noticed a smell in the room and felt embarrassed, sympathetic towards the dead body.
When I lifted an arm and tried to drag the weight towards the day-bed, her skin was warm and slick from the sweat amassed from panting. I got it into my head that I should take some of the orange housepaint I had in the laundry cupboard and stroke it over her forehead, under the lower lids and over her cheeks. It might help her transition across to the otherworld, I figured.
I should have fled the house as quickly as I could but for some reason I wanted to stay for a moment, taking enjoyment in the proximity to the death of my enemy. Strength and satisfaction coursed through me. My feet touched the ground. The angel of death had been in the room with me, embraced me for a moment, thanking me for a job well done. I was able to dance a small waltz with something greater, yet control and overpower it, making the rules of my own romantic musical.
I sniffed the murky air, smelled the perfume of her stomach, the dust and her deodorant. I moved around the room like a predator, scooping up the trinkets I had amassed during my time there.
When I did finally pack my bags, I left the room cluttered and lived-in. I didn't think to touch anything else, instead wiping down all surfaces, walls, light switches, everything I had used or touched since living in the apartment.
I didn't touch her again, knowing even in the arousing afterglow, that allowing my hands to touch her might lead to fingerprints. I needed to be unknown, unseen like a ghoul, shadowy and slippery. I knelt down beside the body and wiped its neck with the sleeves of my jacket. The joints were loose and rolled around like a well-oiled, relaxed muscle. I straightened the hair, which was silky and also loose under my fingers.
Her eyes blazed blankly into mine and I stared for a few minutes, feeling the aura of living energy seeping from her corpse. There was a pleasure in watching her drift away. It hadn't been as quick as I had always imagined it would be. It was as if she'd been suspended in the body for a while before finally surrendering to the darkness and wriggling out of it.

As the evening hit I knew that I would have to leave. There was a sense of melancholy at the idea of abandoning her. I didn't want to have her lying there alone in the dark. For a moment, I considered taking the body with me but knew it would be impractical trying to move her, transport it, then eventually get rid of it somewhere else. Limbs splayed and droopy like Eeyore's floppy, plush ears.
Standing over the crime scene I watched the body for some time.
I really thought her fingers were moving for a moment. They seemed to play like a phantom pianist against the keys and her loose, flabby arms floating upwards, as if drowning in a large sea.
Her eyelids seemed to flutter and her lips whispered a silent prayer, but it was just my imagination playing games and fiddling with my senses. A dead body never really seems dead until you start playing with it, and it wasn't in my nature to get mutilatory against her. My work had been done, I had what I wanted, there was a pleasant silence emanating from her presence, and it was the endgame to my tests.

I waited for another half an hour in case she woke up. There was no breath in her lungs and no beat to her pulse so I knew she was dead.
Finally it was time to go. With my sleeves folded down over my palms, I locked the house up and drew the blinds half across. I slipped out through the back yard, around to the front of the street where I easily slid into the shadows and walked away.
I could feel the poison of guilt pumping in my neck, circulating through my body like hot streams of lava. The weirdness in the world around me turned the stars around in the night sky so that they swerved and pulsated like ancient drumbeats.

.....................

The killer hiked across town to confront the crow. He was a shadow behind the front screen door, but still she yelled at him. She was out of her right mind, insane on adrenaline and rushed from the thrill of what had happened.
I bellowed through the wire mesh on the door. I slammed my hands against the iron swirls and rusting metal.
"I came to tell you I don't want you!"
"Bella!"
"Get your fucking self away from me!" I screeched.
He opened the door, and grabbed my wrist hard.
I liked it.
"Get off me!"
"No, wait, I was just trying to ring you."
"You fuck!"
"I was! I wanted you to come round! And here you are."
"It's over. You're out of my life."
"No, listen!"
"I'm ending this. You're ended. You're finished."
"No. Wait. Wait for .. listen to what I have to say."
As I struggled, he babbled for a minute or two about Elise. The topic of discussion was not one I wanted to hear or face. I'd stumbled into a hornet's nest of killer antics and needed to start making plans about getting out of town, leaving him, facing the prospect of a new future as somebody else somewhere else, finding a new identity. There were blueprints to be drawn up, configurations to configure, thoughts and conjurations to assemble.
I wrestled from his grip but he held me too tightly.
I still liked it.
"Come with me," he tugged on my arm.
"I can't."
I wanted to cry, my sore throat was gagging up with phlegm and tears and I knew any second I'd be bursting into a whining, jagged slip of tears.
"I'm choosing you, Bella."
He whispered it. Like it was the most precious knowledge in the world. And it was. It was enough to stop me dead in my tracks at the front edge of the dead, artist's garden. Dead artist's garden.
"I'm going across country, getting away from her. She's hell to live with. I don't want to be with her. I want to be with you. I can't take her bitching anymore. I love your bitching. I want your bitching, not hers."
"Crow..." I whimpered as the tears came. "You're making it too hard. It's impossible, I can't."
"It is impossible," He replied in the simplest and most sweetest of terms. "I've treated you badly and I want to make up for it. I fell in love with you. You're it for me now. I've done my dash with anyone else. You're My One. You're the one who makes the world .. strange and .. amazing. Like I'm, like an acid trip."
I laughed as the snot came out of my nose and I wiped it away with the sleeve of my shirt.
"So what now, I'm your drug of choice."
"Something like that."
I turned to face him and knew there was no choice for me either. He was my medication.
I think we hugged. I'm not sure. The only reason I remember that we hugged is that I was so choked up on a snarl of tears that they ran down the back of his neck and he made mention of it at some later date.
"Tears on my neck, I'll never forget."
It could have been some terrible poem he was writing for me.
It was tears on my neck kind of poetry I'll never forget, either.
.....................

We drove for hours. When the engine first grunted it was morning. When it took its last gasp for the day it was nearly midnight. All day we drove, making stops along the line. We stood across borders, with one foot in one state and another foot in entirely a different state, thinking we were the bees knees for being so clever and thinking that we were the first to do it.
"Imagine if it was all just one big state, no borders," I babbled as we crossed through one, "Imagine if the whole world had no borders. what would that mean?"
"No war, I'd imagine."
"They'd find something to argue about surely. Who owned which sugar plantation and which family governed which stupid, big, fat, lousy, white picket gate mansion."
"Bellabee you so smart."
"S.M.R.T!" I sang.
I lay on the seat with my head in his lap, looking up at him driving. His jeans smelled ripe.
"You need a shower."
I stroked his arm gently.
.....................

"How many hospitals have you been in?"
I laughed, coaxing him off the scent.
"Seriously," he continued.
"I don't want to talk about it."
"Why not?"
"It's ugly."
"So?"
"I don't like ugliness."
"Reality is ugly."
"Depends on how you look at it. You just have to pick the right realities. Like selecting a stream of magnetic poetry for the fridge door. Use your built-in shit radar. If it looks like shit, smells like it, then you probably rolling in turds but reality can be beautiful. You just have to be selective."
"Is our reality ugly?"
"It's subjective. The story's in the words. You just have to pick the right words."
"What words belong in our story?"
"All of them. But some words fit better than others."
"Like?"
"Fruitcake."
He laughed.
"Sugar. Psychosis," I continued. "Orgasm. Romance." I looked up into his eyes dreamily, "Insertion."
Teeth showing again, he smiled. There was an idiot pride in the knowledge that I could always make him smile.
"Trust," He added.
That hadn't been a word that came into my mind. Trust. I trusted nobody, not even blue-eyed Croydon jogging over rocks in Riley Park, the image of that first night jazzbeat snapping in my mind.
"Trust," I sighed. "Well, then. Three times."
"What for?"
"You want diagnoses?"
"Sure."
"When I was 16 they thought I was Epileptic. Then it was clinical depression, then manic depression as it was known back then, then Bordeline, anti-social, you name it."
"What's your diagnosis these days?"
"In love," I smiled.
He pulled the car over into the side of the road. It was tar-smooth and there was little dust in the air, but I coughed and he held me closely to his chest, just smothered me in like I was his monkey baby.
"I love you Bella."
We were saturated in romance like it was raining down on us in clear, dazzling ornamental droplets. Part of me didn't want to echo his declaration, the other part of me was drowning from not telling him. Of course I said it. The air was too thick not to disperse the tension.
"Crow. I love you too."
The car started up again. He reeled us out into the proper lane and we cruised on towards the desert motel where we hitched up our wagon and stayed for a few days. I was a refugee from my own crimes, he was an unknown, dumb assistant.

.................

We stopped at the littlest towns imaginable. One only had three houses and a gas pump.
I got out of the car to dance while Crow filled the tank and watched me from the side of the road.
When we started back again, cars passing us became so infrequent I discovered a new vehicle etiquette: waving in the daylight, and the flashing of lights at night to symbolise a hello or greeting as we cruised on by each other, us and these license-carrying strangers.
"Flash your lights!" I'd bark excitedly as a car loomed on the horizon towards us.
"Not yet, it's too early."
"Flash! Flash flash flash!"
It would become a song until finally he would flash the lights and the stranger in the oncoming van flashed his back at us, and I felt satisfied and gleeful.
The simplest, strangest things amused me. He was the Yin to my Yang, or the other way round, I didn't know. He was the bridle to my raging, thundering whinnying though I was mostly babbling to keep the noises in my head turned down to a dull roar.
Chiminey sat in the backseat with Hunt chattering away. Hunt was monosyllabic and unaffected by our road trip and I could tell Chiminey was fretful to be away from home, but also excited to be experiencing new things, seeing different landscapes and smelling all the strange, unsmelled perfumes that went with the rolling hills, rolling sands, rolling roads and highways.
"I don't think we should be doing this," Hunt suddenly spoke up.
Chiminey shut up and I stopped sing-singing. Croydon kept driving, unaware we were carrying the two strays.
"I think it's a perfectly good enough thing to be doing," Chiminey responded.
"Shut up both of you!" I shouted telepathically.
"You just killed a person. You're going to be on the news sometime or rather," Hunt added logically.
I flatly ignored him, and turned to Crow, "Lets stop at a hotel. I'm sleepy."
We hadn't yet stopped overnight anywhere. We hadn't yet touched enough for either of us to exclaim the pleasure of each other's company, and it was gurgling in my womb, pulsing enough just to be a familiar, permanent frustration.
"A few more hours yet to go," he promised.
Juiced up bugs as big as small rodents kamikazed into the windscreen. The thudding sound of the splat was rhythmic and meditative. I switched the wipers on and their watery entrails streaked across the glass in a thin, grey smear.
The road was black and the headlights lit the way. Every now and then another car would pass us and we’d exchange some headlight pleasantries but for the most it was pacifying, a gentle lulling motion sending us both toward calm contemplation and rest. The stars were getting fuller in the sky as we headed out and away from the city outskirts.
Finally we found a hotel in the middle of a small town in the middle of nowhere. We rolled into the sapphire shadow of Saint Jude’s Pleasure Stay Hotel Motel just as the sun was rising. The sunrise split a dim hollow of light out over the long, sprawled dunes and I could taste sand at the back of my throat. The way the sunrise carved the landscape in two was spectacular. You could see the stripe of it across the ground.
I felt ruined.
My neck swallowed a vice-like suck on each vertebrae, the crushing ripple effect of sitting hunched over too long. I stretched and wiggled my toes before I fell out of the car. The paintwork was caked in muck from the long drive and when I looked at Crow, I saw his eyelids were giving him some weighty grief. We needed to rent a hotel room or suite. He reached arms up to the dark sky and let his lungs rip with a groan of maximum volume. I managed a laugh.
"Come on, let's check in."

......................

The hotel room consisted of a separate bathroom, separate bedroom and a smaller kitchen dinette. The bathroom had a shower and a small bath, the bedroom one King sized bed. I started imagining all sorts of perverted goings-on and excused myself to go to the bathroom. He seemed distracted by the television so I assumed he hadn't heard me.
The toilet door was unlocked. Secretly I was expecting that he would come in while I was on the toilet, which he did.
There were no ceremonious stutterings or lingering, shy smiles. Instead he stared at me while I urinated. The flow of piss stopped and I gathered myself together but he still did not stop staring. I was reminded of our first night in the hospital, me alone in the rest room, wishing he would come in. Now it was happening, the intimacy was alive and gushing. The fluroescent bulb sizzled like a Bach concerto.
I blushed.
He stared for a long time and I quickly flushed the toilet then thoroughly washed my hands with peach-scented liquid soap.
He stood behind me. I could see him in the mirror. I stared back at him.
My head hurt as he lifted the back of my skirt, reaching his hand around and stroking the lips of my pussy.
I closed my eyes again. It felt natural, perfect, slow, smooth, wonderful. There were no more words to be said.
I felt his body pressed heavy against mine and wished I was naked so I could feel everything.
I felt his fingers between my legs, shyly feeling around for the curves and the textures he had missed. The expression on his face was altered and I could tell he wanted to get his raging cock inside of me as quickly as he could.
He lifted my skirt up over my back, pressing down so that I was almost bent over the sink. The fingers pried me open easily. Opening my eyes I watched as he hunched over my spine from behind and guided himself into me without so much as a kiss.
My new body betrayed me as the sensation of his penis filled me up.
I opened my legs up to let him in deep, as deeply as I possibly could.
I gasped. We rode in silence, but for only a few seconds. He was close to cumming hard and fast, so I let him fuck me quickly, extraordinarily content with the idea of his pleasure taking precedence over mine.
He pried my thighs apart further and pushed in deeper. I felt the head of his dick pressing hard against my womb. He came with a huge push, his cock opening and the cum came pouring into me. I wanted to feel it hot and deep and he continued to push it up deeper, urging the cum up so that I might be able to feel it in my belly. Then he fell on me, spent and exhausted, his cock plopping out of me and letting the fluids fall out from me and onto the tiled floor.
There was more silence. I let it annoy me like a swarm of pesky flies. Silence, which I wanted so desperately to break with the sounds of my own breathing and my own orgasm. I needed my husband to give me the pleasures he had given me before. I missed it harshly.
"I owe you now," he whispered finally.
I shook my head.
He turned me around and kissed my mouth lightly. I let him.
I felt bruised and sore. But still my body hummed, buzzing like a swarm of hellfire wasps. I felt his tongue sliding in between my lips and licking my teeth as his hand slid up to pull my skirt off.
"These fucking clothes."
Crow muttered as he threw the skirt over near the door. I wondered if our neighbours had heard us, though we'd barely been audible to ourselves let alone the rest of the hotel community. Part of me wished there was nobody in the hotel suite next door to us so that Crow could fuck me in the bath tub.
He quickly locked the door. I didn't understand why, but took it as justifyable melodrama.
He smiled and touched my hip lightly, stroking my belly and then up to my breasts. I noticed my panties crushed in the pile with my skirt, and wondered how he'd taken them off without me feeling it. Then, Ohgod, I finally felt his hand where I needed it most. He began to rub and slowly move his fingers around my swollen, fat cunt lips. He slid one finger between them and began to finger me lightly. I pushed down on his hand, grabbed his wrist and began to fuck his hand. I wanted his entire arm inside me.
I could feel the desire driving me to insanity. He let me ride his palm for a moment or two before he leaned in and kissed me, pulling his grip away. The sensation of his mouth and hands on my body sent me into a shuddering rapture. I closed my eyes and held onto his shoulders for support.
We knelt to the floor of the bathroom and I sat back against the cold tile wall. He spread open my legs before him and leaned down so that he could kiss and fuck me with his mouth. His mouth tickled my thighs and around my pussy, his tongue flickered over the lips of my cunt, then down and up again until his mouth had licked up all the dripping honey juices there.
I watched his face, alight and excited.
I nodded and moaned with the sight, this new stranger bent over me and praying into my body. His hands spread open the lips of my cunt as he ate me out like I was a melon. I cried out and tried to hold in the gasps so I wouldn't yell. I reached out to grab onto something, flailing under the orgasm. Still his tongue wiped and rolled over my cunt, all over, licking and suckling at the swollen lips, the labia, then circling around my hole before dipping into it like a tiny cock.
He buried his face into me. The motions of his face against me sent me into rocking spasms. I came hard and fast into his tongue and mouth. He licked me out, sucked the juices from me, drank from me until I was laying back against the wall, unable to move.
The scent of mould under the sink stung in my sinuses, and I wanted to get up.
He helped me up onto my unsteady feet, then we dressed.
"Hungry?" He asked, casually.
"Mm."
"I noticed a Chinese restaurant on the way into town."
I nodded.
There was a strange, electric tension in the air between us, though it seemed to get left behind in the hotel suite as we shut the door and jumped back into the car. Our intimacy needed no long, sly exchanges of expression. Our sex needed no explanation. It had been the culmination of our meeting, and our months worth of torturous foreplay. There would be more. More to come. More acrobatics, desires, raging humiliations.
In me, he had found his equal.
In Crow, I had found my one perfect source of life.

............................

Windows open all around the house to let the fresh air in. It was lousy timing. The wind smelled like dead canyons. With breezes zinging through red crooks and sandy outlets, and washed up, desert oceans fishless but for the perfume, which cascaded around the legs of mighty stone towers in heavy metal sound blasts. The dusky grit on the glass in the window sheets stained all kinds of little droplet beings into a hollow, flat screen.
The hotel room was silent, but carried in its belly the contents of last night's raging sexual exploits. It was a music that, while already played loud and obnoxious, lingered with an elusive, fresh fluidity. Every inanimate object witnessed the coupling of two young lovers with nimble bones and sore, elderly hearts. The ceiling played the blanket, strewn across our movements, distant and untouching but watching and waiting for the sleepy moments. The floor took on the role of bed under the Queen sized bed under trapieze artistry and roughshod kisses. A mute, unlit television watched from behind its grey gauze veil, took notes and considered all gestures for all kinds of re-enactments later in foreign pornographic video tapes.
I felt grimy by some of the things we'd done. I was guilty, spoiled and soiled - and far more beautiful because of what he'd done to me. There were strands of shame in my breath but also a gaping, blissed out grin. So proud that I was so spectacularly pornstar dirty, and learning more skills as we met again during those unplanned intervals.
He left in the morning, just after 9AM to check out some of the local sites. I was too sore and tired to want to go tourist-hopping, so I watched him slip into the car, shoving his black coat over onto the passenger's side seat and looking for his smokes that were in the left pocket. When he grunted up the rattlebox, I tapped on the windscreen of the car and yelled: "Be good. If you can't be good, be careful! If you can't be careful, do it anal!"
He had laughed because of the experiences we'd pleasantly shared only hours earlier. He winked at me and took dry plumes of sand under receding tyre-rubbers, taking them with him like a thousand dustpuppies eager to clip the ankles of their disciplinarian. Knowing he was still jangling with a dry humour, I laughed too and raced into the hotel room to fix some bar fridge drinks.

............................

"Where's your mother?"
"Overseas."
"What does she do?"
"I think she lays about sipping Pina Coladas by a pool somewhere most of the time."
"She's not interested in what's happening in your life?"
"I think she took my birth and my childhood badly. I can't remember a time she didn't want to be distanced from me. I represented everything about my father she hated or was afraid of, so throughout my entire life I've spent a cumulative 2 months in her presence."
He frowned from the statement as if he disapproved.
"You have to understand, and I don't think you get it or you don't believe me when I tell you, that not many people actually like me. I don't have any friends and hardly any family. Any family I do have these days are either overseas or interstate. I had a friend in high school that lasted a few years. In fact I think she and I are still friends, we just haven't spoken or contacted each other for nearly half a decade."
I laughed to cover up the idea that I was hurt by these realities.
"So, you see, there aren't many people who put up with the shit I churn out. You're going to get sick of my bullshit one of these days, I bet you ten grand."
"You don't have ten thousand dollars to give away."
"Trust me, I wont need it."
My mother's name was Hannah Hermitage. Though you can derive Anna from Hannah, I don't ever recall my parents using it as an excuse for conjuring up my common name. They rarely called me Anna, instead choosing Belle or Bella when luring me into the house with the promise of dinner.
They never married, Hannah and my father. He was Daniel Fry: an obese and cranky, six foot four officer in the Navy. In my early years I remember being frightened every time he came back from working on the ship. His immense "presence" made loud thumping noises around the small house, agile and stern thwacking motions of his hand against tables and doors, deliberate clomping in heavy, surly boots and the promise of a red-faced scowl whenever he saw me.
Daniel was an obtuse man. Sometimes he wore glasses, most of the time he wore sweaty shirts too small for him and big, heavy welder's boots. He smelled like body odour, but it was sweet and not overly powerful. On the rare occasions he hugged me, usually as soon as he turned up at the house, the man squeezed me so tight I often had to complain and struggle for him to let me go lest he crush my little ribcage.
He was hurt by my lack of childlike enthusiasm for his return. I could see it in his face. He had been a nice man. There had never been an inkling of abuse, though he could become violent and angered a smidge too easily. He was sulky and moody, tired and rundown most of the time and also surprised that my mother carried on with her life as if he wasn't there. Hannah still attended social gatherings and nightly parties, leaving me alone with him. We would watch television and order pizza, not talking about anything much other than pizza toppings and annoying commercials.
One day Daniel Fry stopped turning up at the front door. I did wait for him to return, but it was as if he'd suddenly realised how much time he was wasting on coming back to us. We didn't want him, we didn't need or love him. Our tolerating his stay-overs wasn't enough to satisfy him in the end. Instead he wrote my mother short, friendly letters with hand signed cheques inside. He always seemed to have a lot of money to throw around and provided for her very nicely. Hannah was able to buy beautiful elegant dresses, hairstyles and pant suits made from real silk and expensive cotton. She was able to vacation every month or so, going somewhere different, exotic and elusive.
At the age of eight, I sat on her King-sized bed and watched as she stroked her hands through the closets full of clothing, choosing outfits to take with her in the hardy, six-piece luggage set she had open like gaping mouths on the bed next to me. I bounced lightly on the mattress, playing with the nametag on her suitcase.
"Where are you going this time?"
"Japan, Thailand, China and a few places you wouldn't know."
"Try me. I'm good at Geography."
She ignored the remark and picked out a long, black dress from the rack.
"I'm going to master chopsticks even if it kills me!" She joked.
Her hand gestured extravagently in a sweeping wave and her eyes peered back at me as if to see whether I was watching her.
I was.
I watched her all the time. I watched her cook and eat breakfast, watched her watch television, watched her walk and move, studying her face when she slipped into a daydream or fell out of a sad funk. It irked and unnerved her, and I knew it did, so I watched her more intensely just to irritate her.
She had moods, much like I ended up with myself later on in life, that would clutch at her like demons tugging a Heavenly rope. She had great, lurching tides of emotion and personality. Hannah was made for drama. If she had been so inclined do to a hard day's work, she probably would have become a great actress or model. She spoke in rich, round tones like a woman several years out of England, her voice tinted high and low in nervous twitters or nurturing caresses depending on her mood.
I knew every wrinkle in her face, though she had few and her skin was always made up with foundation, blush, powder, lipstick, eyeliner, eyeshadow and more. I knew what each eye gesture meant and how she really felt whenever she was lying to me. When she lied, her blue eyes darkened and became grey. When she was happy, they were more spectacular than a well-lit Topaz. I could always decipher her poorly disguised codes of deception and manipulation. When she dealt with men she would alter her entire personality to suit them. When she dealt with other women, she would play underhanded superiority games with them, all the while making them feel secure and special. With me she had no clue, and would usually be distant, nervous or too affected to behave properly in front of me. She would blush and frown easily at my scrutiny, pushing my face away with her soft hand and elongated fingers.
Her fingernails were always immaculately manicured, most of the time dressed in a mother of Pearl pink polish. Her skin was freckled and moley, but smooth. Men melted under the velvet pattern of those palms. They washed in under her radar, feathering her with hundred dollar bills and all kinds of coloured, shining jewelery.
"Hannah wanted a child, but was shocked and, I think, a little appalled when it turned out to be me," I explained to Crow as we thundered down the highway.
The scenery was mostly massive dunes of hard sand, rock-calloused hills and mountains on the left hand side of the horizon. Every now and then there was a cluster of grey-green where some trees sprouted, but mostly it was a blank canvas severed only by the road.
"Hannah sounds like a bitch, if you don't mind me saying."
"She wasn't. I think I actually might have loved her. She was everything I wasn't. She was plump and tall and needed men to be bigger and taller than her so that she could feel petite. I'm the same. I think it might be one of the few things we have in common. But she had perfect hair and that perfect, seductive, favourable quality of being personable, friendly and womanly. She was so feminine and charming, and there I was, this disgusting, fat, little tomboy, kicking down baby trees and burning holes in my own denim jeans with a cigarette lighter."
Crow laughed.
"She didn't know what to do with me. More than once she tried dressing me up in skirts and girly clothes. She bought me all the makeup in the world, a dozen perfumes, a hundred different pieces of jewellery, all kinds of expensive high heeled shoes, and I didn't know how to work any of it. I don't know. Sometimes I wore a skirt, but never anything past my knees and I did wear a couple of rings, but I couldn't use most of what she gave me. It was her style, not mine."
"I like your style."
"So eventually she stopped wasting her money on me. Sometimes she'd buy me something, just out of guilt, but then she'd jet off to Tokyo or London, and leave me with the neighbour."
"You lived with your neighbour?"
"I never had grandparents, and there was no family living nearby."
I deliberately omitted the fact that I had an Aunt and Uncle living in the same city for the most part and it was an omission, which by all purposes would leave me some dignity and save me from having to explain further blood ties to insanity.
"Our neighbour, Ian Olsen. He was, like, forty years old. He was pretty cool though. He let me hang out there. My mum left him with a few thousand dollars each time she'd go on vacation, which he'd give me half of, and I was allowed to do whatever I pleased. I bought my own food and had some fun for a week or two. Hannah would eventually come home and we'd live in distant proximity to each other for a while, then off she'd go and it would all start over again. By the time I was seventeen I had my own trust fund and was living on my own. Hannah sent me a postcard from Venice saying she wasn't sure when she'd be back and 'Hey, Bella, the house is up for sale!'"
"Jesus."
Hannah came back to visit three times after The Postcard Announcement. By then I'd found my own apartment and was squandering the proceeds of my mysterious Trust Fund, which somehow kept replenishing itself. No matter how fast I spent the money on drugs and nightclubs, there would always be a little more each month so that it accumulated more than what I wasted. I never asked her about the balance, or where the money came from. For all I knew, my father, Daniel, had something to do with it. My indifference didn't seem to harm anybody's sense of purpose and so the spending continued.
When Hannah came back the first time, she rolled up on the doorstep of my apartment at 3AM in the morning. Greeting her at the door in my underwear I slurred something profane and profound at her then invited her in to meet my male companion for the night.
"Male companion, meet Hannah the Slutmaster," I drawled and tripped over the coffee table to land in his naked lap, "Slutmaster General, meet Anonymous Male Companion."
"Bella, what the fuck are you doing?" Hannah asked, steadying her suitcase so that it stood up on its own accord. "Put some clothes on."
"No. Fuck you."
"Are you drunk?"
"Only drunks get drunk. I am not a drunk!" I announced loudly.
My anonymous male companion pulled a coat over his exposed penis and awkwardly excused himself from the room.
Though my eyes were blurred from intoxication, 38 hours worth of wakefulness and celebratory drinks, I began watching my mother the way I used to when I was living with or without her.
She seemed curious. She looked at my body. The last time she had seen me, I didn't have breasts or a female form. To her I must have seemed like a stranger. My hair was longer and nearly unfurled like cushioned curls around my hips, I wore black eye make-up and smudged lipstick and had four piercings in each ear.
I was curious about her. I studied her. She wore a modern outfit made from entirely bland materials. Her hair was shorter and immaculate and from what I could see, starkly blonde. She had lost weight. We both had. Our mutual plumpness was in remission for the time being, and we were both grumpy that the other was thinner.
"What're you doing here?" I snarled.
I tugged at the satin robe that had been thrown over the couch and slid myself clumsily into it, wrapped it around me and leaned forward to take a dope cookie from the coffee table. Someone had spilled a glass of Vodka on the glass surface and it trickled over onto the carpet.
"Curse those dogs!" I shouted suddenly.
I looked up at her.
"What do you want Hannah?"
"I dropped by to see you. It's been three years."
"Has it? Three?" I thought about it. "Wow. What a great mother you are. Three. Have you been counting?"
"Of course I have, Bella," She said in a gentle tone.
She moved to sit in one of the overstuffed chairs.
"Lovely."
"How have you been?"
"Me? Quite mental, actually. They put me in a psychiatric hospital for a few months, then let me out. I don't quite know why."
"Why they put you in?"
"Why they let me out."
"Perhaps you're not as unwell as you think? Or as they thought. You were always very clever."
"I have no idea what that means," I replied honestly.
"Apart from that, how have you been?"
"Dandy."
After a few unnecessary and superfluous conversational meanderings she seemed to resign herself to the fact that she wouldn't get much from me whilst I was in such a state. It was 3AM and she looked partly jet-lagged, so reluctantly made noises about getting to her hotel.
"Yeah. Have a great stay in the city," I snapped as she took her luggage and opened the door.
"Should I give you a call?" She asked.
"If you like."
"I think I have your number."
"I'm in the book. My last name is Fry," I reminded her, "Can you lock the door when you shut it?"
Her eyes were dark grey as they looked down at me. I was pale and gaunt at that time, with large dark circles under my also-grey eyes that I had inherited from Hannah.
"Thanks," I added and got up to follow my bedmate into the bedroom.
I didn't hear her shut the door but by 4PM the next afternoon she'd been gone for some time, as was my anonymous male companion.
She came back another two times after that. Neither reunion was particularly emotional nor significant. Each time she had grown fatter and fatter, while I'd somehow managed to maintain my weight loss for a while until I went cold turkey on the Heroin, when my figure ballooned and I became a lonely, socialite hermit and started inventing imaginery friends to keep me company.

It shook me to the core that whenever Crow asked me about my past I would find myself reliving certain events I thought I had put behind me forever. Instead, I was surprised by their clarity and how raw they still were, puncturing my overly cool facade with disasterous ease. Especially thinking of my parents, Daniel and Hannah and the generous, gregarious next door neighbour Ian, and inevitably my abuser, my Uncle who I'd kept separate from my consciousness for so many years.
Crow could tell it unnerved me, and he seemed to continue with the questions deliberately, as if it turned him on that I became so jittery. He liked to plunder my emotional nature. As a budding Psychiatrist with Psychology diplomas and medical certificates, his nature was firstly to provide comfort and security to someone like me and secondly give me all the opportunities in the world to reveal myself and in some weird psychic purge, heal the wounds from the past.
It was a pity that he was unable to provide any healing or therapy whatsoever. Whenever I came close to the crecendo, the climax, I would shut down and push him away, leaving him cold and unsatisfied.
The conversation about my mother was simply one example of that. I told him very little, but in my head all of the events and thoughts were plundering and guzzling down into my belly, making me ill. He waited patiently as we drove for me to continue the story, to tell him whether or not I'd ever seen Hannah again, but I couldn't go on. Instead I clammed shut and we drove to the next truck stop in silence.
He placed his hand on my knee several times but I was tight-lipped and cold.

..............................

"It'll be sweet," the boy promised.
He motioned against my elbow with a mute hand, waiting for the pills to take. I felt feverish - like a war-hound on a landmine, treading little baby steps to the car. I was unnerved and emotional in the moonlight. My sinuses were peppered up with demonic allergens, like the salty blood of death metal, wet winter feet, the bacterial dust of his hand and wrist.
Pink and red, ruddy eyes, crowning uncertain lips curved down as he kissed them. I was heavy with the tethered and leathery comfort of tears, still trembly when he cruised his tongue in between my teeth; still quivering inside uncomfortably when he guided me back against the doorhandle. The silent expectation of little yelps, breathless uncertainty, a torrid flight into physicality denounced the warmth and solid cradle of inexperience. I could not feel the comfort he'd promised me.
I reached out to grab the velvet sag of the headrest, anchoring myself down in the back seat as he spread my legs wider, slipping his cold hand under the curve of my back and lifting my hips a little. I shifted further down against the door handle when he pulled, and the metallic coolness grazed against my ear. His inexperienced fingers sought out the promise of my hole and when he didn't find it, he poked harder until two knuckles slipped inside. My half naked body was folded and cramped, trapped beneath him and there was very little heat to give the rubbery texture of my flesh much pleasure.
"Can we have the radio on?" I asked quietly as he explored me with clinical fingers.
Half-distracted, wheezing from impatience, he used his now scented fingers to switch the radio on. The song was a fast, techno-metal ordeal, and I closed my eyes to try to meditate myself into an erotic calm. The air in the car was thick with tension and an unsettled, platonic uncertainty. I was drugged up by some of his mothers personal supply of Diazepam which sat in my throat, bitterly and lazily digesting. I was barely under the languid spell of narcotics, though, when he finally began to move against me, his unimpressive cock colliding with my thigh more than once before finding its mark. I wished he would lean in just a little bit to touch the rest of me, or slide his hands around my neck and nuzzle on me like I was something delicious to be savoured. I wished he would kiss my starving lips, just a few little kisses, just a sensual slide of his tongue. When he knew where to point his erection, he pushed hard and broke into me. I gasped and cried out at the sensation of it filling her. I pushed his shoulders back.
"I changed my mind," I muttered, "Get off."
"Shh." he said, opening my teeth, feeding me another valium, "I wont take long..."
Greedily I swallowed the tablet, letting it stick in my throat for a while with the others as he moved inside my cunt back and forth. The first three pills were already beginning to make me a little lightheaded and I could feel the car tyres buzzing beneath us, as if the engine was still running - though it was in reality a silent machine cooling in the darkness.
Relaxing a little bit at a time and staring out the back window, I was able to distract myself competently. The glass in the window sparkled strangely. I felt my eyes closing when they were open, and my knees were nothing more than dead lumps of flesh being positioned uncomfortably - but I didn't care. The numbness was delicious.
The boy began to pump into me, pistoning, then thrusting and trying to build up a steady, desperate rhythm. It was viscously unromantic at best, but this boy was a nice guy otherwise. I owed him several sexual acts, even if it was in his cheap sedan, parked outside my mother's house.
A shadow passed over the back windscreen. The boy grunted unhappily, lifting me up again, and slamming down hard into my numb belly and womb.
I frowned, stunted by delirium.
"Man, I think the cops have found us," I moaned.
A traumatic thundering on the car window jolted the kid out of his stupor, and he flew so fast to cover himself up that I could see the slide of his sleeve in slow-motion. Hiding in the corner of the backseat, he was breathless and grumbling as somebody hit the window again.
I glanced up slowly just as the man opened the passenger door and my head fell back, hair tumbling down to lick the greasy gutter, barely realising it was Ian Olsen pulling me out of the vehicle.
"Hello Ian!" I chirped loudly, dangling in true drunkard fashion.
The boy in the car leaned over me to pull my shirt down and adjust my upturned bra which had unleashed my now-naked breasts. He seemed to blush through his anger at being caught in the act, "Hey dude."
Ian grimaced at the sight.
"Get your fucking arse out of my sight you little shit."
Ian, in all his protective and fatherly manner, grabbed me and pulled me from the car firmly, grabbing me into his arms and straightening me up. I felt him behind me, somehow cradling my full weight. The boy jumped into the front seat, and began firing the car engine nervously.
As the car kicked off, Ian tried to hold me up but my fat, rag doll knees gave way and I almost fell, my lopsided foot slipping into the gutter.
Ian pulled her away from the road, and up toward the house. He could smell the bitter scent of drugs on my breath, and my hair stank of cigarette smoke.
I fell on the grass in the front yard, giggling, and though he tried to hold me in place, eventually he gave up and let me fall where I lay.
I was a mess.
My exuberant make-up was a little muddy and smudged, inexpertly applied to begin with, and my short skirt had ridden up the bare dunes of my smooth, chubby thighs. Though he refused the temptation to look, he knew I'd lost my panties in the car. I would never see them again.
At the time, I was barely sixteen and carried the pleasure of youth in every aspect of my luscious presence. At that time I had started growing my hair so it was long and shiny and barely ever brushed, so that it fell in large clumps of silk. I wasn't a natural blonde but the deception was well instrumented. Even to a man of Ian's age, I wasn't thin and when I fell, parts of my belly and breasts jiggled significantly more than normal, but to him there was, and always had been, something delectable about me. I had known it for years. It was something he'd been unable to hide whenever I stayed with him, though we had kept our relationship strictly platonic.
Looking up at him, I must have seemed perfectly lucid. I blinked slowly, and began to stroke his knee with my free hand.
Ian laughed nervously.
"If your mother finds out, man - you know you're in for shit," He threatened. "As your guardian for the time being, I'm supposed to be looking out for you. She won't like me keeping these kinds of things from her."
Ian looked out over the street landscape, hoping nobody had seen the debarcle.
"I'm meant to be her friend. She trusts me. With every aspect of your life."
He knelt on the dewy grass, his trousered knees dampening up as he knelt over me.
I shook her head against the ground.
"No. You don't tell her anything. That boy was just an arsehole. I'm not into little boys. Besides, she wouldn't care. She's somewhere in Europe, right?"
"Yeah," He murmured, intoxicated by the scent of my perfume, and the heat from my unfinished fuck, "Well. We'd better get you to bed."
My glassy blue eyes shone in the darkness at him, and I opened my wet, fat lips to him.
It took him less than a few seconds to consider sucking on the lips, but before he could legitimize the thoughts, his body leaned in further and let his mouth taste me - just a little.
I know that if I hadn't had tasted like blueberries and cream lip gloss, he rationalised, he wouldn't have wanted to lick the back of my throat with his tongue. And if I hadn't had sucked his tongue so expertly, he wouldn't have let me touch the hardening, sore bulge in his crotch. The cool spark of night was suddenly heated up like an oven when I did, though.
"Ohh."
I moaned as he rolled his palms over me. The Valium had made me glow from the inside out, and I was ripe for the touch.
He gasped at the illicit treasure of the feminine folds of my flesh and the way my skin gleamed against the grass, and how I moaned again, deep and thick as I unzipped his trousers, sliding my hand inexpertly into his boxer shorts.
He grunted when I wrapped my heavy ragdoll legs around his waist. My weight tugged him down, pulling his bony, hard cock closer to the place he knew it shouldn't be. But I clutched him in deeper and quickly began milking him like he hadn't been milked in years. Out of his mind with pleasure, he trapped me beneath him, whirled into me harder and gave it to me when I asked for it.
I felt the difference between Ian and the boy in the car: Ian knew what he was doing and when he touched me he seemed to touch me all over.
I was unable to speak as he leaned in and kissed me again. Unlike the boy, he took great pleasure in kissing me. The soft, sensual licking of his tongue shivered up into my spine and the back of my eyes, and I felt myself moaning in a delighted whimper, all from that one, rare and unique intimacy. Boys never kissed like that.
God, how I loved the way he struggled not to tremble under the pressure of his own pleasure. I felt it reel through his older body, and he perched himself up over me, his arms bulging and groaning under a straining quivering.
I tried to pull him up deeper into me, to fill the empty room in her womb and knew instinctively he was going to cum inside of me, which was what I wanted.
Though I wanted to close my eyes and feel the juice inside me, filling my belly, I kept my lilting eyes locked against his. The depth of intensity in his face as he drank my vision in sent me right over the edge.
An unexpected orgasm burst through - the first brain-crushing surge of pleasure I'd ever had just from having someone inside me. I pulled him down and he fucked me like a king, building it up long and sore until we were both cramping from the searing sensation of friction.
In a slow wind-down, we stopped our night time mutual cavorting and he littered my grungy face with hard, small kisses, staying inside of me for a moment to savour the fit.
Finally he groaned, sliding out slowly so that I flowed like a fountain with the juice of his body.
It was more romantic than anything he'd ever experienced. This girl, he thought, this delicious fuckable girl who had somehow tempted him into making such a rash decision, was the daughter of his friend. It was wrong for him to have screwed her, and in such a fashion.
He didn't know that at that moment, I was considering rolling onto him again, forcing more of his meat into me, but I could barely move. My body tingled, buzzing like an electric light. He didn't know what an impact he'd had on me and how my life had suddenly become so much more interesting now that he was playing such a different role in it.

...............................

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more content - meet Tabari - the women - the whores - the town folk?
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"We can't take a kitten on the road with us."
"We can! He'll be a gypsy kitty. He'll be a roadhound like us. We'll stop every few miles and run around and he can chase the wildmouses and moths and, well, he'll get used to it."
I had it in my head that we'd be a band of outlaws. Now that Chiminey and Hunt had gone, even if it was only a temporary lapse of psychosis, there was the three of us: the kitten, the crow and the bee.
"Annabelle," he started, using the name and tone of voice my mother would use whenever I had done something wrong.
I pouted and held the kitten up in my arms to make it wave at him.
"See how cute?"
He rolled his eyes and seemed to tire of the discussion, and flopped down into the chair. I placed the kitten on his shoulder and he patted it resentfully.
"Entertain kitten, Croydon," I pounced happily around his neck, cuddling both of them, "I'll make dinner."
Crow smoothly lifted the tiny kitten's body from his shoulder and neck and held it to his chest, rubbing it's soft, downy fur.
"I have to call Susan Pitt."
"Whose that?"
"Elise's mother. Just to make sure Elise knows I'm alright. That I'm safe."
I stopped dead in my tracks and looked at him. My belly curdled sourly with the idea that he would make contact.
"Nah, don't do that!" I laughed, "Elise has probably torn up all your photographs."
He was quiet as he reflected on the idea. He stroked Kitten's big, gremlin head and ears. Kitty closed his eyes and pretended he was being preened and washed by his mother.
"Yeah I will ring," Croydon put the cat down on the chair behind him as he stood, letting the creature have the warmth from his seat.
"Crow, no."
I tried to grab him and kiss him, keep him away from the phone but he only let loose my arm and drifted sexily towards the bedroom where he could dial the number.
I stood in the middle of the suite for a moment, watching him, waiting for the inevitable. The kitten beeped, alerting me to its presence. It couldn't jump down from the chair. I swooped him up in my arms and cuddled him. I sat cross-legged on the floor, distracting the kitten with a stray string of cut denim on my jeans near the ankle.
Croydon was quiet as he waited for someone to pick up the phone. I could see him sitting on the bed from where I stood. He was picking at his fingers distractedly, as if everything would be alright. Then he sat up, postured.
"Suse. It's Croydon."
There was a pause.
"How are you?" He asked.
This was the moment. I would have to think quickly, decisively. I thought about the still-nameless kitten and wondered why it deserved to have such lousy luck. To find itself extracated from its pleasantly plump, warm, furry mother's teat, into this hell slide we were about to decend through.
Croydon was smiling. For a brief moment it was a pleasant scene, a happy reunion. Then he was silent.
She told him that Elise's body had been found in an abandoned apartment northwest of the city, murdered, strangled, dead for however many days. I couldn't hear her words but I knew the content of the information before he did.
"Where have you been, Croydon? Where did you go?" She must have asked him.
"Am I a suspect?"
"No, they think it's some mental patient. I don't think they have a clue. But the police want to talk to you, Croydon, where are you?"
"I got a job out of town," he looked at me but I avoided his eye contact. I could sense the change in his expression. It burned through me. I was his job out of town.
I sat on the floor, playing with the kitten as it slid over my knee and under my leg, trying to grab the cotton twine.
After a few minutes, he managed to get off the phone.
If I had expected world war three, it wasn't going to happen. He sat in silence for a moment, eerily calm and subdued. The Croydon I knew would be angry. Furious and disgusted, the Crow I knew would have burst through the doors and sped off in the car, leaving me alone and stranded. Or he would have grabbed the knife and kept me at bay while the police were summoned.
Instead he grabbed his coat.
"You want a burger?" He asked.
I looked up, surprised, "Sure. Yes."
I smiled too brightly, pretending everything would be alright as he did the same.
"I wont be long," he replied and left the hotel room to walk across the road to the burger hut.
The party was over. He was going to leave me.
I stood up, leaving the kitten alone and alienated on the floor. I watched him step down each stair deliberately slowly as if he was a blind man, or in the dark, his feet feeling out for the tip of each step. He knew he was being watched. He walked leisurely. There was no bolting, no running. He would not run, he was too afraid of what I might end up doing. There would have to be high-class, high quality facades erected between the window I stood at, and his goal.
I watched him enter the burger place. He eyed the public phone inside. It was painted bright red and was coin-operated. I wondered how much change he had in his pocket, and whether he would use it.
Blurry, hysterical images of police surrounding my hotel suite filled the air around me. I ducked away from the window. The kitten sat in the middle of the lounge room, still and almost confused. I looked at it.
"I'm sorry kitten," I whispered and treaded softly towards the little ball of fluff.
I picked it up and went into the bedroom, placing him on the bed. He was stuck up there, was too frightened to try to jump down. He circled the edges carefully and I watched. He put one paw over the side, then backed away like a terrified baby tiger cub investigated and overwhelmed by a new environment.
I opened the drawers to look for the knife we'd put in there days before. I couldn't find it. I became frantic. Sweat became a film of grease on my already sweaty body. I panicked. I threw the drawers to the floor, breaking one. Clothes fell.
A noise alerted me to the front door of the hotel suite.
The door opened and closed.
I waited.
"I got you a cheeseburger," he called.
I watched him with a delayed suspicion, watching him for signs of deception. Only a liar can recognise another liar, and I saw it in him. I saw the deceit in him, the manipulative behaviour, and yet I also saw trust. I felt safe in his presence. That he had not called the authorities on me wasn't necessarily a shock or surprise, but it did catch me off guard slightly. It also made me extremely fond of him and extraordinarily happy.
Every day I waited for some news of my atrocity to reach the town we were in, looking out of windows for signs of police or the FBI, but strangely, nothing eventuated. Nothing happened. It was as if he had forgiven me all of my sins, washed me clean from them. It was a clean slate and it felt strange to have somebody love me in such an unconditional way. The world was a strange place, my future had just become a little weirder and strangely, life went on.

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more content - friendship with the girls and Tabari
name the kitten. more kitten stuff.
Croydon talks about his family/the death of his mother
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Tabari held up his arm. The large, brown beefy muscle was striped by scars. We all gazed, myself in amazement.
"You did that to yourself?" I asked, cuddling up to Croydon on the couch.
Tabari nodded silently, his light brown eyes serious. The white parts of his eyes seemed whiter, more glazed than usual. He seemed proud and SERIOUS about the fact.
"With what? A razor?"
"My father gave me a knife when I was a boy. It is my weapon of choice for such things," He smiled ironically.
"What about you Anna," Demetia purred from her corner of the room.
"I'm not into self-mutilation."
"Really? Why not."
"It's a waste of time. If you have a problem, why hack your arms up when you can hack someone else's arms up and feel equally better?"
"You are joking..?"
"Of course I'm joking."
Only Croydon knew I was joking. The others looked at me and saw somebody willing and able to harm rather than be harmed. Only Crow knew about the past, knew of my vulnerabilities and horrifically fragile nature. The curse of Elise's death shifted in the air between us and our dedicated silence to her memory lingered slightly. He would probably never trust those sorts of stupid jokes again. He would probably never trust me again.
He spoke up, suddenly, as if attacking me for my comment.
"When I first met you, you had needlemarks all up your arm. Bruises."
"Shooting up is an addiction, not self-mutilation. There's a difference," I looked at him indignantly.
"Is there?"
"One's a drug addiction."
"The other is a pain addiction," Demetia said.
"Mmm pain," I smiled and nuzzled Croydon's armpit.
"You prefer someone giving you pain," Tabari said.
Croydon pinched me to prove it. I laughed and pinched him back.
"There's a fine line, remember."
"Mmmm," Tabari murmured, watching us intently.
"Besides. I wasn't shooting up that much. And only that last time in order to meet Crow."
"You took heroin to meet your boyfriend?"
"Were you a dealer, Crow?"
"No," I laughed, "He was a nurse at a Psych Hospital. I needed some Bluejuice Courage to get me onto the roof of the hospital so that I would jump. They would admit me and I would meet him and make him fall madly in love with me."
"You were going to jump off the roof of a building? How did you know the jump wouldn't kill you?"
"I didn't know. But it was all I could think of to get in."
"That's very dangerous," Ruby said.
"It's very manipulative," Demetia said.
Her voice was tinged with accusation - but it was a fact about myself I had always known. I was manipulative. It was the source of my power. I knew what I needed to have, who I needed, in my life, in order to fulfil my destiny, and there was never room for error or alternatives.
"My meeting Crow was entirely manipulated, I'm not ashamed of admitting that."
"That must feel good to hear, Crow. Knowing this woman, this insane female, would risk death just to get into your life," Tabari said in his deep, dark, vague voice.
Croydon didn't reply. He was staring intensely at Demetia and she back at him, though I was the one nestled under his arm. I had a feeling there and then that they were attracted to each other, and Tabari to me. Tabari was intruiged by me, and Demetia interested in Crow, wanting to find out perhaps what it was about him that had driven me to taking such risks. Perhaps she wondered if there was something special about him.
It was silent for a while until Tabari began to roll another joint. He tapped on an antique tin he said had bullet dents in it from WW2. The high-clink pitch from his fingernail against the metal was specifically orchestrated to garner my attention. He then opened it and fingered out a roll of potent hash, moulding it into a joint.
"Hash is the golden grass of heaven," Tabari murmured as he lit it.
"We don't do drugs," I replied.
"We?" Crow asked.
He easily bypassed me and leaned over to take the joint. He sucked it back into his lungs, igniting the end so that it crackled and sparked. I watched in amazement as the heavy, sweet smoke exhaled, diminished, from his throat. He coughed, jostling me.
"Who said "we"?"
Crow offered me the cigarette.
I was hesitant and not less than a little scared. I hadn't taken any drugs since before meeting Crow and I had calculated a link between even the remotest amount of drug abuse with the existence of my imaginary friends. They had both been gone for the longest time - weeks now - and I was scared that even a little hash might bring them back into the room, back into my head.
I hesitated for a moment but felt safe with Croydon at my side, and took the joint.
"Well," I smiled for the cameras, "I just assumed you didn't."
I inhaled.
I inhaled again.
Exhale.
I sucked it up. Inhaling the tough scent of hash, driving it down deep into my throat, lungs and belly, it was as if a steel trap split down over my eyes. I closed them, pressed my skull back into the curve of my lover's arm, and let the quickly burning spliff send thrashing waves of stoned dreaminess into me.
Nothing happened.
Waiting for the stoned, heavy dregs of intoxication, I rocked my head from side to side loosely. There were movements beyond my body but I took no notice.
A world might have existed outside of my consciousness, but I was indifferent to it. I floated slightly in an imaginery breeze where there was no movement, just a splendid hovering.
Still nothing happened.
I sat up again, lifting my heavy head from the back of the couch where I was suddenly sitting alone. I searched the room. Croydon had disappeared. How long had I been dreaming? It was only seconds, surely! Who had taken the joint from me?
The side of my face was numb. I prodded it with my thumb and fingers. I felt nothing. It was as if I was made purely of spirit.
"Crow?"
"He's in the other room," Came a deep voice.
"Who's that?"
"Tabari."
I smiled. I couldn't see him. The whole place was so dimly lit I could barely see the walls.
"Tabari who?"
"Tabari Me."
I heard a distant chuckle.
"Where's Crow?"
"Getting stoned," He replied.
"Then we should too."
"I think you already are, Anna B."
"I don't think so."
"You sound stoned."
"Do I?"
"Mmm-hmm."
"I want to get more stoned."
"You want something harder?"
"Yes," I replied, instantly.
I wanted to get so wiped out that when Crow came back, he would feel sorry, he would feel guilty for accepting the drugs in the first place. He would be ashamed for leaving me alone.
I felt something solid and hard around my waist, then the gravitational force of pulling, lifting. It took me a moment to realise Tabari was lifting me from the couch. He was huge. My head lolled slightly into his neck. He smelled like ancient Patchouli. My forehead touched the stubble of his short hair near his fat, rolled flesh neck.
My toes didn't touch the floor once as he took me into another room. It was cooler in there and I knew we were alone.
"It's been a long time since I saw a girl like you," Tabari said, his voice hot in the mirror of my head.
I saw the steam from his mouth like colours in the darkness. I didn't understand what he meant by that remark. I assumed he meant a girl as weird as me, as I always considered myself stranger than other girls.
He lay me down on the edge of the bed. My knees were parted, my skirt riding up around my thighs. I could feel the cool breeze between them.
Sounds of moaning came from the room next to ours. In my head, I could see Demetia's mouth around my husband's cock, her hair tangled up in his pubic hair, her head bobbing up and down professionally, deep-throating him in a way I knew my gag reflexes would never allow.
In my head, I hovered up near the ceiling, watching them from above. Ruby held Crow's hands down against the pillows so that, while he barely struggled, he couldn't help but receive the expert blowjob. I saw Ruby kissing his mouth.
In my head I knew Tabari was going to make love to me, too. It was a set up. A group seduction to bring us both into the fold. I imagined all sorts of scenarios.
They wanted us in their group. I would become a girl in their workforce. I would be initiated by the biggest, the most powerful man - Tabari. He would pin me down and rape me willingly, tackle me if he had to, and I would be his. I would belong to him just as Crow would belong to the girls.
This was all in my head.
I waited for the rubbery, hot round nub of Tabari's penis against my mouth but nothing happened. The door closed, and I was left alone, dreaming in the dark.
.....................
In the clear light of day, everything had changed. We were all sober and Croydon was back at my side, nibbling at my hair and nuzzling into my wrist as if nothing had ever happened, which perhaps it hadn't. Tabari, Demetia and Ruby walked us back to our hotel suite where we had a few drinks and watched television for a while, ordered pizza, and had an innocent night of socialising.
It was not something I was used to. Though I used to club myself into decadence several days a week before I had met Croydon, I wasn't accustomed to intimate social gatherings with only a few people, where one-on-one conversations took place and ordinary body language were the norm. I was still convinced Tabari had a thing for me, and Demetia and Ruby were hookers, but I said nothing. They held no danger and I felt reasonably contented in their company. The girls especially had an unusual reluctance to go home and the way they both looked at Croydon was beyond my usual acceptance, but I let it go.
Eventually, by the early morning light, they would be on their way, and Crow and I would curl up in our hotel bed and sleep off the excesses of caffeine, drugs and pizza.

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By the time we reached the bottom of the ladder, I was panting and my legs and arm muscles ached nicely. The salty film of sweat on my forehead and on my body was already cooling me down as the temperature so deep beneath the earth was at least fifteen degrees cooler than it was outside. I felt almost chilled and there was a strange breeze that seemed to waft through the tunnel like an adventurous ghost.
"This is amazing," I whispered, not sure if my voice would work so far underground.
The sound was dead, there was no echo, despite the tunnel moving forwards beyond my line of vision. Vacuous energy filled the hole. I grabbed the ladder to steady myself as Tabari handed me a water container and I took a swig just for the sake of it. I wasn't nearly exhausted yet, nor even thirsty, but it seemed like the polite and proper thing to do.
"You ready to start?"
"Sure."
He picked up the black, canvas bag and swung it over his shoulder as we began to travel into the dark hollow mine tunnel. Tabari had to hunch over slightly, his tall shoulders nearly grating the roof of the cavern.
Torchlight made the journey seem dreamlike. Dizziness began to thump in my head so I grabbed hold of the looped buckle of his backpack to stay near him. Tripping a couple of times on small, unstable stones, rocks, or just poor tunnel surface, he felt my weight shift behind him but not once asked if I was okay. We kept walking into the darkness, and the further we walked the warmer I got.
I turned my torch up higher and the place lit up a little more. I could see markings on the walls of the tunnel. People had been there before us. Probably as recently as six months prior.
"Jamie Loves Sandy" had been scrawled into the dirt and accented with yellow markers, then "Even without hope, all is not lost", "Jason has a small prick" and "Kendrick is a Cunt."
These scribings made me laugh. They were like modern day scripture, buried deep beneath the ground where only a select few would ever find them. I wanted to stop and write something significant about Crow, but Tabari seemed endlessly enthusiastic about reaching his target, whatever it was.
We stepped over discarded panties, a pair of nylon stockings and even a pair of boots, all scattered within hundreds of metres of each other. Pieces of dirty, old, weathered paper lay embedded in the hardened mud, even though there was no weather where we were walking.
Musky air tickled my nose and burnt my throat. The dankness was sublime. I began to cool down again, wondering whether it was the atmosphere inside the tunnel that was regulating my temperature or something else, something within me, a sixth sense or a primal instinct. I wondered if we were getting closer to our destination.
Tabari slowed his pace and I in turn slowed mine as we reached a junction. The tunnel split at right angles like an intersection into two routes. For the first time I was nervous.
"Which way?"
"Right."
"What's Left?"
"We can come back this way and I'll show you," He said, turning right.
I followed blindly, shaking my torch as I anxiously chased his heavy tread and well-worn heels.
"Who would build mines like these? What was mined here?"
"I'm not sure," he lied.
We walked for approximately another half an hour. There were no signs of life now. The air was empty, dull and heavy. It skinned my physical strength but we pressed on.
Finally we came to a room. It was distinctly carved to resemble a large, square room. I felt like I was in a game of Dungeons and Dragons, and looked around me for some sign of a treasure map, chest or gold key. Instead there were three wooden boxes that made for almost comfortable seating, and in the middle of the room a circle made out of small stones, as if a fireplace had once raged there. I wondered where the chimney was, had someone tried to light a fire, they probably would have asphixiated themselves, with no funnel for the smoke to escape from. Inside the circle of stones there were pieces of old cloth and paper, but they were so flimsy that they turned to dust as I scooped them up.
"This is cool," I said.
"This is it. Somebody built this room for something. We don't know what."
There was a rank smell in the room, and I instantly thought, "Sex!"
He smiled, "Yes, we've considered that possibility."
"Did you bring me here for sex, Tabari?"
"Hah. No. Just for curiosity."
I sat down on one of the wooden boxes and shone my torch around the room. There were scrawlings all over the walls again. This was the climactic end to my journey underground and I wasn't overly disappointed.
He sat down too and took a swig from the water bottle, then handed it to me and I gulped down a few, cool mouthfuls. It was sweet, clear water, wetting the most parched inner parts of myself as I realised I was virtually dehydrated.
Coolness resonated between us. The walls acted like calming cradles, confining me and keeping me safe. I could not fall, topple or stumble, and if I did, I would not fall far. I felt eerily protected, being so far away from everything and everyone, even Crow - though I wanted desperately to share that moment with him.
I scanned the walls. All forms of handwriting and scribble adorned the hardened dirt. Some phrases were carved into the earth, others were spray-painted and graffittied.
"Candy Jenkins, 1982." ; "I am not in a warzone. I am the war." ; "Paul ejaculated here, 1990." ; "Stranger." ; "You are standing in a mirror." ; "Ingrid, '87" ; "I came here for salvation. All I got was this lousy Tshirt."
I laughed.
"Paul ejaculated here too, dumbass" ; "Janice Otherington, 1977, age 22." ; "You are currently standing in Paul's ejaculate."
"That Paul has a lot to answer for."
I smiled at Tabari.
"Keep reading," He said.
I did. I scrolled the torchlight over the grafitti, expecting to find something worthy of note, something to make up for the hour long journey we'd taken. There were childish stick-figures, diagrams of weird symbols I'd never seen before, illustrations of people having sex in various positions - a lot of immature evidence of humanity. There was a small poem:
"Slip on the moonlight, Hover like a dim lamp, Submit your mind to endless dreams, And fade all life away."
It was cute, and perhaps I took it more to heart than I would have, had it been published in some lazy library upstairs in the real world. I read it over and over again, thinking that it was what I had come to find, but it left me empty and restless.
I sighed loudly.
There was a long silence. I shone my torch near Tabari so that the residual glow from the light made his large face visible. We stared at each other for a while. It was quiet.
"I feel like your the first man friend I've ever had who I haven't had sex with."
His expression glinted in the darkness and he appeared confused.
"That's important,"I added, "Trust me."
"It is, I understand. Not that I'm not attracted to you."
"Nor I to you. I am. Really. But, I feel like I'm getting better. Growing. Healing."
"Because we haven't fucked."
I nodded.
"That's important," he reiterated.
"Yeah."
"And if you wanted to, and if you asked me, I would willingly oblige to have sex with you."
I laughed.
"If just to stunt your healing process."
"You'd be amazed at the things I've done."
"Probably."
"Do you want to know?"
I imagined confessing my sins to him. Telling him about Chiminey and Hunt, and all the others. Telling him that I had strangled a woman to death. That I was a criminal.
Then what?
"I want to know only what you want to tell me."
"Is that what this place is? A confessional?" I asked.
"It is what you want it to be."
"You're being delightfully vague."
His eyes slipped under the radar of my torchlight for a moment, and I couldn't see the expression on his face, so I moved the beam away and towards another corner of the room.
"You assume I don't know things about you," He said from the darkness. "You assume I don't watch television."
My heart nearly crashed through my chest, bludgeoning my ribcage. I suddenly couldn't breathe. He knew?
"I was on television?"
"A week ago. On the news. It wasn't local."

"Did you bring me here to punish me?" I blurted out, stupidly.
He scoffed, "Don't be naive."
I breathed quickly, "Then what?"
"I bought you here to show you this room."
His calmness unnerved me. I was becoming jittery, a luminous, furious angst boiled my blood.
"Why? What the fuck is so fucking fantastic about this stupid fucking little room!" I snapped.
"You haven't found it yet."
"Found what?"
"Look. In the corner, there."
He shone his torch in the corner nearest me. I hadn't looked down there, nearest to the floor, close to my right boot. I lit the corner with my own torch and squinted. There, carved into the almost petrified dirt, it was. Written clearly with a legibility the other pieces of graffiti lacked, it was almost perfect.
"Read it aloud," Tabari said.
"The Crow eats the Bee.
The Bee stings the Crow.
The mutual destruction."
I recited the quotation as if I were about to collapse. Though the words were spoken, I didn't really hear them. I'd heard them before, in another form.
"I want to get out of here."
"Are you sure?"
There was no time to react. My belly contracted. My legs grew weak and my knees buckled. I vomited the contents of my stomach, which was mostly just water, on the ground. My throat gagged, convulsed, my stomach folded over on itself and I gagged, dry retching this time.
Tabari grabbed me and held me from behind.
"It is alright."
"No," I gasped, "You have to get me out."
My throat lurched again. He held me while I vomited again, suddenly violently ill. Tears fell from my eyes, running down my cheeks onto the ground where a congealed pile of spit and bile had formed.
He collected my things, and took my hand, and we raced from the room blindly through the tunnel. We ran and I stumbled. He picked me up and tried to carry me, lifting me from under my armpits, dragging me through the tunnel out into the dry, dusty Summer air. He didn't know why I was suddenly so overwhelmed and neither did I. I just felt sick.
It was a sickness that continued for nearly ten days.

.....................

I had a fever. My insides were burning up. My brain was broiling under the pressure of heat, even though the air conditioning was on and they had cold towels stroking my legs and arms. I sweated until the sheets were sodden. I pissed myself. I vomited. I began my period, an unusually heavy bleeding cycle that continued for the full ten days of my illness.
A local doctor, a friend of Tabari's, took blood tests and looked me over.
"It's probably a virus," He said, "I could prescribe antibiotics but they probably wouldn't do any good."
I tried to clamber out of bed, but they just placed me back on the steaming wet mattress. I felt my stomach clenching. My mind was hallucinating all sorts of ugly monstrosities. The ceiling was covered in parasites, tiny little buglike creatures and large dustmites. They clicked as they swarmed over my head, falling sometimes into my hair and eyes, crawling into my nose and when I opened my mouth to try to breathe, they slithered in. Mites filled my throat and wiggled through the holes in my teeth, worming into the cavities, choking me.
The bed was made of icy, slippery worms that crawled over my knees and between my toes, licking my ankles, then slithering cruelly in between my legs into my cunt. I cried out again at the repulsive sensation it gave me. I struggled and people around my bed held me down. They didn't understand.
The windows were shards of blue ice when I was shivering. I grappled with Croydon's hand but it slipped from mine like fish. I couldn't get a hold. I was panicking.
I saw myself inside him, inside his belly, inside the monster, diving through stomach acid, climbing up through his throat, my fingers stinging him like needles. Over and over. Trembling wearily I cried out in my sleep, but wasn't sleeping. I heard him through the muted sounds of delusion and delirium.
"Anna, it's alright, please, shhh."
He tried calming me, soothing me with cold compresses and paper towels. At one point, we sat in a cool bath together, and still I was engulfed in flames from within, shivering and sweating and crying out in pain. He held me tightly but it only made the symptoms worse. Eventually he understood and left me alone. I didn't see him again. I don't know where he went, whether he was just in the other room, or if he had taken off without me. Gone away, as far away as he could so that I might get better.
I flailed for another three days until finally the fever broke.

.....................

When I opened my eyes and felt the soothing relaxation of wellness, Tabari was wiping my brow.
He smiled at my lucidity.
"Good afternoon."
I gurgled something and he helped me take a few sips of water. It tasted bitter. I tried to lift my head but was tired and it was too difficult so instead I lay, comfortably on the bed for a moment.
"Where's Croydon?"
"He'll be back soon."
"Where is he?"
"Shhh, just try to stay comfortable. Your fever's broken."
"Tell him to come home," I begged, "I need to kiss him."
"I will. He is. He's coming."
I closed my eyes and drifted off into a well-earned, dreamless rest.
.....................
Croydon was watching television when I woke up.
I stumbled out of bed and walked to the door to look at him. His expression suggested that something had changed. I didn't know what it was. He was angry. Tormented. Something.
His eyes were transfixed on the moving images on the television. Splattered, animated, triumphant displays of humanity dancing and running, cycling and hitting balls with big, wooden bats, umpires gesturing, crowds cheering.
I broke the dam.
"Crow."
He didn't look back at me. I wandered over to the couch, my legs still unsteady.
"Crow..."
"What?"
"Don't."
He ignored me, fixedly staring at the screen.
Waiting a minute or two, excruciating time lapses between thoughts for me, I fondled the remote control from the couch, not changing the station but playing with the rubber buttons.
"Don't,"I repeated louder.
"Don't what!"
He was irate. Tense and angered, entirely frustrated at the situation.
"Don't fuck this up."
"Fuck off."
"Don't fuck this up!"
He jumped up from the crumpled chair.
"Fuck what up? The fact that you're wanted for a murder in another state? Or the fact that everyone knows?"
"This, this, us, our thing."
"It's already fucked up, Annabelle! Whatever we had, it's gone."
"No, don't do that."
He stormed into the bedroom and picked up the telephone. I raced in after him. The kitten was asleep, curled up in a ball on one of the pillows. Croydon held the phone handle up threateningly, keeping me at bay so that I wouldn't step too close.
"You killed someone! It's all over the news!"
"Are you telling me you didn't know!?"
"I didn't know!" He screamed in disbelief.
"Bullshit!" I yelled. "You knew one day this would come back and bite us in the ass!"
"You're the most fucked up person I've ever known...!"
"Then you are too. We're the same."
"We are nothing alike."
"We are so alike. You have no idea, you have no idea what we are. When you lie to me, when you have fists full of whore tits and stinking, rancid pussies, you want me to be standing in the corner, watching, ready to arrest you for some kind of deviant, criminal behavior. You wanted me to catch you."
He wanted the drama. He wanted punishment, reward, sacrifice, worship. He wanted to demolish my mind, then help to rebuild it, and then he wants to respin the cycle and do it all over again. Me standing in the corner, ready to stab him or stab her or go into a frenzy of jealousy and rage, violence,anger, fury.
"You're an illusion too. You're manipulative. You rely on your prowess as a deceiver, not to get what you want, but to see what happens."
I pointed my finger at him.
"We're the same. When you think something I'm thinking the same thing at the same time and I can read your mind, I can read your thoughts. Your brain is trapped inside mine and its only companion is my brain. They're connected in a way nobody else will ever be able to connect."
He would have flashes of intense thoughts like sawmills. Flurries of mood and panic, passion and perception, and everything alters as his brain chemistry altered. I was the same. We were both cut brutally, beautifully and crudely from the same cloth.
"I knew it. From the moment I saw you hopping rocks in the moonlight with Archangel Michael, I knew you were different. You shine luminous with that extraordinary male brain, clicking over like a primal machine. Eat, fuck, sleep, repeat. You don't care what you eat. You don't care what you fuck or where you sleep. But you care about me. And you want me in your world, you want me to know you. You want me to know about Elise. You know I killed her. You've known all along. You knew it would come out eventually, that this would happen. Reality would finally hit us."
Recognition of truth buzzed in his blue eyes, like forest fire bulbs lit up in a dank kitchen. The room bulged silently between and beneath us. Listening. The whole world was hushed, eavesdropping on our skeletons as they clanked noisily from the closet.
"You drop little hints, little clues, wondering whether I'll pick up the scent. You have sex with Demetia and Ruby and Joyce and you come home smelling of their insides. And you think you're being clever, trying to camouflage yourself under what is essentially obvious."
My eyes dropped towards the sleeping kitten for a moment. Thinking. Psycho-analysing myself as I droned on. I locked eyes with him again in a sincere exchange.
"And maybe I like it."
My little, glum smile.
"Maybe I like it because it makes us more alike. All this time I've been trying to hide myself from you, duplicitious and manipulative, and all the while dropping tiny hints too, breadcrumbs, hoping one day you'll have the courage to confront me on it, but you never do, and I get happier and more in love with you and more angry because I know that is exactly what you're doing to me."
Croydon licked his lips. They were dry despite the humidity. The overhead fan, with its muted breathing, whooshed over our heads, threatening us that if we got too tall, it might scalp our skulls and leave us headless.
"Then you're the fucking genius in this mess."
"We both are. We play off each other, subconsciously, consciously, in our sleep. In bed, dreaming. I put my hand on you, and somehow, in your sleep, you know where to put your hand on me too. We're geniuses together."
"I knew about Elise," He admitted, tears sparkling, suddenly appearing like stars.
"I know."
"And I still came with you," he started crying. His mouth contorted slightly. He bent forward, hunched over, the phone in his hand.
"Because it's what you wanted. You wanted me to get rid of her, you thought about it, you wished for it."
I took the phone from his hand gently and placed it back in its cradle on the bedside table.
"And it's what the universe wanted. We were meant to be out here. With Tabari, with Demetia and Ruby. They're nobodies in this story. But you and me, we're the main characters. We fit together because we're both insane. We're here together because we're the Bee and the Crow. We're going to destroy each other because it's what we both want, what we both expect."
Leading him to the bed slowly, he buried his head in his hands and cried - but they were crocodile tears. Tomorrow they would be moleules of salt, crimping in between the fibres in the already clotted carpet and nothing more. Meaningless. Still, in loving motions, I kissed some away, drinking in his grief, the guilt he carried.
"I'm sorry," he whispered croakily, his throat clogged with uncertainty.
"Tell me you love me," I demanded softly.
"I love you."
He met my eyes with sincerity and began kissing my lips, opening my mouth with his well-formed operatic tongue.
"I Love you," he said again with more vehemence. Croydon wrapped his arm around me, pulled me back on top of him on the bed so that I straddled him.
"I need you Crow," I replied with all certainty, "You are my archangel. Everything. Everything," I added and kissed the saltiness of his neck. There were no tears in my eyes. Not for him, not for Elise's memory, or even the fear of being caught by the authorities. He was with me, not against me. He would always choose me. He was mine.
But words are fake, and tears crocodilian in nature.
The irony of the situation was that I really was quite mental. The boy who cried wolf resided healthily inside my head. He liked to dance and ramble there through green grasses sometimes, making great use of my brain for a bed and my eyes for firelights. I called out several times about several wolves, so when it finally happened that I managed to crash like so many bloodied, lead balloons, Croydon took it as just another one of my moments.

.....................
You care about him
He loves me.
I know that.
He loves everything about me, he knows what I did and he still loves me.
You find that endearing. Seductive.
He knows me.
He knows too much about you.
I like that.
It's not good for you.
But I like it.
You have to do something. You know what it is that needs to be done.
Why would I sabotage myself for the sake of suspicion?
Suspicous. You are suspicious.
I can battle suspicion.
It will eat at you. Until you can't bear it. Then you're likely to do something illogical.
I wont.
You have to. Before it gets out of hand.
I can't.
You have to.
I don't want to.
It needs to be done.
I don't want to do have to.
YOU don't have to... We'll figure something out.

.....................

I can hear him in the hotel room. I sit at the mirror, brushing the curls out of my hair. It is me but it is not me. I disassociate. I hover above my own body, unlinked from the skin, shimmering with a desperation as the other part of me, the solid, logical, realistic part sits at the dressing table dragging bristles through curls.
He comes into the bedroom. He sees me and bristles like an animal, his body reacting physically to me. I can feel it through the air. Red blotches feast like fire ants on my eyes. I stop brushing my hair. He comes over with two brown paper bags, puts them on the dresser. They are greasy at the bottom and I can smell their spicy contents.
He touches the curve of my neck, pushing my hair away from the flesh. My hair has grown, symbolic of the distance our relationship has traveled. I cock my head to the side and let out a small sigh to let him think I am happy. It works. The sweet little murmur from the depths of my vocal chords makes him smile.
He says something about the heat outside. My eyes close. Sweat transfers from his fingers to my neck.
I stand up to be close to him. I look him in the eye. His eyes are blue. Roasted gas-fire blue.
"It's hot outside."
"Hot," He agrees.
I am sleepy suddenly. My eyelids are heavy and my thought patterns scrambled like goopy eggs. My heart beat slows right down and I am faint.
"I don't trust you."
"Go outside, check for yourself."
He moves to turn away from me and go the kitchen but when I move, he stops. I have stepped between him and the door.
"Not about the weather," I add.
There is a silence between us.
"You don't trust me? About what?"
"Elise."
He bristles again. The name sparks in him like flint.
"I thought ... we'd come to an agreement."
"I've decided I don't trust you."
His brain races, head full of thoughts. What does this mean, what does this revelation mean to him, his safety, his security.
"Right."
<<>>>
"How do I gain your trust?"
"You can't."
My hand raises the scissors from the table. I hold them there, suspended in mid-air. He sees them. He sees my hand. His eyes move from the silver blades in my fingers to my eyes. He looks into me. Betrayal and hurt find their pasture and they begin to frolic between our eyes.
<<>>
"I love you."
"Don't pout about this. This is just ... I have to do it."
"So do it already."
I am breathless. There is no breath in my throat, in my lungs and I am almost gasping without moving. I am flailing, but stony cold and hard as a rock, stiffened under the weight of my demand. Tears fill in my eyes and white swirls of water fill my vision. My heart aches. I don't want him gone. To lose him would be a loss I couldn't handle.
<<<>>
I cried out.
The scissors slipped easily into his chest, between ribs. Like greased silver knives the blades, parted slightly, sliced through his beef like it was oil and butter. He cried out and pushed me off, throwing me on the bed.
As I fell and bounced on the mattress, he fell against the wall and grabbed the handle of the scissors, pausing before pulling them out and letting the blood gush freely. The bloodied scissors were thrown across the room and hit the corner of the wall and dressing table, spattering little droplets of Crow blood on the mirror and wallpaper.
I saw him, his hand creaming up with crimson, and began to cry. I sobbed on the bed as he ran to get something to help slow the blood flow. When he came back, a towel covered his wound and he held it in tightly.
"Fuck!" He yelled at me.
"You've been stung!" I laughed.
In my head I saw him getting the scissors and wetting them with my blood, doing horrific things to me with them, raping me with their sharp blades. I buried my head in the pillow, demolished by my own evil.
Noise. There was noise all around me. The sounds of airplanes taking off, gunfire, fireworks, smooth, crunching gears of massive engines, his yelling. It continued on in my ears, behind my eyes, for a long time until I fell into unconsciousness and slept.

I wondered if my sleeping was a coping mechanism. When I woke up, he'd been to the local surgeon and was already back with seventeen stitches in his ribs, but I didn't know that. I thought I was alone in the suite.
Sleepy, exhausted, I was barely able to get up off the bed. The bloody towel was on the floor, I saw it laying there as I slung my weight over the side of the mattress. I eyed it, remembering what I'd done. His blood. How would I get the blood out of the towel?
I gripped the wall and held on. I stumbled and slobbered as if I had thirty vodkas freezing up my belly and my brain. When I wandered out into the hotel room, he was sitting shirtless in the recliner, watching cable television football with a cold beer and his lower chest bandaged in a clean, white square.
I held onto the doorframe for dear life and looked at him, drunkenly.
"Did you go to hospital?" I slurred.
"Don't fucking talk to me."
Nodding, my loose neck tinkled with little groans of discomfort. The back of my head ached, blistering searing hot pain when I massaged the tender spot near the nape of my neck.
"Did you hit me?" I asked weakly.
"You hit the bed head when you fell."
"Did I hurt you?"
The silence was an angry response.
"I'm sorry, Croydon."
He held up his hand to shut me up.
"Annabelle, seriously. Fuck. Off."
"He doesn't love you," Chiminey said in my ear. "You can see. There's no loyalty there whatsoever."
Hunt got up from the bed where we'd been sleeping, and he came up behind me too, "You tested his loyalty. Look. You got your answer. You should be ashamed of yourself."

Humming in my ears. Burnt baby breath in my mouth. A forest fire in my chest. My fingers webbed with cobwebs, furry and tangled.
I had taken three times my normal dosge for my medication and was found frothing and rolling around on the bed, taking off my clothes and singing operettas to the witches that were invisible in the room with me, trying to cure me with spells.
Crow came into the crowd, though it was just him and me in the real world.
"Oh my god, are you okay?" I slurred.
"Yeah I'll be fine."
"You have to believe me, I didn't mean to hurt you. They had some scissors......"
"We all know the story!" Barked Chiminey from the sidelines.
"Holes!" I rolled over on the other side of the bed," If you're not careful, they will put holes in you, holes everywhere."
"Holes? Talk about holes. Like the one you put in ME," Croydon snapped.
"I put a hole in you?" I gasped, disbelievingly.
"Yeah you put a hole in me. With a special little 8 inch fucking pair of scissors."
"Oh honey I'm sorry, it was a mistake, they must have meant it for someone else. Not you."
"Well I'm the one with the 7 inch slice out of me."
"Then be careful, for the little people, the little metal people. some of them dressed up in uniforms and clothing, rags and carring little suitcases or briefcases or backpacks. They're small, about half an inch, shorter, smaller. They come into your holes and migrate. Like little festive communiites. They set up sjhop in your veins and stitches and styatr breeeding. And then they breed and they breed little demons. Then you're fucked."
"Sure, ok."
"You're fucked man, then you're fucked!"
He was silent for a long time, watching me. I felt his nervousness grow as he realised there was something wrong.
"I'm fucked now because I have tiny people invading my wounds?"
"They're very interested in your open wound becase i made it and it's sacred to them."
"Sacred? What you did to me, with the knife in my chest, that was sacred?"
"Not to me. I'm not into all that. That was an accident. But, Crow, once they're breeding, you can't stop them. There's no anitobiotic that can erase them. The demons just grow and grow in th eperfect environment, te pergect demon ecology - the human body. they get real religious in there, using your untapped sources of logic and spirituality which has a function. then they get bigger and bigger and take over major parts of your body like your stomach or your brain or kidneys. Then you're screwed because now you're run by a savage team of invisible little demons that have taken out your independence, your desire."
I could barely blather, I was slurred and stuttering in such a nonsensical stream of drivel that he had stopped listening to me.
"You'll see. Your wound will clear up faster than usual, quickly. That's their nanotechnology, building their citities inside you. and they can live live in side you for.. forever if they want, then you get diseased, like me."
When I opened my eyes, I was alone in the room but I could hear him talking in the distance.
Chiminey fell on the bed beside me and whispered something in my ear.
"It's all going down, now. It's all going down."

We we in the hospital ambulance.
I was tied up with leather bindings and buckles. He was at the end of the bed. I rolled around trying to get out of the tethers but he just watched on, distanced from me. Objective.
I had to let him know before the world came to an end and I'd go to hospital prison and he'd go back to his life, and we'd be divided by time and space and the universal conundrum of distance. I had to let him know. I sat down on the bed, twisted arms in my bindings, crossed legs to look at him.
"Crow, you betrayed me, but that's okay. I love you. I love you, Crow. Everything about you I love you. You are my eyes, my eyes, you are in me, in my spirit, in demon parts of me too. Don't be scared by that. Just know I have great power and i can alter the entire force of the universe, and we will be okay. we will be safe. we will be loved. and lovers. Just know, Crow, I love you.. I love you."
He caught my eye.
"I love you Crow."
"I love you too Bee."
I smiled, weight falling from my shoulders. I fell back onto the bed and rested, happy with the idea that he still loved me. It would all work out.

...............

"Tabari took me down the tunnels."
I nodded.
"I didn't get sick though," He added.
"Lucky."
"How're you feeling?"
"Okay."
He propped my pillow up behind my shoulders. I could smell aftershave on his clothes. Aftershave and the outside world.
I heard him sigh. He sat down on one of the hospital chairs.
"Tabari ..." He thought about something and laughed softly, "Tabari wants to break you out of here. Says you don't belong here."
I felt sad, but I smiled for the cameras. It was one of my sad, fake smiles. I was hunched over in the bed, too tired to move much. The medication they had me on made me feel empty, worthless and like a zombie. I couldn't concentrate very much, had lost all of my ability to converse intelligently or creatively, and was barely able to blink without wanting to go to sleep for another week.
"What do you think the quote means?" He asked.
I was confused.
"What quote?"
"The Crow eats the Bee quote."
"I can't remember it."
"In the tunnels."
"Oh. The Crow eats the Bee. The Bee stings the Crow. Something something."
"I was pretty freaked out when I read it. I started wondering all sorts of things."
He leaned over and in a hushed tone, admitted it so quietly that the psychiatric nurses couldn't hear our conversation.
"Yeah. I think it means... I don't know."
"What if, what if you were to get better."
"I'll never get better Croydon," I promised, "I'm me."
"I have faith that you will."
"I think I might need to die soon."
My weakling croak of a voice was almost inaudible so ashamed were my bitter grey eyes.
"Why do you think that?"
"It's time."
"I think if you died, if that's what you really wanted, I'd let you go. But if instead, you did what makes me happiest you wouldn't be considering this. So that's the deal, mojo. It's a womb-tomb surrender, you and me. I'm supposed to let you die, let you sacrifice yourself to the shittiest, blackest prank clouds that aren't even clouds at all because they're so full of smog and shit that God lets happen to people as insanely beautiful as you. And you're going to let me sacrifice myself for you so you can give yourself up for the sake of ...... whatever the fuck this is."
"I don't know what the fuck this is."
"This is true love."
"I always told myself True Love would save me. But it hasn't."
"It still might."
"I can't see how. If you haven't already been able to alter my inner chaos, make it at least a little warmer, softer, more lovable, I can't see how a few more weeks of brutal lovemaking will change anything. I'll still be someone who destroys."
"You might be someone who damages things, who chews too much from your fingers or cuts too much from your feet, you might never change - but to me you'll be the shiniest lantern with the prettiest bulb that exudes the most magic light, because to me that's what you do. That's who you are. You're the glowing monkey in the neon sign that says: "Cheap Smokes" that makes my crunchy heart go flappity flap."
I laughed through my bleary tears.
Croydon relaxed a little because he thought I was feeling better and I suppose I was. His words meant that he was seeing my true self, the whole me, and he still wanted something resembling love from us. He wiped my hair from my wet face.
"Suicide sometimes might seem like a destiny, if that's all you've conditioned yourself to believe for years and years, but it doesn't make it inevitable."
"Written in tunnels. In messages from the future. Set in stone, maybe."
"Stone gets washed away in time."
"Over a millennium."
"If it takes that long. You're worth it."
..................

Bella: The novel

1st draft