CARRY HOME

CK Kane

“Who would you rather kill: Mom? Or Dad?” Paul looked green behind the wheel of his car at night. His mouth was big and red and wet and loud and from one side of it, in the dashboard glow, he doubled down.
     “Seriously, Faye. If you could get away with it.”

I laughed and looked down at the bag of ribbons I’d won that day at the horse show. I fiddled with the stereo ‘cause track five on the Morphine CD was too sad. He rejected sadness, alchemized it. In someone else it would be repression but with Paul it was magician shit. He put on a Brainiac CD and it was fun and chaotic like he was. He grabbed my thigh and rattled me a little.
     “C’monnnn, it’s totally Mom.”
     I smirked at him as he thrashed his wavy blue-black hair to the music. The green luminescence rendered him a timeless villain: a widow’s peak, a bomber jacket and gleaming graveyard teeth.

My stomach was a pair of tennis shoes in the tumble dryer. Still in my show breeches, my thigh felt cold and deflated where his hand had been. Being with Paul was like Halloween. He made mischief mature and exciting. Our bodies jerked in clumsy unison, crash test dummies joyriding under a sunglasses-clad moon made of cheese.
     He gunned it along the slick rural roads that led from the showgrounds back to our suburb. A feeling of danger crept up my tailbone into my gut like a crack spreading across a frozen pond. I never felt fear with him. He shrieked into the darkness, beguiling me with his unbridled zombie zeal.

I didn’t know how long I was in the hospital or if I’d gone to Paul’s funeral or if they just told me I had. I didn’t know when I would ever return to school. I didn’t know what the point of having a body was, but I’d never known what the point of having a body was. I was especially skeptical of the temporal—its trickery and equivocation. The delicate squeak of a rodent’s wheel on repeat forever, atop a hearing-test tone in my underwater ears.

Maxillofacial hardware had my jaw woven into a vulgar metallic clench. I sucked gloopy banana baby food and cans of nutrient-rich chemical vanilla sludge through wires, screws and raw-nerved incisors. Grit remained. I was confined to my room, a tedious matching furniture set—life-size dollhouse pieces—peppered with trophies and ribbons. The centerpiece was now one poster, from Paul: The Gun Club. Miami. A Gumby green and neon yellow exposure with watermelon hued font. Two scorched, sullen palm trees loomed over the band, Jeffrey Lee Pierce a mop of bleached hair brooding from the crook of his arm.

But I’d stopped listening to music for some time.
     Occasionally my mother entered my room, each time looking like she’d accidentally found a hidden place in the house she hadn’t seen before. She clutched a Styrofoam cup of vodka. I began noticing that she’d chewed the cups leaving teeth marks in a half-moon scallop around the rim, tinged with a little lipstick. It was revolting. My face strained from my neck to my temples, wanting to dry heave but locked in place like a threatened bivalve. She leaned over me in my silly canopy bed, buffing imaginary marks off the wallpaper with one hand while the chomped Styrofoam squeaked in the grasp of the other. Beneath her I smelled the vodka—sharp and sterile plus the perfume I had begged her not to wear for most of my life. This fragrance had a top, middle and base note of if you mixed Egyptian musk oil with necrotic uterine clotting. My lungs sealed up in its noxious wake. I emitted the ugliest sound from somewhere in my throat—a guttural attempt at a chuckle, stifled by my vaulted maw— remembering Paul backing my remonstrance, during an argument with our mother. He’d said something clever and undisputable, as usual, but added: “Must you spritz yourself with Nefertiti’s fuckin’ abortion?”
     My failed laugh, which sounded like the groan of an ungulate, zapped mother out of her fugue. Startled by the sight of me, metal-faced and tucked into my sinister pointelle bedding, she suggested the liquid diet was beneficial for my looks. When she reached the doorway, she told me that at the crash scene, twenty feet down the road from the accordioned green Eddie Bauer Ford Explorer, someone found one of Paul’s baseball caps. They picked it up, gathering belongings. Underneath was Paul’s brain.

I was disappointed when I woke up from a dream of being a sea anemone. It was nice to have limbs gently dancing and swaying. No thoughts, just adapting to the current and being the least alive necessary, and still spectacular. I oozed drool through the slots of my jail cell bite, my jaw and neck like jerky sinew. I was rigid, agonized. Feeling good was a faraway and laughable concept.

I creaked, the floor creaked and I crossed into the sacred preserve, Paul’s room. My father wanted it boarded up, a hidden museum. I’d heard about grieving parents doing this before, but this wouldn’t apply to me. I needed something. I was hit with the laundry pheromone boy smell, though Paul usually smelled like an old man. My eyeballs hurt, they may have audibly clicked like an amphibian’s. It was almost too much to finally look around someone else’s space, to carefully turn my head.
     I stood in the center of the room and tried to plant my feet steadily. I became aware of the spaces between my fingers as I held my arms out, trying to scan, trying to absorb. Anything.

Stagnation hung heavy as I studied now-artifacts: ticket stubs, books, smokes, a picture of Paul drinking fountain R.C. Cola at an arcade looking like one of the Lost Boys. He had a whole other world I never knew about or got to experience yet. Shaggy hair, sticky condoms, beat up cars. I never got that. I climbed onto his bed, examining his beloved record collection as a whole. I was compelled to masturbate through my clothes. When I finished, my gasping pushed puffs of saliva-gurgle through my gnashed sneer like a frustrated and carnivorous beast. I sprawled out, a gangly pentacle atop his flannel duvet. It didn’t depress me the way some else’s flannel bedding might.
     I imagined his closet flying open and revealing some version of Paul, greener and ghastlier with blackened lips and shadows around his Fraser spiral eyes. He wore a backwards newsboy cap and wheezed in his best Sam Kinison:

Henry was half draught horse: thick and sturdy haunches, a gray dappled back end, a giant head that didn’t fit in most bridles. His familiar feet clopped behind me. In the cross ties, I breathed in his sweet warm fur. I curried him as clumps of hair fell softly like a clumsy first snow. He let out a grumble and relaxed so much that the tip of his dick dropped out of his body, the “tip” being the size of a very large human cock. His was hot pink with a black freckle on it, which was always so cute. I brushed him until his fur was taut and glimmering. I combed his mane and tail, gently releasing tangles and burs, bits of cedar shavings. I tacked him up with an extra saddle pad to protect his withers. I tightened the girth on his left side as he blew his stomach out so as not to have it too tight.

I dangled his bridle and guided his nose and ears into it, sticking my fingers behind his teeth to force the bit into his mouth. Smack, smack, smack, he adjusted his tongue to adapt to the fat snaffle. I led him into the ring outside. A wind picked up and whistled in my ears, while Henry’s stood straight up on high alert. I tightened the girth with my weak and cadaverous body. Stirrups dropped, I gathered the reins over his head and climbed on.
     The sway of his shoulders beneath me was the only semblance of a homecoming I’d felt since everything. I winced as I made clicking “go” sounds through my locked teeth.

My trainer saw me from afar and looked at me precariously as though I were a porcelain butterfly, a lawsuit, a bad idea. Ignoring her, I picked up my trot and eventually a forward, uphill canter. Every porous bone and beef jerky tendon in my body radiated pangs of treacherous rot and awakening, like they were coughing up sawdust. I was free.

Afterwards, Mark, the farrier, lingered in the aisle ostensibly to shoe one or five. Henry was shod in aluminum, his hooves seemed as big and round as hubcaps. Mark always pretended he needed someone to hold Henry still while he shoes him, but it was just an excuse to hang out. It was like I could hear Paul’s voice in my head, louder than my thoughts, hurling lascivious implications at my every interaction.

Kitty Kat was my only close friend since the 7^th grade. Her nurturing presence was something my parents didn’t give me. She brought me candy for when I’d get my wire out. She didn’t mean to be cruel, she just forgot. She chewed taffy, pulling bite after bite while flipping through a SPIN magazine. She always wore glitter on her eyes, clothes from the Delia*s catalogue and smelled metallic and fresh.

She found a box of pictures at the bottom of the stairs and brought them up to me. They were all framed photos that had Paul in them, except one, of my great-grandmother.
     “Faye, she looks just like you!”
     I glanced at the picture, one I’d never paid attention to, and realized it was true. We had the same beauty mark, the same strong jaw and aquiline nose, the same distant stare. I also realized one of my parents removed the pictures from the walls downstairs. I had this feeling I got sometimes but could not describe. It was almost like a smell. It was sudden. It made me feel like I wanted my parents close by, like I wanted a second chance to be innocent.

Kitty Kat held me, stroking my hair, picking knots out of it. Her breath was banana taffy warm.
“Kitty Kat,” I croaked through my tightly wound bite. She thought it was a rhetorical musing, but I repeated myself.
“What is it, Faye?”
“I saw Paul—”

I turned around to face her before she could dismiss this as some delusion of loss. I prepared to articulate as best I could despite my tomb-mouth, alloy-sealed.
     “I saw him, in his room, mm, and he was wild and sweet and made me laugh! And scared me! And he communicated, I dunno, telepathically somewhat. He said death is fantastic and everything else is boring. And he’s still handsome.”

She looked at me like she felt bad for me and I hated that. She told me I needed some more rest. I told her resting sucks. She headed out and turned around at the door.

“And Faye? You might…you and your dad might want to get your mom checked out.”
     I was apathetic, surely, but perplexed. She stepped closer.
     “My mom saw her at some party at the country club trying to pretend everything was ok. And then they realized…”

Kitty Kat took a big breath and widened her eyes. I wanted to scream, Spit it out, Dummy! but didn’t.

“Well, they realized she had a freakout in the powder room. And she smeared shit all over the walls.”

I just stared at her as she tip-toed out of my chamber. And then I burst. I heard Paul cackling inside my head. It was like we were laughing together, really losing it. That was it? Mom plastered the ladies’ room in all its floral powder puff soapdish-ass quaintness with the contents of her longing, vodka-pickled bowels? I vibrated a weird hyper laugh. We vibrated.

I was bent over in a hard right angle on Mark the farrier’s wooden kitchen table. I thought I made some sounds through my wire mouth, and they were stupid, just like him. He pumped away at my body parts, holding my pelvis still with his burnt baseball mitt hands. I peered around his kitchen, which, to my dismay, had a “Home Sweet Home” sign hanging above the stove or the maybe the door. I couldn’t be sure.

I looked up again and saw Paul! He was pretending to be turned on, grabbing himself and nodding like a freak. My idiotic polka dot panties were around my knock-knees. He flashed his long pointy tongue from his black mouth, giggling.

“Really kid? Polka dots! Too wholesome!!!!”
     Paul erupted in maniacal laughter. I gazed straight ahead, and despite my active dissociation, I laughed too.
     “Shut up!” I begged.

Mark the farrier grunted quizzically and kept pumping. My eyes tried to blink but I would not allow it. I had to know this was happening, extinguishing my disbelief. Paul just stood there, laughing at me getting fucked.

“Mark can’t fuck you, Mark can’t fuuuuuuck youuuuu,” Paul taunted. He came closer and got right in my face. I couldn’t contain our ghoulish prurience. Mark finished, I guessed. I used his phone to get a ride home from Kitty Kat.
     “Good night and God bless,” Mark the farrier said. Paul let out an insane squealing laugh, his eyes rolled back and he spat on Mark’s face. I slithered away.

After school, I walked home. Though the wire was gone, I had become accustomed to not opening my mouth and so I didn’t, much. It stayed shut and tasting like loose change and papercuts. My body did not feel like a body. It didn’t belong to me, it didn’t do the things bodies were supposed to do. At home I’d begun listening to music again. I took The Gun Club’s Miami album from Paul’s room before we closed it up for good. I listened to it constantly, the track “Brother & Sister” especially:

The sins of me

They buzz and hiss in the trees
Their little skeletons

Will harm no one

I had no energy to go to the barn or talk on the phone. Despite the room still smelling like my sick self—stale, a yellow vomit haze hovering unwashed sheets, wound dressings curdling in a tiny trash can under my desk… I easily spent time in it.

I drifted into a vision. I rode Henry through somewhere Mars-red. I was being followed by a presence, not a being. The whole sky breathed, audibly undulating nebulous respirations. I was overcome.
     We arrived at a bubbling lagoon and followed the shoreline to more aggressive water. Henry hopped and spooked. I found a human skull. I inspected the inside of it and saw, physically, the parts of his head that made his decisions and thoughts and habits.
     Henry became agitated at the crashing of the crimson water–its choppy waves with frothy caps. It didn’t surprise me at all to see and hear loud, loud motorcycles revving and screeching and somehow bouncing from crest to swell. Through the blood-foam they accelerated and rode farther out towards an oceanic Edicule. Where the sky and sea met was an ominous purple swirl that looked like home. I knew on one of those motorcycles, or on all of those motorcycles, was Paul. I shortened my reins, pulsing Henry’s jaw as he jigged with unease. I beheld the swirl until I lost sight, opening my mouth.