Christmas Story

Sunday

I've never been so scared in all of my life.

But there on the ground slithered and oozed the remnants of four years, fifteen dye jobs, and one ridiculously ill-advised set of bangs. She even shaved my neck. My head feels like it is floating above my body in some transcendent halo the likes of old catholic iconography. I am the Madonna of dyke haircuts.

There is a freedom here from the expectations of the feminine. No longer is my hair my greatest glory. No more will I shut my locks in car doors, or bind them up in Pollyanna braids like some fetishized virgin. This winter, I have no fear of it freezing into a straight ponytail because I slept in and had no time to use the blow dryer.

Of course, I feel more exposed without a nest of frizzy ginger to hide in. My neck curves a long, swan line down my throat and between my shoulder blades. I spend inordinate time at the bus stop fingering each cervical vertebrae and scoring my fingernails along the insubstantial line dividing the nape of my neck from the spiky sprouts of shorn roots.

Note to self, buy hair color.

The afternoon commute would have remained in freshly trimmed euphoria if that jackanape on the bike hadn't clobbered me in the crosswalk. I spent the entire episode of CSI Miami picking detritus out of my forearm. Time to bust out the goth sleeves and make this new look as emo as possible.


Monday

The back of my head defies gravity. Someone should call Stephen Hawking. I was forced to use inappropriate products to get the damn thing to flatten out. I expected longer prep time with the new 'do, but I still barely made the 419 Crosstown because of my arm. Eight band aids! A pox on all wayward cyclists! Man was not meant to wheel about like a moron!


Tuesday

Sick again today. I thought leaving work early yesterday would have knocked it out of me. But I barely managed to call out before crashing again. I did succeed in dragging myself to the diner for nourishment in the afternoon. Muse is such a sweetheart. She brought me honey for my tea and only charged me for the soup. I'll need to put her on the Christmas cookie list, provided I can force my feeble limbs into baking positions again. I think I was delirious with fever for a while, because I saw the strangest things crawling along the floor and up the walls.


Wednesday

Note to self, never take the bus while sick again. Just pay for the damn taxi. Avoid the unpleasantness of ralphing out the window along Madison Street. The doctor gave me a work excuse for a few days, but no real help. I forgot to ask for them to dress my arm properly, but dealing with oozy scratches is on the bottom of my list of priorities.


Thursday

Shoot me, please.


Friday

Mom asked if I was pregnant. I told her I was gay.


Saturday

And like that, the fog has lifted! I lead a charmed life if I can take a week off with the plague and still salvage the weekend. I don't know if words can adequately express the relief of being healthy again. But I am a writer of some passable if melodramatic talent, so I can't shirk from a challenge.

Considering the days of illness behind me, the best comparison to be made is that of a fortnight of nightmares. Time stretched and frayed beyond temporal tensile strength, shedding pieces of moments, edges of seconds, and dropping them all willy-nilly into my once-properly linear circadian rhythms. I became a creature of some other world, howling at the light in the windows and dreading the chill of night. A pulse of something ancient and vital filled what lucidity I claimed; a heartthrob, dubstep beat that lingers like a commercial jingle in my ears even now.

For fuck's sake, I just cleared out the nest I made in the closet out of bathrobes, my senior prom dress and the batting from my Martha Stewart Collection Bedford Flowers comforter! Comfy? Perhaps. But clearly the work of a madwoman with stylish, if overpriced, taste.

But tonight, my head is clear and my hair is amazing. I'm hale, hot, and hungry. It's time for this temptress tart to take to the streets. I've waited long enough to debut the new me. The real me.


Sunday

Note to self, stash the flats before hitting the club. These boots aren't made for walking, let alone the walk of shame across town. But blisters are a small price to pay for a night like that.



I can't remember what happened.

I am here and I am safe. I do not need to be afraid. These are my fingers. They press and mold against the gentle curve in each key on the keyboard. Pressure bounces down against hidden spring's tension and snap a gentle rhythm of clicks and clacks as long as I keep typing. I am here. I am home. I am safe.

My cell phone is full of blurry pictures and incomprehensible texts, but that's par for the course my Saturday nights. Nothing incriminating has popped up on Facebook yet, which is not. I'm suffering no hangover either, but my body feels a gentle weariness, as if I've danced too hard or run too fast recently. There are no marks on me where I can see. The girls are tender, but they always are during my period.

This should be the hallmark of good time, but I have no memory whatsoever after leaving my apartment last night. I can't even remember the interior of the building I left this morning, let alone the face of who I spent the night with there. An hour on Google maps hasn't helped me recover where I came from.

I am here and I am safe. I do not need to be afraid. I can feel the raised notches in the home keys slide against the tiny whorled ridges on my fingertips. Cool air sucks between my teeth each time I breathe and gusts over my hands when I exhale. I am here. I am home. I am safe.

Oh fuck this.


Muse kept me in coffee the rest of the night. She's such a comfort. After the boss left, she changed the radio station for us. I feel a lot better now. No one is peeking in the windows or shuffling under the bed anymore. I think we talked through her entire shift. Her stories are wild and often stretch credulity, but what can you expect from the ex-wife of a Hell's Angel. The way she talks about her ex, though, between crazy monster stories and sexcapades, I wonder why she left him.

In any case, I've reclaimed a decent measure of sanity and a quality dose of humility. Losing a night like that means I was abusing a potent substance. I'm lucky to be alive. The scene will rock on without me for a long while. I need to have myself tested for STD's, out of respect for myself and any future partner I may have. I am an intelligent, capable woman. I should know better how to protect myself.

Muse gave me her pepper spray, even though I promised I wouldn't be going out again anytime soon. She stuck it on my keys herself and told me it was a practical good luck charm to keep jerks from both worlds out of my way. I'm assuming she means bikers.


Monday

Shoot me, please, if I ever take a week off again! My inbox has no end. I worked straight through lunch and then stayed as late as I could before they had to lock the building. And the whole time I'm spurred on by guilt that my absence has injured my coworkers and my boss somehow. Office politics dictate that no one risk douchebaggery and actually say it aloud, but I know they despise me for being gone and suspect I was deceiving them.

For all the staring, no one even mentioned my new haircut. I feel rancid.


Tuesday

I couldn't bring myself to make dinner tonight. Nothing is appetizing. Muse threatened to beat me with the menu unless I made up my mind. In the end, she brought me soup and refused to let me leave until I ate the entire portion. I appreciate her meddling, even if I find it obnoxious. It means someone cares and that abates the loneliness for a while.

Tonight she told me a story about her ex that seems worthy of being penned, though I realize she hasn't told me the whole of it. It begins with a young man, a bike, and a desert to cross. He is baked by a merciless sun and forced to slake his thirst at a dusty bordello. Other thirsts follow and he indulges his time in the company of a native woman who hides her stretch marks and makes him howl. On the next morning, he cannot force himself leave her side. There are duties to perform and a simple wage to be earned, curves to be engulfed in and nights to twist and writhe in her sheets. His great journey stalls out for the sake of playing house with a red-skinned hooker.

One night he dreams of a great storm tearing the firmament in twain. He sees the earth gape open and lightning spear the gulf. When he wakes, he knows he must complete his journey or risk dying in this place. Breaking her heart is no easier than escape, because he no sooner tells her than she walks out of the bordello, over to his motorcycle, and proceeds to eat the entire thing.

I asked Muse if she meant for me to believe her ex-husband dallied with a prostitute with an vehicular appetite. She swore on her iPhone that the story was true.

Unable to claim the loss of his bike as anything resembling an act of God, he seeks transportation with the steady flow of truckers through the bordello and, eventually, completes his journey. Years later, when he has ascended to a higher standing in his gang, he returns to the bordello. Muse didn't say why, or give much detail other than statistics. Fourteen Hell's Angels rode onto the property and only two left alive; her ex and his brother.

Muse goes on to say that her onetime brother in-law never confirmed the incident, but the man she knew never got back in the saddle and spent the rest of his days eking out a living on disability in Reno. Of course, then the story shifted to the year she worked as a waitress at a cafe attached to a bordello in Wells. I suspect she was trying to take the sting off her campfire story.


Wednesday

I can't work like this. Everyone is watching me and the air is rank with disapproval. The back of my neck stings with the prickles of judgment. My face is swollen and hot and I can barely see for the tears. I constantly seek refuge in the bathroom to shore myself up against them. I don't know what it is they have discovered, but I can't escape it.

Drinking during the business week was a habit I happily dropped back in college. The mental battle I waged in front of the cooler at the gas station rivaled Grecian epics. Returning home dry, I turned on my heel and went back out. Muse looked at me like I was the crazy one in this pair, and brought me a Zinfandel with dinner.

She took a picture of my forearm tonight, which is weird. But she was all upset when I rolled up my sleeves and showed the scratches I picked up last week. It is rather disgusting, and I felt embarrassed when she brought attention to it in front of the other customers. I'll have to remember to put on band aids to protect myself. I can't expect them to heal if they are under constant aggravation, after all.


Thursday

Someone followed me home! I know it, I know it! The same car that passed me at the bus stop is making circuits through the neighborhood. I've closed my curtains and barred the door and windows. Muse's pepper spray lives in my pocket. My cell phone is charged with 911 ready to dial.

I am here and I am safe. I can hear the soft hum of my computer and feel the vibrations in the floorboards whenever someone walks down the interior hallway of my building. I have nothing to be afrai Fuck, I maced the super.


Friday

At last, the weekend is here! Oh God, spare me a week like that from ever happening again! I supposed I earned it with my dangerous exploits last weekend. Well, no worries. I'm planning on remaining close to home and hearth. I have a new season of The Office to distract me from the ills of my life. If I can just convince these cramps to submit to the will of Midol, then all will be well. I may even order a pizza.


Saturday

Fucking doctors are fucking useless. I'm not supposed to have flow like this. I went through two tampons in the WAITING ROOM! I know my own body! You've never had a cunt, how do YOU know what is normal menstruation?

At least he gave me some Vicodin. I don't want to be awake any more.


Sunday

I am here and I am safe. This is my room and this is my bed. The sheets are twisted and tangled and sweaty and warm. I can hear my heartbeat in my ears and taste it in my mouth. Sunlight dapples leaf shapes over the curtains and I can hear my upstairs neighbor vacuuming at this ungoldly hour. Dreams are not real. Dreams cannot hurt me. I am healthy, hale and whole. I am home and I am safe.

I'm going out.


For the sake of what remains of my sanity, I will not set to page the dreams I had this morning. But I did tell them to Muse and she is very concerned. I find it surprising that she has been spending the effort to pay this much attention to me, but apparently I am the subject of her text message conversations with her ex. After I finished my salad today, she came out of the kitchen with her phone and asked me blunty if I had been paranoid at lately. I told her my work environment was replete with suspicion and mistrust, and she went back to texting furiously.

And then she set my world on fire.

I am safe. I am home. This isn't real.

Muse said her ex is hunting a demon. I told her not to believe the wild tales of her biker beloved, because he clearly is trying to impress her by taking advantage of her gullibility. I mean, who eats a motorcycle? She told me to watch my mouth.

"There is shit in this world you don't know, Mary,' she said. "And it wants to fuck you."

I am only retelling her story. I don't believe any of this. I am safe. I am home. I am safe.

Before the evolution of man, and possibly before the dinosaurs and trilobites and any of that, the earth was inhabited by great monsters. Creatures that spanned entire ecosystems, beings of vast intelligence and unending hunger, all writhing and rutting and spawning and eating each other. True Pandemonium reigned hell on earth. But the time of the ancients came to an end, or was forced to end to make way for the new age. Most perished, but some escaped to nearby realities, hiding just beyond the pale. And there, they wait for their time to rise again. And all the while they watch us, hating us for our existence, desperate to devour the entirety of our race and birth a new lineage of horrors to set upon the world they deserve.

Further, the prisons which bind them from this world are faulted. While too small to allow escape, the permeation allow the monsters to pass their influence into our realm. Lesser monsters and creatures attempting to breed evil on earth. Anything exposed to these impossible beings is poisoned and defiled. Any hapless person who touches upon the elder creature's influence is sheared from all sanity and twisted into some bare semblance of who or what she used to be.

She thinks I'm crazy. I am not crazy. I am safe. I am home. None of this is real.

After Muse dropped that bit of wisdom on my plate and refilled my coffee, she proceeded to tell me that the Hell's Angels hunt down those lesser beings that escape into our world. Or at least, the bikers her ex rolled with do. I imagine he recruited the baddest motherfuckers he could trust into his war on the supernatural. Well no, I don't believe any of that, but it sounds like a reasonable plan of attack after some whore gobbles your ride.

I don't believe any of this superstitious bullshit biker religion bullshit bullshit. I am safe. I am home. I am safehomeandsafe I'm safe I'm home I'm going to take some Vicodin and get to sleep now


Monday

I am safe. I am home. I am safe. I am home. There are things that I feel and I can't think of them right now but I'm typing and I can see the words on my screen and they make perfect sense when they are lined up on the screen like that. What happened today? Oh yes, I heard voices in the bathroom at work. I was hiding there, trying to staunch the endless flow of blood and meat from my body. At first I thought I heard my supervisor talking about me and telling her friend about her suspicions of my poor behavior. I twitched every time I heard my name. Mary. Mary? Mary! Marymarymarymary and my name stopped being my name and just became some endless litany of my questionable credibility.

Then my supervisor came into the bathroom and the voices stopped.

I think there is something inside me.


Tuesday

My doctor referred me to a shrink. I want to quit my job.

It listens to me when I think. It kicks and shoves me out of myself. Mary is draining away like motes of sand from her broken glass womb. I think I'm going crazy.


Wednesday

They sent me home. Medical leave. I don't believe it. Not their concerned faces nor gentle, false platitudes. Get well soon. What a wretched nest of lies! They must know the truth about me. I can't be certain how, but perhaps some underdeveloped part of the lizard brain fires a few synapses whenever they see me, waving instinctual hands in the air in warning. They know!


Thursday

I never knew clarity could come at the bottom of a bottle. I am suffering for it this morning, but I feel more myself than I have in a while. I need to record this while I can. My general sense of stability is wavering and I must take advantage of the time I've been given.

Muse told me to drink and I did. She sat me in the corner of the restaurant and kept my glass full until the boss went home and she turned out the other patrons, locked the front door and killed the lights. Then she introduced me to her ex.

Should anyone read this in the future, please understand that I am not all that attracted men. At least, not often. Accepting this variation in my life has not been a simple or pleasant task. Despite my experimental sexual history, I am content in the label of homosexual. Lesbian. Yes, these work much better for me than the anything-goes nomenclature the term 'bisexual' entails. I've crept from the closet and done as little as I can to draw attention to myself.

So please understand that when the man stepped from the shadow into the narrow slats of streetlight, I was not prepared for the overwhelming surge of lust to hit me. I wanted that man the way the body wants food, full up of blood and cravings and merciless pangs. Desire knifed me in the stomach and it was all I could do to not spread on the table in front of him.

He was tall where Muse was short, lean where she was pleasantly rounded, and that's about all I can actually remember of the way he looked. He didn't shake my hand, didn't touch me at all, but I felt his appraising gaze lick the length of me. I hid my face in my napkin.

"Yeah, it's coming for you," he said. "Got you good and worked up. Takes about three weeks to make the changeover. Lucky you don't live closer to the mountain or all kinds of swinging dick would be crawling over the hills after you."

"I told you, I knew a Stinger when I saw it," Muse said. "Why is it you always doubt me?"

Her ex looked at her. I saw a glimmer of a greater history and a story that did not have a happy ending. And then I saw myself sprawled and moaning under him on the table and made myself finish my drink while they traded low, sharp words.

"Well, you done good getting her sauced," he conceded. "If that bastard found her again, there wouldn't be enough left to bring back. Then she'd start eating folk and-"

"I know well enough how to keep that from happening," Muse interrupted him sharply. "You go on ahead. I'll bring her back into the kitchen and you can get started."

What followed in the industrial environs of the kitchen reminds me of the three witches in MacBeth and the brew they used to cloud his mind with truths and visions of a grander future. Bubble, Bubble, toil and trouble. But Muse and her ex fancied more Jim Beam and less eye of newt. Though there was something that looked like a lizard that went into the mix, along with a handful of herbs that I did not recognize and imagine aren't legal in this state. Also, cherries. Which is nice, I like cherries.

Surprisingly, very little of it made it into my mouth. Instead, Muse anointed my head with ladelfulls of the concoction and then shooed her ex out of the kitchen and used a wash rag to scrub my arms with it. She got under my shirt and I was happily reminded of my predilection for girls. The greater saturated I became, the more lucidly my thoughts arranged. I stopped fantasizing about her ex in a shower and instead followed an entertaining daydream about rockabilly biker chicks.

"Better?" Muse asked after some forgotten amount of time.

"Yes," I answered. I smelled like death, booze, and cherries. "I can't believe I let you do this to me."

She wiped my face with her rag. "Ain't the first time I heard that."

I've been cognizant and calm ever since. Muse drove me home in her ailing hatchback and I didn't even care that her ex trailed us on his motorcycle. I've been told that the mixture is blocking the particular pheromones I'm emitting, so that I cannot be tracked by the creature that stung me, nor can the unnatural emissions from my body drive me mad. I've been warned that, should my thoughts begin to waver, I must give myself another dousing. I have a thermos prepared.

I just wish I felt cleaner. The liquid has dried to a sticky film and it adheres to everything, especially my most comforting blankets. I'm going to see about getting some sleep while I can.


Friday

Unlean! I'm soiled and infected! Oh god, I can't get the taint off my skin! It's inside me. I woke to the voices again and they keep screaming my name. Mary! Mary! Mary! The shame of it cripples me. I have to regain control.

I am safe. I am home. I can feel the endless tug of a thousand tiny mouths and their sharp, grasping teeth against my skin. I can see my heartbeat in the pulsing light at the window. I am Mary and I am safe and I am home. I am safe. I am so goddamn itchy! I can see the scored lines of my fingernails up and down my arms, but there is no surcease.

Fuck it, I'm taking a shower.


The man in the window keeps staring at me. I can hear him inside my head. I feel like a motorcycle desperate to be ridden, or perhaps consumed.

Mary. Mary. Mary. MaryMarymarymarymary MARYMARYMARYMARYMARY MARYMARY MARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYMARYma



Saturday

Shoot me please