He feels the ache in his body once again, the unease of trying to understand why his partner awakes and leaves the room in silent, antagonistic form. It is a movement of distrust, a movement that awakens him, leaving him staring at the ceiling, wondering why he cares at all, why he invests in that which he cannot trust.
His partner sits typing on the couch. The computer is the portal to that which has the potential to destroy whatever glimmer of hope their relationship may have at any given moment. And those moments are few and far between these days.
He feels things, feels a general malaise has swept over the relationship. It is a complicated disease, a disease without name and at times, without proof. It is a throbbing, a pulsating movement across tundra, now barren and dusty. It is the feeling that try as he might, he will never trust this person that he is supposed to be with, that to be protected and to protect himself is the only way he can operate in the system they have built together. And this saddens him, deeply disturbs him. He feels himself slipping away and cannot think of a scarier moment than the moment one realizes one is no longer present, that one’s form has been changed, worn over intense weeks of conflict like stone which is eaten away at day after day by running water.
Doves sound from outside. The air is still. The house remains dark, save for the white light from his partner’s computer screen. He wonders how an otherwise peaceful situation could be filled with such angst, such gut-wrenching distrust. He wants out, wants to run. Jump in his car and just drive, away from his situation, away from this person and all the complications, away from this thing that he has created for himself that, like Frankenstein, has turned its wicked claws in his direction. He feels at mercy to his own doing and wonders how he ever let it get to this. He wants out.
Unease. Tommy turns. His stomach has wrenched up in knots, he looks into the fibrous wall before him, he lays still. As still as he can. And yet the images return. For two weeks now he has struggled with the image of his dog crossing the road, the oncoming 4×4 truck, far too big to be necessary on a scenic highway. The screeching of brakes, the thud, the roll. He had seen it all. Cradled his dog in his arms as it passed away. He didn’t cry once.
Dogs to him were the go-to when the human race failed him. Perhaps it was the control he felt he had over the creature, maybe too it was the unconditional love. Whatever it was, he saw himself moving closer and closer to these animals and further and further away from those close to him. The doctors had called it parasthesia. He had called it a vacation.
Rolly had been the small puppy in his litter. German Shepard, tall, thin but graced with long hair and a needy personality that caused him to whimper at the slightest movement away from him. He was lovable and Tommy had fallen for him almost immediately. The adoption assistant, an aged, gray-haired old woman bent slightly at the lower back and with a wobble in her left leg, had looked up at Tommy cockeyed.
“That one? You want that one out of all the others? Look at this one. Don’t you like this one better?” she had reached over, lifted up another puppy from the litter, turned it around as if she were Bob Barker and the puppy was a new toaster oven.
Tommy had grimaced at the theatrics of the situation, stared at her, and coldly stated, “Yes, this one.” It was just yet another instance of the banality of the human race, more than enough reason to further push him away from what he took to be a failed species.
He had taken Rolly home wrapped in a blanket his mother had given him when he was six years old. For Tommy the blanket signified the last time that he remembered the warmth of an embrace, the last moment that he could recall where someone had felt it necessary to acknowledge his existence, care for him as a parent should. His mother was gone but seven months later, his father a non-entity that traveled via Amtrak train across the Western states of the US. He had never known his grandparents.
When he was transferred to the adoption home, his father seen as unfit to handle the needs of a six year-old boy, Tommy had befriended an old man by the name of Edward that swept and mopped the floors of juices, crumbs and other child-induced stains at the adoption home. The closeness of their relationship sparked the interest of the caretakers in the home, some spread rumors of foul-play, and Tommy’s meetings with Edward in the playroom were more and more the center of the attention of the adoption home’s staff. A few months later, Edward was “let go” and Tommy was once again as alone as he was upon entering the home.
Rolly had taken quickly to his new home and Tommy, for the first time in a very long while, felt at home, a part of a family, centered in what he took to be a tumultuous and hostile world. The nuzzle from Rolly in the middle of the night had signified a need now met, a longing for closeness satisfied. The dog’s deep sigh was of comfort, calm, safety. Tommy felt provider to a new entity other than himself, relied upon, as if he now was given the chance to prove against all evidence that not all human beings were selfish and short-sighted, vindictive and cruel. He had wrapped his arm around the sleeping dog, pulled him in tighter and let his mind wander into sleep as his life unfolded before him in waves.
That night she had dreamt about Donnie. He had entered her dream in a phallic-shaped catamaran, the two penises slicing through the rough seas like butter. It had been lucid and to her surprise in the morning, wet. Where he was coming from she could only guess but with a rapidity unheard of in the real world, he approached Felicia who sat stark naked and spread eagle on a deserted island of gruyere cheese. It had smelled awful but she had suffered through it for her approaching knight. Defying physics, the penises penetrated simultaneously. Her dream burst to the sounds of her own sensuous screaming. For ten minutes, she sat awake in bed trying everything in her power to fall back asleep. Sheep wouldn’t do it this time.
Felicia was bothered by the rabbit testicles that now adorned her car hood; bothered not so much by the testicles for she thought them rather cute but instead by the careless manner with which they had been sliced off and discarded. It was a flippant act of vandalism, careless and petty. She thought about the rabbits, los castratos, and felt pity. “All these unborn rabbit babies,” she would think to herself.
With her little pinky, she had removed them, one by one. They had made a slapping sound against her driveway pavement and she had written them off as her neighbor’s dog’s newest treats. She backed up, stepped on one with a ‘squish’ and with a rapid scraping movement she entered her car, sat down and started her car. She was headed to town, headed to her uncle, the unsavory bastard who had impregnated his daughter and later, committed her to the asylum when she had lost it following weeks of verbal abuse by the sordid brother of her mother. A diagnosis of hysteria. It seemed most of the town’s women had strangely been coming down with it as of late.
She arrived at her uncle’s house just as late as she had intended. He sat cross-legged on the porch, a worn, beat-down old man, his eyebrows bushy and gray, his eyes cold and distant. Felicia stared at the petrified lizard, watched his eyes pan slowly across her car, to her face and then down to his folded hands. He was ashamed before she had even exited the car.
From the “belligerent baby-breeder” as the townsfolk called him, Felicia had come to collect her cousin’s shawl, the one her mother had made for her on her 12th birthday. It was a horrendous piece of fabric riddled with worn bits where the moths had gotten to it but it had great sentimental value for her cousin, a reminder of a time in her life when things weren’t as fucked up as they currently were, a beam of hope in the white-stained halls of the asylum.
Felicia had received her request via a hand-written letter. With tender care, Felicia had loosened the top flap with her index finger, rolled her pinky underneath and gently ripped through the top. The letter had been written on soiled and very thin cardboard in pitch black ink. Felicia had held the letter up to her nose, let the smells of stale urine and washed linens roll over her. They were appropriate smells to accompany the letter which outlined her cousin’s extreme isolation and loneliness, her stigmata growing deep inside her belly, her crying sessions at night and sordid memories of her father. The white walls cried out to her of emptiness, she had said, and she had wanted on more than one occasion to cut her finger and paint them red. “Just for a bit of life,” she would say. Her letter ended with sentiments about her mother, fond memories of being pushed on the swing, fleeting moments on Sundays watching her mother walk in the garden, a type of moment we often walk past so quickly but sometimes remain the longest. These “traces” as she called them riddled her mind, bore holes into her soul, colored fancy a longing to be free of all that was past, make new memories while all the while being stuck in a place unforgiving to change or mental wellness. Felicia had finished the letter with a feeling of foreboding. She knew she could not ignore her cousin’s request and had to go see the man she so greatly despised. She had set the letter down quietly on her bedside, rolled over, and cried.
Her uncle hadn’t moved an inch, his face still turned downwards towards his hands. Years stacked upon his neck, he cringed, shoulders bunching as the car door opened and Felicia stepped out.
“Hello Robert,” she said, lightly but laced with a poisonous undertone.
Robert looked up, dark lines under his eyes, folds of skin gathering at the edges of his face. He was the embodiment of sadness and regret, a severity self-imposed, a mechanized body gone without oil. With a nod symbolizing decision, Robert stood and stared at Felicia with an utter repose of indifference, with the look of the walking dead. He could stand only for one minute until the weight of his carrion memories pushed him downwards to the seat once again. He grunted as he landed and Felicia approached.
“I came to get something for my cousin,” she said, walking taught and erect, up each step of the weathered porch prepared for violence. But Robert just sat, said nothing, could stare at her with those wicked eyes only as long as his neck permitted before it dropped once again to his hands.
“I’m gonna go in there and you are going to move, you hear?” She stood, hand on hip, eyebrows raised. With a creaking scream, she pulled the screen door open, pushed the inner door in, and walked inside.
There was a smell that she couldn’t quite place.
Felicia knew of only one man capable of adorning her car hood ornament with strings of rabbit testicles. They had met a few months prior in the back of a dingy, dusty bar in El Paso, that kind of place families drive by and roll up their windows, the father stepping on the gas just a little bit more. The name of the place was The Hole and a flickering, dust-covered, neon cowboy lit up the entrance, his index finger and thumb tightly formed into a big “O”.
People of a particular type entered into the Hole. Mostly the destitute and weary, the alcoholics and more-than-occasional drug users. Felicia was none of these things. Rather, she was a “good” girl, a woman whose pride arose from her inability and unwillingness to lie or sleep around as her two sisters, dubbed “The Banger Sisters”, had. It was that “good girl” attitude that had piqued the interest of Donny, a 6’3” brown man, rolled from the soils of Texas, hardened by that noon-day sun. He had waltzed in one early evening to find Felicia sitting at the bar, lime and soda water in hand, stirring the lime around the bottom of the pint glass with a long red straw. He had smiled, she had taken notice but had quickly lost interest, and Donny situated himself far enough away to not bring attention to himself while still being able to maintain sight on his new-found love affair.
Felicia had perhaps noticed first Donny’s boots. Strong, weathered leather. Dark brown. Crusted over on the sole with what looked to be caked mud. Creases and cracks along the side of the boots. Her eyes had followed the creases of his tight blue jeans up his leg to his thighs, timbered and taught. To his outstretched chest, his veined neck. To his over-sized chin, grizzled face and the beginnings of a beard.
Donny had simply noticed her eyes. Leopard ovals pinched tight near the bridge of her nose. Seductive with care. Classy but sexy. Long, feathered eyelashes coupled with the odd piece of auburn hair swept to the side, framing her face. He watched her stir the drink. Precision as the lime swept in a perfect circle around and through the odd ice cube, her long slender wrist rotating just enough to guide the straw without moving her arm.
Donny wore trouble on the tips of his sleeves. Felicia could sense it from how he walked, that stout swagger coupled with the mischievous grin. She listened to him talk, heard the deep baritone voice, calm and collected, assured without being arrogant. Leaning over, Donny had whispered something to the bartender. Laughing out loud, the bartender had made his way past his bottles of drowned memories to her, set down a drink: a gin and tonic, extra limes lined up on the side of the glass. She had smiled and Donny had taken that as his cue to approach.
The introduction had lasted as long as it had taken her to down her gin and tonic. For Felicia, it was a mixture of bad teeth and horrible posturing. Pulling up a stool not one foot from her left hip, Donny had straddled her, leaned his left elbow on the bar, his right dangling dangerously close to her lower back. His invasion of her personal space had set off alarms, had caused her to drink faster, speak less, and begin to perspire which she would later blame on the gin when Donny took notice. In a matter of minutes she was standing.
Donny watched as she left without a word, already fixated on what he would refer to as the “woman of his dream within a dream”.
Felicia left, unaware that her future was now being written by the whims of an obsessed psychopath.
