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.
