Number 11
By Hollis Harper Skaling
As she extended her leg out long in front of her the wooden chair creaked and she resolved to allow the chair to support her, more so than they ever had. She feigned interest as the smoke swirled blue from her mouth, the window making shapes masking as revelations through the neon light flashing on and off; she had never felt this content. A quarter inch of ash formed on her filter less go to and she tapped the ash onto the growing dark pool on the floorboards next to her. Various reasons society would give for such an act ran through her mind and for the first time in a long time, she was sure that she didn’t care.
She thought back to the first time in the dank apartment that had housed the unspeakable; the haunted had taken their business elsewhere due to the malevolent force that was this inhuman taking the shape of human. It was a schizophrenic barbaric quality that one would be shocked to discover emanating from a woman. The tragic and frail fragments of the woman’s declining insanity were obvious and apparent to everyone but her; this fallacious symbol of atrophied compassion was not what she had bargained for in a Mother. She shifted in the chair thinking about the closets, the drugs, the fucking she was made to watch by this broken whore who had so freely given her chances at innocence away on countless occasions.
She crossed her legs to avoid the impending pool moving toward her right foot and took a deep inhale, the kind you take in the girl’s bathroom when you want to impress and wondered it odd that she had not a shed a tear since this began. They would say that it was premeditated, and they would be right, but not in the formal sense of the word. She had fantasized about this day her whole life and never really thought she would have the gumption to make good on that dream, but that’s all changed now. She dropped the cigarette into the pool of poison next to her and it paused in the thick red redemption as it resolved to finally topple over and go out, sizzling just a bit. As she fished in her jean’s pocket for another smoke out of the pack she thought about the john that had saved her life. A sallow, obese, wonky white trashcan of a hic named Hank. Who would’ve thought her Mother would even be able to ward off the eternal nod long enough to even pull a gun out on her? She recalled watching her Mother and Hank have sex; the nonexistent presence of her Mother that she would later utilize in her own distorted sexual encounters, the rough, pathetic groans of the white, slippery whale of what was passing for a man moving up and down at the pace of an unseasoned lover and praying, although he had never listened before, for her to possess the ability to simply disappear. This little girl just wanted to go away in whatever form that came in; death, magic, the law…..anything.
As Hank had plowed away on her Mother, her Mother had kept one eye out making sure she watched and that her eyes were not closed. In the space of seconds, her Mother had caught her not watching and unbeknownst to Hank, she reached over to the nightstand and pulled out a 9 millimeter and had taken aim. “You open your eyes, NOW” her Mother had said in a thick and dangerous southern accent. She had shook her head and squeezed them shut even tighter, but when she had heard the cocking of the gun, she opened them. Color had drained from her face and a warm steady stream had ran down her leg and onto the floor; she cried but made no sound. Hank had finally taken note of what was happening and in the calmest voice possible had said to her Mother, “Aw, honey you don’t wanna do that now, that’s just a baby. Set that down darlin’, atta girl, let’s get back to this here…” She had quietly snuck out of the room after that and went to the closet she lived in and cried as her pink elephant her Dad had bought her in England consoled her.
She took another deep inhale and blew a couple of smoke rings; she lifted her right foot and placed it on the head next to the creaky wooden chair. She rolled her foot on the head as to see the face clearly. As she gazed down at her Mother, she didn’t see anything; not even a vessel that had brought her into this world. Just an empty shell of used skin, genitals that had been abused in too many forms to name and a broken defective casket that had never served her in the most basis of needs. She would have this disease forever now because of her Mother, this cureless killer that would gradually attack her immune system and destroy the life that she had once prior thought to be mendable in the face of absence; absence from this rotting mound in front of her now. Her Mother had known that she had the virus and had main lined her with the needle anyway; she had just found out a week ago. One week was all that was left to accomplish what she should have years ago. It was quite possibly the only gift her Mother had given her; the gift of freedom. Within this one act, she now indulged every bad feeling, every numb section, and every rageful knife that had cut into the humanity of her shattered being.
She leaned back in the chair and surveyed the room for open spots where she had not applied sufficient plastic wrap and found none, pleased; she inhaled and let out every unspoken hurt with the smoke along with the holy grail of sentiments, relief. Though they would view her possibly no different than her Mother, she had taken careful steps not to affect anyone that would discover this gruesome scene, she was a monster. She stood up, stretched and walked over to the front door of the room, opened it and placed an envelope on the front before she closed it again. She walked over to her Mother and zipped up the plastic body bag and took a seat on the chair. She carefully put the cigarette out in a water bottle and pulled out a wax bag and a set of works. She had been in recovery for years, but felt a hair below giddy about the prospect of doing this thing now. As she proceeded with the steps one took to ascend into junk heaven, she was certain of the clarity of her decision and pushed the plunger in; releasing fireworks of strychnine and heroin. As she fell off the bridge, she knew that in this case, two lives were better than none.
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