writing from
Scars Publications

Audio/Video chapbooks cc&d magazine Down in the Dirt magazine books

 


This appears in a pre-2010 issue of Down in the Dirt magazine.
You can get saddle-stitched issues that are now longer printed
by requesting a reproduction of the issue for amazon sale
as a 6" x 9" ISBN# book! Email us for re-release to order.

Down in the Dirt v058

this writing is in the collection book
Decrepit Remains
(PDF file) download: only $9.95
(b&w pgs): paperback book $18.92
(b&w pgs):hardcover book $32.95
(color pgs): paperback book $75.45
(color pgs): hardcover book $88.45
Decrepit Remains, the 2008 Down in the Dirt collection book
Last Image

Sabrina Dawkins

    Blood oozed from her neck as I sloppily applied pressure to the wound, my tears diluting the red liquid. Her mouth was agape and it trembled slightly. I turned my ear to her dry lips-a final sigh. Then I involuntarily jerked my head around so that my lips were almost touching hers. It was over. I ran from the apartment. The darkness protected my mindless departure, since I was still wearing her blood. It wasn’t until the steering wheel restricted the slide of my palms along its leather rim that I realized that I was losing it. Eight murdered and not one mistake until now. The sound of warm blood in her throat filled me with disgust that was almost unbearable. I pulled over to the side of the road along the empty highway. I gagged. What was happening to me?
    For as long as I could remember, I harbored an insatiable desire to view dead bodies. Not the powdered up pansies in ridiculous attire, placed neatly in boxes, and with no real resemblance to anything that once housed life. The exact moment when the soul escapes, as it were, interested me the most. That clumsy stare, those flaccid eyes, beckoned me to a world that only they had knowledge of. So I guess the body itself only indirectly interested me, while the escaped life eluded me. And it has been mere science-an objective and healthy curiosity about death, that has made me effective until recently. I would passively and unemotionally store the data in my mind, effectively stealing the last living image of the recently deceased. However, something went horribly wrong during this particular murder. I drove on, briefly ignoring the speed limit, until my better judgment kicked in.
    I removed my shirt in the car and pulled off at the exit. I looked in the mirror and noticed that there were small specks of blood on my face. Using my shirt to remove them, I pulled into my apartment complex. No one was outside, so I pulled into the closest parking space and walked briskly to my door. I heard footsteps nearby and fumbled with my keys, holding the bloody t-shirt. The keys slipped out of my hand and a young couple approached, nuzzling and giggling. I froze. No-they were headed toward their car. I balled up my shirt and picked up my keys. As they passed, I unlocked the door and walked in. The sour smell was embarrassing. I checked to see where the couple was; they were turning the corner. I had to wash clothes and get some air freshener. Suppose I got another girlfriend-what would she think of such a stinky, slovenly bastard?
    I washed up and stretched out on my bed. I could not sleep. The body was still there, visible for all to see. What an idiot. I finally fell asleep. When I woke up, the image of her was still in my mind-not a picture to casually be unearthed from time to time to marvel at the science of soul loss, but a persistent flash of information that refused to obediently disappear when not needed. Red hair and grey eyes are indeed rare; I understand that. I don’t care about the beauty of her face. And the continual flashing of her image will certainly cause me to burn the body when I get around to it, in order to deface her once and for all.
    I wooed her, unlike any other. All of my other subjects were strangers. It is indeed convenient that people wander into my life, begging to be examined. Telepathically, they offer themselves up to be dissected and discarded. How passively they appear within their own lives, stumbling through their pointless existences. I didn’t love her. How could I have? I only knew her for less than a month before killing her. I remember her fitted yellow shirt and expressive eyes. I hated her at first sight-that is why I decided to humor her. Her delicate hands gently touched me at every opportunity and I became nauseous. Was I attractive to her? What did she see in me that made her smile so foolishly? It was a fa&ccdil;ade, and I knew it. Humans live behind the masks of their temporary bodies, afraid of the moment when they are no longer protected by such an effective means to hide who they truly are. But when the mouth is agape and the last breath escapes so clumsily and conspicuously, the shell is shown for what it truly is: an animation, a puppet, an image, a stench. What I was interested in was the entity that pulled the strings; unable to see it directly, however, I settled for the result, or effect, of the energy leaving the useless puppet.
    She always smiled. We went out to lunch a few times and she just could not stop smiling. I dreamed of knocking her teeth out with a baseball bat or a hammer. I wondered how cheerful she would have been then, without her animation to hide her secret contempt for my perpetual sadness. Each time we went out she stole a portion of my energy, my life, and claimed it for her own. Her eyes drained my happiness through their unyielding stare, and her lips continued poisoning me with tales of pleasure I would never know. She was mocking me from the beginning-mocking my inability to experience real joy, mocking my lack of any real friends, and mocking my uneasiness around her. I was not a charity case, and when she approached me at the car wash, not long after my last impersonal killing, I knew then the secret of life-at least I thought I did. From her imposing disposition, I knew immediately that she differed from my other subjects. I had thought that they held the secret of life through their lifeless bodies, but after eight murders, life was still taunting me, still flitting around my peripheral vision. And that became obvious to me when this lively woman appeared in a bright yellow shirt, flashing perfect teeth. She wanted to know the time, as if wearing a watch would have actually inhibited her in some way. So full of life, I could not stop staring at her, and she noticed. That is when she started patronizing me with her worthless pity clothed in the invitation to lunch.
    I’m sure I had some inkling after murder number three that the only information I’d ever receive about the nature of life would be through the lifeless corpses I was left to dispose of. It was as if life was an acrobatic firefly that always escaped the enclosure of my hands while laughing at me. Each time, the corpses became more disgusting and difficult to dispose of. Ms. Thomas, the elderly woman who lived in the apartment complex across town, was the hardest of all. That was totally unexpected, since she was like 200 years old. But apparently she had more life in her than the seven prior subjects. Her soggy flesh pounded me ferociously as I tried to collapse her neck. The more she scratched and punched me, the quicker she would die. But she was oblivious to that, as if keeping her life bound in the animated vessel was all that concerned her. She was illogical and frantic. Death was certain, and perhaps had she not fought me, her death would have been less painful for us both. But I envied her fight, her courage, at such a time that she should have been thanking me, rather than trying to hold on to the maybe five years she had left. And since she screamed and fought, I had to be extra careful disposing of her body so not to arouse suspicion. I even stayed with her for eight hours after her death in order to make a clean getaway. Finally, her soft flesh yielded to me as I carefully wrapped it in plastic bags and emptied it into my trunk.
    Crystal approached me while I was contemplating the difficulties in the last murder, and spoke to me as I pondered the inhuman strength of the old crone. It was as if life was winking at me that very moment, egging me on to try and catch it once more before it ceased to be. But I was in a tug of war with a 200-year-old, and suffering an embarrassing loss. Then the seeming embodiment of shining life approaches me, grasping life so effectively that it permeated through her skin. She was a social worker who took a special interest in abused and neglected children. How sweet. I played into her patronizing me because I was sure that she held the answers I was looking for. And this time I would trick life into opening its mosaic in order to provide a clear and unified picture of the energy behind the animated veil. But the more I talked with her, and after the second time we met up for lunch, I realized that she wanted to keep the secret for herself, that she would taunt me until I had no choice but to take the answers from her. I’d rip open her tender skin and smile at her twisted face, lifting my bloody hand to show her my theft: a throbbing red glob dripping on her concave chest.
    We had only gone to lunch about five times before she foolishly invited me to her small house. I knew she was not desperate from the beginning, but her having me over and then not yielding to my attempts at sexual friendliness, I could not forgive. Although I always hated her, I was hesitant to murder her until the moment she refused my sexual advances. It was at that moment that I unified my muddled thoughts about her and focused only on one goal. She did not want to hand over the secret of life, even though I was trying to take it from her in the least painful way possible. I sat there quietly for a while, listening to her talk of us being just friends. Concurrently, I envisioned her separated corpse, her wavy red hair matted down to a head sitting perfectly on her upper thigh. I dreamed of stabbing her repeated in the stomach in order to watch the irregular fountain of blood from her lips involuntarily wasting life like a leaky faucet-more like a busted water pipe. I wanted to bash in her perfect face and then take a picture of her mangled profile to admire later. But for a while, I just sat there, captivated by how artfully and skillfully she navigated her soon to be corpse, how everything attached to her operated in such musical harmony and awareness. My stomach moved. She was doing something to me even then, before I watched her last animated image fade away. And now, as my skin crawls with nervous twitches, my stomach aches with anticipation, and my heart pounds uncontrollably, I know that whatever she transferred over to me will last longer than expected.
    I watched her glide effortlessly around the kitchen, preparing our meal like I was her child, home from school. I ate calmly and politely as she sat across from me at the tiny table on the mats we used for chairs. We ate silently-I suppose my earlier conduct contributed to that. No longer did her eyes and teeth flash at me; however, I still felt the drain that I noticed the first day I met her. She was mocking me, refusing to even look at me. And she was whispering with life, in order to negotiate a way to keep me always wanting and never quite getting there. I watched her delicate throat as she swallowed the meat she had carefully cut up. The small, perfect pieces she meticulously separated entered her mouth effortlessly, and every time she swallowed, I imagined my own flesh and life force being devoured by the deceitful keeper of secrets. So I dislodged the knife from my steak and pierced her thin neck with its tip. Pushing it all the way in, she gasped and grabbed for my arms. Maybe I was on the verge of losing it even then, but I swear I saw steam rising from the hole in her neck as she fell backwards; I assumed it was my life force, which she had been stealing ever since we met. I jumped on top of her and punctured her neck in as many places as I could. Unlike the old lady, she did not fight; instead, she seemed to remain in a state of shock, even after her life force was gone. Maybe that is why I almost began resuscitating her-I knew that through some force of nature she was still alive, and still laughing at my infantile attempts to catch life by the tail.
    The nervousness and sloppiness followed that illogical action of almost resuscitating a life I’d taken; now I lie in my bed feeling like another person. I mean, I don’t even know if I can continue these experiments with my sudden, uncontrollable nervousness and chest pains. My skin is soaking wet and my eyes will not blink. What has she done to me? I want to enjoy these new feelings that seem to be connected to life in some way, but they are quite unpleasant. For once, the thought of blood, especially her blood, bubbling from her mouth and ripped throat, is unbearable. My vision is blurred from water-coated eyes. An image of her marble eyes appears, searching and questioning. My chest pains increase and I fear a heart attach will result. Good. Then I won’t have to worry about going back to her house and seeing her interrogative eyes once more. But then the images start appearing, previously innocuous and passive, they now elicit emotions that are unbearable. It is as if all of the images are blending into one, and conspiring to overwhelm my feeble brain. They occur in the form of a slide show, moving too quickly to be passive and uninvolved. Are they taunting me? Immediately, I try to block them out with my realism. I picture them rotting silently in their hidden graves. I think of the small creatures tearing away at their flesh and conquering them effortlessly. I know that the last images that I stole are no longer real; they only exist in my mind, yet I can’t make them go away, or appear only for entertainment, anymore. I hear the last sighs over and over again, each one a unique contribution. The vacant eyes transform from flaccid buttons into points of infinity. And they beckon me to a place that I want to go.
    My skin tingles pleasantly, and my chest pain has turned into a painless throbbing, as if to simply make me aware of its existence. I relax my arms and legs and place my palms neatly by my sides. The images stop, and focus only on one-hers. I feel a surge rush through my veins and seem to hear a faint music generating from my limbs. A smile creeps onto my lips. “Yes, she has definitely transferred something to me.”



Scars Publications


Copyright of written pieces remain with the author, who has allowed it to be shown through Scars Publications and Design.Web site © Scars Publications and Design. All rights reserved. No material may be reprinted without express permission from the author.




Problems with this page? Then deal with it...