Fist of the Spider Woman (6 page)

Josiah wipes his face on me, smearing my wetness against my belly, then gets up and walks out. I pant and heave and wonder what I should do, struggling to regain my mind. He returns a minute later with a broom and dustpan, and sweeps up the broken glass without saying anything to me. I watch, still recovering.

Just as I'm about to open my mouth to try to say something, he says, “Have a good night,” winks, and leaves again. I hear the pantry door, footsteps down the hall, and then the click of the door to his bedroom.

I float on the air mattress, missing Elfy, trying to wrap my head around all that's happening. My knee is throbbing, and I wish I could take another pill. I am having sex with my ex again. One of my phone sex clients is stalking me. Someone stole a copy of my zine from my apartment, and Josiah says it's not him. I want to be able to put all of this together into a big picture, but my mind races from one thing to the other, trying to retrace my steps, trying to find the missing piece that makes me feel a little less confused and terrified.

How will I survive?

In the morning, Josiah and I have another argument over a breakfast of blueberry waffles. We've only been hanging out again for two days, and already I'm getting sick of his shit. He wants an organized, rational plan, he wants to know what's “really” going on, and all I can tell him is a bunch of weird shit keeps happening, and I'm worried they're about to get me. I shouldn't have told him about the night when Elfy was looking at me weird, but he was pushing me for examples and it just came out. I thought at least on a psychic level he would understand that there's something fucked up going on, but he just rolled his eyes.

“Were you high?” he asks. I was, but I don't see what that has to do with it.

“I should have known you would blame it on me. You're such a fucking traditionalist, you want to believe the easy explanations. Why can't you see that things really are as bad as we were afraid they would get? It's all connected, they're trying to hide it from us, they want to separate us so they can bring us down.”

My voice gets higher, more hysterical.

“Okay, if the government is stalking you, and, as you seem to believe, posing as a phone-sex client, and then sneaking into your apartment to steal a zine in the middle of the night, and turning your stuffed animal against you, then what do you want from me? What can I do for you, besides get sucked into your paranoid story?”

I scream through gritted teeth and slam my fist down on the table. How am I supposed to know? The first thing I'd like is to be believed.

“I'm going to have to ask you to leave,” he says, his face turned to stone.

I scoot my chair back from the table and clunk into the living room, grabbing my cane, my bag, and my jacket, leaving the air mattress and blankets in a big messy heap on the floor. I curse the stairs on the way down to the street, my knee aching and pounding.

By the time I get home I am crying from the pain in my knee.

I feel broken. I'm fucking pissed that we have this fascist government that uses the money that should go to health care on war and spying on its own citizens. I'm fucking pissed that the only work available to a person with a disability is mind numbing and soul sucking. I'm fucking pissed that queer people don't know how to support each other.

I take a pain pill and fall into bed.

My dreams are missing. They are not mine anymore.

CASE #10442289073628MDM84667

UPDATE: Consistent drug use. Taking steps to send anti-government propaganda to terrorist cells across state lines. Deviant sexual relations with former drug addict posing as opposite gender.

ASSESSMENT: Patterns of behaviour pose a potential threat not only to government and commerce, but to society at large.

CONCLUSION: Neutralization in process, effective immediately.

I wake up at six p.m., and it's already dark out. It's time for me to sign on to work. My mind feels heavy and murky, my whole body is aching, and I feel nauseous. I lurch toward the kitchen and pour myself a bowl of cereal. The crunching sound hurts my head. I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror as I pass the bathroom, and have to go back and look. In the dim light, I look old, my face hollowed out with shadows, eyes deep in my skull. I see what is happening, but it feels so far away now. I move into the living room to sign on to work, gritting my teeth against the pain in my knee and my head.

“Hi, it's Desiree, signing on for work,” I slur into the phone.

“Are you okay?” The dispatcher actually sounds concerned.

“Yeah, just tired.”

“All right, I'll let you know if I get anything for you.”

I plop down on the couch with Elfy clutched to my chest. He doesn't feel alive, just a lump of fluff. I feel silly holding him; I'm almost thirty. I pick up one of the envelopes on the coffee table and pull my zine out. It looks corny to me, like it's trying so hard to be something. I stare at the photocopied barbed wire, an obvious metaphor, sloppily executed. That's not how I wanted it to look. I open it, flip through, and land on a page with a drawing of a girl with big dark sockets and little shrunken eyes.

“You won't even notice it when they come for you,” it reads.

“It will happen at the kitchen table, or in the bathtub, or at the grocery store, or watching TV. You will decide that you might as well be satisfied. At least you haven't been bombed, or put in prison. Yet. (Or maybe you have.) Or maybe you got hurt some other way, trapped or sabotaged. Maybe there's someone else who should pay for it. Maybe you should just be grateful for the government's protection. Just join them and be glad you get to.”

I won't let that happen to me. I won't be neutralized as long as I am paying attention to what's happening. I'll just keep watching and describing, believing—because I have to—that they can't take me from inside myself.

I do three routine phone-sex calls before Hugh calls me. When he does, I answer it in my phone sex voice, without meaning to.

“You knew it was me, didn't you?” His voice sounds so close. I slam the phone down, my heart racing. I pick it up and try to get a dial tone, but the line is silent.

“I called the police on you,” I say to the air on the other end.

It feels like a flimsy threat.

The line is quiet. I tap the lever one-two-three times. I hold it down for seven seconds. I listen again for a dial tone.

“Hello?” I ask.

Quiet.

“I'm not alone, my boyfriend is here. He's really strong.” I am quiet again, wondering if he can feel through my lie. I decide to elaborate. “I'm not afraid.” I don't want him to think I feel weak. “I'm not afraid of you.” I say again, trying to sound assertive, hearing my voice rising with panic. “Stop calling me. I called the police and I'm calling them again as soon as I hang up.”

I hear a muffled sound. He's laughing at me.

Before I can feel the crux of my fear, everything just lets go. Like it's all fire and molten lava, a boiling soup with no barrier between myself and anything else. I hear a loud sound; it's hurting my ears, but it's my own scream. I am still screaming when Josiah answers the phone.

“What!” He shouts. “What's going on?”

I stop, confused. “I didn't call you.”

“Obviously, you did. What is going on?”

“Josiah, they just connected me to you, I swear I didn't call you, my hand didn't even touch the phone.” In my mind I see an image of my hand moving over the keypad, and change my mind. “Maybe I did. I don't remember. It was him, he was on the other line, and he wouldn't go away, and he was laughing.”

“Did you call the police? They should have him on file, and after three reported calls they'll issue him a warning.”

“That's not going to help!” I try to keep myself from freaking out on him. I need him. “You have to help me. I need you.”

“Actually, this isn't a good time.”

We are both silent.

“They're all over me,” I whisper.

Josiah sighs. “Reggie, they're not. I promise you. I know you don't want to hear this, but you're going to be okay. You're scared right now, but nobody's going to get you.”

As he speaks, a terrible truth starts to dawn on me. “You're one of them, aren't you?”

Josiah groans and laughs. “Yeah, fine, Reggie. If that's what you want to believe.”

“Josiah, please. Don't you remember?” I am crumbling. “It's me.”

“Like I said, I really don't have time for this.” The line clicks, and I tear the cord out of the wall before waiting to see if there's a dial tone.

I grab my aluminum baseball bat and hurtle toward the front door. I push the heavy recliner from the living room, lunging in front of the door. I pull a blanket from the closet and drape it over the windows, covering the cracks of the blinds. I turn off all the lights in the front room and clomp into my bedroom, curling up with the bat next to me, listening to all the night sounds.

They can't get you if you keep watching. Stay alert. Stay present
.
I don't sleep. Not that I remember.

Someone is calling my name.
Regina
. From the depths of my most buried self a dull innocence, a search for recognition rises.

“I'm here.”
Regina
. “Come find me.”
Regina. “
Come in.” I'm swimming through something thick, a warm syrupy liquid that encapsulates me. Where am I? Am I born? Whose body am I in?

And then there is a wall. I want to pass through it because there is something beautiful on the other side. I want to touch it, hold it, see what it is. What is this membrane, this separation? Let me have the pretty glimmering self-thing. I want it.

My eyes open in terror to find my body moving without my consent. The sensation in my skin is both hot and cold at the same time, and it's a friction, a moving, both within and without.

“Oh, you're such a good girl, such a sweet little girl.” Hot man-breath on my cheek; his chest pressed down on me, stealing my breath. I feel him moving inside me and my body is reaching up to him, meeting his thrusts, sucking him into me, hungry for more, trying to touch the promise dangled in front of my heart.

Safety. Protection. Comfort. Be mine.

“Oh, you feel so good,” he groans into me. I feel warm and open and cold and distant, all at once. “So nice and wet, such a sweet wet little pussy.”

Over his shoulder in the dark corner of the room I notice a tiny red light. A camera's black form makes itself visible against the rest of the dark. It enters my reality smoothly, like the punch-line to a joke I heard years ago.

My body turns animal against me, trying to break through the layer of control. I wrap my legs up around him and pull him in harder and deeper, moaning as my back lifts up off the bed. He breathes hard on my nipple as he licks and sucks, grunting, “Oh my little girl, such a good little girl, oh you feel so good.” I reach my arms around him, his broad, muscled back, cringing at the tufts of coarse hair and waxy raised bumps under my fingers. I dive further in, pushing off from the bed and rolling over on top of him. I feel my knee crushing in on itself, but the pain is far away and meaningless. I bounce and grind on top of him, squeezing the muscles in my cunt, watching his face. Not an attractive face: bulbous, undefined features, visible nose hairs, unruly eyebrows, a high forehead with an unconvincing comb-over, splotchy grey five-o'clock shadow. But something about him is appealing, the way his material form slips away into powerless pleasure. I slide up and down on his penis. It twitches inside me as his eyebrows knit up and his mouth opens to reveal dull yellow teeth. I observe as though from a great distance, barely feeling any sensation in my body, only my determination.

CASE #10442289073628MDM84667

UPDATE: Neutralization successful.

I wake up with a vague sense that something has happened, but I can't remember what. Thinking about it doesn't feel good, it makes my stomach seize up and my head throb. I feel disgusting, open and bloated with need, seeping bile. Getting out of bed, my knee collapses on me and I have to push it back into joint.
Fuck.
That old deep body shame weighs heavy on me as I hobble to the living room for my brace.

When I step through the doorway a light flashes in my head that paralyzes me. Everything looks normal. The furniture is all in place. Blinds are drawn up, sunlight streaming in onto smooth surfaces.

I sit down on the couch next to the radiator and start buckling myself into my brace. I stare at the shiny pink typewriter in front of me. I see a flash of my hands on the keyboard, get a sense of déjà vu. I lean toward the feeling but can't locate it.

I look out at the people and cars moving through the snow-covered street. They all seem okay. I need to stop feeling sorry for myself. I should work harder and be nicer to people. Stop blaming everyone else for my problems.

Every Dark Desire

Fiona Zedde

Belle woke up thinking about murder. Well, it really wouldn't be murder since the vampire was already dead, wasn't she? She stared down at Silvija in their shared bed. The beast was beautiful, there was no denying that, in the quiet darkness of the bedroom. Silvija lay with her head back against the sheets, showing off the fine curve of her neck, strong jaw line, and the feathery brush of her eyelashes against her cheeks. Julia lay against her breasts, smiling in demon sleep, a hand splayed possessively over Silvija's muscled belly.

Belle pulled away from them, although her skin nearly groaned at the loss of contact. The sun was still high outside the windows, and the day warm. She knelt in the bed, watching in silence, wanting to rip the skin from the beast's face and feed it to Julia before burning them both to hell. How possible was it? As quickly as the thought brushed through her mind, she was leaning over Silvija and slashing down with a clawed hand. The beast's eyes flew open and she jerked out of Belle's path. Her fingers sliced through the sheets, and before she could adjust her balance, the beast was up from under Julia and behind Belle, her hands grabbing roughly at Belle's upper arms and immobilizing her. The other beasts in the bed didn't stir, she was so quiet.