Like Porno for Psychos (4 page)

They said she dressed too sexy and that’s why she had been raped. So she stopped wearing skirts and shorts and only wore long pants and dresses and shirts that covered her arms so that none of her skin showed from her neck down. She stopped wearing makeup and cut her hair short. They said she was too friendly with boys. So she shunned them. They said her friends were a bad influence so she got rid of them too. They said her body developed too fast so she starved herself until her breasts and hips disappeared and her body looked like that of an adolescent boy. She listened to their arguments and would burst into tears when she heard her father call her a slut and accuse her of lying about the rape to cover up her promiscuity. Sometimes her mother would defend her and sometimes she wouldn’t.

Every day that passed following the rape, her parents seemed to grow more agitated. There was a nervousness, a cautiousness, in the way they tip-toed around her. Despite the arguments they had with each other about her predicament, they hardly ever spoke to her about it. They hardly spoke to her at all anymore. She could sense them not wanting to be alone in the same room with her. They never looked her in the eyes or touched her anymore. It took a while for Shana to recognize their apprehension and hostility for what it was—fear. When her belly had begun to swell with pregnancy, their trepidation had turned to panic.

An endless procession of Yuruba priests and witchdoctor’s began to attend to her almost daily. They prayed, meditated, and chanted over her and gave her herbs and medicines to drink. They gave her oils and ointments to rub over her belly. None of them would touch her. The rains would come almost immediately when they arrived and last for days after they left. The sky would rage, roaring out its pyrotechnic wrath and hurling a barrage of lightening bolts in every direction. Shana could see the terror on the faces of the priests increase as the dark clouds smothered the sky and the bolts of electricity struck closer and closer to her house. It was not uncommon for one to suddenly get up and flee the room. It was almost expected that the priests would fall ill soon after visiting her, and not even surprising when news of their deaths came back to the house. Shana had become a pariah, the shadow of death.

She never got to see her baby. She gave birth in her bedroom surrounded by Yuruba priests and priestesses, candles, incense, and chalises to catch the blood of the offerings chained to her bedposts.

“We cannot just sacrifice a goat for this. Chango will want a greater offering.” One wizened old priest said.

Her father lowered his head and pointed at Shana’s belly.

“He shall have the child. That’s what he wants.”

“You can’t! You can’t do this!” her mother shrieked.

“We’ve tried everything else. There’s nothing we can do!”

The earth shook as lightning scorched the earth all around their home. Smoke and car alarms went off all down the block. The louder Shana screamed with the throes of labor the more frequent and the closer the lightning struck. The priests and priestess began to slaughter the goats and chickens, slitting their throats and spraying their blood around the room. They danced and chanted and prayed. Then they began to shriek as the child came screaming from its mother’s womb in a flood of blood of rage and the lightning smashed through the window knocking them to the floor and striking the bed.

Shana couldn’t remember what happened after the room exploded with light and her head had filled with a sound like the earth itself cracking open. When she awoke, she was in the hospital and the baby was gone. No one ever told her what happened to it and she was forbidden to ask. The storms went away after that. However, her father’s anger was even worse then before.

Just a few years later, mere days after Shana graduated from high school, her father kicked her out of the house. He refused to pay for her to go to college. He told her simply to “Pay her way the way the other whores did.” So she’d started stripping. Her “exotic looks” had made her a favorite and soon she was being offered money to do more than take off her clothes on stage. Soon she began to take it. Eddie had stolen all her pride and shame in that alley and her parents had made sure that she would never get it back. So what did it matter if she suffered another indignity or a hundred more? She was a slut now whether she took the money or not. So she’d begun to take their money, fucking without pleasure on sweaty motel mattresses and the cramped backseats of cars.

“Let me cum in your face, whore!”

“Take it up the ass, slut!”

“Come on and toss my salad for another hundred.”

Shana had suffered every debasement imaginable. She’d sucked off two bikers in back of the club while another fucked her in the ass with a cock lubed only with saliva and another fisted her swollen vagina. They’d cheered when she began to cry and took turns jacking off in her open mouth before tossing her a measly hundred dollars, a fourth of what they’d promised her. She’d let a fat dyke who looked like Rosie O’Donnell with a mohawk savage her with a dildo the length and girth of a man’s forearm while going down on the woman’s morbidly obese life-partner who was easily twice as large, smothering beneath a mountain of gelatinous adipose tissue for a mere two-hundred dollars. Still, no matter how many times she shamed herself, no matter how much degradation and humiliation she put herself through, nothing erased the shame of that first time when she’d been innocent. Nothing erased the look in her father’s eyes when she told him she’d been raped.

Then one day Eddie came into her club.

She recognized him right away, even though he’d grown a beard and looked now more like John the Baptist than Jesus Christ and more like Charlie Manson than either of them. She began to follow him, working up the courage to do something. Then, one day, he came to her and offered her money to drive with him into the park. She’d taken the money and her knife.

The storm clouds followed as they drove. Shana recognized them instantly. She knew they contained far more than rain. She felt a strength surge like fire within her. Her body felt charged with electricity. The hairs stood up all over her skin. Eddie was feeling it too. His hairs were standing up as well and the electrical system in his vehicle was going haywire. He turned off the stereo when the volume abruptly jumped to ten and the grunge rock turned to a static shriek of deafening white noise.

Shana’s nerves were jangling like live wires and a rage was building inside her, a wrath so powerful it felt like an alien presence within her. They left the car and walked into the park. James immediately began to paw at her, raising his hand to strike her when she resisted. Shana obeyed, allowing him to force her head down into his lap, taking his sweaty cock down her throat and ignoring the tart tangy taste of smegma and the syphilitic drip from the tip off his cock. She listened to him moan and shout obscenities at her as he forced his cock further and further into her throat until her nose was buried in the musty stench of his unwashed pubic-hair. She let her rage build as he gripped the back of her head and thrust even deeper as he came in a thick hot gout of semen that splashed the back of her throat and made her wretch. Then he pulled his still erect cock out of her mouth and squeezed the last drops of his seed onto her face where they dribbled down her cheeks like tears of pearl. The fury in her eyes went completely unnoticed.

“Yeah, bitch. That was perfect. You suck that dick like you were born to it. But you know what I really want. I want to fuck you in that fat ass of yours. I love how you nigger bitches have those big round asses. Bend over bitch!”

That was the word. The same word he had used when he raped her the first time years ago. It was the word women like her had heard from the lips of white slave masters since this sinful country was born. It was the word of violence, and hatred, and oppression, and rape. It was the last time she’d ever tolerate it. It would be the last words Eddie would ever speak.

Shana’s thick wooly hair filled with sparks and her eyes roiled with blue-white fury like ball lightning as she seized Eddie’s nutsack with both hands and dug her nails into them. Searing heat blazed through his testicles churning his guts in agony as Shana twisted his balls in hands that coursed with electricity. His testes sizzled, boiling in her hands as Eddie’s screams reached a falsetto she would have never guessed him capable of. They popped like suppurating pimples, exploded in her fingers like eggs in a microwave, spraying whatever semen remained within them out onto the grass. His nutsack caught fire turning Eddie’s pubic hair into a burning bush as his genitals were charred to a cinder. He opened his mouth to scream before the lightning left her and threw him twenty feet back.

Rippling waves of energy surrounded Shana as she approached Eddie with the ire of a God within her, filling the hollow spot where the child she’d carried for nine months had nestled. He cringed helplessly in the dirt, clutching his blackened genitals, as the rain began to fall and lightning pounded the earth. He could hear it getting closer and closer until it was right on top of him, striking him repeatedly, tossing him about like a leaf in a dust storm.

The electricity fried his brain in his skull. By the time the police followed the source of the unearthly cries of anguish to their source, the skies had cleared and Shana had already begun to take her own anger out on the near vegetable laying in the mud at her feet. She was still cutting on him when they leapt from their cars with weapons drawn. Then she’d begun cutting herself.

It had been her Great grandmother’s beauty that had first drawn a God from the heavens to mate with her and it was Shana’s beauty that had drawn Eddie. So now she meant to destroy that beauty and forever escape both of their attentions.

Eddie could no longer control his own motorfunctions. The necessary synapses in his nervous system had been fried. He could not remember who he was or why he was in pain. Why the woman with the flaming eyes was hurting him, cutting and ripping at him. Why she was cutting herself. He could see the pain in her eyes and some dim part of his brain told him that he was responsible, that he deserved this, and that it was going to get worse. That it had to get worse before he could be forgiven. If he could ever be forgiven.

He knew that he’d already been badly wounded, perhaps even fatally. He looked at his ruined and ransacked torso and wondered how he was even conscious with so much damage done to him. So much pain.

“Forgive me,” he begged. But she couldn’t hear him. Because his lips and tongue were no longer responding to his commands. They would not move to make the sounds. He tried again and only managed to make bubbles of saliva. He looked up into her eyes. The flame was gone and she was back to being a hurt and angry little girl. A very angry little girl. But something in those dark jewels told him that she would forgive him if he could only form the words. He bubbled up more saliva and watched as she raised the knife above her. Her eyes began to roil and flame again. A long wail escaped Eddie’s mouth and tears rolled down his face.

He remembered what he had done now. Though he couldn’t remember this woman specifically, he remembered the faces of the little girls he had attacked, any one of which could have been her or her child. He could hear the echo of their screams fill the dark voids in his memory and he knew then that he would not be forgiven by this woman. He knew that he should not be forgiven.

Eddie looked up at the clouds assembling overhead, dark angry clouds, and saw faces forming within them with furious eyes just like the woman with the knife. He saw the face of a sorrowful child who looked just like him. They scowled down at him shrieking with rage in voices of thunder. Their faces widened and split apart as their roars shook the earth and lightning spilled from their eyes, screaming for his blood. He cowered in the mud wondering which would kill him first; the angry gods roiling in the dark nimbus above him or the mad woman aiming the knife down at his face.

“This is your last warning! Put the knife down and back away from that man! Put it down now!”

The police yelled at her waving their guns and Shana smiled. She could see the storm clouds moving back in, she could feel the energy rising within her, and she took back all she’d said about God never helping her. God, her God, had heard her and he was coming.

Lightning rained down its fiery wrath upon the earth and Shana smiled and laughed as the rain washed over her, healing her wounds. She thrust the knife into Eddie’s eyesocket and heard him gurgle his last living words before hell took his soul. Bolts of electricity smashed the cop cars like toys and reduced the officers to panicked screams. Shana watched as all the pain and horror of her life erupted forth in bolts of electric fire, burning her tormentors to shrieking cinders and for the first time, since her mother held her down while her Nana mutilated her, she knew real joy.