Milk-Blood (2 page)

*NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR - As both a social worker and a writer, I have always believed in the adage that everyone is the hero of their own story. None of us view ourselves as an evil-doer. If there is evil being done, it is for revenge or it is justified based on a hurt done to us. So I write the same scene from inside the head of Latrice.

Chapter Two: Latrice -
10 am, Day after Christmas

Fluid filled
her eyes and burned like acid. It gathered in her eye sockets and sizzled the color right off of her pupils before spilling over the side. Big teardrops rolled down her cheeks.

This was all wrong. All of it was wrong and her gut hurt so bad she wondered if the baby would be vomited right out of her.

The baby was causing this pain.
It grew in her like an ulcer.

“Puckett
,” she said. “It was Puckett.”

The words felt good to say. She blamed Puckett. She knew he hated
Puckett, she knew he would believe it was Puckett, and she knew he would kill Puckett like he had killed for her before.

The first killing was her stepfather
. Shot him in the head and then burned and buried both the gun and the body. Since that time, it was like she was set free. Like her prince had kissed her cheek and woke her up. Now she was connected to Zach forever. She was in his skin. She was in his blood. When they fucked, she left part of her own spirit in his bloodstream. She was quite sure his veins were lined with parts of her. Sometimes Zack hated that but she knew it gave him purpose. Without her to serve what would he do? Without lives to take, what would his own life mean? Nothing. Nothing at all.

Making p
eople her puppets is what she was good at. She’d been getting in peoples’ heads her whole life.

Zach had fire in his eyes for Puckett now, and
Puckett deserved to die slowly for a million crimes, but his seed had never been inside of her, and he certainly wasn’t there when she was walking by 617 Brentwood Street.

617
Brentwood was now nearly destroyed, bombed out by Zach who fucked the job up being wrecked on Xanax and vodka. It was messy. His target was someone else, but the man was not home, only the man’s son was there. Left alone at 8 years old. She hated to think about it. She looked at the rotting timbers of the house sliding and disintegrating into the earth, day by day, and she had to do some quick self-surgery on her psyche.

A tragedy.
Who would do such a thing
?
I am glad it was someone else, and not the man I am with
.

It wasn’t hard to distance
herself when she looked at the blackened embers.

Why didn’t she move from this street?

Because families stay here forever. You don’t get out of here. Everyone on this street is related. Somebody in a house dies, a relative scoops the house up, pays some taxes on it, and invites the other half of the family over to stay.

Seeing the charred remains of the house was like seeing the insides of someone’
s body. Like their skin was tore off and just the guts and skeleton were left. It looked ugly. The front window seemed like a mouth, and the big dormer window on the second story was the eye that looked over the whole street. Now the eye was blotted out and the glass was broken. The white was charcoal black. Bars on the windows remained and it looked like a vacant jail cell. The front porch had started to sink.

Xanax and liquor put Zach into a raging blackout
, but somehow he passed the police interview two days later. Stuffed animals and balloons had been placed on the front lawn by grieving neighbors for a week or so, but they became dirty, forgotten, and now were long gone.

The kid didn’t burn, the smoke killed him
,
she told herself. Whoever did this, was an evil man, but it wasn’t her Zach.

She forced
the thoughts from her skull and was ready to move on when she saw a light brown boot in the overgrown grass. She tracked the boot up and saw the leg inside a pair of dirty jeans.

Dead or alive
?
Was her first question. Alive was her quick answer, since a dead body would have been hidden deeper in the grass, like the last one they found here stuck under some trash. If it was buried nobody would have bothered.

This brown boot was either part of a sleeping street person or just some wasted fuck. She needed to walk by. She was carrying a plastic grocery bag with five packages of Ramen noodles, a quart of milk, and some lucky charms. The milk made the bag way too heavy. Why do they always ask if she wants her milk in a bag? Like they are too lazy to put the damn thing in the bag themselves.

She could feel the plastic stretching, slipping, ready to break. She moved her fingers for a better grip but needed to get home before the bag burst and everything splattered.

But something stopped her. The body. She had to look. She took a few steps closer.

No, he wasn’t moving. Maybe he was dead.

She nudged his boot slightly with the edge of her foot, and it swayed one way and then back. Her eyes traveled up his body to his arm and figured out what had happened. A needle was sticking into his underarm liked he’d been hit by an arrow, and something was tied around his bicep.

Shadows from overgrown grass gave much of the body cover, but the skin she could see was a dark black and a shade deeper than hers even.
She waited to sense for motions. His boot remained still, his chest seemed stationary. He was not living. Or perhaps this was the sleep of the overdosed, the coma of the high, and he had nodded out right there but would soon emerge.

She tightened her grip on the plastic bag, took a step forward to move on, and then heard a rustle in the grass.

Her head turned, she took another step, and then she felt it. Clutching onto her ankle. It was the grip of his hand.

She
tried to kick her leg forward and pull free but could not. The clutch was strong and full of life. Long fingers squashed her bone the harder she pulled. She tugged with her whole body and dropped the bag of groceries. The milk hit the ground and burst.

A second hand grasped her leg and pulled her to the ground. She landed with a thump and he hovered
over her. The smell was rotten. His skin was dark, crispy, and mixed with the reddish scabs that weren’t bleeding but the color of blood. The whites of his eyes were huge. He had no eyebrows or eyelashes.

She’d fought off tweaking crackheads befor
e, but this creature was strong and mentally ill. She could feel the power of his sickness. She screamed, gained power, and freed one leg to kick at the man’s face.
Smack
, she made contact, like kicking a soccer ball. His head jerked back.

But he was not fazed and was back on top of her
. His smell penetrated and filled her lungs. She beat on the man’s chest and felt it thump like it was hollow. Just the whites of his eyes shined in the dusky air under a street full of broken street lights.

“
You,” his voice spoke with rotten breath. “You will like a little piece of me. You’ll see. Just a little shot of me.”

She fought back
but her arms felt frail as a child.

With one hand he grabb
ed the needle from his arm. It was stuck there like a dart that needed to be tugged out of cork. The needle came free and he held it in front of his eyes. Traces of a liquid dripped from the tip. In an instant he smashed the needle into his own chest.
Thwack
, and his body pulsated with energy. He began to draw from the syringe, slowly, like what was coming out from his chest was too thick to fit through the needle.

She fumbled
on the ground for something to fight with. Tiny rocks, pebbles between her fingers, nothing that could help. The milk puddled under her head and made her hair wet. The milk was still cold. She remembered that. And she remembered how warm his body felt on top of her. Feverish.

“You’ll
always be a part of me...”

He stabbed the
needle into her groin. The hard, thick metal made her gasp like she had been impaled through her slit up her spine. Time seemed to stop, and everything was motionless. The sky above was the dark blue of dusk and a fluff of cloud looked down. She laid there like she was six years old and gazed up, hoping the ice cream man would brave her street and she’d hear the sweet jingle of the white truck.

The needle had impaled her, crucified her, and something pulsed inside.
She was being filled with all the dirt and grime of the gutter of this street. All the discarded waste of dying skin and lost hopes and crumbling walls and peeling paint and broken 40 ounce glass and tweaking crack head nerves filled her insides.

She woke in her bed.

How she got there she was not sure.

Days that followed were not the same. A pit of despair expanded in her stomach. She imagined it like a peach pit, hard and shriveled, but this one grew.
Despite not taking care of herself, it grew. At times it would kick, often it would make her puke, and she imagined the substance that came up was the result of a miscarriage. Her body was discarding the poison.

When she got the ultrasound and they rubbed the cold gel on her belly and found a heartbeat, only then did she believe it was human. It was not waiting to be born, but waiting to come and get her.

The hospital that day
was the dusk of a night she didn’t want to face. Even the clean, well-lit hospital felt dirty. Spasms stretched her muscles and pain came in unrelenting waves. She needed the evil out of her. The nurses came and went and wrote their name with a blue marker on the dry erase board in her room. Medical equipment stood guard and waited.

Zach was there and spoke but she pretended he wasn’t
. She wanted some dope, some Oxy, she wanted an epidural stuck inside her forever. If she could have reached, she would have grabbed something sharp to cut her own veins and take the pain away.

When the child was out of her, she
felt such relief. The baby was barely human and still a tiny fetus. Its skin was blue and translucent from a “cyanotic” heart defect. It was defective, she already knew that, and here it would die. Time to go home and leave the defective baby at the hospital.

She went home, but
Zach remained.

Days at home alone and she felt cold and hollow. Zach’s mom was home too but La
trice paid her little mind and the new grandmother was barely fed.

Latrice
wore sweaters on top of shirts and pulled the sleeves over her hands. She wasn’t sure when to change, wasn’t sure if she ate. Xanax become her vitamins. Each quiet moment was just waiting to be shattered by a phone call from Zach saying that the baby had died, that the infant wasn’t fit to live. Instead, every call from Zach was asking how his mom was doing and if the house was ready for the baby to come home. Latrice said little, and what she did say was muttered without conviction.

When Zach finally carried the tiny infant through the door,
Latrice looked down at the creature for the first time. Breathing on its own, outside of an incubator, and part of her family.
Maybe this will spark something in me,
she hoped,
maybe looking in her eyes will change things.

But the baby’s skin
was still blue, like she was amphibious. It was like you could see the rotting wood of her insides ready to crumble if held the wrong way. Eyes were bulged. Skin was soft but wrinkly. One large hand could squeeze and crush her to death in an instant.

The first night was quiet
and easy.

The second night, the infant’s t
ears cut into her eardrums. It went on day and night, each time stopping only long enough to tease her hopes that the quiet would persist. The infant’s high-pitched wails became the background of her life. Especially at night in the darkness it shattered her sleep. The Xanax and Oxys were like cotton cushions for her ears. Glances from Zach burned her with disdain while he tried to comfort the baby. Trips to the hospital in the middle of the night happened more than once, and she prayed the doctors would say,
“This is serious, we better keep her here,”
but it never happened. Instead, they stayed in ERs with glances from others and drove home with the same infant.

“It’s not supposed to be like this,” she told Zach.

“This is how it is,” he forced back.

“No. You can take care of this. Take care of her like you do. Make it like it was before. She’s not meant to be alive.”

She saw the shift in his eyes. She had convinced him, and he would kill for her again. He was going to put to sleep for good the horrible child she created. The aching in her gut that never left no matter how many pills she took would probably live on, but maybe it would fade and decompose with the child’s body.

She heard him leave the room with purpose to take care of the child. His feet were
heavy with his years. She closed her eyes and curled up into a tiny ball, tight as she could. The inside of her eyelids weren’t as dark as she wanted them to be so she pulled the covers over her head. But then she heard the footsteps return. He was back. She pulled the covers down and rolled her body to face him, and saw the whites of his eyes hovering above.