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Authors: Karina Sims

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BOOK: Sinners Circle
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XV

Whenever
it comes down to women, it always comes down to me. It’s not a hatred I have,
some deep grudge bubbling to the surface, some underlying anger with females or
the fact I’m trying to cope with the loss of my mother. Because when the
opportunity of selection comes, I’m really collecting symptoms of myself.

When I see a girl with black hair
enter the room, I’m looking her up and down, trying to see which part of her
I’d like to ingest.

Memories of days past, the
thought of cribs and trailers, my dark haired mother pressing us together cheek
to cheek in the mirror, “We’re twins, Amanda,”—it didn’t really occur to me
until I lost her, how completely empty I was. The more I grew and the more I
was faced with having to mingle among others, communicate in socially
appropriate ways, these were just emotions and pleasantries I’d learned to copy
cat. Because really, I had no opinion on current events, no attachments to
sporting events, interests in books, television or media, no comment on the
weather.

I’d sort of just use television
as a method of learning what to talk about when confronted with the burden of
friendship. In my teens a lot of girls where cutting themselves. I’d be sitting
in the bathroom stall eating my lunch, listening to the Goths talk about being
needing
cigarettes and being molested, while they gouged
their wrists with push pins, glazing their arms with razor blades they swiped
from wood shop class. So I tried that too. I went home and dragged a razor
blade across both thighs, I still have the scars, but I didn’t
feel
anything and there wasn’t any
release for me.

I’d lay in bed, in the same
basement bedroom I live in still, not thinking about anything except my mom’s
face against mine, her bright lipstick, her white teeth, her voice “We’re so
beautiful...” in my ear. And then I’d fall asleep and that face of hers would
melt away, tearing off completely, her teeth broken, her body tied to some
awful chair in Mexico while children danced around her, pulling her body apart.

Until I started dreaming about
Gina and being in the bathtub, drinking Coke with her out on the lawn and
busting her face in with a brick, pulling out her guts and eating her skin, I
felt nothing.

Around sixteen girls my age were
falling in love with ‘Pretty in Pink,’ but I was falling head over heels for
zombie films. I fell in love with the idea that I was a living zombie. I’d
spend all class drawing this monster I’d imagined. It was like a zombie, but it
consumed human beings entirely,
it’s
skin would rot
and fall off, so it had to pull pieces of flesh off the corpses it killed,
patch itself up. It would swallow hearts for its own and guts and everything
like a normal person would have. In my mind, the creature grew; soon it would
need two hearts, then three, then four to survive. Eventually it would consume
entire communities, towns and even cities. When everyone wanted to be Cyndi
Lauper
, swarmed with adoring crowds and MTV coverage, I
ached to become this big lumbering beast tramping through the streets
slaughtering everything in its path, slapping strips of skin onto my
boney
back, blood running through my teeth.

This big dumb monster consuming
all of humanity until it keeled over and died, the beast with a billion hearts,
a billion brains and all the brawn on the planet, just lying there after
everything is totally gone. Pumping to a stop, collapsing into the ocean and
just rotting away into the water, I called this thing ‘Slaughter Geek.’

Starting off with what looked
like it, what it felt like it was, finding those people and swallowing them
until it really didn’t matter anymore what you looked like because anyone would
do.

The problem with imaginations is
there aren’t real bullets and there aren’t real bars. These are things that
exist only within reality, and sometimes if our imaginations carry us away, we
wind up with one of these things in front of us—bullets in the head, surrounded
by prison bars. So if you’re going to dream, keep it real, or you’ll lose it
all and everything that you’ve worked for will come crashing down, and you’ll
have to sit in a prison lunch room eating peas instead of people.

I’ve long since realized that if
you’re going to be a monster you have to hide it until you are powerful enough
to come creeping out of the shadows and into reality.

XVI

“She
developed an allergy to cats when she was young, but she always loved them.”
Carl is cradling one of those Fur Real cats, you know, those toys moms buy for
their kids when they get bored of their real living, breathing, shitting house
pets. He’s petting the robot kitten, flicking the flaps of fabric sewn to its
scalp as ears. In some spots the fur has
been trimmed right down to the plastic body. What used to be white hair is now
all gray. One of the back legs is busted and there’s gum stuck to the
underbelly, keeping the battery case in place. “She spent all day winding these
fuckers up or
pluggin
’ in batteries to keep ‘
em
going. She had about six dozen of these...” He pokes the
eye, grabs a calico and lifts the tail looking for the crotch. “...
Yup, at
least
that many.”

I lean against the desk, the one
with all the FUCK YOUs cut into it. “What brought her in here?”

He laughs, tosses me the bubble
gum bellied kitty.
“Neighbors.
Apparently she was
busted breaking
into
the little girl next door’s bedroom one night.
Tore a Hello
Kitty sleeping bag right off the little girl lying in bed.
Kid screamed so the parents called the cops,
naturally.”

“What?”

He shrugs. “Yeah, she’d cut half
her own ear off that night as well.
Blood all over the
place.”
He finger snips his earlobe.
“To be like one
of these things.”
He prods the plastic ribs of the calico, Velcro
stomach opened up. This cat must’ve been one of those toys that came pregnant
in the box, kittens sold separately. Kids could play and replay the joys of
pregnancy until they got bored with the miracle of life and those tiny cloth
kittens with retractable eyelids wound up in the garbage can or lost in some
dark and forgotten corner of the house. “When they brought her in here, she was
saying she didn’t think they’d catch her, because she was invisible.”

I put the cat back on the desk.
Carl drags a hand down its back.
“True story.”

“What’s that?” I point at a deflated blow up
doll on the bottom shelf.

He turns around, smiles, and
hikes a thumb behind him. “Oh
that’s
the Queen. Dennis, you know the ‘King of France’ in here, yeah, that’s his
lady. That’s
La
Reine
.”

“Hot.”

He laughs, small bits of spit
flying off his lips and landing on my arm.
“Yeah, what a fucker.”

I crack my
knuckles,
trace a finger along the obscenities carved into the table.

Carl looks at his watch. “Oh
shit, I
gotta
go, Amanda, I’ll catch you later.”

We walk down that awful hallway,
this time the screaming is coming from the rooms on the other side, while total
silence weighs on the other. Carl pats my back in the main lobby and waves a
hand over his shoulder. “See
ya
later.”

I go over to the apple box
library and dig through the
Archies
until I find a water damaged digest featuring Cherry
Blossom. I sit down on that awful couch and move my eyes back and forth from
Cherry’s tits to the nurse’s station. One of the cool things about Carl is he’s
a Sabrina man, you know, that white haired teenage witch bitch. I’m a Cherry
Blossom girl. Neither of us are Betty and Veronica people, and that’s rarer
than you’d think. It’s these small differences that really matter.

Cherry is half way to the mall
when out of the corner of my eye that big lug from the porn store, the one
whose pockets looked like huge swaying tumors from all the shit he was trying
to steal, appears out of nowhere and sits down beside me. He’s thumbing a dog
eared Bible and I’m not even kidding when I say he’s got dish towels stitched
together and safety pinned to the back of his Goldberg t-shirt. He opens the
book but stares at me from the corner of his eye.

The lumpy pad of comic pulp in my
hands shows
Cherry
laughing at a pair of boots. I turn
to the big tumor thief and smack my lips together, “Hi. I’m Amanda.”

He looks up from the Bible he’s
pretending to read. “I’m Dennis...”

“Hi Dennis.”

He looks down at the carpet,
tucks his
slippered
feet tight into the couch then
closes his eyes and asks, “Have you accepted Jesus as your personal
savio
...”

“Are you a rapist?”

His eyes snap open, breath caught
in his throat.

I look him in the eye and smile.
“It’s not like she ever said
no
...
but
that doll you’re fucking, it never really said
yes
either did it? I mean, masturbation
is a sin, too. And if you’ve accepted Christ...” I point at his Bible. “And
you’re
still
doing it… I’m sorry,
Dennis, but…” I lean in a little bit. “You’re going to hell.”

His face does this funny little
dance between screwing up into tears, getting angry, back to crying, then
straight to tomato red. He jumps up, that half destroyed Bible flying to the
ceiling and like all great things, falling to the floor faster than it rose.
“Blasphemy!
Satan! Satan! Satan!” When he shouts like this,
I can see all the veins in his neck and forehead. “
Do you know who I am
?”

While a nurse shoos him off for
shots and straight coats, I slip in the coma ward and wander around until I
find Lilly’s room.

She’s lying in bed, hooked up to
all sorts of breathing machines and tubes running fluids into her. I’m sort of
moved when I see the blankets are tucked in at her arm pits.

The
clipboard
swinging at the edge of her bed tell
me this is Lilith Amber
Wahlund
DOB:
Feburary
21st 1994.

Upon arrival she had severe
internal bleeding,
ecchymosis
of the liver, multiple
cigarette burns to the left foot and calf, damage to the Achilles tendon,
possibility of temporal brain damage. Condition: unconscious/responsive to
heat.

At the bottom of the page is a
signature from RN Sophia Harris. Says here Sophia checked on Lilly twenty
minutes ago. I pull up a chair beside Lilly’s bed and pet her head. I kiss her
fingernails and watch her breathe for a few minutes. I stand, press my
fingertips into the glass pane and pull them in towards my palm so there’s a
streak that looks like a flower; I drag a finger down each center, stemming the
posy. The sun comes out behind a sky scraper, shining directly into my eyes so
that I’m forced to look away. I turn back to Lilly and bend to kiss her
eyelids. As I pull away, I gently bite a strand of her hair and chew it as I walk
back down the hall and out into the world.

XVII


There’s
more twos over there. You missed them.” She slaps my
hand away before my brush touches the cardboard. “
Different
brush
please
!”

I drop my brush in a glass,
purple bleeding into the warm water making it look like My Little Pony took a
piss test. Marcy waves a few fingers over to the palette of acrylic paint
smeared onto a dinner plate. “Pass me the orange.”

I pass her the plate, get a new
brush and swirl the tip into some robin’s egg blue. “Are you even allowed to be
getting help with these?”

She rolls her eyes, “As long as
it’s
me
telling you what to do and
you
are
here with
me
I don’t see how I can get disqualified.”

A brass plaque commending her
victory in the 1997 state Paint by Numbers Contest hangs beside the framed Last
Supper paint by numbers picture, which hangs beside a ribbon for participation
in the 2004 county competition.

This year the painting
requirement for the competition is Mother Mary. Judges will look at all five
hundred paint by number portraits, eventually presenting a plaque to the winner
and pinning ribbons to the chests of the losers.

Marcy is the most militant paint
by numbers artist on the planet. If the colors go outside the thin black lines
of the assigned number, she’s prone to emotional collapse. So far, we’ve had to
start over twice.

We sit in complete silence.
Finally she leans back, closing her eyes and motions for me to take away the
plate of paint. She wheels herself over to the kitchen. “I’m ready for clean
up.”

I soak a
rag,
wash her fingertips and arms, carefully rubbing away any bits paint on her
skin. While I wash her face with warm water she asks me, “You talk to any of
those boys?”

I wipe a glob of ivory white off
her cheek and toss the rag into the sink.
“Boys?”

She wheels back a bit and rolls
over to the couch.
“Yeah.
You know,
men
.”

“No, sorry... No. I haven’t”

“Well, if the guys you work with
are such dolts then why don’t you try getting friendly with some of the
customers?”

I think about Rick finger banging
the silicone cunts on the shelf, Dennis raping his inflatable Queen of France
and crying about going to hell. I think about the midget and the creep who
stood beside her. I think about Trisha, I think about the dildos I stole and I
think about hiding them
inside
Trisha.
I think about Lilly, I think about her little burned feet and I think about
murdering Harry with a baseball bat while he’s masturbating.

“No, they aren’t anything to
write home about, Marcy. So,
bringing
them here... it`s not an option. You wouldn’t like them anyway.”

She turns around to face me, her
eyes heavy with insecurities, “Why? Why wouldn’t
I
like them?”

I run the dish towel under some
warm water to get all the paint out.
“Because you just
wouldn’t.”

She turns back to her TV staring
at it for a good minute before turning
The Price is Right
on. I clean up her painting messes, do her dinner dishes
and ask if she needs help going to the bathroom. She doesn’t say anything so I
open the door to the stairs that go down to my floor.

She says, “You’re ashamed of me.”

Bob Barker asks America to please
remember to spay or neuter our pets.

I turn to her and say, “No Marcy,
you would be ashamed of
me
.”

As I’m walking down the stairs to
my suite that cuckoo clock clucks three pm. I grab my wrist watch off the back
of my couch and call Carl.

Neither of us have work that day
so we go to the park and snort Ecstasy until Alison shows up with some decent
cocaine and a loaf of bread which we toss to the ducks under the bridge.

Carl starts talking about Michael
Jackson’s
Bad
album saying how great
it is.
“His best one.
Better than
Thriller
I think.
Smooth
Criminal
though is easily his
best song.”

Alison and I both light
cigarettes and shake our heads. She says, “
Billie
Jean
!
Billie Jean
!”

I say, “
Bad
isn’t his best album. But
Man
in the Mirror
is definitely my favorite song of Michael’s.”

Carl laughs, spits over the
bridge into the water. “Yeah it’s good but my favorite song on the album other
than
Smooth Criminal
is easily
Leave Me Alone
before
Man in the Mirror
. I mean, he could’ve
left that track out and still had an amazing album.”

I shake my head.
“No way.”

“Yeah way.”

Alison is digging in her pocket
for more cocaine but keeps the bag inside her jacket as a jogger goes by
pumping little plastic weights as he runs.

I wrap my smoke in a piece of
bread and toss it over the edge. A duck catches it before it hits the water,
shakes a bit, squawks violently and then flies away.

Alison hands me the little baggie
and a snipped straw from McDonalds. “How’s Ronnie doing, Carl?”

I take a deep sniff and pinch my
nose as the drips slide down my throat. Carl shrugs. “He lived, so I guess that
means he’s good? I bought that Ecstasy from him yesterday. He doesn’t look too
too
bad. A little pale I guess, but otherwise fine. Why?”

She takes the baggie away from
me, wipes the straw on her jeans and sniffs the thing empty.

Kinda
scary.”

I
aim
a
wad of spit at the duck below me, but it moves just in time. “What was?”

“Just freaky I guess.”

I try cracking my neck. “Well,
just
gotta
learn how to handle your drugs, I guess.”

Carl slaps my shoulder.

Exactly
.
Like
what Roger Alan says, right?”

I rub my sneaker into the cement
wall of the bridge. “If you’re
gonna
be dumb you
gotta
be tough?”

He laughs, lights a smoke and
slaps my shoulder again. “Yes! That’s
exactly
right!”

Alison tugs my tank top. “Trisha
is coming out with us tonight.”

“We’re going out somewhere
tonight?”

Carl jumps up onto the bridge
ledge and pisses into the water. “Fuck yeah!”

Alison rolls her eyes. “I’m
gonna
push you off.”

His piss stream quivers a bit.
“Don’t you fucking
dare!

She pulls some sunglasses out of
her pocket and scratches her cheek. “Yeah we’re going to some house party.
Friend of Carl’s is throwing some party for his medical school acceptance
thing.”

Carl jumps back onto the bridge
and squeezes Alison’s butt. “Yeah, so we’re
gonna
get
lots of drugs before we go over.”

I spit over the ledge again.
“What about beer?”

He looks skyward and scoffs,
“Well, obviously.”

We head back to my house, watch
Betty
Boop
cartoons and drink beer until Ronnie shows
up at my door with three grams of cocaine which he insists on snorting at least
half of with us before he leaves.

When we get to Carl’s buddy’s
place, two of the front windows are broken and half the house is covered in
picnic cups dripping with keg beer. The DJ in the backyard is blasting
Ladytron’s
“Seventeen” and feeding himself pills between
mixes.

I’m starting to peak from the
Ecstasy and I know if I don’t pee now I won’t feel like I have to when this
shit really kicks in, and I don’t want my bladder to explode so I go into the
bathroom. Of all the people to be there, Trisha is on the toilet. Some chick is
sitting on the sink pissing so I tell Trisha to spread her legs. I pull my
pants down and sit on her thighs so I’m facing her. I run my fingers through
her hair and pull her mouth onto mine. Half my piss drips off her pussy before
it hits the water.

The chick on the sink, the one
with the faucet jammed up against her tramps stamp, she farts into the drain
and says “You guys are
fucked
.”

Trisha’s heart is pounding hard
enough to turn her face pink, she’s all out of breath, I have to keep covering
her mouth to keep those horrible words from slipping out, but they do in awful
little gasps, “Amanda...I... want you...to... be
my...my…girlfriend...Amanda...”

I pull up my pants and drag her
into the hallway; she’s still tugging up her jeans while we walk through the
kitchen, crushing plastic cups under our feet with every step. No one really
notices because about fifteen of them are all doing keg stands and playing flip
cup.

We go into the backyard. Carl’s
friend must be rich because there’s a fucking river at the end of his lawn and
a dock and a few sail boats and not a neighbor in sight. The DJ is spinning
this really shitty mix of
Tomcraft’s
“Overdose” while
Trisha and I sit on the grass and feed each other all the drugs in our pockets.

There’s a group of guys down by
the dock with a helium tank. They’re inhaling it, inflating balloons and
setting them free in clusters. You can hear one of the guys speaking in that
high ducky voice you only get from helium. “Now watch me bring
em
back down to earth boys!” Helium boy fires a few rounds
out of a hunting rifle, pops half a dozen high rising red balloons and laughs
like an
Oompa
Loompa
. “Bam
bitches!”

We make out under the moon and
stars until the stars are dancing balls of light, illuminated fairies I try
catching, but the gun shots and balloon fragments floating down from the sky
keep scaring them away. Trisha is talking about wanting to be a model, asking
me if she could be a model, while pulling blades of grass from the lawn,
chewing them. Green spit drooling down her chin, she’s shouting in my face
“Don’t you think I could be a model?!”

The gun shots and pixie stars and
damp grass all around me, I grab a hand full of dirt and shove it in her mouth.
All that grass between her teeth, makes me want to put her into the earth,
water her every day, mow her nice and short. She spits out soil and jumps on
top of me, her face millimeters from mine. When she talks, that green drool is
pouring into my mouth and I’m spitting it out, misting her face with grass
juice. “I love you Amanda. I’ve never been with a woman, I want you to be my
first,
I
want
you
.
Love me! Love me! Love me!” She starts crying, her tears dripping onto my
eyelids, onto my eyeballs, stinging them. I push her off me and wipe my eyes.
She caresses my arms, “Don’t you cry too! I couldn’t take it if I ever made you
cry!
Fuck
!”

I want to tell her something, but
I just can’t think of what to say. I can’t stop staring at the sky. She’s
pulling on my tank top saying “I love you!” over and over again, I get up, walk
over to the DJ and start dancing with Carl and Alison and some other jerks
flailing around.

Alison asks me how Trisha is, I
look over to where we were and she’s gone. I shrug and keep dancing. Those
helium gun boys go into the house and come out with a keg. At least fifty
people come filtering out of the house and the keg is empty within a half hour.
Me
and Alison do keg stands until she pukes and I take
her inside to help clean up all the foam and puke soaking her t-shirt clear to
her tits.

Alison is stumbling in front of
me through the house, mumbling between spit strands, “This is so gross...”

“Nah, don’t worry about it. I’ve
seen worse. Just go into the bathroom, I’ll help you clean up.”

She spits off to the side, a wad
of phlegm sliding across the kitchen counter. “Thank you, babe... Thank you
so...” She pushes the bathroom door open. Two dudes are standing side by side,
pants down around their ankles, one of them aiming a cell phone down at Trisha
as she jerks him off, her mouth full of the other dude’s cock.
Her eyes watering, little rivers of black mascara traveling down
her face, soaking in with green bits of grass and spit.

The cell phone jerk-off guy says,
“Fuck yeah, ladies! Join the party!”

Alison stands totally still,
stares for a second, and then throws up again. The cell phone jerk off guy
flicks his phone shut and backs up.

Awww
,
gross
!
Get the fuck out of
here, bitches! That shit isn’t cool. This is my buddy’s place...”

Trisha peeks around the guy whose
dick she’s choking on, sees me, goes to speak, but her jaw snaps up and the guy
with his dick in her mouth howls, backs up and slaps her hard. “You
bitch
! Why’d you
bite
my dick,
you fucking
slut!”

Trisha reaches forward but she’s
too fucked up to stand. “Amanda, I...”

Me and Alison back out of the
room and close the door before she can say anything else. Alison, she shakes
her head and looks at me. “Holy Christ...”

BOOK: Sinners Circle
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