ache1
before she became ache1: Wah!
the
exhalation yelped and the headless plastic doll did not bounce when she dropped
it onto the packed dirtfloor of pornography hut.
ache1
before she became ache1 (panting): Oh Christ. Oh God. Oh Christ.
She
pulled E.T. from her satchel and sat him alongby just inside the dull interior,
holding onto one of his puffy hands while the shock abated. Half a minute
passed before she dared reach again for the pink decapitate.
There
were three wedge-shaped holes stabbed into its torso: one on each breast, one
between the legs, and while her heartbeat decelerated to its normal meter she
had to force herself not to wonder at the little sickhouse this old railway hut
had become, filled with its habitual stink.
Together
with the mutilated doll were the usual scraps of nondescript and filth-caked
clothing, tiny torn photographic fragments of underwear and naked flesh, and
along one side a horsehair mattress sourcing the shack’s peculiar fudgy odours.
After
raking space with her foot in the corner under the one glassless window, she
tipped out the content of her satchel: a box of matches, a full bottle of
nail-polish remover, and eight small books, their spines aching open under
duress of every page warped with tiny biro embossments.
She
worked quickly now to stave off all thought of consequence, denying her actions
their true weight and actively blind to the appeal of any wording key to
recalling wholesale sections of this life even in its current abandonment.
Neither
“not to mention Judas when she came back
from the hospital” nor “told me and
Steven and Becky that she would not have steel marbles in the” nor “tell him that deleted name bought
it for me or he would go” nor “so
upset that I spilled my popcorn all over the floor before I” to hold the
chemical back from spattering the pages, and E.T. dumb in the doorway, unable
to persuade her from this folly.
The
sodden journals briefly kissed by matchflame: a skeletal blue bubbling, a
flammable outline quickly sketched in the dull air and as quickly disappeared,
flames proper form upon the paper, willing incineration of her words committed
nightly across years to the very evening previous, and onto this ache1
before she became ache1 positioned the headless doll, a punctured
effigy of what she was now and what she would shortly become both.
Its
legs melted bent over her burning history as heat peeled apart the gashed
plastic crotch, opening up the main body almost in half to let smoke well out
of the hollow shape then blacken in confine. She backed away, collecting E.T.
into her satchel by his spindly arms as the other doll puddled into the rapid
consumption of days and scribbly days. When certain nothing would remain of her
chronicle she left for the main road to take her back down into the suburbs.
The
fire began to cross the floor on debris, paper breasts and pubic hair rendered
ash at its bright fingering, its consumption of the mattress’ sustenance so
fierce as to leave of pornography hut a skeleton comprising one single upright
of charred wood sentinel over the collapsed and prostrate panels of corrugated
roofing, remnant yet.
