Fucked Up [excerpts] – Damien Ark

February 1, 2019

excerpts from a novel written by damien ark, entitled, ‘fucked up’.

 

pages 12 – 14

 

It’s essential that I never know the names of the people I hook up with. I don’t want to get close to them. They need to treat me like I’m a cheap blow-up doll and in return I will treat them like a jar of slime. The mystery man is the only guy that I’ve been messing with for the past month. There were probably twenty other guys and ten girls before him. I was recently fucking this mother who works at a private Catholic school until her kids walked in on me rubbing my semen all over her face. Didn’t end well for her, but I passed go and collected two hundred dollars from out her purse before I left. Spent it on dope. Think the husband beat the fuck out of her for all that shit. Oh well. She probably deserved it.

The mystery man is in his forties and pretty well built. Built like Dwayne Johnson, but with the most beautiful black skin. Before him, I had always imagined that all those heavy weight lifting guys had to have super small baby dicks formed by years of abusing steroids, but the mystery man debunked it all. He’s a good eight inches and has the thickest dick I’ve ever seen. Sometimes I dream of him decapitating me and fucking my dead ass on a cold cleaning table. I sent him a text an hour ago asking for him to break into the house using my bedroom window. Sometimes I have him do this and pretend he’s going to kill me. Other times I get bored of that and just want something fake and romantic. Right now, I’m thinking about having him use my pocket knife to taunt me and maybe even cut my back a bit.

I pull back the cap on a bottle of water-based lube and forcefully fuck myself with three fingers. I’m afraid that he’s going to show up and I won’t be thoroughly prepared for him. He’ll ask if I douched and I’ll lie and say that I did. Most of my diet consists of beer and light food, like canned soup that I make for myself because I’m neglected and poor, so I’ve never really had a problem with cleanliness.

My ass feels strangely tight today. I slip the fingers out, wipe them off on my bed sheets and almost start to sob into my pillows. The mystery man slips open my window before I get the chance to cry and tosses his muddy boots off at a pile of expensive records that I have scattered on the floor.

“Don’t move,” I demand. “Strip naked and leave your clothes right where you stand. I don’t want to be cleaning mud out of my carpet all day.”

He rips his shirt off like a wrestler, tosses off his shorts and walks over to me with his over-sized banana shaped dick leaking pre-cum. I pull back the sheets, hand him the lube and lay on my stomach. Mystery man props my ass up and grabs both of my cheeks. Each of his hands is about twice the size of my skull. I slip my Nintendo DS out from under my pillow, put in some headphones and start this game that challenges me with algebra questions.

“Hope it’s ready,” He sympathizes. I move onto the next round while he spits at my hole. Fuck. How do I figure out this probability question in less than sixty seconds without a calculator?

The mystery man’s dick penetrates me like a rusted machete, but it only hurts for a few seconds until he starts pounding. At that point, I’m in my emerald forest of euphoria. When I’m being fucked, I imagine that I’m being brutally killed. When I’m fucking someone, I imagine that they’re having a death stroke. They’re either Bijeh or I’m him and I can’t imagine sex any other way.

He grabs my Nintendo DS, throws it at the wall and slams my head deep in my pillows. I push his hands away, glare at him hatefully as he drills my ass and I spit at his face. “You stupid little faggot shit,” He grunts. The mystery man pulls out, spins me around to a different side of the bed, pushes me up against it and shoves his dick down my throat. I gag with tears immediately forming, but at this instant, this is precisely what I want from him. I don’t want him to kiss or hug me firmly. I want him to beat the fucking shit out of me and leave me for dead in a dumpster.

“Use your teeth against my shaft,” he insists. “Drag those canine teeth against the head and make me bleed.”

It’s a strange request, but he’s a pedophile and all of them have their own bizarre quirks, like getting off to diapers full of shit. I stop sucking on it and attempt to give him the laziest blowjob that I can provide. The warmth of his dick just rests on my tongue like a ship marooned in a foreign island. “Bite on my cock when I ejaculate,” he screams. “Just fucking bite it! BITE MY FUCKING DICK WHEN I CUM! BITE MY FUCKING DICK OFF!”

I look up at him and have no clue whether I should actually do it or not. He seems so disconcerted and apathetic. It makes me want to puke all over his member, which I’m sure he wants me to do eventually, but I’d rather not have to wash my sheets today.

His dick explodes jizz down my throat and I give the shaft a weak bite. He pushes me off my bed and whimpers, “What the fuck was that? You didn’t bite! All you did was nibble on it. I can’t fuck around with you anymore. I thought you were a freak and now I know that you’re just a poser.”

“Wait,” I trip over one of the legs of my chair. “I can still bite your dick off if you want me to! Just let me try again and I promise I’ll bite harder this time. You can’t leave me. Do you know what you mean to me? You’re my Daddy! My father! Don’t leave me again. I love you, please don’t leave me please don’t leave me pleasedon’tleavemepleasepleasepleaseohgodpleasedon’tleavemeagain.”

The stranger walks over to me, semen still pouring out of his swollen piss hole, and then he sits on my computer chair. I stare up at him with carpet burns smoldering on my back. “Grab my shorts,” he says. “And stuff my jockstrap into your mouth. I need to slam and then I’ll decide what I’m going to do with you.”

I stand up and throw his jeans at his face. He pulls out a black bag and organizes his kit on my computer table. Looks like he’s going to shoot up with a used syringe. Maybe I should get tested for the second time this month. He claims that he only fucks kids and virgins, but I can’t ever trust a divorced Grandfather that’s addicted to meth.

“Didn’t I tell you to stuff my jockstrap in your mouth,” he says. “And get me a glass of vodka while you’re at it.”

Worst pedophile ever. Aren’t they supposed to worship me? Why is he treating me like this? I think he broke my fucking DS too. I’m pretty sure that I’m not even getting money out of this either.

He yanks a USB cord from out of my computer tower and uses it as his tourniquet. “Fucking veins are collapsing,” He says. I pull up a dirty pair of basketball shorts, grab his rotten jockstrap from off the carpet and leave my room with it stuffed in my mouth.

My mother has her chair pulled up close to a window. She’s staring out at the rain and looking stupid insane bitch crazy like she always does. I pull a bottle of vodka out of the freezer, grab two glasses and fill them both halfway up. Mom turns her head to me and says, “You should know that I didn’t mean what I said to you this morning. I’m just… Not in a good place, you know? And I know that we’re going to get through this because we’ve already come this far.”

I hand her a glass and almost say something in response, but then I remember I have this stupid fucking guy’s underwear tickling around in the back of my throat. She downs it in a few seconds, sets the glass upside down on the kitchen floor and gently pushes her head against the window. I place my hand on her shoulder for a few seconds, as if to say ‘it’s okay’ even though it isn’t, and then I simply walk away.

He’s done with me for good.

The mystery man told me that he wasn’t interested in fucking me anymore because he knows kids half my age that can obey orders better than I do. It’s whatever. He can go back to molesting eight-year-old boys in rat-infested rest stops for all I care. His loss, I mean gain, I guess. I should turn him in and fuck him over, but I fucked myself over by not allowing myself to know who he is.

I’m cleaning the mud he left on my carpet with a wet rag and trying to get over it while listening to an LP by Clifford Brown and Max Roach. It’s not really working. I can still feel his filth all over my skin, sinking into all my bruises and scars, working its way into my bloodstream and attempting to find my weak spots. I spit at the mud spots, scrub at them and keep doing it in circular motions until each one is gone.

I put up an ad on a hookup website after I finish cleaning, but nobody that’s worth it is going to respond. People know my face on all these sites. They know that I’m a worthless whore. 

The record stops. I flip it over to the second side. Max Roach’s drumming helps me drift on through the lazy Oxycodone river stream. I close my eyes and pretend to kiss Hannah’s lips. She’s not even there in the blackness behind my eyelids anymore. I can’t imagine her without a picture, because she has never truly existed to me. Sometimes I’ll dream of her, but she always dies in the dreams. That doesn’t make it a nightmare. She still dies under glossy neon lights. Her death is still calm and compassionate like a cold ghost sigh. It’s never really that sexual, but it is when I wake up. To be honest, I’ve never had a wet dream. I’ve never had consensual sex in my dreams either. It’s always Bijeh raping and killing me. That doesn’t seem to bother me as much as it used to. Some nights, I’d rather dream of him over anything else and pretend we’re all that’s left on this planet.

 

pages 20 – 22

 

I reach the record store thirty minutes before the seapunk girl expects me to be here. It gives me time to look for hidden eclectic jewels and hunt for smelly hairy hipsters to fuck. I lock my bike up onto a rail, wipe the sweat off my face and head inside.

It’s always crucial for me to make sure that the records that I couldn’t afford during my last visit are still hiding somewhere in the back behind a stack of used country records that nobody will look at. Unfortunately, it appears that someone bought the rare Hijokaidan LP that I put so much effort into protecting. I look around in the noise section for anything else that could catch my eye and then I debate over a few albums in the free jazz section.

Unbelievable. I just found this power electronics LP with some torn up corpse on the front cover. I’m on the verge of purchasing it, but then my date or whatever shows up with flashy seaweed green hair. It’s hard to ignore her silk aqua T-shirt of a random anime girl holding a surfboard and her purple PVC skirt that reveals that she’s not as skinny as I thought she’d be. In fact, her legs are pretty fat and she’s about a foot taller than me. Her pictures must have been at least a year or two old and I’m guessing that she lied about her age as well.

She asks, “What record are you buying?” 

I grab some random vinyl out. It’s the Deads EP by Mayyors, which is a record I’ve been searching for on the internet for a long time. I show it off to her like it’s the most precious thing I’ve ever heard or whatever and bullshit to her, “Well, this what I was looking at earlier.”

“Not into it. Don’t even know what it is. I’m like, listening to Basic Channel and Maurizio and albums by Gas most of the time lately. Pretty esoteric shit that you don’t know anything about. How big are you?”

I look down at my shoes and up at the ceiling as if that’s some magical way of measuring my height. How tall am I again? “Uhm, five foot seven.”

“No, I was asking how big your dick was. Like, you’ve measured it, right?”

“Like, six and a half inches.” Subtract that by half an inch. Whatever. I’m not nervous at all. My expectations are already as low as the anchor she handed me with her first nude pic.

She stands there, tongue moving around in her mouth like she’s sucking on a marble as she studies all the other guys in the record store. It’s possible that they might notice her and possibly give her something better to suck on. Seeing her perform this action makes me immediately feel pathetic. But I’m in luck and out of nowhere she says, “Let’s go to the bathroom”, and so I follow her towards the back of the store, still holding the record and I enter the women’s stall with her.

The bathrooms clean and all, but I don’t have a place to set the record, so I just let it rest in the sink. My eyes are glued to it and worrying that it’s somehow going to get fucked up, which is ruining the moment. As I’m frustrating myself, she yanks my pants down, pulls my dick out and squats.

“You don’t seem much like a Sheree,” I say. “Or a Sheree Rose. Maybe just Rose. Is it okay if I just call you Rose?”

My cock is already in her mouth. I squeeze onto the doorknob and lock it. She yanks onto my hair, which fucks with me, a trigger that reminds me of what Bijeh used to do when I annoyed him at times. It’ll take me longer to cum because it’s a girl sucking me and I’ve already jacked off two times today and I’m also still fucked up on Oxy. I’m looking at my hands and freaking out while she’s kissing my sack. They’re fucked up; bruised knuckles, dry skin, paper cuts on all my fingers and some weird brown scar on my right pinkie. She pulls up her shirt and I immediately suck in the stench from her hairy armpits. Her breasts are probably a 36D cup size, which is fine. I get on my knees so that I’m face to face with her and I keep jerking off and shove my face into her chest. I pull her bra down just enough so that I can get a tit in my mouth and nibble on it. She keeps pulling at my hair from the root and it’s kind of killing my erection; I don’t want to lose my chance, but I’m already sick of her.

“You’re decent,” she says. “I want to know what your cum tastes like. I’m guessing it’ll be a mix of vegan tacos, peaches and pears, and sour Gose beer.”

Rose deep throats and gags on my dick. She makes it look easy, which has me wondering if I’m smaller than what she typically likes and if I’m boring her. I run my hands through her hair and fantasize of scalping her as her mouth makes nasty gargling and popping sounds. Looking down, I count the spit bubbles before they pop on the base of my dick as she tongues my slit. 

I’m close. The memories fade in and distort my vision. A car explodes in front of me. A tyrant of flames rises to the sky. The air is thick and dry. I can taste the dust. Bijeh is choking me and fucking me and his son is watching. I remember seeing that old lady that he killed and the brain matter she left behind. God, I’m so fucking close and I just want to fucking end it all.

Her technique progresses, but I don’t know anyone that could ever suck a dick better than I do. I cum in her mouth and she snowballs it back to me. It must have tasted like shit, I guess. I pull back, brush my hand underneath her right breast and ask, “Do you want me to fuck you in here?”

“No.”

“Where do you want to go?”

She pauses, straps her bra back on and puts on her shirt. I take it as a hint that she’s not interested. The thought makes me feel so fucking ugly and pathetic. I want to kick myself in the face and shove myself into dog shit. I’m short, frail, ugly, stupid, insane and worthless to her.

“Tomorrow night,” She answers. “You can fuck me at my place.”

I pull my pants back up, grab the record out of the sink and open the door for her. Nobody notices the two of us exiting the restroom, which relinquishes some of my anxiety. We walk up to the cashier and Rose says, “I’ll buy it for you. Consider it a gift.” And so I let her.

The thunder rolls in and cracks apart the clouds. Lightning spreads out in a nonstop manic frenzy. The rain is going to hit us soon and I don’t know if I’ll be home in time to avoid it.

Rose opens the door for me and asks if I want a ride home. At first, I reject it, but then I realize all this positive energy that she’s reflecting on me and I also consider that the negative thoughts that I was having before were utterly delusional. She’s in love with me and I’m slowly falling for her. I take her offer, put my bike in the back of her trunk and lay down in the backseat of her car.

After we make it back to my house, she invites me to a concert. I’m standing amid the storm as she explains, “There’s a concert at the Death Shelter tomorrow. I’d like for you to meet me there and buy my ticket. Can you do that?”

“Of course. Which band?”

“Brainbombs. They’re a noise rock group from Sweden. Daughters play before them. You know who they are, right?”

I lick water off my lips and say, “Yeah, I know both of those. I’m surprised a girl like you would be interested in such violent and controversial music. What’s your favorite song by Brainbombs?”

“Oh, I think Fuckmeat is decent. I think that song is about me. You should listen to it a few times before we meet up.”

“Yeah, totally.” 

I turn away from her, walk up to the garage and enter the key code for it to open. She’s gone as soon as I turn around and I remember that I left my record in the backseat of her car. I hope she listens to it a thousand times before she sees me again and fantasizes of me like I will of her tonight. 

If this relationship works out I might be able to finally put my thoughts of Hannah to rest. I’ve never been so happy in my life and maybe this really is the perfect time for me to quit abusing opiates. God, I just want to know what it feels like to be inside her and have that connection with our souls twisting and fucking. I want to look into her eyes and pull her fucking neck apart. Drown me in her blood. Thrust my knife into the back of her skull. Listen to her croak. Let her kill me while I kill her. Thrust my cock into her corpse as I’m dying at the same time. Fuck it all. I’m in love with a girl who listens to Brainbombs.

 

pages 24 – 28

 

Rose is outside of the venue sitting down on the steps with a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. She looks drunk or fucked up on opiates, which I get, because I’m there too. That makes us a perfect couple. I’m in the alleyway next to a slimy dumpster sobbing over stupid fucking memories of being raped. I feel weak and cold. Eventually, I’m able to tell myself that it’s all over and I’m going to be okay, which gives me just enough strength to approach her with a fake smile implanted over my face, but it’s not over and it’s not okay because I want to kill myself and I’m never going to move on from these stupid fucking memories of being raped.

“You look like you just finished crying,” she says. “What happened to your wrist? Are you a cutter or something?”

“Uhm,” I shrug. She pushes herself up, flicks her cig and surprisingly kisses me. I put my right hand on her hip, but it’s over before I can even get the chance to really enjoy it. A big enough tease to make me want to kill her, but I couldn’t ever hurt a person.

She unrolls the gauze from off my arm and I let her without pushing her back or hiding in shame. The role of bloody fabric flies into the streets and gets caught under a muddy car wheel. Rose tells me, “My younger brother used to cut himself, too. His name was Preston. Killed himself a year ago when he was fifteen. His best friend killed himself a few months before. My parents were pretty fucked up and… Anyway, I wrote a book about them, but it’s mainly about my brother’s friend.”

“You wrote a book? Why haven’t you told me about this?”

“Because I don’t want you to read it.”

“Then fuck you,” I say it with a smile, which she understands.

We’re finally allowed to enter the venue, which is dressed as an industrial shack of bamboo walls with a glimmering checkered stage. The band members of Daughters are setting up their gear and getting drunk before the show. Some of the people in the crowd are already piss wasted. Everyone is either wearing a black noise rock or power electronics T-Shirt’s and then there’s Rose and me, all dressed up for an imaginary funeral. I feel naked with the cuts on my wrist being open for anyone to see, but at the same time, I’m pretty sure the crowd will be too fucked up to notice or care.

Rose lights a cigarette and rests her head on my shoulder. I just stare on at the stage in a trance as the music begins and then the band members are throwing themselves around while destroying their own amps and instruments. It’s visceral and engaging. The people in the crowd are punching each other, jumping, screaming, kissing, puking. Beer cans are thrown onto the stage. Sometimes Rose will squeeze my arm when there’s a melody she likes, but then she loosens up and caresses me again.

The noise comes to an end and the band vanishes. Parts of the crowd slip away for more beer. Brainbombs starts playing by the time the crowd returns. I look at Rose and say, “I really like this song. This is off their new album, right?”

“WHAT? I CAN’T HEAR YOU!”

“NEVERMIND!”

Ocean blue stage lights focus down on the band as they drunkenly stagger around the stage. The lead singer is groaning about killing hookers. At some point, the trumpet player just walks off stage. I think he might have been too trashed to continue playing his instrument. Sheree’s sucked into the music and dancing and swaying drunkenly while my attention is stuck on her.

The concert ends after six songs and mostly everyone drives off to crash their cars into street poles. I buy Rose a record from the merch table and she gets it signed by the band members. Just as I dreamed it would happen. She follows me to an alley where I left my bike behind a dumpster and then she leads me to her car.

“You can put your bike in my trunk again,” she calmly suggests. “My house is about an hour away.”

My Mayyors record is still in the back seat where I had left it.

Sheree lives in a small house across from a baseball field. The yard is littered with empty beer bottles, a frying pan and scraps of rusted metal car parts. We enter through a black kitchen door where a cat hisses at me behind a dozen flower pots mounted on a counter-top. The place is a fucking mess. Strange sticky brown substances are fastened into the floor tiles and crushed bits of popcorn are flattened with every step that I take. She opens the windows in every room and apologizes for the smell. I look through her garbage to get a better idea of what kind of person she is. It’s full of used hypodermic needles, torn up pizza boxes, a slab of wet dirt and a Target bag full of dried up cat shit.

“Your place is pretty neat,” I lie. 

She leads me to her room, where piles of dirty clothes are piled up in corners like Egyptian pyramids. Her bedroom smells like a car-wash even though it looks like a murky toxic Chinese lake. A few candles stay lit on top of a desk of cut up work out magazines. The further I explore the room the more trash I find. Bowls of unfinished cereal rest on top of Xbox video game cases. Dead flies in the sour milk. A broken coffee grinder is hidden under a nightstand. Hundreds of empty bottles of makeup products, some shattered, others covered in strange orange fluids, are piled up next to a stack of shattered sunglasses and dirty G-strings.

She strips naked in an instant and tosses her clothes onto one of the many other piles of shit. I turn around and stare at a streetlight that flickers on and off from out of the screen window. Rose turns me around and says, “I want to shower with you. Take off your clothes. I’ll show you where it is.”

I can’t decide where to put my clothes, so I just tuck them underneath her bed next to a pillowcase full of dry leaves. She walks me to her tiny bathroom and turns on the shower. There are three wet towels on the floor an inch away from the toilet, which hasn’t been flushed and is full of piss and shit. She tells me that it has been broken for a few weeks now and she hasn’t had enough money to get it fixed. Most of the time she goes to the bathroom outside and sometimes she will just go in the sink. She talks about the few times that she has had to shit in the shower and stomp it down the drain. Certain parts of the walls have these gaping holes in them and I begin to imagine that if I were to place my hand in one of them that a snake would jump out and sink its venom into my veins. Her shower hasn’t ever been cleaned. It’s just an oval shaped shit hole of grime. I tell her that she can pay me to clean it for her and that I can probably repair her toilet, but she just laughs it off as a joke. I’m guessing that she’s already comfortable with this existence.

“The water is too warm,” I gripe. “It’s fucking burning my cuts.”

She adjusts the water and soaps my body. I bring my head back, close my eyes and consume myself in my negative thoughts where she’s drowning me, I’m drowning her, both of us are drowning together with stones tied to our feet, our limbs stuffed in plastic bags and full of concrete.

Rose kneels down, throws her hair over the front of her face and says, “Please, urinate all over me. And then I want you to clean my body like I did yours.”

“What? Did you just tell me to — No fucking way. No. That’s not happening.”

“Just do it. Do it. Come on. Just fucking do it.”

She’s so prepared and serious about it. It’s just a joke to me. What the fuck do I have to do to get out of this situation? What is she getting out of it? Is this some sort of sex ritual for her? The act itself would seem to be humiliating to her, but I feel like I’m the one that’s being degraded. It’s like she’s testing my perverseness. But I can’t let her win.

So I piss on her. She squeezes her hair, caresses her breasts and fingers herself as the urine spirals down the shower drain from off her body. As I expected, there’s nothing sexual about it. It’s entirely spiritual for her. I’d rather just have useless sex and leave, but this is the girl who listens to Brainbombs and dyes her hair a different color every week. She’s continuously shape-shifting. I’m afraid of her and what she may do to my mind.

Rose has me clean her with a bar of soap and I feel compelled to scrub her until she’s covered in blood. I feel so confused and disgusted with her, but I have no control over this moment, and so I just obey her like she’s mythological sea Goddess. We get out of the shower and wipe off with the same towel, which she drops on the floor next to the others.

The hazy green streetlight shines on her as she sits on the edge of her bed. I lay down beside her and wait for her to make the first move. Instead, she just smokes a cigarette until its dead and flicks it at the wall. I ask her, “When was the last time you had sex?”

“Huh? Oh. Two years, I guess. I mostly isolate myself from other people, so I don’t really desire to get fucked that much. The last time I had sex was on my twenty-second birthday with some fourteen-year-old that I paid five hundred dollars.”

“Are you fucking serious? Don’t you think that’s sort of fucked up?”

“Which part? Getting fucked by the kid or paying him or something else?”

I go silent. She lights another cigarette and continues on, “He looked older for his age. I had him choke me until I was on the verge of passing out. Wouldn’t be surprised if I made him into a serial rapist or spree killer. But yeah, you’re right. I’m fucked up. Who the fuck isn’t? You’re probably just as disgusting.”

“No. No way. You don’t know me.”

“Yeah, I know. Whatever.”

She turns around, falls next to me on the bed and spreads her legs as wide as possible. I take this as a command for me to initiate it. I stare at her cunt and ask, “So what? Are you going to give me five hundred bucks after I eat you out and fuck you the way you want me to?”

“You’ll give me what I want whether you get anything in return or not. You do actually want me, right?”

“Maybe. I don’t know. Having sex with you may help me figure something out about myself that I don’t know. Like… I want to know how far I can go. If I’m really crazy. But maybe I do want you more than anything else. Maybe I don’t want anything from anyone at all. Maybe I want to be of use for you because I feel so useless in every other part of my life. I’m not sure I even enjoy sex.”

Thunder shakes the entire foundation of the house as a single purple lightning bolt rips apart the sky. I rest the end of my head on her pubes and softly lick her. A few minutes after eating her out I look up to see that she’s burning tinfoil and sucking up fumes through a straw. I lick her thighs and legs, bite her ass and suck on her toes. The memories start flooding and then I start feeling like a kid again with Bijeh trading me affection for blowjobs. He taught me everything I currently know about the human body and how quickly it can be manipulated, but I still feel like I’m the one that’s continually being used.

Rose pushes me forward and has me fuck her. It’s cliché to say, but I can’t help but hear piano ballads by Frédéric Chopin play out in my head when I’m doing it. At some point, I stop acting all passionate and end up pushing her against the wall in the most uncomfortable position imaginable. I twist one arm around, having her left leg hanging off the mattress while the other is stretched out towards the ceiling, and then I roll her head around like I’m casting some spell through a magical ball. Sheree just goes, “Mmm… Ohh… Wow. Oh God. Wow.” It drives me nuts and agitates the shit out of me, so I fuck her relentlessly and press my nails as deep as they can go into her skin.

Something holds me back from coming inside of her. At some point, I just pull out, get off the bed and jerk off in her bathroom. I don’t even think about anything when I do it. I cum all over her toilet seat and puke into her sink. When I come back, I find her in the same awkward position that I left her in. She asks me, “What was that all about? You were doing great. Did you have to piss or something? You could have pissed on me. I wouldn’t care at all.”

“Just… No. I’m sorry. I just can’t.”

She stares at me with this unbelievably discombobulated face. I feel utterly humiliated and pathetic for the hundredth time this month. Should I just leave? Would I even be able to find my way back home?

“Yeah? Well, whatever. I sort of loved you at first, but now I don’t know how to feel about you.”

I place myself under her covers and rest on her pillow while she stays frozen against the wall. She smokes three cigarettes back to back to back and falls asleep with her head between her legs. Her pulse is so slow that I consider calling an ambulance, but this is probably normal for her.

Pillowcases full of dry leaves. Silk blankets that reek of vinegar and sweat. Her cat jumps on top of the computer desk and chews on a half-smoked cigarette. It notices me and quickly dashes into a bent cardboard box.

Rain seeps through a crack in the ceiling and slides down her backside. It’s raining more massive than it has all year. The clouds are at war with us. This is what we get for placing land-mines into Mother Nature’s skin and tossing our trash into her oceans. I feel her pain and pray that she drowns us all. Crush these skyscrapers and homes into rubble. Don’t stop until everything is torn apart and deader than dead. Mother Nature will never regret her destruction. She’s suffering, and nobody cares. Is she too far gone to save? I’d hope so.

 

pages 33 – 35

 

A single 160mg Latuda, 400mg Seroquel, 40mg Celexa, 15mg Zyprexa, and a refill of 2mg Alprazolam. All the pill bottles are lined up like miniature orange cryogenic chambers. I’ve been skipping my 50mg doses of Trazodone for a while now, which is fine because I don’t feel as if there’s really any difference when I do take it. After contemplating the idea of taking all of them at once, I swallow my handful of pills, pull out a blue from the little bag Xavier gave me, crush it up and snort it through one nostril. Something tells me that it won’t be enough, so I end up snorting another one and then I beat off to pictures of anthropomorphic wolves on my iPhone.

The static from the television is at full blast, which is so extreme that I have to stop masturbating. I exit the bathroom with my pants still unbuckled and I mute the volume with the remote doused with my blood from yesterday. The static on the screen reveals itself in numbers to me – something like an encrypted NSA code. 

I’ve always had a theory that my mother has been a covert spy for the federal government. Two years ago, I had caught her speaking to the President with my phone and telling him that I was a faggot and a shameful son that was deserving of death. She said that she was speaking to her dying sister in England, whom I have never met and have no proof that she even exists. My mom didn’t show any emotion towards me when I had I came out to her as bisexual. I remember preparing myself, expecting to be disowned and castrated, but she just looked at me and tilted one of her eyebrows. Her response to my fortitude was to tell the President of the United States that I enjoyed sucking dick. Now every fucking hate group and anti-LGBT politician knows my name. They have assassins plotting my execution, drawing crosshairs on my forehead, waiting for me to step into the right alleyway so that my death can be swift and tasteless. I know how they would do it; they would come up to me from behind while I would be locking my road racer onto a pole and someone would perfectly slit open my throat with an eighteen-inch-long machete. Some people say that most of these LGBT teens are dying because they’ve committed suicide. That’s bullshit. The military is breaking into houses, raping young gay kids and hanging them in their closets. They’re on top of skyscrapers with sniper rifles and shooting transgender kids daily like they’re cattle for the slaughter. It’s because they know we’re going to transform the planet and make everything gay as possible.

In the television, the numbers form an image of a masked man in a black leather suit sharpening his knives. My death is close and there’s no way I can escape it. It’s a horrifying thought, but it gives me a slight erection at the same time. I close my eyes and focus on my death. One of my favorite fantasies is to be put to the guillotine and beheaded in front of everyone in my life that has emotionally abused me. I can’t help but find something extraordinarily sexual and beautiful at the thought of being decapitated for being a worthless person in front of people that have reinforced and influenced my negative behaviors.

My visions are disrupted by a phone call from Kyle. He asks if he can spend the night, which doesn’t bother me because all I had planned for today was to snort pills, drink malt liquor, listen to black metal cassette tapes and look at Saudi Arabian execution videos.

I walk down the hallway towards my bedroom, stop halfway and stare at my mother as she taps one finger against a single piano key in her study room. She notices me and mumbles something under her breath that’s too delicate to hear, so I enter the study and ask her, “Were you trying to say something to me?”

“Elliott,” she slurs. “Do you think that you’ll ever forgive me?”

The way she says it comes off more like a statement rather than a question. It’s like she already knows the answer, even though I don’t know it. She turns around on the bench, looks at me like a lost fly on the wall and asks the question again.

“Maybe.”

I’m afraid of her. I think she’s going to kill me. Her eyes are cutting into mine like daggers. She’s in my head, swimming in a sea of my cerebrospinal fluid and chewing apart the neural tissues of my brain.

“Stop looking at me,” I beg. “It hurts. I’m going to dig a screwdriver through my eye socket and force every thought of you out of my brain.”

She turns around lazily and knocks over a sheet of music. I spit on the carpet, rub my foot into it and kneel to pick up the paper she left on the floor. It’s for Chopin’s Ballade No. 1 in G minor, Op. 23.

My mother had me start taking piano lessons when I was living in Egypt and I continued to play when we had moved to Istanbul. I mostly studied the work of Chopin and eventually came to learn his Ballades by heart. The hospitalizations and over-sized doses of narcotics caused me to lose almost all my talent and interest towards playing the piano. That wasn’t her fault. It doesn’t bother me too much, because nobody ever noticed me playing in the first place.

She looks down upon me and rants, “Sometimes I think you don’t want any help or that you want to be depressed. I mean, what did you expect? Did you really think that everything was going to be okay? That you would get to be like the rest of them? Yeah, you were raped, but that’s over, so fucking move on. Maybe I wasn’t there for you, but I can’t change the past, so just forgive me. You’re such a fucking asshole. How could you be so self-absorbed? Do you really think you’re the only one that’s ever been abused? You think I haven’t been hurt by someone? Fuck you, Elliott. I fucking hate you. How do you think I felt when I found you all those times after your cry for help suicide attempts? You think that was fun? You fucking asshole. How would you feel if you came home and found me hanging from a rope in the bathroom? Makes you think, huh? Piece of shit. Stupid fuck. Faggot. You fucking baby. Why didn’t I abort you? Why didn’t I fucking abort you? I could’ve had a better son if I waited a little longer. Maybe he wouldn’t have been schizophrenic or thrown himself at a serial killer. Did you ever think of the consequences? You should have just stayed in the fucking apartment when I was gone and watched your stupid fucking cartoons. No? That’s right. You had to let some older man take you home and fuck you. And all those kids he killed? That’s your fault for not reporting him. You didn’t tell me anything! How do you think that makes me feel, Elliott? How am I supposed to feel sorry for what happened to you? You wanted him. You wanted it to happen. You didn’t even fight back. Did you just close your eyes and let him do whatever he wanted to do to you? I bet you got into it. You thought it was fun, right? That’s right. You’re a faggot. I can’t believe I gave birth to a cocksucker like you. Could I ask for anything worse? Why do you think I have to spend four hundred dollars a week on alcohol? That’s your fault. Just remember that. You gave yourself the schizophrenia, depression and PTSD. That’s all on you, Elliott. You think it’s all my fault? I’ve given you everything. What do you do for me? You bring people over to my house and have sex with them. That’s what Bijeh taught you, isn’t it? Does it make you feel valuable? How can you be so stupid? I’ll never love you. I gave birth to everything that I hate. I hate myself so much because of you. And and and all this fucking pain! It’s your fault! Fucking asshole! Asshole! Asshole! Asshole! Fuck you! Get the fuck out of my room!”

Once again, I have turned to stone. I’ll never fight back. I just give in and take it. Thanks, mom. Yes, I forgive you. I truly do. I’ll never be as honest as she is towards me. How can I be so weak? I should have been hanging from a crane next to Bijeh for my act of silence and embarrassment. I’m such a fucking loser. How could I be so fucking selfish?

“Yeah, that’s right,” she sneers. “Stop cutting horizontally and do it as deep as possible in one vertical line. You can go outside to the backyard and do it right now. I’ll wait a few hours to make sure you bleed out and die before I call the cops. It’s okay. I wouldn’t have to clean up the blood, so you won’t have to worry about feel ashamed.”

I turn my head around, still holding the sheet of music and ask her, “Will you ever forgive me, mom? Will you ever forgive me? Please… I love you, mom. I’m so sorry for everything I’ve done. Please forgive me.”

“No. Never. I’ll never forgive you.”

 

pages 41-49

 

Rose pulls down a silk bed sheet from off the kitchen table and hands me a hair dyeing kit. I ask her, “You want me to dye your hair?”

“No. I’m going to dye yours tonight.”

“Why? I won’t make a good blonde. Trust me on this. It’s fine as it is. I mean, it’s not, but I don’t want to look any dumber than I already do.”

“Look. If you don’t let me do this, then we can’t have sex anymore. I want you to look like my brother, so we have to do this if we’re going to fuck tonight. You seriously have no idea how important this is to me. I need you to become him. Come on. It’ll only take an hour to do.”

There’s an oversized power drill sitting on the table that wasn’t there last time. I point at it and ask suspiciously, “What are you using that for?”

“You’ll see. It’s part of my fantasy.”

“Are you going to kill me with it?”

“No. I’m not going to kill you with it.”

“Okay. Well, that’s cool. I’m glad you’re not going to kill me with that power drill.”

She has me lay naked in the bathtub and mats the yellow paste into my hair while I imagine her using the power drill on me. After she’s done, I spend a half hour staring at myself in the mirror and attempt to imagine that I’m her brother now, not Elliott, but it doesn’t work because all of this is stupid and insane. Right as I begin to question if she even had a brother she leads me back into her living room and shows me a piano that once belonged to him. That’s when I begin to realize that there really isn’t a difference between me and her dead brother. 

“My parents wanted to throw all of his stuff away,” she explains. “So I went over to their house, took everything out of his dusty bedroom and stuffed as much shit that I could into my car. My parents don’t know about the novel that I wrote about him or his friend, nor do they really know how much of a freak that I am, so that’s why I shaved and put on makeup today. Trust me, I hate it just as much as you do. My brother’s ghost had been haunting me ever since he had died and one point I even ventured out to hire a paranormal investigator to exorcise him from out of my home. That was probably the worst decision I’ve ever made in my life. Since then, I’ve been obsessed over the thought of wanting him to haunt me all over again. I’m afraid that I’m going to completely lose him soon and if I do I don’t think I’ll ever be able to write or survive ever again. That’s why I need to make you into my brother. You’re young, you have his figure, you have the cuts on your arms, you’re practically him already as it is. For this to work, I’ll probably have to stop calling you Elliott and begin to call you after my brother’s name. If this works, it might give me the hope and inspiration that I need in order to write another book.” 

“Does that mean you want to write a novel about me?”

“Sort of. Like I said, you won’t be Elliott at that point. I’ll even let you move in if you want. The only issue with that is that I would need you to be completely dependent on me and never leave the house. You wouldn’t be able to communicate with the outside world or use any technology. It’s obvious that you have emotional issues, but my brother was on the verge of suicide when I started to have these feelings for him, so I would need to have you pushed as far as possible to want to commit suicide but not being truly able to do it. You get where I’m going with this?”

“Uh… I guess so. I don’t really know how much I can play along with it though. I want to go to college and major in anthropology, you know? Maybe I could do all that fantasy stuff after I graduate and get the job that I want, but that just seems like a lot of work for me. I’m not trying to be rude, but I already have a lot of shit on my plate with managing my medication and schizophrenia. I just don’t think I can do all of that.”

Sheree is never fazed or astounded by anything that I say. It’s evident that she knows what she wants and will do whatever it takes to please her needs. My opinions aren’t going to matter. I could get out of this situation right now by sprinting out of her house, but chances are that she wouldn’t give me back my bike and that she might end up drilling holes through my skull. I should have known that this situation was already too fucked up the moment that she forced me to piss on her.

I look around the room, trying to find some sort of bottomless pit or mystery bookshelf that will get me the fuck out of this place in the snap of a finger, but there isn’t. The front door to the house is literally taped shut with black gorilla tape. I’m too much of a pussy to beat the shit out of her. She notices how anxious I am and says, “Are you afraid of me or something? I know it sounds weird and horrifying, but people do this all the time. It’s perfectly normal to submit yourself to someone. A lot of people enjoy being degraded, used and treated like animals or slaves. You know a lot about that, right? It can’t be too bad. Just be open-minded. Just think of it as if you were returning to the worst moment of your life, but remember that you survived it.”

“This is so, so, so unbelievably fucked up. You want me to become your dead brother? I mean, what the fuck is wrong with you? What do you know about what I’ve gone through? You fucking bitch. What do I get out of all this shit? Huh? Are you going to give me drugs or money? Yes? No?”

“That could be arranged,” she says. “I can pay you fifty dollars for tonight, and I can also offer you a taste of my heroin. Is that good enough?”

I’m not really interested in her heroin, but the money has me responsive, even if it isn’t that much. The situation seems cataclysmic, but now I can’t get the smell of cash off my mind. If this is what I have to do to get more Oxycodone, then I’ll do it.

Rose grabs a pack of cigarettes from off the floor and searches for her lighter. We’re still nude and I’ve forgotten where she put our clothes. Her tits are perked like diamonds. 

I feel so pathetic. The voices in my head are telling me that she’s going to kill me with the drill after she hands me the money. I’ll have to kill her first. Will I strangle her during the sex? Can I punch her hard enough to knock her out? Will my fist blast straight through her skull like I read in the mangas?

“It’s time,” she says. “You have to take a shower. Use one of the towels on the floor next to the toilet to clean your hair. Just make sure you don’t use the one with mold on it.”

She walks me to her bathroom and shuts the door for me. There’s a coffee cup sitting on top of the toilet, soiled cold coffee that’s probably a week old, and toilet paper rolls stuffed into one corner of the bathroom while a pile of wet towels lay on the floor. They’re the same ones from last time. The shower water is cold and weak, and a wolf spider emerges from the drain and crawls into a hole in the wall. Not sure if the spider is an NSA agent or not. I finish washing my hair, walk out of the bathroom and use the Brainbombs T-Shirt that I bought her to dry myself off.

Rose is in the kitchen, still nude and dancing with the power drill in her hand. She notices me and sets it in the sink on top of a stack of slimy plates. 

“You really are my brother,” she says. “Back from the dead. I can’t believe it’s actually happening. You’re channeling his energy into your own soul for my sake and at some point, he will completely consume you. This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Better than any high.”

“Hey, wait, you’re not serious, are you? I don’t want to be consumed by a ghost or some shit. Do you see his orbs or something? What color are they? You’re just fucking around with me, right?”

I’ve gotten a different reaction out from her for the first time. Now she’s just as confused as I am, but in a matter of a few seconds, her facial expression changes back to her typical maniacal grin. I still don’t know if she’s fucking around with me.

“There’s a pair of clothes on the sofa,” she notes. “I’d like for you to put them on and then return to this room. I’ll tell you what to do afterward.”

And so I do what she says and head into the living room again and look at the neatly arranged soccer gear arranged on the pillows. I’m guessing all of this belongs to her dead brother. I curse at myself while slipping into the dirty yellow sports clothes and dig my feet into the tight orange cleats.

Rose catches me off guard, which causes me to anxiously trip over nothing and land against her brothers’ piano. She’s wearing gray sweatpants and a woven black dress. Strains of her wet hair are stuck against her face as if she was just thrown out from the eye of a tornado.

  “I’m starting to scare myself,” She says. “Now that you look exactly like him.”

I shut my eyes and focus on the moment. The static in my head reveals to me an image of Rose made of numbers and cryptic code, and once decoded, I find her levitating above a bucket of blood and wearing the same outfit as the one she has on. I open my eyes. She’s not levitating, but it feels no different. She carefully sets a mason jar on the beer stained carpet and takes three steps away from it. I ask her, “Do you want me to urinate into that?”

“Yes.”

“When do you want me to do it?”

“Now. I’d like for you to… I’d like for you to urinate into the glass jar right now. Is that going to be a problem? Do you need more time?”

“I’ll be fine,” I answer. “Uh, what if I end up pissing on the carpet?”

She circles around the glass, stops midpoint and keeps her eyes locked on mine. “Doesn’t matter. It’s practically destroyed already.”

My heart is on the verge of bursting and I can feel the cancerous and shameful anxiety consuming me. I take three steps closer to the glass, pull out my dick and pee into it. My piss pours over the top and sinks into the carpet. After I’ve finished, I quickly turn my back from her and pull my pants up, embarrassed by what I just did in front of her. Sheree picks up the glass and paces to the kitchen with it. When she returns she explains, “I’m keeping it in the fridge. I’ll drink it after I come back from dropping you off.” She licks piss off her fingers, grabs my right arm and drags me to her bedroom. I’m lost in the crunching static and don’t know what she wants me to do, so I ask her, and she responds, “Just do whatever. You can make love to me or you can abuse me. I don’t care. I trust you. After all, you’re my brother.”

The backwash chipmunk voices are giggling inside of my skull. My face twitches and I stare at her like how a ghost would do if it saw its reflection in a mirror. Fucking shit. I’m lost in the moment and she’s fucking waiting for me. What the fuck do you want from me? I droop down like a swinging anchor and hold myself up with one arm on her bed. Her neck muscles tense up. It sets in. The need. Leviathan. This is how we’ll destroy each other. 

I lift one leg up, push it back against her right breast and continue to drive my cleat down on her. Her body restrains itself. Surprised, because it doesn’t really bother or excite her. She’s still bored. I ask, “Did you ever fuck your brother or is this just some sick fantasy you’ve secluded inside of your head your entire life?”

“We never fucked,” she answers bluntly. “He never knew about my feelings. Like I said, it wasn’t until he was suicidal that the feelings started, but the sexual aspect didn’t give birth until after his funeral.”

A part of me is relieved, but then I realize that she’s just like me. As addicted as I am, nobody gets as burned out on sex as I do. Despite her earlier response, I pull myself up above her and onto the bed and then I squeeze her left breast so hard that her face cramps. She grunts. There it is. Teeth exposed. Sucked into the gut of the Leviathan. 

“Don’t stop,” she says. “Brother…”

I strip off her dress in the matter of seconds as revulsion showers over me. She tries to touch my face, but I slap her hands down and forcefully shove my tongue into her mouth. She resists and brushes her left leg against my crotch. I begin to worry that I’ve gone to far with the violence, so I let go until she squeezes my cheeks and spits in my mouth. 

“Now I know,” She divulges. I smirk, noticing that she’s stolen my trance, but I don’t think I’ve taken her power. No, she’s still in control of me. I can tell by the way that she’s staring between my eyes that she just saw something in my head that I’ve never seen. And that frightens the shit out of me. I look at her skin, attempt to find shelter and trace its pale texture. It’s like a dry riverbank. The most hideous parts of her body and personality somehow turn into my favorites. I listen to her heartbeat, might as well not be beating, I suck her tits, drool on her chest and finger her for a bit. Sometimes her head pushes back into the bed sheets, but most of the time she just bites her lips and squints her eyes. There’s God somewhere in there, or maybe that’s the devil, or both in each eye. 

Rose shoves my head down to where three of my fingers are jammed into. I take off her sweatpants, spread her legs again and stare at what I’ve already done to her pussy. “God,” I curse. She holds herself up with her elbows to get a look at me as I go down on her. I perform long, slow and heavy licks as if I were distilling a wound. My chin is covered in her juices and spit. She tastes like cheap and raw swai, but I don’t let it bother me. It’s an upgrade from the girls I’ve fucked that I label to be on the Popeyes menu. We lock eyes, which fucks with me more than it should, so I move my mouth away, brush the liquid from my chin onto her ass hole and plow two fingers in.

“Bro…therrr,” She squeals. The sick fucking cunt.  

I squeeze the back of her right leg and get three fingers knuckle deep into her ass. This is what you want, isn’t it? Four fingers. She can take more than most men do at this point already, which is unreal to me because I also realize quite quickly that she’s never been fucked in the ass before. I’m guessing that she didn’t expect me to go this far either because her anus smells unwiped, like she’s been taking big shits all day. I’ll go ahead and piss on her if she wants, but there’s no way I’m rimming her, even if she did have any sense of basic hygiene skills. 

But whatever. I’m going to fuck her and I know she’s down for it. I ask her if she has any lubricant and she nods, spends fifteen minutes or perhaps an eternity digging in a closet of dirty clothes and eventually hands me the bottle. I squeeze some on my dick while she tries to find a comfortable position on her broken mattress. She lifts her ass and then I’m fingering her shit hole with lubricant and then I’m doing her ass and her cunt at the same time with the same hand. During all of this, she keeps telling me that I’m her brother and all I can think about is how fucked up this is. While she’s mumbling and nodding and trying to get off, I surprise her and pull my fingers out and stick my cock up her ass. It’s so tight inside of her and I’m afraid that I’ll end up getting bits of fecal matter on my cock because I know how this shit goes with anal virgins. She pants uncomfortably over the pain and I ask her if she’s okay, but I don’t really mean it when I say it. 

“You’re fine,” she says. “Just… Fucking…” 

I position her ass into a more comfortable spot and fuck her as barbarically as possible. Her hands grip into the bed sheets, fingernails digging into the palm, teeth piercing lips again, eyebrows raised up and heroin veins pulsating like a swarm of interconnected worms. I pull out, toss her halfway over the bed and fuck her hard, imagining that I’m the power drill on her table. Sheree’s eyes are swollen like magnetic marbles hitting against each other. I take that in for a bit while looking downwards at my dick as it’s thrusting into her. It’s the perfect sight. My most depraved fantasies are coming to light. Her arms stretch out to the core of the Earth as if she’s playing dead. I’m getting lost again, but the static isn’t as bad as it was before.

Rose brushes one hand up my jersey and I fall into her breasts. It seems unending; all of this sweat, our loud offbeat heartbeats finding each other, the smell of her breath burning into my throat, my tongue still trying to explore her map. I’m four fingers into her pussy again. Feels like a nest of worms, which is oddly exciting. I look back at her asshole, which is bruised with a deep purple. “Hope you’re ready again,” I warn her. And then I have her on the carpet against a massive slab of her dirty clothes and broken computer parts with my dick slamming into her ass, back into her swollen pussy, then back into her ass, and then I’m pushing her face into it (the mess) and pulling her upwards and giving her a taste of her own juices from off my fingers. She hides her face with her hair, but I’m still drilling into her eyes with my own. I flip her over and onto the carpet again, slip off my shorts and fuck her ass again. No lube needed. She doesn’t care either. Her moans vibrate against the walls. I come inside of her. Keep it in until my heart rate is back up while hers is still dropping because of all the dope she’s shot up. When I pull my cock out, I notice that it’s covered with thick, gummy blood. She looks at my dick and says, “I’m glad that you made me bleed.”

“I’m not,” I shrug. “I hate getting blood on my dick. It makes me feel like shit and now I have to clean it off and feel guilty over it. And also, you’re a fucking disgusting little slutty bitch.”

I end up resting on her sofa for about an hour after taking a second shower with her to clean the blood off my body. It’s a quarter after midnight when I wake up. Rose is pent up on the end of the sofa with her laptop in her lap and my phone in her hands. I ask her for my phone back and she hits me in the face with it. Like I said, fucking bitch. 

“Don’t worry,” she says. “I couldn’t figure out the password to get on your phone.”

The password used to be Bijeh’s last name, but now I’ve changed it to Nigel’s. 

I’m half naked and wearing only her brothers’ jersey, which has remnants of my cum on it. I look down at a pile of empty beer bottles that weren’t there two hours ago. Rose glares at me with a flushed face and asks, “Do you know how to play the piano?”

I pause.

A cruel piercing sound wails in my head and I shut my eyes. In the vision I see cars exploding. Here I am in Cairo at the age of six witnessing a car bomb go off. And then I find myself standing on the street at night as a mist blurs the flames that carries Hannah’s soul to the Heavens. An inferno rises and swallows the entire planet. I watch as Bijeh slits the throats of children and rapes me on his cold brown mattress. Xavier’s watching this and laughs at me. He shoots Connor in the back of the head. I’m in the corner of one of my classrooms and I’m screaming as gigantic neon spiders rip at my flesh. Everyone’s laughing at me. I’m being raped and everyone’s laughing at me. I’m being hung by a crane and Bijeh is laughing at me. All his victims get a severed limb to take home. My fault, that’s my fault. Bijeh still kills them. He drills holes in my limbs like he did to the other young boys. I’m in Cairo again. Car bomb. Hannah exploding. Car bomb. Flesh spreading through the air. The weather on that specific day. To taste it. Have it on my arms and neck. God is watching. Mom’s not here. I’m scared. He throws a sword against his back. I’m sobbing out my mother’s name in the street and

“Hello? Are you there?”

“What?” I look back at her, allowing my eyes to trail back down and then I respond, “Sorry, I sort of get lost in my mind sometimes. Flashbacks. Bad memories. Just, bad things. What were you asking me again?”

She pushes her legs against mine. “I was asking if you played the piano.”

“Oh. Well, I used to. I think I was pretty good, but I might have not been good at all, because I’m sort of a fucking stupid person. Anyway, I’m pretty sure I’ve forgotten how to play.”

“Have you tried to play recently?”

“No. That’s the thing – I don’t want to. I just don’t care anymore. It’s probably because of how chaotic things became when my mother and I moved here to America. I was in and out of the loony bins and having medication fisted down my throat. Well, that’s sort of still going on, but it’s not as out of hand as it was. I guess I just lost all my inspiration and motivation to make anything beautiful ever again and now I’m just this stupid fucking ugly whiny faggot slut.”

There’s a silence between us, which is specifically familiar to me. I already know how this situation plays itself out. She’s going to ask about my mother and then I’ll have to explain to her why I’m so fucked. Kyle was the first friend I ever told about my sexual abuse. At that time, I couldn’t even use the word rape. Instead, I would call it the r-word. I wouldn’t even say the word therapist, because if you take out the first three letters, it spells out rapist. I used to go into therapy thinking my therapist was going to rape me because of this, but then I had told the story of my childhood trauma a hundred times in group therapy sessions inside of all the various mental hospitals and got over that. It’s easier for me to talk about it now that I’ve reduced my own trauma to some stupid fucking cynical joke. I’m numb to talking about it. It’s my normal. Everyone gets raped these days anyway, I think, so who fucking cares? People tell me all the time that it could be way worse, so I downplay what happened to me, because who fucking cares? Not even my own mom. She’s the only person that I want to see care about it, so fuck it.

She peaks over to get a look at me and asks, “So where were you born?”

“Huh? Uhm, Egypt.  I was born in Maadi, which is one of the districts of Cairo. Basically, my slut of a mother had gotten fucked at an awards ceremony, and then I came into being. She used to be a photographer for National Geographic and a few other magazines. Talented, I guess.”

“What’s your mother’s name?”

“Magnolia Smith.” She types this into her laptop and goes silent again.

I go through my phone and message a guy on Skype who’s sending me pictures of his dick. He wants me to fly to his house in Ohio and let him and his brother fuck me. I always keep that option in mind as a last resort in case I ever have to run away. With the way things are going, that could be any second now.

Rose squeezes up next to me and points at a picture on her laptop. “This is amazing,” she says. “Your mother is a true fucking artist. You should be proud that you’re related to someone like her. Like, look at this picture. Look at that gigantic fucking snake squeezing this woman to death! Holy shit! And now the toddler is resting on the snake? This is just unbelievable. National Geographic? Where can I find those pictures? Is it okay if I reblog them on my Tumblr?”

“Yeah, go ahead. I’m sure her shit is on there. You’ll probably find her photographs of me on there, too, unfortunately.”

“Oh, found them. Holy shit. This is real? This exploding vehicle… The color of the flames and all of the blood on the road and the frightened faces… I’ve never seen anything like it. It’s vaguely erotic.”

“Yup. I was there. You could find body parts from half a mile away.”

She slaps my shoulder. “No fucking way. I’m so jealous! You actually saw him die? What was that like? Was it sexual?”

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I shut her laptop and she pushes me off of the sofa. “Yeah, fuck you. That car bomb is my earliest living memory. And when I bring it up to my mom, she doesn’t give a shit. She doesn’t give a single fucking shit about what it did to me.”

Rose opens her laptop again and continues to scroll through the archived articles online featuring my mother’s photography. She says, “Why do you hate her so much? What is it that she did to you that was so fucked up that you can’t even forgive her?”

“She was never there,” I answer. “And because of that, she had no idea that her own son was being raped by a serial killer. It didn’t even matter when she did find out. It’s not that she pretends it didn’t happen, because I know that she acknowledges it. She just doesn’t care. When we moved here, I ended up being diagnosed with childhood-onset Schizophrenia. The doctors and nurses and therapists and psychiatrists all told her that I might have to be taken care of by her for the rest of my life because having me live on my own would be too dangerous. She didn’t listen. And that’s why I’m here with you – why I’m fucking you in your dead brother’s clothes and wishing you were someone I never met that’s also dead. You think she’s a fucking artist? She’s a fucking drunk.  I’ve tried to kill myself over the way she makes me feel.”

In between the silence, the room becomes frigid cold. I think her brothers’ ghost is with us now, listening and observing, seeing me in his clothing, disgusted by his sister but unable to do anything, just wishing he could have killed her instead of killing himself.

Rose slams her laptop shut, rubs at her bloodshot eyes and says, “Would you feel better if I gave you some tar? I’m supposed to give you something in return for tonight anyway.” 

She rummages around under the sofa and hands me a small glossy bag with an orange stamp of an eye on it. I can hear her heart beat barely thumping and somehow, she’s barely even nodding. Her neck is glimmering with beads of sweat. I notice the track marks on her feet. Her toes. Then up to her neck and back to her arms. 

“Thanks for the offer, but I think I’m ready to take my money and go home.”

“Yeah, I know,” She gets off the sofa and brushes her foot against my dick. “Your clothes are in a plastic bag on the kitchen table and your shorts are still in the bedroom. I’d like for you to stay in my brother’s clothes for the rest of the night, though. On second thought, from now on I’d like for you to wear them whenever we hook up. You get that, right? Because you’re my brother now, not Elliott.”

“Yeah, fine. I really don’t fucking care. Just hurry up and finish the bag in your hand so that we can leave.”

I have to look away when she sticks the syringe in her pinkie toe. I don’t really know why I can’t watch. Maybe I’m just not attracted to her feet. But it’s not that big of a deal and now I’m stressing on stupid bullshit. Rose shoots up and we leave a few minutes later. She nods off at the wheel at every red light and stop light and I have to hit her with the corner of my Mayyors record to keep her going.

Half an hour later and we’re pulled over in the parking lot of some stranger’s house and she forces me to eat her pussy out like it’s a Chinese buffet. Think I can taste my cum deep inside of her cunt. All of this just so that she can stay awake for the drive home to my place and then back to her disgusting house of maggot shit.

“Think I’m going to die,” she says. “Too much. Oh my God. I’m such a lightweight.”

Rose says that she loves that feeling when she’s so fucked up that she feels like she could drift off into the “all-consuming black clouds of death.” She takes a wrong turn two times and has me jerk off and shoot a load all over her leather passenger seat. During all of that, she’s constantly dying and when I freak out over it too much she pretends to croak just to fuck with me. It’s two in the morning when she reaches my street and when we pull up to my block she parks in my neighbor’s driveway to give me some privacy in case my mom is awake and waiting for me out of the window.

“Wait. Don’t leave yet. I have another bag in the glove box,” she says. “Do you think your neighbors will mind if I park in their driveway?”

My mom is passed out on the kitchen floor with two empty pizza boxes cushioning her head. I kneel beside her, check her pulse to make sure she’s not dead and try to cry over her body, but I just can’t, so I take four shots of vodka and punch myself in the face to get me going. It’s not enough, so I go to the bathroom and snort three Oxycodones. Still can’t get myself to cry over her, so fuck it, guess it’s not worth it. I take my clothes off and throw them down the hallway and lay down on my bed naked while listening to funeral doom metal with the lights off. Then I finally cry.

I listened to this album before I went to Hannah’s funeral. It was packed like a stadium concert for a corporate sponsored indie folk-rock band. You could hear her fans outside of the funeral blasting her music from out of the shitty speakers in their run-down cars. Her brother wrote the eulogy and I missed it because I was in the restroom jerking off to the image in my mind of Hannah’s body being forever sealed in that casket. The father wanted her to be incinerated. I don’t know if I would feel the same about her if that had happened. It wasn’t until I had sat back down in the pews that I had realized my pants were covered with my cum. I had a Bible over my crotch for the rest of the service because I couldn’t stop thinking about her cute and tiny and sexy dead body rotting inside of the Earth.

There will be no funeral when I die. My body can be fed to a tank full of sharks. Burn everything I own. Throw away every picture of me. I don’t want anyone to ever know that I ever existed. The only thing that will be left of me is my name under a list of victims on Bijeh’s Wikipedia page.

Impossible to fall asleep, so I sluggishly slide myself to the computer chair and enter my password into the computer. Connor sent me some shitty electronic beat that he made in Ableton, which I open in FL Studio and mess with before sending it back to him via Skype conservation. His status says that he’s ‘Away’, but he’s probably ignoring me. I move my cursor bar around on my desktop for a minute while I try to think of what to do and then I maximize Google Chrome. A porn video titled ‘Ebony bitch takes ten-inch Satanic cock’ resumes where it left off. I don’t remember watching it. The guy in the video isn’t ten inches long and I don’t know how to tell if his penis is really Satanic or not. I close that video out, search on a porn site for something else, something a bit tamer and calming, and then I come across some glory hole video where this sixty-year-old man sucks off a freshman jock. His cock is about three and a half inches long. Hard to imagine myself as the guy getting sucked off since I’m bigger than him, but I can at least fantasize about humiliating him over it. The guy on the left has a good technique towards sucking dick, so I’ll take some notes from him. It’s then that I realize that I’m not even jacking off, so I pull my boxer briefs down to my kneecaps and start spanking my meat. But I need something to listen to that isn’t a loop of this somewhat shitty thirty-two second Detroit techno beat. Okay, no problem. I maximize iTunes, slide it to the right side of the screen, move Chrome to the left so that the video is still playing, and then I click on a random album by Fennesz. It doesn’t really fit the mood that well, but I’ve masturbated to stranger music than this. “Fuck,” I curse out loud to myself. “Are those albums I started downloading earlier finished yet?” I open my downloads folder to check and see if the rare Drum & Bass singles I found are finished – they are – and thank fucking God. New messages from Connor and SnakeBite808. Ignore. The blowjob video is over and automatically plays something from my favorites folder. Some twenty-three-minute low quality video where two pale and skinny guys fuck a frail redhead girl with a fat zit on her right cheek. They speak in Russian throughout the video and there’s no subtitles for me to read. I guess that I prefer it that way. One guy licks her pussy while the other guy sucks his dick. Russian guys always have skinny penises and long ball sacks and Russian girls have small breasts with fat ripe nipples. My phone buzzes on top of my pillow. It’s probably Sheree, so I’m not so sure if I want to get up and stop masturbating to read her text messages. Too lazy, I guess… Last time that I stepped out of my computer chair to answer a text I ended up tripping over a pile of Japanese poetry books and hit my jaw on the end of my bed frame. That’s some bad voodoo that I’m not ever going to fall for ever again. I pace myself with the masturbation and open the Skype screen. My friend Dylan from Ohio, also known as SnakeBite808, wants me to send him a picture of my cock. I send him a devil emoticon and tell him that I can’t because my webcam isn’t hooked up and there’s too many wires to fuck around with at this time of the night. He tells me to just use my cell phone. I tell him about the bad voodoo. He doesn’t care. At this point I cave in. I carefully rotate my chair in an eighty-degree angle, fall over and onto my bed, and then I turn on my cellphone to read Sheree’s message. It’s a picture of her spreading her meat wallet. Not bad. I take a handful of pictures of my erect penis and send them to Dylan first. They take a few minutes to fully send. Sheree texts me another picture of her holding some tin foil with a bag of heroin hanging from the teeth. I ignore it and hop back over to my computer chair. Dylan messages me back with a picture of his own cock. I ask him if he thinks it’s better to take dick pics with my hand at the base or the bottom of my cock. He says that it doesn’t really matter and that I shouldn’t be self-conscious about my penis, but I’m not. Maybe he’s the one that’s self-conscious about his cock, but that isn’t rational since he’s bigger and thicker than me. Maybe he thinks I’m self-conscious about my cock because I’m uncut and he’s not. If anything, my penis is the only part of my body that I’m not self-conscious about, because every other slab of flesh on my body is meant to represent what I was born to be, a container of trash for mindless sex and torture. Fennesz still quietly playing. Phone rattling against an empty beer can that Kyle or Connor left in my bed a few days ago. I take my hand off my cock and find myself in some sort of existential crisis. Everyone around is me is going to die soon and it’s going to be my fault and then I’ll die too. Fuck. I should probably take my psych meds and double up on the sleeping medication tonight. The Russian porn video glitches up and stops. Maybe the website has a virus or something, or maybe the NSA is trying to shut my service down so that they can collect all my documents. Either way, I can’t think, and everything is glitched and fucked and obviously my fault. Before heading to sleep, I edit an Excel spreadsheet that has my exercise routines and add what I need to do tomorrow to it with a big reminder to take my morning dose of medication. I leave an album of monsoon rain field recordings on after I take my pills and brush my teeth even though it’s practically the same weather outside. The smell of Sheree’s hair is matted inside of my nostrils, and I just hope that it doesn’t mean I’ll have a dream about her. I’d rather dream about what it will be like to fuck Nigel in the ass. Sweet dreams. It won’t be Nigel in it and it won’t even be Sheree. It’s always him and almost always ends with me dead.

_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________

‘fucked up’ is a novel by Damien Ark detailing the transgressive exploits of seventeen-year-old Elliott as he attempts to survive the trauma of being the sole survivor of a serial killer while his abusive mother reinforces his inevitable cycle of self-destruction. Diagnosed with Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Elliott numbs himself with sex and drugs, blindly falls into the hands of rapists and murderers, but continues to search for some sense of hope in his life. Set in a postmodern dystopia on the verge of the apocalypse, fucked up is an eclectic take on transgressive literature that finds surreal romanticism under the grit of one of the most confrontational narratives ever written. 

Damien Ark is a self-taught outsider writer and an aspiring novelist. You can find and contact him solely through his twitter account. 

 

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