Oblivion – Dee P. R. Kay
November 15, 2025
New Orleans, Louisiana
Tania’s brother, Dacre, was a true Southern gentleman, who’d said “ladies first” at a suicide party for two with his girlfriend, Belinda, and watched her blow her brains out with her daddy’s .357 magnum then decided against offing himself ‘cause it’d only please his haters: their whole family was a shit magnet.
“What the actual fuck?!” Tania said.
Delilah closed her laptop hiding what was on the screen.
Delilah had only cleared $2k from that porn shoot and spiraled in the shower afterward. Not from shame, but because one of the male actors had said she looked great for her age and to go wash her hair.
“I brought a mess a sweet blue crabs caught out the ’Chafalaya,” Tania said.
Delilah smirked.
“You know the fattest crabs they pulled outta Lake Pontchartrain was back in the 60’s. Plane crashed with 58 souls on board. Only recovered wreckage, no bodies. Crabbers made so much money that year they were poppin’ ‘n’ switchin’ driving around in Caddies. Put ‘em in the frig, babe.”
Tania had made the long-ass drive to Breaux Bridge to get the crabs from the same craftsman who’d made her sinker cypress writing desk. She deposited a writhing paper bag of crabs in the frig with zero fucks given about their dietary habits.
Delilah normally offered Tania some Tito’s, her favorite. Not now. Tania collapsed on the sofa, sighing, trying to twirl her bob hair cut in vain. She wasn’t willowy. Not quite thick. Not exotic. Just a white chick writing copy to make that dollar holler. Her fiction was like a bourbon-fueled fever dream written on a bar napkin by a triumvirate of Barry Gifford, Cormac McCarthy and Flannery O’Connor, and the only thing she had to show for from this morning’s writing session was a coffee stain on her jeans from P.J.’s.
“I thought you were quitting the life?” Tania said.
Delilah sauntered over and stood in front of the leaner mirror. All 4’10” of her: painted-on black athleisure wear caressing her glorious derrière with her tits sqouze-up in a sports bra to manufacture cleavage, face scrunched-up under light makeup, haunted hazel eyes, and her bottle-blonde lioness mane replete with extensions performing a Houdini to hide her black roots. How she straightened her natural curls in the NOLA humidity remained an unsolved mystery and names were changed to protect the innocent.
“You’re married, cheating on your husband with me AND a closet lesbian! What’s it matter how I survive?”
“It’s not like that, babe. Just the idea of gooners spreading a bukkake video of you… that’s all.”
Delilah sidled-up to the sofa, naked now, kneeling, unbuttoning and peeling off Tania’s jeans, tossing her panties. A mix of ecstasy and revulsion washed over Tania as the warm sensation of Delilah’s razor tongue soothed whatever hang-ups she had about seeing her girlfriend glazed on the worldwide web, and Tania climaxed like a spastic mongoloid. It was only polite to reciprocate. Tania started, then felt something curly and spindly scratching and tickling the roof of her mouth before coughing it up, holding back her gag reflex, with as much decorum as possible, as a trick’s long gray eldritch pubic hair of octogenarian origins in the palm of her hand stared back defying her not to puke all over Delilah right then and there. Tania bolted to the kitchen sink and hurled the beignets she’d scarfed down earlier at P.J.’s, as Delilah harangued her “ain’t nobody got a garbage disposal in the Quarter, babe.”
The apartment smelled of ecstasy and despair and bile and bougie candles.
“I’ll get you a pair of my jeans, babe. Yours look like you shit yourself.”
The shortest woman to live was 2’ tall, and now she dwarfed Tania. She walked over to the primary bath to wash up, and Delilah stood akimbo in the doorway like a Kafkaesque sentinel: “This bathroom is a mess, babe. Use the guest bath.”
Tania didn’t like the idea of washing up in the same bathroom Delilah’s tricks used. The guest bath was immaculate, but just the idea made her wanna run a UV light over everything.
As she snooped Tania’s phone, Delilah’s shattering black-mirrored broke down palace of a para-social admiration society didn’t bring seven years bad luck, only random clumping of odds till she found her next supply. But dayum, this was inconvenient…
The e-mail to Tania’s husband read:
From: tania0519@gmail.com
To: mikhail_tarkovsky@mail.ru
Date: Nov 5, 2017, 5:02pm
Subject: Poka
Mishka,
I’m not leaving you. I’m leaving the big nothing of it all. Please tell Lailichka and Zaichenka mommy will always love them.
Love,
Tania
Then a flood of Expedia itinerary confirmation e-mails for a one-way ticket to Port-Au-Prince, Haiti, burned into Delilah’s retina along with an e-mail Tania had sent herself with a rambling rough draft of a book outline on Maman Brigitte, the death Ioa. Outside the gas lamp streetlights on Royal flickered once and stayed dark.
The steam had barely dissipated from the shower and Tania was bludgeoned by Sam Hunt’s “Make You Miss Me” as she stepped into the hallway from the tricks’ guest bath, triggered by the pseudo truck-bed ballad and the history of growing up in bumfuck nowhere St. Clair Springs, Talibama, assaulted by real country bleeding up the holler from the Robertsons, the same ones whose daughter Gail had burnt Dacre with a cigarette while babysitting and pre-set his entire prerequisites for future exes, and her own musical tastes had drifted to punk and metal once her parents Chuck and Florrie were splitsville, and she’d moved to civilization in Birmingham to crash with her Nana and gotten off in middle school huffing ethyl from a brown paper bag with Josh and Brad and getting drunk on Robo and passing out in a ditch behind Putnam Middle School after shoplifting from K-Mart to buy dope. She didn’t wanna stay here.
“Let’s hit the bookstore, babe,” Delilah ordered.
They trekked down to Crescent City Books off Chartres, their tragedy punctuated by indifferent potholes and puke-slicked street gravy, and Tania thought she wouldn’t walk across the street for most music but she’d cross the street to get the hell away, especially the mawkish soulless pop-country bullshit Delilah subjected her to, when she preferred the Misfits but remembered how they’d been arrested in’82 and skipped bail for trying to grave-rob Marie Laveau, and don’t nobody steal the bones from a tomb still warm with lipstick kisses every week, but “Dig Up Her Bones” was still one of their best songs post-Danzig: no matter, contentious dissolution, fist fights and lawsuits followed in ‘83.
The bookstore smelled like cats and ancient tomes. Blavatsky’s The Secret Doctrine found Tania. It contended that some were soulless. A shell. A mimic. A soul-void with human gestures. A predator practicing interpersonal colonization and reality dysmorphia. An appetite wearing a human face. Other people were a gas station.
Delilah wandered around, chatting up the twenty-something boyish clerk, peppering him with “babe,” as she babbled on about Bartolomé de las Casas’ A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, rattling off massacres and mutilations and burning people alive and infants smashed on rocks or drowned and natives eaten alive by dogs and slavery in mines and plantations, particularly children, and systematic depopulation. The clerk looked at her like she was reciting a grocery list, then went back to doom-scrolling his phone, before she gave her unsolicited encore about how Columbus had shucked ‘n’ jived the Taíno in Jamaica by using an astronomical almanac to weaponize an impending eclipse and convinced them that the Christian God was angry that they would no longer provide him succor, and that the blood moon would be “inflamed with wrath,” thus getting what he wanted when the eclipse occurred on the evening of February 29th… she remembered the date because it was a day before she was born and discarded by her mama for adoption. The clerk said he had to step out to smoke and breezed out the door.
Delilah found Tania and opined: “That’s cute. We’re still talking about souls in the 21st century? Let’s bounce and go cook those crabs, babe.”
Tania complied.
Just a little pin-prick while she was on the sofa spiraling.
“You look pale, babe. Guess we’re not having crab cakes for breakfast.”
Tania staggered to the forbidden master bath, dazed and confused, hugging the wall for support, only to be greeted by too-bright LED lighting, blacked-out mirrors, the journal she’d given Delilah open on the hoary quartz counter-top with complex Midazolam pharmacological calculations and a drawing of a skull with a childish arrow to the frontal cortex saying, “it’s here,” and a Black and Decker drill where the hair dryer should be with the cord neatly coiled up like a serpent, and in between the twilight sensation she noticed the Misfits’ “Horror Business” was booming from the bluetooth speaker, and Delilah was looming over her, ball peen hammer and chisel in hand, with the same maniacal grin she had in her Costco membership photo when her adoptive parents had finally ceded control of it to her.
“This is what you like, right, babe?!”