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With Love – Prequel – Part Five

“Okay, we need to go,” she said, standing up. She looked around again.

“Should we try and clean this place up a bit? Like take away our finger prints or something?”

“If we start going through this house trying to remember everything we touched we’ll be here, wiping door handles clean when the cops come through the door. No, we just try to get out of here without anyone seeing us.”

I took another swig from the bottle. I picked up a fresh lemon from the floor and bit into it. That twisted juice screwed my face. I was starting to feel piss drunk.

“And if they do?”

“Well then we’ve still got five bullets left each” she said, smiling, scratching her head with the gun. I took another drink and another bite of lemon. I wished we had more coke.

“I wish we had more coke” she said, looking at Esmeralda.

“I was just thinking that.”

“Tequila will have to do. Where is it?”

I gestured towards the cupboard beside Esmeralda. She walked over, stepping over the pool of blood on the floor, opening the cupboard and hitting Esmeralda with the door. She moved. I turned away. I took the last mouthful from the bottle and let the half chewed lemon fall onto the floor.

“One bottle? Two bottles?” she asked, holding up two bottles of the same shit I just finished. I was on the verge of being too fucked to think. The verge was not where I wanted to be.

“Two. Fuck it. And the lemons.”

She started picking them up from the floor and putting them into the bag with all the money. She zipped the bag up. I saw her smile as she looked around, taking everything in. She fixed on Esmeralda. Her smile sank a little. She pinched the bridge of her nose, and exhaled.

“Come on, let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“Okay” I said, drying my eyes again, wishing I could just wake up from this nightmare and lie awake in her arms until sunrise, where we would be free.

*

We jumped into the car and started up the engine. The sun was beginning to rise. The light was soft. She pointed in front of us. South. We would be at the border by sunset. The light would be too bright for the rest of the trip.

She kissed me on the cheek as I put my foot to the floor.

As I chased the horizon into the day, she drifted off to sleep without saying a word.We had thirty grand in cash, a stolen Cadillac, half a tank of gas, two bottles of Tequila, fourteen lemons, a maxed out credit card, two guns, ten bullets, no cocaine, and a love that would have to prove itself to us as long as the sun shone high in a sky that we stole in the night.

New look

Just pierced both my ears and spent more than $4 on a haircut.

New look for the new life.

Ross x

With Love – Prequel – Part Four

*

We both sat in silence for a few minutes, passing the bottle of Jose Cuvero back and forth to one another. I felt frozen through but for the burning liquor running through me. It was like I’d been microwaved. We tried not to listen to the shouting going on above us. They were both screaming back and forth at one another. I pulled out my cigarettes and offered one to her. She shook her head and took a swig from the bottle. I watched her wince as it hit her tongue.

“I only married him for the green card you know” she said, sliding the bottle back to me.

“I know.”

“He’s a bastard. He beats me.”

I nodded.

“Please, let me go.”

I pretended I didn’t hear her. I just took another big swig from the bottle. I looked at the gun. I passed the bottle to her.

“Fuck you you bastard! You fucking raped us! Both of us!” I heard her shout through the roof.

I squeezed my eyes shut and snapped my fingers at Esmeralda. She slid the bottle back to me. I took another gulp and almost wretched. I squeezed my hands tight around the bottleneck and dug my fingers into my skull. I couldn’t stop thinking about my daddy. About when my big brother was her, but with knuckles, not bullets.

“Do you have any lemons?” I asked her, looking up. I knew I had tears in my eyes.

“Sure” she said, getting up and going to the refrigerator. As she opened the door the light bled into the room, drowning the candles out. I picked up the gun and looked at it in my hands.

“Fuck you you fucking piece of fucking shit!!!!!!” screamed Jolene from above.

We both looked up.

Bang.

Bang!

*

I picked myself up from the floor. I was shaking. I dropped the gun. I could see the little wisp of smoke rising from the barrel. I looked back up at the ceiling. I could only hear her footsteps. No arguing. No shouting. No screaming. Just soft, calm footsteps. I stood up. I looked at the refrigerator. I fell back to the floor as soon as I saw the blood. The bright white walls of the refrigerator were a bright, wet red. Esmeralda had huge dark hole in her forehead. Her eyes were open wide and staring at the door. Blood was still pouring from that hole, down her nose, over her mouth and onto her nightgown. There was an over-turned box of lemons on the floor. I puked on the white floor. I could taste the tequila and the coke mixing together like the chemicals in a battery, pouring from me. I puked again.

I heard Jolene jumping up and down on the bed, laughing. I sat with my back to Esmeralda, unable to move. Frozen again. I reached up and fished around for the bottle of tequila. I picked up one of the lemons that had rolled towards me. I took a big swig from the bottle and winced as I sank my teeth into the lemon. All that acid came through my teeth and onto my tongue and put a little back into that little battery inside me. I puked a little in my mouth. I swallowed it back down.

I looked over at the lemons on the floor next to me. I saw a trickle of blood run along the floor, making a river of the joins in the tiles. It looked a metallic black in the candle light. I took another swig. And another bite. I felt that warmth thaw me out a little more. I heard Jolene coming down the stairs. She was running. I puked in my mouth again.

She came around the doorframe quickly. I saw her wiping her eyes. They were a fresh red. She saw Esmeralda lying half in the refrigerator before she saw me sitting on the floor. She put on a smile.

“Oh great, you killed her! Jesus, she actually looks kind of beautiful like that, don’t you think?”

I said nothing. I took another swig from the bottle and bit the lemon again. I held the bottle out to her. I picked up a fresh lemon and passed it to her. She laughed and grabbed them both. She took a big gulp from the bottle and bit down hard on the lemon. She looked around and smiled as she took it all in. I looked at the bag by her side.

“Is that the money?” I asked.

“Yeah” she said, patting the bag, “About 30 grand I’d say. Not as much as I was hoping for. But it should be enough, for now.”

I nodded. I pushed my head into my hands and squeezed my eyes shut. I felt her come and sit next to me. Our backs against the work surface, facing away from Esmeralda. She slid her hand across my back and onto my shoulder.

“Are you getting over emotional again?”

I nodded.

“Look, that piece of shit got what was coming to him. And her, well, she just got caught in the crossfire. That’s just the way it works, sometimes.”

I nodded again. I knew how Esmeralda felt.

With Love – Prequel – Part Three

I took Esmeralda downstairs. She’d stopped pulling and tugging and was just walking with me, sort of limp. She was still crying and whimpering to herself in Spanish. I tried to ignore her. I tried not to think about what Jolene was doing to her father. I tried to stay cold.

“I need two things from you: I need money and booze” I said as we walked downstairs.

“I don’t know where the money is” she pleaded.

“Bullshit” I said, tightening my grip around her arm. I pushed the gun into her side. I felt her whole body shake and tighten up. “Please,” I looked into her eyes, “Please tell me where the fucking money is.”

“Honestly, I don’t know!”

I dug the gun in a little deeper. I knew she didn’t know though. Just looking at her and that whole situation, I knew that she wouldn’t die for that fat old bastard upstairs.

“I don’t know! He doesn’t trust me!”

She started crying again. I pulled the gun out of her side. She went limp and put her head in her hands. I wanted to console her.

“Come on” I said, walking downstairs towards the kitchen. She sniffed and walked after me. I wanted to just let her go.

I walked into the kitchen and turned the light on. The whole room lit up so bright. The strip lighting that stretched across the ceiling was sterilizing. I could feel it scrubbing my skin clean.

“Jesus! Have you got some candles or something? This light is horrible.”

“What?” she said, looking at me, still terrified.

“Candles, a lamp with a nice shade, anything, Jesus, just do something about this light.”

She went to a drawer and started rummaging around. As I looked around the kitchen and let the light sink into my eyes, I looked at her looking through the drawer. It occurred to me that she could be looking for a gun. I mean, it wasn’t likely, but I wasn’t about to get myself shot. Not under this light. I held my gun up and pointed it at the back of her head. I picked my spot just as her neck faded into her skull. I watched the little marker on the end of the barrel tremble. I wrapped my finger around the trigger. I could feel my heart thumping. I could hear the footsteps of that coke running its final lap around my body.

She turned around holding two candles and a lighter. She shrieked and dropped them onto the floor. I jumped a little but dropped the gun to my side. I breathed out slowly. I felt like an asshole.

“I’m sorry. I’m…I’m sorry. I just thought maybe you were going for a gun or something.”

She was crying again. Her make-up was all but gone. She bent down to pick up the candles, watching me all the way down.

“I’m sorry. Honestly. I didn’t mean to scare you.”

As soon as I heard myself say that, I wondered what the fuck I was doing. It became obvious to me that I wasn’t cut out for this.

“It’s okay” she said. But I knew it wasn’t.

She lit the candles and I turned out the lights from above. The kitchen looked much better. There were two warm glows coming from each side of the worktop, reaching out to each corner. I felt my heart rate slow a little. She stood looking at me, sniffing, shuffling from side to side.

“Sit down, please.” I said, wiping my nose, avoiding her eyes. I couldn’t look at them.

“Where?”

“Just, I don’t know, one of those seats. Just sit down will you? Please.”

She sat down quickly. She kept staring at the gun and I. I moved the gun behind my leg.

We sat quietly for a minute, thawing in candlelight. She was probably thinking of how to save herself. She couldn’t know that I was thinking the same thing.

“Why are you here?” she asked after a minute or so.

I was just about to say that I didn’t know when I heard Jolene shout something at her daddy through the ceiling. We both looked up. She sounded really angry, but completely in control. I looked back at her step-mother. Neither of us said anything. We both knew that this had nothing to do with us. It was just the way things had to be. We were like the kids in the nasty break-up.

I sat down opposite her, sitting the gun on the worktop. I ran my hands through my hair and back down my face. I looked around the room again.

“Do you have anything to drink?” I asked her, suddenly remembering why we were in the kitchen.

“We have wine and tequila” she said, wiping her nose, looking back at the gun.

“Tequila, please.” I sat my head in my hands and exhaled. “It’s been that kind of night.”

She nodded, and started to cry again.

With Love – Prequel – Part Two

I watched her walk through that opened gate with the cigarette hanging from her mouth. She held that big old gun next to her as she walked. I watched her walk past me and I could see her perfect round ass through her dress. I was still hard and I still wanted her. But I just stood still as she sank into the darkness.

We got to the back door. She started looking around for a key, turning over plant pots and lifting bricks. I got ready to put my elbow through the glass.

“Fuck. I can’t find the fucking key” she whispered at me.

“I’ll break the glass.” I said, nodding, feeling charged.

“No, wait, let’s think about this” she said as she put her hand on the handle and lent in. The door flew open and she fell onto the kitchen floor.

“Shit!” she shouted. I picked her up. We laughed a little.

“Are you okay button?” I asked.

“I’m fucking great sugar. Come on.”

We crept through the kitchen and started up the stairs. I guess it didn’t matter if ran up them or snuck up them. The outcome would be the same. At least this way it wouldn’t be as loud. I followed her shadow, just a little darker than the dark. We walked down the hallway and stopped at the door at the end. I could hear someone snoring through the door. It was one of them drunk snores that doesn’t care who else is trying to sleep. She’d told me her daddy was a big boozer.

“This is their room” she whispered, “I’m going to go in and stand above them. You’re going to stand at the door. When I’m ready, you flick the light on. Okay?”

“Yup” I said.

I started to get really nervous. I was still spinning from the line, but clicking the safety off a handgun outside your father-in-law’s bedroom as you gulped back a little blood from the chewed walls of your mouth was a sobering experience.

We opened the door quietly. I watched her creep over to the huge bed. I gently padded around for the light switch on the wall. When I found it I fished in my jacket pocket and pulled out my sunglasses. I didn’t want him to see as I was. I didn’t want him to see my dying eyes. I sat the glasses on the bridge of my nose. I looked over them at her as she positioned herself above her daddy and her step-mom. She turned to me and nodded. She was smiling. I could see her bright white teeth. That Colgate smile always sent a shudder through me. Like a little pulse of electricity. I pushed the glasses over my eyes and hit the lights.

“Morning daddy” she said, before bringing the butt of the pistol down on his nose. I saw the blood burst out. I heard him groan, her step-mom scream and Jolene laugh. I stayed silent. Just watching.

*

“Come and grab this bitch!” she shouted to me, still pointing that big old gun between the two of them. I rolled my shoulder up from the doorframe and walked across to the bed. Her step-mom was crying and saying some stuff in Spanish. She had tears coming streaming down her face. She was only a few years older than us. The blood from her father’s nose had splattered up the walls and was seeping onto the bed. But he was just lying there, deadly calm, like he’d been expecting us, looking through the gun, at the daughter he used to have that was holding it.

“Come with me” I said, grabbing her arm and helping her up off the bed. She looked straight at me. Her eyes weren’t so different from the way mine were in the car. Fighting death. She started to struggle a little. I squeezed her arm tighter and pushed the gun into her side. I smiled. The coke smiled.

“There’s no point fighting this” she said turning to her step-mom, smiling.

“What are you doing Catherine?” her daddy said. I looked over at him. Catherine? I wondered who the fuck Catherine was. It certainly wasn’t the same person that was pointing a gun in his face. Maybe he was all mixed. He was piss drunk. Just like she said he would be. I looked at his face. There wasn’t much in the way of similarities between them. He was all fat. He had blue eyes. But they both had that same little dimple on their chin. I always told her it was cute. She said she hated it.

She started laughing, throwing her head back.

“Because you did this to me” she said, pointing at the side of her head.

“Did what?” he asked again.

I just watched. I wanted to say something. I wanted to tell him to shut the fuck up. Or threaten to shoot him or something. But I couldn’t. I was frozen again. I just held onto his wife. My mother-in-law, I suppose.

“You fucked me up!?” she shouted, grabbing hold of his hair, pulling his bloody head back, pushing the gun into his broken nose. He screamed in pain.

I watched her steady hand holding the big gun. It didn’t flicker as she pushed it further into his bleeding nose. I had to turn away. I couldn’t watch. I had to leave. This had nothing to do with me.

With Love – Prequel – Part One

We came rolling up to her daddy’s house at about 4am. I was driving, slowly, lights out. Creeping sort of. She knew exactly where to go.

“It’s the second house up there on the left,” she said, throwing her arm in front of me and pointing. I looked over at the big house with the wall around it. The whole situation suddenly felt exactly like it was. My cold sweats started up again as the car slowed.

“That big one?” I asked.

“Yup.”

“Okay.”

I brought the car up to the sidewalk and switched the engine off. The music stopped playing and everything went so quiet. There was a little cricket whistling somewhere to the side. I threw my cigarette out the window and turned to her. She was putting her lipstick on in the mirror. She had gone for red today. I watched her pout those full red lips out at herself.

“So what are we doing then?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow and turned her eyes to me. I saw one of those little smiles come across those big red lips. She kissed the color out. She turned to me and took my hands. My cold sweaty hands.

“Okay, so first, we’re going in. You’re going over the wall. There will be a keypad on the left hand pillar, next to the gate. You press the little green button. That one opens the gate. Then I come in.”

“Okay”

“Okay, so then we go round the back. We can break in through the back door. We creep upstairs, go into their bedroom and tie those motherfuckers up. You deal with that bitch. I’ll take care of that piece of shit.”

“Okay” I said again, looking down at my cold hands in hers. They looked just fine without any blood on them. I exhaled with some force. I just wanted her to know how I felt about all of this. I wanted her to know that I would do anything for her. But I wanted her to know that she could never ask me for more than this. This was my limit.

“Look, I know that you don’t want to do this. But my ‘for’ is much stronger than your ‘against’. I need to do this. And I need you to help me.”

I looked up at her and smiled. Her big eyes were blinking softly at mine, soaking up and keeping tight. I looked back at her hands, and nodded.

“Great! Now get that coke out. We need some electricity.”

I smiled. I went into the glove box and pulled out the wrap. This was the last of the coke we bought before we left LA. Almost eight grams of electricity had rushed around our body in the last three days. Through our noses, into our blood, into our heart, into our liver and out somewhere, into something. We forced ourselves to leave just one more line each for this. We didn’t want to need something we couldn’t get. We were in crystal meth country. And we knew that we’d rather crave coke than end up craving crystal. But leaving those two big lines had been hard. When you’d been thrashing it like we had it was tough to just stop. You could hear the shit whispering at you from the glove box, drowning out the growling of the engine and the grinding of your teeth. We’d been hitting it for what felt like weeks. But that was only cause we hadn’t slept for days for the tweaks and the twists.

“Okay, but me first. You owe me that much” I said with a smile.

“Of course sugar” she replied, leaning over and kissing my hair.

I pulled out the Cadillac manual and carefully poured what was left out onto the picture of our big red car. I started moving the stuff around with Mr. Daniel Ford’s maxed out credit card, taking every last grain and shifting it around. Poor Mr. Daniel Ford, whoever he was. I stopped and looked at the big fat lines. They were identical. I felt my hand start to shake a little and my heart start to race. I cut a little of mine and pushed it onto hers. She needed that extra power. Damn triggers are heavy rocks to move. I rolled up my last Andrew Jackson and leant into the book. I looked right into the front seat where I sat and vacuumed the line, passing her the book and closing my eyes. I sucked the stuff back into my throat as I let my face freeze. I felt my hand steady but my heart start to thump in my chest. I looked at my dark eyes in the mirror. They looked like they were dying with a fight.

I watched her lean over and blast the last of what we had. She sat up and wiped her nose. She grabbed my hand licked my fingers. She rubbed them across the manual, getting every little bit we’d missed, and put them into her mouth. I felt her soft tongue run around my fingers. I started to get hard. I kissed her. I smelt her hair, felt her body and tasted the last of the coke. I wanted to grab her and fuck her right there in the open air. Forget all this madness for a few minutes. But we both needed this buzz. I opened the glove box and pulled out our guns. I had mine and she had hers. I saw those dying eyes of mine in the reflection from the barrel. I checked the chamber and hoped that there would only be one bullet missing from each by the time we reached Playa del Carmen.

“Alright,” she said, throwing the manual onto the back seat “let’s go kill my daddy!”

“Okay.”

The Grave

When my first hamster Vincent died I asked dad if we could bury him under the tree. Dad said no. My brother and I dug a hole anyway. We took one of my teddy bears and pretended it was Vincent’s dead body. We put the teddy bear in the tiny open grave that afternoon and climbed the tree. As we got higher and higher, we were pulled lower and lower. The branches got younger and younger under the weight of our age, closer and closer to the teddy we pretended was once aging, just like us.

Untitled 2

Drip

We stayed up late one night.

Late for nothing

but bed.

We talked about this

talked about that.

Happy about this,

sad about that.

She passed the wine

to me, dripping down

the neck, onto my fingers

as I pulled another

mouthful of drips

from its body.

“What do you see your heart as?”

she asked, like it was a plan.

Like, ‘what are we doing tomorrow

and the tomorrow after that?’

I thought from the bottle,

watching the wine drip

and slowly dry.

“A battery” I said.

She smiled for a second,

And then let that drip, too.

I passed the bottle.

She drank again, a little more.

I could feel the red

making its way

around my battery,

dripping inside.

We looked at one

another.

In the warm darkened glow,

from the candle

on the floor.

Dripping too,

flickering still.

Keeping us in sight

of one,

of another.

She looked sad.

Maybe I did too.

“Like a cheap AAA battery” I said again,

for some reason.

I reached for the bottle.

I took it from her.

I saw that red wine on my fingers

from those drips from the neck,

that came from the body.

And dried.

“Don’t say that” she said.

She reached for my hand,

with the drips all dried.

I held the bottle tight.

Gripping its neck.

She changed the subject

to something.

Something far away

from hearts

and batteries

and wine

and drips.

But I kept thinking

about how we drip

and dry

until there’s nothing left.

Nothing but that sour taste

From the holes in the battery

that dripped

every drop

and stopped

one day,

without warning.