Latest installment of SHELF-LIFE OF A SPOIL, offered to you like a dewy apple off the tree. Writing these characters feels easy, for now. Some of them might seem familiar if you’re a Final Fantasy fan. By chapter 5 the story kind of started writing itself, which is really weird and consists of me going back to read what I wrote the previous night and being shocked.
Without further adieu. . . .
Chapter 1 is here.
Chapter 2, here.
Chapter 3, here.
Chapter 4, here.
and Chapter 5, here.
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Chapter 6: Where the Fallen Land
When you show hostility to your colleague, hostility rather than accord or apathy or perhaps the easiest thing, simply ignoring them, your jealousy is like a little toilet paper flag stuck to the bottom of your shoe.
I’d gone to sleep confident in my decision to cancel with Lighton. I’d been convinced that none of it felt right, that I’d been wrong, thoughtless. However, I’d had all morning to think about it while I’d cleaned up, read a few pages in a romance novel, munched a pop tart, sipped coffee. Then I’d sat down by the phone, thinking.
I was now convinced that the age difference between Narel and I felt like the boundary between two eternally conflicted yet negotiating territories. There seemed no end to the immaturity I was capable of as opposed to his level-headed steering and navigating through demons large and small, real and imagined, to keep the ship afloat. And he put up with it to no end, seemingly, as if he expected it or maybe as if he needed it in his life. Sure, everyone does, right?
As I sat near the phone, contemplating what I would say to Lighton, I was filled with regret and I felt the distinct discomfort of unfairness as I had never commented on nor had I ever been asked what I thought about any associates of the opposite sex who may have been friends, business contacts or anything else in Narel’s life. I had never expressed jealousy and then drawn boundaries. I knew what the unspoken boundaries were, obviously, and I expected him, if I was indeed his girlfriend, to abide by them, to respect me, and to never fuck me over–the basics of a functioning relationship, essentially. But something felt off. I felt it in my hesitation to simply dial Lighton up and cheerfully cancel with the boyfriend out of town excuse. It occurred to me how insulting that would be to Lighton, seeing as how he was not trying to become my boyfriend, and therefore using mine as an excuse to reject his friendship seemed presumptive, arrogant, and kind of fucked up. The birds bothered me, yes. But being a shitty potential friend bothered me more. I could hide from the crows, turn the music up, avoid windows. I could not avoid myself as my brain would play the same song on repeat until I faced the guilt, or the music so to speak.
I hadn’t been able to do much more than cower in the face of Narel’s anger. I’d understood his anger, and I’d registered my folly. But now, sitting alone by the phone, I registered the entire picture. I’d acted like a child and allowed, no, implored Narel to make the decision for me.
It was 9:45am.
A knock on the door scared my hand off the phone. I had to buzz people in; they couldn’t just come and knock on the door. I peeped through the pinhole in the door and saw a man in a black pin-striped suit, a middle-aged man I’d never seen before.
I opened the door. ”Yes?”
He smiled at me as if fascinated for a moment, gaze searching my face and then my body. He was angular like a rodent, but cleanly shaven and polished. He wore a pin on his lapel, gold angel wings. His handkerchief frothed from his breast pocket, shiny burgundy silk. He laced his fingers together and dropped his hands to rest over his crotch and I caught sight of a Rolex on his wrist and some obviously expensive rings on his fingers. A business man, seemingly enough. Or mafia.
”Can I help you.” I raised a brow at him. He took one step towards me, and I thought he was going to force his way in, but he stopped there. He’d placed his foot just far enough past the doorjamb to ensure I couldnt close the door against him.
“Yes, you can indeed help me. You can help a lot of . . . very important individuals in very high places. You are Kairi Elle, correct? Age thirty, employee at Superior Home Care, artist and writer extraordinaire?”
I made a sarcastic sound. ”What do you want?” His eyes were silver, like coins with pupils within. His jet black hair was spiked into peaks that looked sharp enough to pop balloons.
“I just want to be friends, Kairi. You see. . .” He took a step further in and I took two back. I was angry I didn’t have some kind of weapon, a screwdriver, a lamp, anything, to defend myself with. “You could be the solution, or you could be the downfall. The amazing thing is, its up to you. He left it all up to you, can you believe that?” He was laughing now. “We don’t get any choices, but you, an outcast, a freak, an orphan–you get to decide it all. You don’t mind if smoke, right?” He lit a cigarette then thrust the door open with one arm so forcefully that I stumbled backward and tripped over the throwrug.
I swatted my hair off my face, pushed myself up and stared at him. ”Who the fuck are you. Or what,” I growled.
”One thing he never said, though, or forgot to say, was that we couldn’t interfere. He never said we couldnt affect you, and it looks to us as if that might be the only way to win this thing and kill you for good this time.”
I heard the crows in the corridor behind him and I scrambled to my feet. My heart was drumming erratically and I smelled. . .
I smelled incense. The fringes of my vision were going white as I stared at the man and I knew beyond any doubt that this man had everything to do with the dark birds haunting me. He almost looked like one of them, his long nose and feathered spiky hair.
“You’ve already tasted poison, haven’t you, Kairi. It doesn’t work on you, though. I tried to tell big brother the bitch is too strong for poison, she’s been alive too long, and here you are, healthier and more defiant than ever. And might I say, radiant.” He grinned. “You’ve gained a new name, you know. Poison eater, just like one of those tropical rainforest butterflies. You always did love butterflies.” He chuckled, exhaling ribbons of bluish smoke.
Poison? I’d an odd experience right before Narel came to me. Poison, yes. In California I used to eat at an Italian deli every night after work. I’d call it in on my way home and then pick it up on the way. The last night I ever went there, my food had smelled strange, sour and acrid. I had taken one bite and then another and pushed the rest aside. It’d tasted like it smelled. I’d been too busy with homework to return to the place and complain. Within an hour my pulse increased as though I’d been running at top speed. I heard it rippling in my ears, and my blood burned through my veins, and my heart felt as if it was expanding, trying to burst free from my ribcage. I had concentrated on my well-being, concentrated and prayed, perhaps. I fell asleep, ice cold and twitching, sure I wouldn’t wake up.
When I did wake the next day my mouth tasted sour and acrid like chemical, and it hit me that it had been the food. But I’d no way of knowing, no way of proving that it’d been poisoned. Maintenance had visited the building the morning after I’d eaten the poison. I remember the building cleaning lady; she was El Salvadorean. Brenda. She proceeded to use what seemed like bottles of bleach to clean the halls, and the entire building was saturated with the odor. The odor had made my already punished heart beat too rapidly again. I’d had to leave the building and go to the coffee shop. Later I’d read the label on a bottle of Clorox Clean-up, specifically the red-lettered warning at the bottom of the label: something to the effect that the odor of bleach adversely affected heart patients or people with irregular heartbeats. As I drove out of California, contemplating what had happened to me, poisoned, I couldn’t help but feel that the bleach had been used to finish the job, so to speak, because it certainly had an effect on me, however my body had caught the signal and I’d instinctively escaped to cleaner, bleach-free air.
I’d called Narel and told him I was leaving California; I was going somewhere quieter and less poisonous. I pleaded him come to me, stay with me. I never knew if Narel had truly believed me, but he’d come to me on the next plane. I was fine by the time he arrived, of course, which had been a week after the incident. Despite his urging, I didn’t want to go to the doctor. I just didn’t want to eat out-food anymore. I’d only eaten out-food again, recently, with Narel, and he would always pick the restaurant and I would feel safe. A subsequent exam at the doctor, several weeks later, showed me doing as I always had, which was abnormally perfect, my heart in excellent condition as was everything else, except my state of mind.
My eyes stung with tears as I stared down my intruder. “What do you want from me?”
He scoffed. “Death or cooperation. Ask something more complex, such as how we let you slide for so long or why you’re so important to him.”
He gazed at my apartment walls, at the artwork on the walls, at the thrift store furniture. His gaze darkened when he looked at the chair, Narel’s and my chair. He sniffed in the chair’s vicinity, hard and vigorously, like a dog. He laughed. “So that’s it.”
Before I could react he was in my face, his hands clamped to either side of my face, his cigarette smoking in between his fingers in my hair. I smelled my hair being singed and I struggled, but his grip was rock solid, and the heat in his hands tremendous. The cigarette dropped onto my arm, momentarily stinging, and then onto the carpet, burning. His fingers bore into my temples like he was trying to mold clay. Pressure was building behind my eyes.
”Why?” I whimpered, holding his gaze, ”why?”
”You don’t get it,” he hissed at me. “You don’t get to fuck your way back to Graceland, understand? Everything you do belongs to us, all your fortune and your failure and your blood and bones until such time as you have absolved the debt you owe. If it was up to me I’d smash your pretty little face right now, fingerpaint your dying expression in your sketchbook with your blood and your brains. Little bitch. Fucking whore.” He started squeezing my head, as if he meant to crush it.
I began screaming. At the top of my lungs, with all the strength in my diaphragm and all the fear I’d been storing for years, I bloody screamed.
“Stop it! Stop it, you fucking cunt!” He was shaking me by my head. The entire world appeared to be quaking. I snatched the angel wing pin off his lapel and drove the point under his chin. ”Damn you!” He let me go, flailing, and a hundred crows, a thousand perhaps, poured flapping and squawking through my front door and towards the window in the livingroom, which they smashed through like paper. Their bodies flowed from door to window like liquid pouring into a cup, and the wind from it was enormous, whipping papers and books off of shelves and tables, knocking vases and paintings to the floor.
I think I was still screaming. He was yelling, ”Fuck you, fucking–! Shut up!” He pushed me down with an invisible force from his extended hand, and when I hit the floor he started kicking me. ”Shut the fuck up!” He kicked my neck once and I noted, amidst my choking and sputtering, that he was wearing some very expensive steel-toe shoes.
I let my head loll onto the floor as I coughed and trembled and curled up and braced for more, when suddenly I saw a second pair of boots, another man, entering my apartment. Without words, without hesitation, a brawl ensued between them. It seemed I heard no voices but countless screeching birds, the piercing high shrieks of falcons, the throaty caws of crows, and it seemed, as the world became gilded in white and all the edges glowed and throbbed, that I saw feathers landing on the carpet amidst their battle.
The last thing I saw was the second man, whose hair appeared to be a shocking shade of crimson, jumping out the window in pursuit of the spiky-haired man. I wondered how they would survive the 3-storey fall, and then all my vision was swarmed by light until I squeezed my eyes shut, unable to take any more.
*
I awoke to my landline ringing. The ring was eerie. It echoed and rose in timbre at the end, which I never remembered it doing before. My left side cramped explosively when I attempted to rise. I crawled toward the easy chair and slumped against it, reached the phone.
“Yeah.” My throat hurt, voice rasped. I remembered getting kicked in my throat. I was sure I was bruised inside. I could feel a lump, taste the copper of blood.
”Kairi? You okay?”
The voice was familiar. My mouth opened and nothing came out.
”I’m down here with Dorothy Jane. I just read her a prayer and I was about to leave the hospital, since. . .”
Shit! 2:45pm. Lighton. He’d stayed with Dorothy all afternoon waiting for me. How had he gotten my home phone? ”Uh, Lighton. Hi. Im sorry. Um. I meant to go. I did. I had a . . . visitor at the last minute.”
”Kairi. You don’t sound okay. What’s wrong?” Genuine concern.
“Um. It’s a long story,” I said. My voice was shaking, dammit.
”Care to explain?”
”Well. . .” I didn’t know what to say. I started crying quietly. I couldn’t tell him what happened: Some mafia-type dude in a two thousand dollar suit burst into my home, told me some crazy shit, that I owed a debt, then beat me to the ground, which apparently instigated a fight with another chap who showed up in the nick of time and chased him off. . .?
“Are you at home?”
“Yeah.” I looked around what remained of it. Glass was everywhere, splinters sparkling in the dark gray carpet. Smashed window, front door hanging off the hinges, wallpaper scraped and peeling. The landlady would not approve of this shit. It seemed to me that she would not believe that I hadn’t done it. In fact, I was the likeliest candidate.
”I’m coming over, okay? I know the building, it’s right by the cafe, but I don’t know your apartment number.”
I hardly felt present as I told him the number. After I hung up I lifted my tank top to look at my side. A heavy bruise had bloomed just under my ribcage, purple edged in crimson. Nothing was broken, just on fire. I took four aspirin one by one without water and stared out the broken window. The curtains were ghostly remnants of curtains, ragged and buoyant on the sea breeze. I looked down to the ground where the two men must’ve landed after their exit. Nothing was amiss down below, no proof that they’d been there or that anything had happened aside from the shattered glass on the lawn. I remembered seeing feathers during the chaos. There wasn’t a trace of them now.
I would’ve started cleaning before Lighton arrived, except I think I wanted to know if he saw all this shit, too. I sat far from the easy chair, which I remembered had garnered a strange comment from the pinstripe suit. I sat on the love seat and I left the front door open, as it had been all these hours while I’d slept, and I waited for Lighton.
*
”Why won’t you call the police, Kairi,” Lighton said. He sat next to me on the love seat. He dabbed a wound on my forehead with a cotton ball dowsed in antiseptic. The sting was incredible, but I let him because he seemed angrier than I at that point. He needed to be preoccupied.
”What do I say to them?” I was tired after explaining it all to him. I’d recounted everything so deadpan, so leaden, that I couldn’t believe he believed me, although the state of my livingroom was proof enough that something extremely insane had taken place in it. ”What can they do considering . . . the supernatural implications of my story? They’ll put me in the looney bin, which, you know what, is probably the safest place for me right now.”
”Kairi. You’re safe now.” He looked in my eyes for a moment, then went back to my wound.
”Here?” I said, gesturing around my trashed apartment. ”I can’t even close the window or lock the front door. After she kicks me out, my landlady is going to sue me.”
“Come with me. Just for tonight.” He was looking at his lap, then turned his gaze into mine. He was absolutely serious. And I was still not quite present.
”Really?” I said.
”I won’t let you stay here alone. I’d stay here with you but as you said you can’t lock the door. You can’t even close it the way it is.”
”I won’t interfere with anything? I won’t be a bother?” I was cautious, always, of being a bother. I considered myself such a fantastic one for Narel.
Narel. Shit.
”Let’s pack now before it gets dark.” He was already up, inspecting everything, opening and closing closets, checking. He wandered into my bedroom and I assume he found my clothes and whatever necessities he thought I needed because shortly after he returned with three bags bulging with my things. ”Come on.”
I went like I felt, traumatized and vacuous. He grabbed my hand in the hall outside the apartment, because I stood there blankly, staring through the broken door into my room. I was looking at the easy chair. He squeezed my hand subtly and I squeezed back to let him know I registered it. ”Let’s go. I’ll bring you back in a few days, when you need to come back. I can fix the window, if you’d like.”
”You do that kind of thing?” I asked as we walked towards the stairwell.
He smiled. “I build all sorts of stuff, fix all sorts of stuff. Plumbing, construction, carpentry, I do all that. Whenever I get upset it’s good to go banging around on some wood or some pipes for a couple hours, dispel the rage.”
I knew the feeling although I would’ve rather banged on something else. I decided to spare him this joke, as I wasn’t in the mood and I didn’t want him blushing again. ”I really, really appreciate this, Lighton. You just don’t know.”
“Anything for a friend in need, Kairi.”
The sun was setting beautifully as we exited the first floor lobby. I was starving. ”If we stop by the store for a few things I can make us dinner,” I said.
“You cook, too, huh?”
”It’s one of my talents.”
”I’m intrigued.”
”Good,” I grinned. I felt better the farther we got from the room and the closer to his car.
“Are you up to it, though? I still think we should take you to the hospital.”
“I’m a quick healer,” I said. At his silence I added, “I’d go if I felt I needed to.”
He looked at me critically for a moment. ”Why don’t we both do dinner? I might also know a thing or two about cooking.”
I raised my brows but wouldn’t let him see it. I had a good suspicion the next few days would either be very, very interesting or very, very disastrous. ”So. . .You like Italian?”
lipsonthewhistle 