I Bury My Women with a Sad Wishby Sean Kilpatrick
art by Sonja Haskins
Here’s Judy, tip-toeing out of rehab; slow notches cycling diagonally inside her stomach. The red spandex of hydrants, pulling the landscape. Mid-city incineration. Trash gunked curbs along the sidewalks like statue eyes, unblinking under the shuffle of her thrift store ballerina slippers.
She sent me placid emails, justifying her addiction with what she called “existential bacon and eggs.”
This morbid sentiment, dated 2/14/03, appealed to me:
“I am not used to how easy it is to disappear in the city. Everyone is indifferent. Ask the clerks, or a cop, or a building, the swarming pestilence of bums; ask the university children if they give a shit. Their response would be like something only a rock could defecate. My one chance at true joy is a plunged syringe.”
I had to meet her.
I was familiar with the blue shock of wig-thick hair she wore shapedliked the Eiffel Tower. We exchanged pictures. She said I was fat and unethical, but that it would be okay if we someday met. I had to first: get in shape, and second: grow a pencil thin moustache.
I flattened my torso with a rolling pin, trimmed my face and greased my hair into a fourteen-inch spike.
Downtown Detroit, no parking near her college dorm. I finally banked the Studebaker into a mud filled ditch and climbed out, two hours late for our meeting.
A reeking crowd of jaundiced, homeless men and women circled me, out-stretched arms closing in. I let them warm their filthy hands in my armpits and proceeded. After some hour long foreplay with different buildings, being locked in lobbies and threatened by angry mothers, my identification held for security and background checks, I found her room number.
A haze of German static blared from the speaker. Forty minutes later, two girls came out and we began walking.
“This is my roommate Elise,” said Judy, “the lesbian.”
“I’m a lesbian.” Elise said.
“That include dental?” I screamed.
“Oh my god!” They complained, in unison.
They sped up, trying to loose me, into another building. I chased them up five flights of stairs, yelling, “my spike is a gunpowder wick! If you light it, I sexually combust!”
I followed their spiraling laughter to the narrow entrance of a dorm room. Suicide small. Hardly room for two people.
“They barred the windows so no one can jump during mid terms.” Elise scowled.
“Does that guy come with the room?” I asked.
Leaning real cool against the doorframe was a slick, skinny boy, cigarette dangling from his lips.
“Oh, that’s Kim. He’s cool. He’s Asian.”
“Include dental?”
Kim smiled. His teeth were frighteningly white.
“I see.”
Kim knelt in the corner, head tilted up, cigarette down; a mane of epileptic, dyed blonde hair. The ash respected him too much to fall.
“Kim gave me an abortion last week.” Judy said, glowing.
“That’s fantastic.” I was getting bored.
“Hey! It’s her body, prick neck!” Elise spat, mechanically.
“Cigarette abortion,” Kim interrupted, “the child atrophy, coaxed slowly out crawling like unborn fluid. Not five minutes and crying ball of little fingers arms toes flushing liquorish black on carpet.” He made a complex series of gestures. “Missed two puffs only. Never advisable to nurture woman’s belly, no. Pre-birth like lobster delicacy.” He trailed off with a small laugh, puffing smoke in my direction.
“For now, we call it the whiz kid.” Judy said.
A shuddering wet sound emanated from the bathroom. I began smiling and couldn’t stop.
“What’s on Lifetime?” Elise said.
There was a widescreen public television in the lobby. No students were allowed personal electronics.
“You know how many dildos I had to leave at my parents’ house? Like I’m really going to smuggle dynamite in a fucking vibrator. It says that in the handbook,” Judy said, “Just because some stupid New York stock brokers were incinerated, I can’t get myself off.”
“A woman wouldn’t want to please herself! No! Fucking men!” Elise yelled to the bugged room.
“Anyway,” Judy retrieved a syringe from her cleavage, screwed it together and poked the needle into the base of her left breast, “wanna watch us play hopscotch?”
“Yah, yah!” I said with my sore, grinning face.
“Too bad.” Elise smirked.
Kim rose, crossed the room, and filled the hopscotch squares with mad dancing.
“Beautiful.” I said.
“He’s better at it than we are.” Judy said.
“I know.” I said, the corners of my mouth ripping.
“Well, yah, but check this out.” Judy kicked a panel out of the floor with her bare feet. She lifted a heavy wooden box, strapped it to her back.
“Let’s go to the roof. My eyes are taking in the slow movement of electrons. We must move a football yard away from here.” Judy said.
We left Kim and Elise and hiked to the roof. The river wind performed its cold surgery. She set the box down and opened it. I looked inside.
“What’re you gonna do with that?” I asked.
“I can always tell if I’m meant to be someone’s girl.” She said. “This is our test.”
The rocket launcher glinted in the dying sunlight. Judy strapped it around her shoulder and aimed at the horizon. A distant helicopter glided slowly above the buildings.
“This is what came with the room.” She said, and fired.
A plume of smoke shot behind her. The rocket become a red dot, miles away, aligning gradually, with horrible expertise toward the doomed helicopter. There was no sound. The copter jumped, a dash of flame, seemingly the size of a lit match, and puttered down at an angle, shattering against a large skyscraper in a fit of glass and metal shards. The smoke and dust grew like the yawning ghost of some Homeric giant, until we were encompassed and I began coughing through my smile.
Judy dropped the weapon and smiled back. She reassembled the syringe and jabbed it into her neck, left it hanging there and stuck her arms out. Her eyes fluttered. She stretched an open hand waist-level, toward me. I took her hand and we smiled together.
“No.” She whispered, shaking her gleeful head. “No.”