annihilator (Chapter 1)

Starts ugly. Does it get better? Probably not.

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I’ve been waiting for you.

Christ, Christ, Christ.

Everyone goes on and on about Christ. Have for 2,000 years.

But no one talks about my brother, as if he wasn’t the second coming. As if he wasn’t real at all. Christ, the original got an entire religion built around him. He got a story that changed the way stories were written for 2,000 years. My brother got an obituary and an Irish funeral.

But they both did the same thing. Shuffled off their cosmic duty onto others. For Christ it was the sin of humanity: ‘Now you’re all responsible for God’s suicide’. For my brother it was something worse. Maybe not for the world, but worse for me.

It’s funny to me now, really. How he was missed by the world.

Then again, most things are funny to me now.

Once upon a time, my older brother drank himself into a coma and a few weeks later, died.

There were so many tears at that wake. So many faces glowing red and dripping. Most of it was a performance, I’m certain. Or people just leeching off of the strongest emotions in the room. They would call that being an empath or something. I call it being greedy and self-involved.

The people who really cared were there, of course. Others were family friends, people who were sad, maybe, but not devastated.

None of his college friends came. Perhaps he didn’t really have any.

Mother’s incessant wailing raked at my eardrums. All my efforts to avoid her, to slink away into my childhood room and praise the gods of addiction were thwarted by some local nobody, who would capture me and pull me back into the living room.

Beside the coffin, mother sobbed and father feigned stoicism with a stone expression that cracked around his puffy eyes and trembling chin.

Their tears meant nothing to me. I refused to acknowledge the faces of the black suits and dresses meandering around my childhood home like weepy ghosts. Even mom and dad were mostly obscured by the fog in my mind. Only two people mattered that day: myself and my brother. And as I stumbled over to his coffin, dragged against my will by some distant, fickle family friend, and stared down at his death painted face, I was warmed by a hateful recollection: The last time he tried to rape me, he couldn’t get it up. I shoved him away and he stumbled back, drunk and slurring. He puked down his shirt; black coffee grounds that stank like ground beef, fish, vodka and fernet. The alcohol smell was alcohol, no doubt. But I know he hadn’t eaten that day.

Ground beef and fish. That was the stench of his guts rotting from the inside out.

I should have been disgusted, but I was elated. I knew what that meant. It meant my prayers would be answered soon. It meant he was on a fast track to the void. To being nothing. Harmless worm food.

That was what I thought at the time, anyway.

Some days I still look at our little silk rope, the one that stretched to the morgue. I think of how I must have changed that rope ever since I first saw it. Whatever geometries it makes now come from my sheer pleasure of knowing that, while we may be stuck together for all eternity, I got to spit on his corpse.

I wasn’t thinking when I did it.

His expressionless face in that padded coffin blanked out all of my thoughts as it always had before, since I was 13 and he was 21, when he forced himself on me the first time. But now he couldn’t overpower me. He couldn’t overpower a fucking fly. So I snarled like a rabid dog and spit on his face.

Taste the poison you left in me.

The collective gasp brought me back. I froze rigid and my senses heightened. Suddenly I could look in every direction, but none of the fast moving objects spinning around me were very clear. The shape that was dad shot up. Someone bleated vitriolic obscenities in my ear. The back of someone’s palm struck my face. I knew it was a hand because I had felt this one before after being accused of being a druggie.

Mother’s hand. Ignorant, hopeless mother.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She demanded, as if I was a 13 year old child and not a 22 year old woman. She narrowed her eyes, her head trembled like the tongs of a tuning fork. I watched her jowls jiggle as she hissed at me. “Are you on drugs?”

I opened my mouth to speak but I must have smiled. I didn’t mean to. I swear I didn’t. But maybe I felt happy for the first time in 9 years. Maybe I couldn’t help myself.

She smacked me again and my vision went burning white as I stumbled back and steadied myself on the couch. Father yanked her back. His stone face shook too. No matter how hard he tried he was like looking through glass. Fragile, translucent glass that had long ago lost all its durability.

“I think you should leave,” he said, his voice cracked.

I didn’t fight.

I left that instant without even glancing back to see if they might apologize. It didn’t matter if they did, because the gods were on my side that day, even if my face was throbbing.

I laughed my way out of the door. I didn’t even know I was doing it until I found myself gasping for breath halfway down the cul de sac, unable to breathe. I tumbled into the ground and ripped open my stockings and tattered the hem of my dress. I felt the blood, hot and sticky blot on my stinging knees.

As stars flooded out my vision in the orange and blue end day sky, and I clawed at my throat, and burst into laughter, though nothing was funny. I was certain that I would pass out, but two arms wrapped around my shoulders and yanked me off of the asphalt. My instinct was what it always was. I froze, even though I was choking, my body still went rigid. Then suddenly, a cold splash of water soaked me, and I was no longer laughing.

The arms that seized me released me for a moment. I stood but wavered. Strong arms became soft hands that held me upright by the shoulders. The more I blinked the more I could make sense of my surroundings. I had made it out into our cul de sac. A few neighbors stood outside and gawked, but one neighbor in particular had come to rescue me. I turned to face him.

His name was Dawson Twin Horse. Dawson and his wife, Raena moved into our neighborhood when I was 9. I knew Dawson was American Indian by the sheer fact that he looked it, and who else could ever get away with being called “Dawson Twin Horse”? Raena, on the other hand, had lighter skin but she had the same cheekbones and almond eyes as her husband, so I suspected from a young age she was also Indian.

They both smiled constantly and effortlessly, and they had matching streaks of late-thirties gray hair on their temples and clone smile creases in their cheeks. They were the most handsome couple I had ever seen in my life, and as a little girl I was secretly in love with both of them. Though, maybe my exposure to them was limited. I recall one of the first conversations they had with my parents was at one of my mother’s summer cookouts for the block. I don’t have a flowchart of how the talk went, but I remember they announced at one point that they were strict anti-natalists. My mother never invited them to another neighborhood function but for whatever reason thought it was alright for me to go over to their house for piano lessons still.

Dawson was always home. I have no idea what he did for work, but he was usually dressed business casual. That day that he saved me he was wearing shorts and a band shirt.

Water dripped down from my hair onto my chest and dress as I gawked at Dawson. He held a now empty plastic cup in his hand. At first I thought I would slap him, but his expression told me he knew exactly what he was doing and that he was prepared for anything.

“Why?” I asked, stupidly.

He smirked a little.

“Worked didn’t it?”

It did. I was finally catching my breath as my chest heaved up and down, in desperate stretches for air. I brushed my fingertips across my neck, over the pulsing peaks and valleys of veins and muscle.

“Thank you,” I said and turned back towards my old home. Mother and father stood out front, cradling each other as they watched hawkishly. But they didn’t lift a finger to my aid. Why hadn’t they saved me? Why hadn’t it been them who pulled me off the ground?

Different spiders like different meals. Different webs catch different things.

But at the time I was certain I understood their disdain for me. Mother never looked at me the same when she first found weed in my room at 15. Father never forgave me for dropping out of college. To them I was the fuck-up. And their good child, alcoholic or not, had a degree and a good software engineering career and a bright future ahead of him. I know what they were thinking as they stared me down with those pathetic woe-is-me expressions plastered on their grotesque, pallid faces that drooped with age and were weathered prematurely by that banal terror that comes to all suburbanites when their frail eggshell world cracks in the slightest. I knew their venomous thoughts, I could feel their psyches plume out of their heads into materiality, leaving a sickly metallic taste in my mouth as if I were being flushed with radiation:

It should have been me.

I turned back to Dawson, who had this endearing let-me-help you expression on his face that also made me hate him a little. He held his arms out as if to wrap me in an embrace, but I stepped away. Behind him, Raena burst through the door and rushed out to me with another plastic cup full of water. She held it out to me.

“Sweetheart, what happened?” Raena demanded.

I snatched the water cup out of her hand and opened my mouth to speak again. But my feet felt so light just then. They felt like they could take me anywhere. Unfettered, untethered, I didn’t feel like I had to stand and exchange niceties or even explain myself. What good had any of that done me? Sure, I loved Raena and Dawson. But my feet told me to run.

So I did.

I spun, blurred my vision into streaks of light and elongated objects like putty. For a moment everything stayed like that, stretched and clawed apart. I knew then, intuitively that something was wrong with me, that something had changed inside of me. But I couldn’t let it bother me then. I raced forward down the street until I could see again, even if my frame view made my head throb with splotches of light that flooded blindingly out in every direction. I could see enough.

A car whizzed past me and honked (a well intending neighbor?), the sound exploded in my ear and almost sent me toppling over someone’s mailbox. It didn’t stop my feet.

With ringing ears I listened for the cries of the Twin Horse family or of my own. No one called for me. They let me run, whether out of shock or carelessness. They let me go.

And maybe if I hadn’t ended up at that park I might have never noticed what was poking out of my head, maybe if someone had helped me, if someone had wrapped me in an embrace I never would have seen the silk.

I consider that often.

Like an apple a day keeping the doctor away, maybe a little love would have kept me from seeing the silk, the webs. I consider this, but I know better. A little love was just a different geometry from a great deal of misery. No difference but the taste.

But I did end up at the park;

An empty, pathetic little park with a slide made of rusted metal sheeting and swing set waited two blocks from my cul de sac. The grass was brown, dead and unkempt as if the Torrance Parks Department stopped checking in on it after I left home and moved to San Pedro.

As I approached, my head flooded with memories of times when I used to have friends. My little community of middle school boys and girls always met here to get into whatever trouble after school and after homework. Mel, Thomas, Carissa and me were best buds until highschool, until my brother dug his claws into me. As I approached the little park and my legs slowed from their swinging run to a zombie tumble-forth, I watched Mel launch herself over the swing set, over Thomas and Carissa who lay flat in the grass, wincing, waiting for her to come down over her and smash their heads.

Mel cleared them and leapt up and down with excitement. Little Evil Kniev-Mel (EvMel Knievel, Melevil Knievel, etc), we called her sometimes. Thomas and Carissa jumped to their feet, jittery and giggly. And I watched them from a safe distance. I knew Mel would want to add another body for her next jump. But that terrified me. By 13 I knew that if I was going to find myself in any danger, I would not be able to roll over in time. I knew I would freeze up and she would smash my ribs.

“Come on! Come over!” They cried, all giggling, all cheery and carefree.

I laughed nervously. We were getting too old to play on playgrounds anymore. That’s what I told myself. 13 years old meant we’d have to start doing our taxes soon. Getting afterschool jobs. Paying rent. Boozing on the weekends. Drinking coffee. Adult stuff. Those were the excuses in my mind, those were the reasons I had to go.

My brother was home again. After being gone for four years he was back home and looking for jobs. But he wasn’t home that night. Luckily for me, he had decided to go out and get drunk with some of his old highschool friends. Hopefully he would sleep on one of their couches so I wouldn’t have to stay up all night wondering if he would stealthily stumble into my room.

Mom and dad were home though, which usually meant I was mostly safe.

I wanted to be safe that night.

“Come on! I need one more body!” Mel announced with confidence.

“I have to go,” I said.

It was met with universal displeasure. Aw. Come on! Do you have to? Just five more minutes.

I shook my head at their protestations.

“My mom needs me home,” I said and left.

They didn’t talk to me at school the next day. I didn’t reach out.

I assumed it would be something we would phase out of, like playing with Lincoln Logs or watching Sesame Street. But they kept not talking to me, and I kept not reaching out. Both of us waited for the other to budge, to give in, to go “I’m sorry, bring it in. Let’s forget all about that.” Instead I just watched the three of them on the school yard, and for so long their circle remained open, waiting for that fourth member to return. But I watched them getting closer and tighter until their little circle closed off. They were now a trio. I could read it in their body language the way I read my brother’s thirsty stare at me on his first day back from college. I was out.

I saw even less of them as years passed.

And when everyone left for college I never saw them again.

I found myself sitting in the swing Mel had sat in nine years ago the last time we played together. I rubbed my eyes with my palms until I saw little splotchy rims of burning, unimaginable colors against my eyelids. I was crying. I didn’t realize it until I pulled my hands away and found my palms soaked and dripping. I must have cried for hours, because the sky was mostly black now, with only a thin streak of blue and orange on the horizon.

I glanced up into the black and spotted a few stars. Most of them were blotted out from light pollution, but the few I could see shimmered particularly brightly. I imagined them coming towards me, like an invasion. I wouldn’t have minded. I had clearly alienated myself from everyone and everything. What did the planet matter to me now?

Let it get eaten.

But something else shimmered in the evening glow. Something right before my eyes.

At first I swatted it away, thinking it was a June bug or something, but my hand made no contact with anything, whatever it was. Then I blinked, certain this was some afterimage from staring at the stars for too long. It wasn’t. I jumped up from my swing, swatting at the just barely visible thing that emerged like a horn from the top of my head.

My heart pounded, but I didn’t know why. Something told me I was in danger. Something told me to close my eyes and run as far as possible. But my feet were planted. I swung at the thing on top of my head, but every time I moved it moved with me, every time I turned its shape changed, but never left my view.

I dropped, gasped, the freezing sense of panic iced over my nerves and crushed out the air in my lungs. I stared at it. The object was no thicker than a rope, silver and blue like moonlight. But the more I stared at it, the more it horrified me. It stretched out on and on, almost indefinitely. I could see no end to it.

It’s happening. It’s finally happening, I told myself. I’ve lost my mind. It’s been too much and I broke, that’s all. This happens to people all the time.

I succumbed to my fate, nodding my head, convincing myself. I looked down at the dead grass at my feet and felt sweat drip into my eyes. I dared not reach up to wipe it off my brow. What if I felt it? What if I was actually able to touch the thing coming out of my head? The hallucination. The delusion. I didn’t want to see it, much less feel it and my heart was beating so powerfully I could feel it pulsing in my teeth. So I resolved to stare at my feet and my eyes traveled up my legs to my torn and bloody stockings. I forced myself to think about something else, anything else. And my asphalt-ground legs were the first thing I could really focus on.

I hadn’t shaved my legs in maybe a year. I got wise, thinking it might deter my brother. I reasoned that maybe it was my budding femininity that had first sicced him on me like a dog to raw meat. Maybe it was me being 13 and wanting to be a woman. When I was so little I tried to dress so maturely, I shaved my legs, I even shaved my arms. But when I stopped, I soon learned that being hairy was never a deterrent for him. If he wanted it, nothing stopped him. Even my parents. Even if they knew I was telling the truth, they wouldn’t stop him.

Because family is built on social credit, and social credit is built on secrets, lies and wickedness.

I learned that the hard way.

Tears gushed from my eyes. I prayed to all the old, dead gods to slaughter every person in that house. Kill them all and leave me alone. To eradicate my family and make me sane again. Cut those ties from me, please god. Please god, please god.

I didn’t mean it, of course. But I felt it, and that was enough for me to plead with the unlistening, silent Divine.

Ever since high school, when I lost my friends, all I ever wanted was to be left alone, to be untethered from everyone around me, to be my own woman. I prayed so hard for the day to come where I would emancipate myself from everyone and I felt that I was so close now. But I was so wrong.

And then I made the mistake of looking up, the mistake of hoping god would come down from his throne beyond the firmament and grant me my wish. It’s a natural human impulse to look up in search of that great big capital-T True Thing. We think with our size, with our bodies and anything above our heads must be powerful, right? But if you value the little delusion in which you live, don’t look up. Don’t look down. Don’t look anywhere. Because if you look you’ll see the silk. You’ll see the webs, and if you’re terribly unlucky, you’ll see the spiders too.

I saw the silk rope, taut from the center of my head. It was clear now, as if my eyes had been wiped squeaky clean for the first time in my life. I call it a rope, but the shape is unlike anything I’d ever seen. It is something that cannot be seen and reasoned, but something that can be felt and intuited, then your eyes place it there in some reasonable way. It burned my eyes to behold the first time I truly saw it. While I know it was stationary, unmoving, I could feel it move, I could see it morphing, shifting and pulsing, like an optical illusion that tricks the mind into thinking it is seeing a moving picture when there is nothing of the sort.

And I couldn’t take my eyes off of it.

The tears dried up in their ducts, my heart steadied into a rhythmic thumping gallop. The breath in my lungs tasted stale and thick. Something like terror overcame me, something like elation. But I didn’t freeze. Something else crackled to life in the back of my mind. A childlike inquisitiveness I hadn’t sensed in eons woke inside me. I was afraid, of course, but the silk tugged at me like a tractor beam.

It pulled me up to my feet and dragged me forward. I reached for it to snatch it up in my hands, and now as I watched the center of my forehead I saw it wasn’t that it would somehow turn to smoke when I grasped it, it was that, even though it spawned from the center of my head it was always, somehow out of reach.

I stumbled through the park, out into the street, further from my home as twilight soaked away into blackness. Out past the suburbs it dragged me, a straight line, never faltering, never wavering, like something harder, denser than any reality I’d ever encountered, but fluid too, immobilized by its elasticity. Somehow the silk occupied both phases of matter at once, contradicting each other.

Along Crenshaw’s sidewalk I tumbled over city trashcans and bus stops, pushing past other evening pedestrians making their way back from McDonalds or the local community college where I had taken classes a year or so ago before dropping out. Torrance night time neon flickered around me. Nothing like Downtown Los Angeles, but still sparkling in my periphery, accenting the silk, but not like light normally should have. The colors reflected, not along the strange and unstable frame of the exterior, but echoed all around it from the inside out. I couldn’t look away.

As I made my way through the Ralph’s Grocery Store parking lot, I peered beyond the silk to where it might be directing me. My gut crumbled into a gaping sinkhole. I had a hunch and I prayed it was wrong. I prayed that in reality I was alone at the park, passed out from exhaustion and this was just a bad dream. But I knew dream from reality so well at this point. I had been steeped in far too much reality for the past 9 years. This was real, with all the crushing force that reality has over everyone.

I knew where this line was heading.

I knew it intuitively.

And as I worked my way past the local barber and the local taco shop, the morgue came into view. The silk rod, taut against my forehead, stretched through the walls of Jolin’s Crematorium without leaving so much as a crack, like even though the silk clearly went through the wall, it was never even touching those concrete, wood and drywall atoms. I followed it now, no longer peering at the silk, but at the walls themselves, cold and gray. I spotted one of the windows as I approached. It was black inside, they were closed up. Meaning they’d already roasted my brother to bone dust. I had a moment of hope. What could that silk possibly be connected to, in there? I began thinking up objects. A coffee mug, a pencil, a gas pipe. Maybe one of those objects had attached itself to me for some reason, to reel me in. Perhaps it was a ghost fishing for new souls and caught me. My imagination ran rampant. But it rejected any possibility of the thing that first possessed my fears.

Anything would be better than that.

It didn’t cross my mind that I was committing any sort of crime when I scooped up that stray stone and lobbed it through the window. Glass smashed and burst the midsection of the pane to splinters. An alarm blared within.

I was close enough to Crenshaw at this point that a couple cars had stopped to watch, but no one stopped me. The main drag still hustled busily as if mostly nothing was happening but I felt eyes on me. Moreso, however, was the feeling that it didn’t matter who saw. It didn’t matter what happened beyond finding out what the hell was at the other end of that rope.

Broken glass carved fissures into my hands as I climbed up the wall and through the window. Shards tore my dress and left the skin on my knees and fabric of my stockings matted together in a knotty, bloody mess. I didn’t even recognize the pain until so much later. In the moment, I only felt the need to know, the desperate desire to wrap my hands around a nonsensical mystery. Beneath all that was the terror of uncovering the answer.

My heart thrummed as the alarm bleated in my ears. I followed along the tile floors, past the receptionist into the back doors that lead down a staircase. I followed my silk rope down the staircase into the cremation room. It stank like soot and overused canned air freshener. The smell made my stomach churn, which was the first sensation I felt beyond fear in what seemed like hours. I blinked a few times, feeling my heart racing as I realized where the hell I was and what absurd things I had done to find myself in this wretched place. I propped a shaking hand up against my mouth as if I might scream or speak too loudly and get found out. Something wet and hot smeared my face. It tasted coppery and thick. I looked down at my bloody hands and felt the white hot fires raging, pulsing from my wounds.

I nearly screamed, but stopped myself when, far away, above the blaring alarm, I heard police sirens screaming towards me. My attention snapped back to the rope in my head as if my eyes had some sort of magnetic attraction to them. I followed it to its final point opposing me. The furnace on one side of me and a collection of messy desks and shelves on the other wall framed a small, dark shelf immediately across from me. The rope stretched out in front of me to that shelf, upon which sat three little black cardboard boxes. The shelf was labeled: UNCLAIMED.

I stepped towards them, unthinking, the sirens and alarms so loud now I couldn’t hear my own thoughts. With each step I blinked, eyelids fluttering as if trying to wake me from this horrible nightmare. But in between each flash of darkness and each glare of light, between each blink I saw images unfold:

My brother lay in his casket, the fire clawing around him, tearing through wood and resin until reaching his flesh.

I stepped closer, the thick stench of formaldehyde reaching my nostrils.

The fire enveloped him and his fingers trembled and curled as they blackened to a crusted char.

Closer now and I could read the labels on the little boxes. In particular one little box. The one my silk was attached to. My chest heaved and my heart thumped rigidly behind my ribcage like something trying to break out. I blinked down at the box.

As the fire wrapped around him, he jerked up, like a man waking from a nightmare, smashing his head into the lid of his casket. THUNK! He dropped down and lurched up again, bashing his head harder this time. But his hair was all burned away, his face glared like crumbling asphalt. No eyes, no nose, no lips. Just a blackened lump.

I said my brother’s name.

“Are you alive?” I whispered.

He dropped down and lurched up again, crashing into the lid. THUNK!

I opened my eyes and stared down at the label.

I read my brother’s name printed on that label, stuck just below the silk that penetrated his box of ashes.

THUNK! His head hit the lid in my waking nightmare.

“Are you alive?” I asked the box.

My brother didn’t answer. A man shouted at me from behind. He told me to get on the ground with my hands behind my head. But I couldn’t move. A chorus of trampling footsteps paraded behind me, and I could see the flashing blue and red lights from outside. They had finally arrived. But I couldn’t explain what happened. I couldn’t explain the rod in my head that stretched out to my brother’s ashes. I couldn’t even explain it to myself.

So I froze.

And my vision blurred out as someone tackled me from behind and ratcheted handcuffs around my wrists.