austin is a (deadman) wrote in repose, @ 2020-04-27 19:46:00 |
|
|||
Entry tags: | *narrative, miles williams |
[narrative]
Who: miles + an annoying ghost.
What: miles gets a text message for his next killjob, someone named... margot mayer.
Where: his abode.
When: morning, then night time.
Warnings/Rating: none but bad words.
The man works thru a trifling linger of morning drizzle, unperturbed by the cold, filmy sheen that it stings his chapped knuckles with. The housework needs to be done. Overhead, there was a crystal sconce for a sun behind a deathly bridal veil of gloomy grey. When the milky light would snatch a cameo of his bloodshot, life-drowsy eyes, or the unsmooth plane of his burdened brow, he would yawn around in the thought of what it would be like to die. The transparent blonde, effulgent as a four-nerve daisy, had hiked to the street corner unshod. The man had winced at first, in an innermost, anxious socket of his protective heart. Thinking of the teeming, strange life of shuddersome germs awaiting her naked heels on the pavement, but then he remembered that she was already dead. She gawked into the smudged face of the hiding sun for a long while, and regretfully, he had pined over the idea that by some merciful blow, she’d be lifted up and away and swept to the elsewhere ranges of an elysium beyond his mortal comprehension. Instead, as he’d re-caulked sharp cracks in rusted windowframes near the autumnal husks of daddy longlegs, he thought of the satin blur of hair he’d wake to see on his sleeping wife’s pillow a grief ago, and time crawled on. The blonde had stood there, stationed, for hours, as if entranced. Nothing took her.
She had thought, can I go blind? What is it like to be a blind ghost? Are there any blind ghosts? She saw cherry-cheeked children gamboling, cheeping like a covey of barnswallows behind fiberglass at a busy neighbors. Gawking thru the window was like watching television, or seeing a toy store come to life. One of the littler kids had waved and she waved back. But she received no blindness. Consequently, no answers to her wonders.
Later, he was washed of the yardwork and on his 13th Lone Star. Cozy, he had carved a slice of the dilapidated blueplaid couch and named it his acreage. He’d pinned himself there for a few days of ongoing despair. The blonde had left him be. She had learned her lesson: the only time that Miles ever had a mean bone to pick with her was when he was finally tired, when his body is heavy and his spine begs for warm dreams. Dreams as dark and watery red as the pulsing of a womb, where one has their last moments of peace. Dreams just as comfort, benumbed to existence for a while. He would offer her a beer, sneering like wildlife, or a pull of the indica that was supposed to ensnare him into slumber like a sirens song. It was the only mean things that he ever did, knowing she couldn’t imbibe, knowing she couldn’t smoke. And when he did them, the guilt was instant in his sore blue eyes. He’d stay up longer than he needed to, to make up for it, fighting sleep like a toddler with his vision rolling up into his dusty skull. And she would say that he was the nicest killer she’d ever met.
“What’s it like,” she asks the minute he wakes, him embarking on a blind quest with his hand for a beer on the coffee table. “Living with me?”
“Like having a cat,” or so he drawls, rubbing the blunt, cactal terrain of his unshaven jaw, “Except way more annoying.”
“You think I woulda been a good mother? Maybe we should get a cat and see!”
“I ain’t taking care of no cat while you watch me do it.”
“Is it like having a kid, having me around? You’re too young to be my dad, but,” an invisible mischief must’ve pulled the corner of her pink mouth up into that spreading, impish grin, because it seemed impossibly defiant, “I could always start calling you daddy.”
Miles is mid lazy side-sip of upon-waking Lone Star when she says this; he hasn’t even sat up yet from the couch. The carbonation goes down the wrong way. He arises, choke-laughing, fatefully receiving some text message in that confusing moment (did she actually make a naughty joke that was somewhat funny?). The ringtone is an alien zap, specific to that other job of his, and he hardly skims what it says with his bleary eyes. He sends a text back to confirm that he’s taking the money, the kill. There’s no backing out after such a text is sent. He thought it said Mark something. Probably some pedophile asshole who wears pewter dagger necklaces from Spencer’s. He tosses the phone away, near the chair she’s made her foxhole, where she beams, smiling triumphantly, but then…
“You kill girls?” she says in high twang, peering down at the phone. “I didn’t know that.”
“What?” he’s clearing his throat of that skein of caustic froth, but manages, “I don’t kill girls. That's for uncouth, dickless shitheads.”
“Then who’s Margot Mayer, you big fat idiot?”
Who, indeed.