© Sauce*Box, ßummer 2001, All rights revert to author.
Material may not be reused without author's explicit permission.
Material may not be reused without author's explicit permission.
Trasig Men Trogen
by Dusty Angel
HAVE YOU EVER seen bricks fall from seven stories up? They tumble through the air like suicide victims, with screams so silent you'd have to be a master of telepathy to hear them. When they hit the cement, this fog of faery-dust disbands in all directions, and a few shards of clay are propelled into the unsuspecting bystanders.
"Those who stay far enough away always saunter over afterwards, to inspect the damage and all. There's never a thing there. It's like this invisible, invinceable force; this monster. Almost Godlike."
"God is a pile of bricks?"
He smiled, and the greying strands of hair on his chin twitched. A mole sank into a dimple. "Little girl, you'll never see beauty like that. You'll never witness it."
"And if I did?"
"You'd die." He paused a moment, and the mole fell into the crevice on his face again.
"Oh, fuck off."
He grinned still, placing his hands on her shoulders, as if preparing to be a mentor on beauty. "Listen, love..." With too much force, he threw her back. Her head hit the wall before she fell to the bed.
Out cold.
He undressed her, slowly. He removed her short dress with an aggressive tenderness and her underwear with a delicate touch customarily unknown to the type of individual who would knock a young woman out of conciousness and strip her.
He spread her legs and shaved the hair from between them. He placed her left hand across her vagina, protected by her pale thighs, and the right arm across her breasts, as if she was hiding herself out of shame.
He ran his long, yellowing fingernails down her torso; from her neck, between her breasts, down to her pelvic bone. He pressed them into her flesh until blood surfaced.
He lit a candle, a putrid-coloured green. Tilted over her stomach, the wax began to fall. He set it between her breasts. As she breathed, it tipped and bled across her chest, the flame not ceasing to burn.
He dug through dresser drawers and kitchen cabinets until he came upon a dusty old camera, which must have been more than a decade old. With his dominant hand he took photographs. The other was in his courdouroys, stroking the contents over an agonizingly long period of time in which he'd just barely begun to lose flaccidity. He finished off the roll of film (and himself). He developed the pictures while she slept. There was a photograph of his daughter and himself from years ago, before his hair had gone white. In it, his daughter was in her early twenties. About the same age as the girl unconcious on his bed; forced into a twisted sexuality by what he thought to be a rotten old man too intent on finding the beauty in things that were repugnant.
Later that evening, they went to the construction site down the block to watch bricks fall.
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