Excerpt II

Here’s a second excerpt for anyone who is interested. The release is still set for May 10 and we got the ISBN number today.

-Adam

* * *

Christmas that year was unseasonably warm. It had been two weeks since her little sister found Betty, when I slipped the rope around my foster mother’s neck and kicked the chair she used to tie me to out from under her.

The local paper had called it the “start of an epidemic.”

I remember her biting her tongue in two when the rope tightened. I remember the sound of her house slipper falling off her foot and smacking the concrete floor. I remember her eyes bulging out from their sockets and the windows behind them drawing dark like curtains. Exploding colors of synapses and loss of circulation. All those years she had choked me, now it was her fucking turn. The feel of that rope cutting her off from the world, as her mind separated from her flailing. She pissed blood and shit herself.

That final hush is the same as the one you’re born with. We’re brought into this world with that hush, that last moment of peace before the screaming starts.

I remember the hard-on forming at the thought of my dead mother, toes pointing at the floor. It was still there when the paramedics came to cut her down.

* * *

Jack awoke that night after dreaming of Heather’s performance. He had thought of his foster mother when he looked into her eyes and heard the dogs. She had Melanie Sanders’ eyes.

* * *

I passed out after my mother spit her last breath. First the paramedics showed up. Then the neighbors. Everyone assumed I found her that way. Everyone was polite enough not to ask about my hard-on.

I remember the taste of cinnamon chewing gum in my mouth. The paramedic must have been chewing it. It’s the odium that brought me back to life from a tunnel of what should have been guilt. I didn’t see any light, but I wanted to go towards it just the same.

* * *

After years of mediocrity, Jack felt like he had truly made something of himself in the film business. Sure, there were no credits, but the money was starting to roll in and he was creating something real.

Those little things about his foster mother, he would cherish them forever. Force them through in every new project. Like how she used to make the best peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and would take Jack to the park because his father was too busy. How she used to clip off the tips of the cherry flavored freezer pops. How she used to come into his bedroom while he slept and gag him before she sodomized him with a wire coat hanger.

She always said I deserved to feel the pain she felt.

3 Comments

Comments RSS TrackBack Identifier URI