Lust Demented

{LIII}

ALIVE AMONG THE ROTTING. THE morgue workers shook off the chills and got back to work. The waking coma drug seemed far-fetched. Science made perfect sense and for that fact alone was light years behind this town. Life was floating in and out of consciousness regardless.

“I’m here for a pick up. A guy with a slit throat.” I couldn’t make out the voice and it bugged me out how I was more popular dead than alive.

“You got a coffin? No corpses leave without a coffin.”

“In the hearse.” The voice became almost recognizable, but I’d heard so many.

“Alright sign for him and he’s all yours.” Something familiar. A pen scratching paper. The body bag zipped over my head. The wheels were rolling again.

“Humans are flawed Farrow. You desert people when they need you most.”

The world saw me as dead. The inside of the body bag left a whole lot of nothing to be desired. I could feel the car cruising down what felt to be an expressway. I wondered if it was really a hearse. Dodging the definite possibility, I visualized a red Ferrari cliff hanging through the Swiss Alps, an orange Super Bee blowing dust past the Laredo border. I wondered who was driving. A land of too many faces. Why could I only see my own? An ancestral scream, no longer repressed tries. I felt the wound on my neck start oozing. No sound comes out to find the future.

“I’ve never deserted writing Percy.”

Covered in fireflies, I sunk into the casket’s mattress somewhere within the stone maze of Calvary Cemetery’s arrogant tombs. Gotham’s peaks appeared to be in arms reach. A lunge towards the skyline beaming through the sinister opacity. Clenching my free hand around the Empire State Building. Trembling and twitching - more insect-like than human.

Brodie was shoveling into the dirt a few feet away from me. A beaten up hearse idled at his back. Its headlights carved light out of darkness. I flexed the muscles in my abdomen. I was beyond hungry. Beyond disfigured. Almost beyond life itself.

“Writing never deserted you Farrow.”

I regained consciousness staring up from a claustrophobic grave. Dirt was dropping from eight or ten feet above. My legs were nearly covered. The soil splattered on me. The coffin was missing. It couldn’t have fit anyway, which I guess is why I was planted here without it. Brodie’s loyal obsession to bury me alongside heroes and villains was unnerving. He grunted laboriously refusing to catch his breath. More dirt fell. There was no fight. It caked inside my mouth.

“It’s a world you had to enter Mikey.” Featherton patted my back with such force that I ended up in the shallow fountain. My hands immediately filled with pennies.

“Angel of the waters… you know Farrow. The fountain’s sculptress was the first woman commissioned for a major work of art in NYC. I published a lot of writers under the Featherton label, but Missy will be the first woman I’ve sold.” Percy stared emptily into the tunnel with pillared arches.