Sacred Monster

Flashback 1A

Jack, sixteen years old, reared up over the waiting Wendy in the backseat of the car. His feet drummed against the door she’d just made him slam, switching out the light above his head. Wild-eyed, staring in the dark, his nose filled with a suffocating musk, he trembled all over, his body moving in rapid disorganized jerks. “I can’t—” he cried, his voice breaking back to childish falsetto, “It’s so— You’re so—”

“Get with it, willya?” Wendy demanded, half laughing, teasing, poking at his chest with sharp-knuckled fingers. “Come on!”

Jack’s arms flailed around. He beat himself on the head in his mad struggle to get control of himself. The Buddy-facade he’d come in here with had failed him and fled. Grabbing Wendy’s shoulders in his fists, clutching tight, he yanked her this way and that, gibbering in frenzy, shaking her like Raggedy Ann.

“Jesus!” Wendy cried. “Watch it! Hey, the window crank! Look out, you’re— What are you— Gahhh!”

Jack shook and thrust with rhythmic mania, flinging the two of them about so that the car rocked on its springs, and down the road Buddy grinned to himself at the sound of it. But every time Jack lifted Wendy’s body now, though in the darkness and in his own frenzy he didn’t notice, her head merely flopped, back and forth on her shoulders.

“Yes!” Jack cried. “Yes! Yes!” And he collapsed atop her, gasping, shuddering all over, spent.

Slowly, at long last, he lifted himself again onto his elbows, perspiration glinting on his brow and his neck. “Wendy,” he said, low and hoarse and still winded, “Wendy, I’ll never forget you, I’ll never—”

He stopped. He stared. His eyes bulged with horror. His scream filled the car like knives.

“I break things. I break things.”

My lips are loose and blubbery, my eyes are crushed grapes, strings of foul seaweed hang down in my throat, my head is a cavern full of crows, every nerve and sinew in my entire body is untied and aching and trembling. I am like the body of someone who has been electrocuted. This is what it feels like afterward, after the lightning has filled your body and done its work. “Punish me!” I cry. “Punish me!”

I stare from my bleeding eyes and O’Connor is there, still there, always there. He’s plagued me my entire life long. “But you can’t punish me,” I tell him. “I’m a property. I’m too valuable to punish. Nobody can touch me.

“Buddy helped you that night, didn’t he?” O’Connor asks.

“I don’t want to talk anymore.”

“You’ve come this far,” he says. “Buddy helped you get rid of Wendy’s body. That’s why he’s always had such a hold over you, why you could never refuse him anything he wanted. Why you’ve always been grateful to him, and always afraid of him.”

“He’s my-me-my-my old-old-old—”

“It was Buddy, wasn’t it, who thought of what to do that night?”

Yes, I think, while my mouth wallows and drools, sloppy, piggish, revolting... Yes, I think. I nod.