You Killed Mama

What you see before you is, beyond doubt, your mother’s head. Something red and purple with strands of black hair drooling from the end of your mother’s neck. It’s smeared all over the asphalt, with an open cavern for a skull. Brains aren’t supposed to be that colour, are they? Blood-coloured brain spilling over broken edges, a single eyeball floating on top. The other eyeball is oozing along the strands of hair, like gravy coating burnt vermicelli.

The teeth, now, that’s a sight to see. It’s a rock garden in there, an orgy of uprooted molars, their little phallic tines dry-humping each other with the natural lubricant of blood-tinged saliva – or is it saliva-tinged blood? The tongue is the corpse of a black slug that has had salt sprinkled over it. It pokes out from between the grinding stones.

It is staring at you. The ridged opening on the tip of the tongue, it is staring at you. The gaping hole through which the squashed head breathes, it is staring at you. The sole eye is straining against the veins like ropes – any moment now it will burst into an orgasm of black and purple liquid – and even so it will stare at you like it is now, even when the irises with slivers of blood in them are oozing from the tips of your fingernails.

The tongue does not move, despite the intensity of its stare. You have to strain to hear it speak. Ahah, there it is. What is it saying?

I am weird, no?

Am I weird?

Look at me, am I weird?

I’m weird?

Am I weird?

Look at me, am I weird?

Am I, am I weird?

It is an insane little song, a rhythmic chant or lullaby, and what’s left of the lips seem to curl into a smile. The hole where the mouth once was stretches obscenely wide, almost like the movement of a vulva being stretched out until the labia rip apart at the seams.

Your mother's head is frozen in a silent laugh. Your mother's head, smeared like so much strawberry pudding over the asphalt, is frozen in a silent laugh.

“Mama,” you moan. “Mama…”

There is a squelching sound as you scrape the squashed head off the ground and press your lips to where you think its lips might have been. You feed your breath into it, sweetly, lovingly. You taste the shape of its laughter. You caress the top of its spine with your tongue.

“Mama,” you call out for her yet again, your voice burbling in her blood.

Someone makes a choking noise. You pull your lips away from your mother’s, making a little popping sound like a bursting gum bubble, and look up. A man is stumbling away from you. His eyes are bulging, his face ash-gray in the shadow of the moon, his mouth a black hole of violently churning silence. It’s a while before you realize that he’s staring at your mother. You open your mouth to speak, but he trips, falls to his knees, and starts to retch. You are hit in the face with a cloying sour stench, a corrupted, putrefying sweetness, as the ground around him is splattered again and again with chunks of vomit. The moist, spurting sounds remind you of watery feces splashing against the rim of a toilet. You stare as the man is racked by steadily weakening spasms, his torso thrusting with less and less vigor until his movements melt away into stillness.

It’s a sustained stillness. A holding of breath. Moonlight shafts out of the drifting clouds, bleaching his light, feathery hair a pure white. Skeletal hair.

A groan claws its way out of his throat, slowly, inch by inch, until it spills out of his mouth into the night air.

“This isn’t happening… oh god… this isn’t happening…”

His lips tremble as they are pulled apart by some inexorable force, the corners of his mouth straining, almost ripping, and you brace yourself for a scream. But then his eyes meet yours.

Again, a pause. Echoes of silence stretch like a mask over his short, gurgling breaths.

Then his face and limbs burst into a frenzy of motion as he scrambles through the puddle of puke towards you, shrill syllables tumbling out of his mouth like fresh guts spilling out of a wound.

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t see her – you – it was so dark – no streetlamps – the trees! Oh god, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry, oh god, I’m so sorry – !”

“Hey,” you say. Your voice is mild, muffled almost, like it’s emanating from the fading stars above rather than from inside of you – but somehow the sound of it makes the man flinch. You squat down before him and push your face towards his until you can see the gleaming snail trails trickling from his nostrils, smell the fresh puke on his breath, hear the sticky, moist sounds of his throat twisting in over itself in agony.

“My mother needs to get to a hospital.”

He stares at you, dumb, as if he doesn’t understand what you’re talking about.

“Can’t you see that she’s been badly hurt?" you say, raising your voice. "You’ve got to drive us to a hospital.”

He’s shaking his head, a slight movement from left to right, no, and you fight the urge to scream into his face.

“Are you deaf?” you snap as you transfer your mother’s head to your left arm and grab the man’s shoulder with your right, trying to pull him into an upright position. “Get in your goddamned van and get us to the hospital, now!”

“B – but – ” he stumbles to his feet, looking at you like you’re the freak. “She’s dead!”

She’s dead.

His words roar straight through your brain and your world explodes into the pulsating heartbeats of a thousand wavering butterflies.

“No!” you scream, trying to drown out the sound of frantically beating wings. “She’s not dead, she’s not, she just needs a doctor! You’re gonna be fine, right ma? You’re going to be perfectly, perfectly, fine –”

“But – you – she – her head!” Air spurting is out of his mouth in wet, shredded gasps. “Y-you’re holding her – ”

“Shut up shut up shut up shut up shut up!” You hug your mother’s head closer to your chest, clutching it so hard you hear something crack inside.

“I drove over her head!” His voice breaks and words sludge out of his mouth in a keening wail. “I drove – over – her – head – ”

“Shut up!” you roar as you sink your nails into his cheek. Something gives; blood wells up in crescent shaped slits. The man cries out and shoves you away from him. You lose your balance – your arm goes slack – your mother’s head tumbles out of your grasp –

It lands on the ground with a splat.          

The man is crying now, almost screaming, but all you can focus on is the sight of your mother’s head on the ground. There is nothing remotely resembling a smile on the mess of red and purple. There is no sign of laughter. There is nothing. No breath, no life. Nothing.

“Mama,” you moan. “Mama…”

It seems that you blink and the night drops away from you for a second.

When you come to, your right knee is jammed up between the man’s legs, your kneecap grinding his testicles into a pulp. You hear howling, and it doesn’t take too long for you to realize that it’s coming from both of you – two injured wolves fighting for dominion, bound together in pain and fury – but for the moment you have the upper hand.

You push the man off your knee and he collapses, clutching his crotch as tears stream down his face. Before he can react, you grab his shoulders and slam his torso into the ground. His skull hits the asphalt, hard, with a sickening crack. As his body goes stiff with pain, you straddle him and pin his hands down to each side of his head.

“You killed mama,” you whisper, your voice hoarse from screaming. Drool slides down the side of your chin and drips onto his cheek. “You killed mama. Give me one, one, one good reason why I shouldn’t kill you – right here – right now – ”

The man’s face is a twisted, silent mask of horror.

“Stop staring at me like that,” you say, trembling. “Stop it!”

Rage rises in you, becomes words that pour out of you like burning wax, searing your chest and your throat as they roll out, one after another, red hot words as smooth and beautiful as molten gold.

“It’s all your fault, not mine! You killed her! You goddamn fucking killed her! I can’t live without her, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t, I simply can’t... so I’m going to kill myself – yes, kill myself! So I can go to where she is… so I can be with her again…”

Your whole body is shaking with joy.

“So I can tell her… I didn’t just let her killer walk away…”

You don’t know if it’s because you banged his head on the road, or something else, but something changes in his face. The twitching stops, his cheeks collapse, his eyebrows smooth out into slender, sloping curves. His face is a mess of tears, blood, saliva, and yet his eyes are quiet.

“If I let you kill me, will you promise not to kill yourself?”

You stare at him.

“For the love of god, I don’t want to have your blood on my hands too!” The mask of serenity breaks; fresh tears are rolling down his cheeks. “Kill me if it’ll make you feel better, I don’t care! I can’t live with myself, I can’t live with myself knowing that I was the cause of a woman’s death! So please… kill me… if that’s the only way you can live…”

His chest is heaving with his sobs under your crotch, but you can feel his muscles sagging, relaxing; it feels like he’s opening his body up to you. You lift your hands carefully off his wrists, ready to slam them back down again in case he retaliates, but he doesn’t. You lift your hands higher until both his hands are free to tackle you and yet he remains a paralyzed, sobbing hunk of meat under your thighs.

You can’t believe it. You can’t believe how easy this is going to be. You dig your thumbs into the tender skin of his eyelids and push all the way up until the curves of his eyeballs are revealed. The tips of your thumbnails gleam, painted red with your mother’s blood. You can do it. You know you can do it. You want to do it, to push his eyes into his brain until they’re mashed up against the back of his skull – but slowly. Very, very slowly. So that he feels every single jolt of pain that your mother felt when he crushed her.

“Can you promise me something?”

“No,” you say flatly, as you start to apply pressure on his lids.

“If my daughter comes looking for me, will you please tell her that I love her?”

You freeze.          

“…You… have… a daughter?”

He nods. You feel like crushing his pathetic face.

“You want to die, but you have a daughter?”

And there’s the poison again, seeping through the cracks of your heart into the recesses of your soul. You grab the man’s collar with both hands and pull him into a sitting position, so that your chest is pressed up against his, so you can feel his heart beating. You pull your fist back and slam it into his face. His neck makes a satisfying crack as his head whips to the side.

“That,” you say, breathing heavily. “… was for even considering abandoning your child. How dare you… how dare you… how dare you sit there and just let – me – kill you – ”

The man is staring at you again with that bloody, broken face of his.

“Are you crying?”

You realize, to your surprise, that you are. Then you realize that these are the first tears you’ve shed since your mother died.

“I’m sorry,” the man is murmuring, looking even more heartbroken than you are. “I’m so, so sorry…”

You can’t speak anymore; the inside of your throat feels like a rectum that’s just been raped with a poker. Even breathing through your nose hurts. Your fingers are slipping in the man’s vomit-laced shirt, your nails catching in strands of cotton and mucus; your muscles are suddenly nothing more than tubes of jelly. The strings of tension holding you up go slack and you collapse into the man’s arms. Your head comes to a rest on top of his shoulder. Your eyes are melting, seeping down your face to pool at the junction where your flesh meets his.

For the first time, you’re close enough to him that the smells of vomit and blood are receding into the distance. You bury your nose in the crook of his shoulder and inhale. You can feel the contours of his neck undulating as he swallows, the soft pulsations of his carotid artery.

He smells like a good father.