if the heavens ever did speak
I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies
tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife
We all float here, he had thought, falling, but he does not float. He hits the ground, bounces with his plastic buoyant skin.
There is a noise then, the girl whose wrist still holds two small red dots from the clown he left in the toy box. It is loud, more giant’s roar than girlish squeal – he is so small, now, that sounds are distorted. Her squeal is like the roar of oceans, all around him, reverberating in his skin.
He’s in her clutches then, grasped in a sweaty palm with fingers wrapped around him, pressing hard enough that his skin indents, like she could squeeze the life out of him.
“Where did you come from?” she asks, but he has found himself frozen. The words boom about and echo off the walls.
“Mine,” she whispers, and it is still too loud, the fingers pressing tighter until Sleaze is glad he no longer seems to have organs because they would have surely spilled out his throat by now.
The days are blurry, and come in fragments until he forgets that time is a real thing – there is only her, Nerissa, the god, the devil with clutching fingers. He does not associate her with the memories that washed over him in the toy box, not at first. He does not know this is the girl the animals loved despite it all, the one they were meant and made to love.
He knows her name because she carves it into him. First she simply writes it in sharpie, the chemical tang potent enough to sting his frozen-open eyes. But it is not enough (nothing will ever be enough, he will learn in the days to come), and she carves along the black lines with the open blade of mommy’s sewing scissors. He feels each letter, feels eviscerated after, a perpetual open wound, the jagged plastic seams of him unable to ever knit back together.
She calls him Velvet, like the horse in the old movie, and he thinks no, I am Sleaze. He doesn’t have much, but he has a name. His name.
Sleaze. He is Sleaze.
Time blurs worse, after, but this is what he remembers:
He is made to live in a plastic stable with other horses. Some of them he thinks he recognizes form the dark night in the toy box. They are made to race and jump impossible heights and when he crashes down he can feel it in his legs.
Some of the horses are made of more delicate plastic than he, larger and more realistic, like the horses he might have encountered Once Upon a Time when he walked Beqanna’s meadows and did not know this world laid in wait for him. The word Breyer is etched across the yellow boxes they come in, and he wonders if it’s their name or something else. He tries to talk to them, when Nerissa leaves the room and he can move his aching limbs, but they whinny and snort and roll their feral eyes and he knows they are not like him.
One of them – Cigar, a bay modeled after a racehorse that broke records – is run too hard by Nerissa’s overeager hands and his leg snaps off cleanly at the knee. Sleaze is not being played with and hears the crack and her resulting cry – first of surprise, then of dismay. But the dismay does not last long – she had no particular bond with Cigar’s outstretched form – and Sleaze watches as the three-legged creature is tossed into a round container and is taken away the next day by the housekeeper.
He is in a boiling ocean, drowning.
She encompasses the water, pallid flesh rising like mountains in this ocean (a bathtub, he will learn later, a new word, whispered by the cropped-haired Barbie he speaks to). He looks around and realizes the ocean is dammed by white ceramic. Somewhere there is a waterfall. He is submerged again and made to swim and when he tries to breathe there is only hot water perfumed by soaps and shampoos that stings his throat and eyes and fills him up until he feels heavy and distended.
She finally lifts him up and squeezes in; squeezes tight until the opposing sides of his stomach touch and he wonders what it was like not to hurt. The water pours out like vomit through a hole in his stomach, one she accidently poked there when carving her name.
She holds him under the waterfall then, the water pounding out, pounding over him like it wants to crush him into the hard white ceramic, but she holds him up while he tries to breathe and time does not exist, only this: the water, the fingers sunk into his skin, the pounding heartbeat silence that comes with being drowned.
He is made to fight the other animals, the plastic ones he met in the toy box. She brings them, reaching blindly into the toy box. She withdraws a tiger, and he recognizes it as the one with shoulder blades creeping up through striped skin. Its body has been mangled, and part of its face is missing. Nerissa throws it away without a second thought – it happens, sometimes, to her toys, she assumes she does it and forgets – but Sleaze’s eyes remain fixed on it.
He tries to call out to the mangled, discarded form but there is no answer, and he remembers the way the clown had buried its face to her throat.
And then he can no longer watch the tiger’s graveyard because she has pulled out the plastic animals, engaged them in an elaborate battle only she knows the rules to.
He fights them as best two animals made stiff by plastic can fight. A wolf’s frozen open mouth drags across his face, is fastened for a moment around his throat then lets go. He is made to rear and clash against a unicorn, a pale white thing that glitters and later stabs against his chest with her twisted horn.
He can hear the laughter of the other animals in his head, and he realizes they enjoy this. To them, it is a game. They do not feel pain the same way he does, he realizes. They have no concept of it. To them, they are merely happy to be in her clutches, crashing and biting at one another, free of the toy box, free of Pennywise the clown who lurked there with his Glasgow smile and halo of red hair.
(On the latter he cannot blame them.)
Does it not hurt? he asks Kapu, the wolf who once saved him and has since clawed and bit his way across Sleaze’s skin.
To which Kapu replies, the confusion evident in the words even as his face remained frozen, only the clown hurts. She loves us.
She loves us is a mantra that repeats itself across the toys.
She loves us, thinks the cropped haired Barbie; thinks it even as Nerissa places her thumbs on the underside of the woman’s chin and presses up until the head pops off like the cork from a champagne bottle.
She loves us, thinks a fairy with wings like a dragonfly, as Nerissa jettisons her out of the second story window to watch her float down.
She loves us, thinks the soft Cinderella doll as the scissors vivisect her naked body and something white, like clouds, spills out.
She loves us, Sleaze tries to think as she scratches the fine point of a scissor blade back and forth across his eye, eventually removing the paint and leaving him half blind.
He still feels pain. He has drowned and been carved into, bitten and kicked and made to land impossible heights on legs that felt like they would shatter. He has been squeezed until deflated and left to reflate, the feeling strange and terrible and he wonders if there’s an end, any end, to the hell he woke to.
It goes on like this. Time passes. He does not know how much. He forgets what his skin used to feel like. He forgets his father’s name. He forgets the taste of grass in his mouth. He forgets what it’s like to live without such an omnipresent force.
Sometimes he forgets his own name and that is the most terrifying, he will whisper it into the shadows when she sleeps, this one shred of self that is left: Sleaze, I am Sleaze.
I am Velvet, he whispers once, almost out of curiosity, and he is shocked at how right the name sounds.
I am --
----------------------------I
---------am
------------------------------------ (sleaze)
---------------------------------------------------------(velvet)
She loves us, he thinks, and it almost makes sense.
One night she is sleeping and he hears the creak of wood and a muffled thump. He moves his head and sees something, a blur of white and red and yellow dragging itself across the hardwood floor.
It crawls – slithers – up her nightstand, and he hears the clown whispering to the girl, though he can’t quite make out the words, and is glad for it.
She moans in her sleep, turns over, and the clown lays a mangled, white-gloved hand on her neck and seems to contemplate something.
Sleaze almost loves her then, because even though she is impossibly large, she seems so delicate and fragile beneath the reptilian yellow gaze of Pennywise.
She loves us, he thinks, and in that moment he believes it, and his body hurts a little less.
Time no longer matters, but it is morning. Nerissa wakes, sleep-eyed and stretching in a pink shirt. She sees the clown and grabs him quickly, shoves him back into the toy box. She notices the balloons are gone but assumes they broke off and are scattered at the bottom of the box.
She shuts the lid tight and heads downstairs, allowing Velvet
(sleaze)
to move, to stretch out his limbs. The other toys that are out are chattering joyously enough, excited for what the day’s play will bring.
She loves us, they chorus, and Velvet
(!! sleaze !!)
choruses along with them. It is easier to do it. It doesn’t hurt. It’s okay.
She loves us.
The bedroom doesn’t look like the gallows, all pinks and whites and golds. A palace, perhaps, but not a gallows. Gallows should be dreary and dark, not pink-wallpapered with a poster of a Pegasus thumbtacked to the wall.
But Nerissa is bored (or perhaps a strange little clown whispered a suggestion into the curve of her ear). Nerissa is bored, so she wraps her hand around Velvet’s head and twists, keeps twisting.
Velvet’s head is twisting and is there pain? He doesn’t know anymore. He doesn’t remember pain, it fades like a dream, a delirium of another life.
Velvet’s head spins, and eventually something gives way with a low pop like a seal being broken.
Through his one remaining eye he sees her own eyes, ice-blue and watery, peering down at his decapitated head. There is a feeling of pressure as she tries to press him back together, but fails. She gives up, and gathers his body in her hands, drops him into the same garbage can Cigar and Barbie and Cinderella all went into.
She loves us, Velvet thinks, but thinking is harder because the bond forged between child and toy is breaking, he is transcending, changing, dying.
I am -- he begins, but cannot finish.
She loves --
Somewhere, miles away, he thinks he hears a clown laughing.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
|
|
|
