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
He has three lives, three selves, encompassed in one strange body.
There is Sleaze, child of ill magic, the zealot who once knelt in the moss while his father walked away. The boy who sent up mangled prayers to a god or gods, who laid prostate on the earth, desperate for something to believe in. The boy who did not say a word when his father laid his head across his back, letting out a sigh Sleaze could never quite decipher. The boy who was chosen with no rhyme or reason for this quest, to be transformed from horse to toy, flesh to plastic.
There is Velvet, who grew out of a toybox massacre. Velvet, whose belly was the canvas for a girl to carve her name, Velvet, who drowned, who was scarred, whose body was bent and made strange. Who thought, for the first time one lonely night as the girl slept and a strange clown crept, she loves us. Velvet, who was left decapitated in the trash, a coffin of papers all around him.
There is Cloud, who was reborn on a craft table, made whole again, repainted with clouds to cover his scars. Cloud, who never hesitated to think she loves us as the gentle girl fed him medicines and tended to a play stable, who built him a pasture of moss under an oak.
These selves all exist within one strange body, they live and die and live again, his brain churns with names, with thoughts, with queer memories and he wonders if they were all real, or if he has gone mad.
We all float here, he thinks, and he wonders if he’ll end up as mad as Pennywise, if he is destined for a Glasgow smile and bright balloons.
”That’s mine,” Nerissa says, again, stepping closer. There is a glassiness in her ice-blue eyes, the same glassiness he remembers as she wrapped her hands around his neck and twisted.
(the memories come back, flood back, he is Cloud and he is Velvet and he is someone else, a name on the tip of his tongue he can’t quite grasp, a vague shadow of a father, and he knows something is coming, the denouement, the end times)
Her shadow falls over them both, Cloud and Lena, and a piecemeal prayer springs unbidden to his mind: yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil.
“You threw him away,” says Lena. Her voice is calm, with a flatness to it that Cloud is not used to, the stillness that reminds him what it’s like before a storm, “you threw him away, and now he’s mine.”
“He’s mine,” repeats Nerissa, and Cloud is stuck there motionless in her shadow, thinking about the glassiness of her eyes. At her side, her fingers curl into her palm, and he can see the knuckles turn white. The circles under her eyes are deeper now. It’s clear she hasn’t been sleeping.
“Mine,” Nerissa says, voice quivering like she might cry, “Lena, Velvet is mine.”
“His name isn’t Velvet,” says Lena, almost idly, but she picks him up and holds him tighter than she ever has before, “see? We painted clouds on him, because you hurt him. I made him better. He loves me, and wants to live with me.”
“He’s my…” here Nerissa pauses, contemplates, then continues, “he’s my fucking toy.”
It’s her first time cursing, and the word tastes strange and sour in her mouth, like the wine mother drinks when she thinks no one’s looking, even as her belly curves out with the brother to be.
If Lena is shocked by the language she doesn’t show it, instead she curls her fingers tighter, and slowly stands up.
Nerissa’s clenched fist is shaking and her eyes are still glassy, like she is not entirely there. Lena whirls and runs into the empty house, her mother busy cleaning up inside Nerissa’s home. She runs to her room, the island of misfit toys, her small sanctuary.
Nerissa follows.
(She wouldn’t do this, normally. She’d never liked Lena, but had tolerated her well enough. Sometimes she saw glimpses of old toys in the backyard, ones she’d sworn she’d thrown away. But it hadn’t mattered; father was always coming home with something new and bright, dolls you could feed, Breyers painted outrageous colors, stuffed animals as big as she was.
But she’s tired. It feels like every dream features the clown, who smiles bigger and bigger. The clown says he’ll leave her alone, if:
If she cuts Cinderella open.
If she tears Velvet’s head off.
If she hurts Lena, makes her pay.
She wants to sleep.
One day she’d even been ready to tell mom, to face her punishment – tell her she’d been a Bad Girl and gone into dad’s study, taken the clown from off the shelf – but when she’d gone to speak to mother that morning her gaze had already been distant and unfocused, breath spoiled with alcohol, and Nerissa knows she wouldn’t listen anyway.
She’d tell father, but he goes to work early and comes home late, later than usual. Sometimes when she’s lying awake in bed she hears him yelling.
She can hear the clown's voice louder now. She’s beginning to think she’ll do anything to make it go away. Or just to make him be quiet. Just for a little while.
She’s so tired.)
Nerissa follows Lena into her room, stops and takes in the scene. Her broken toys, all here, all looming down at her, made whole in this backyard cottage.
You hurt them, sighs the clown, in the back of her mind, you hurt them, and now they hate you.
Toys don’t feel, she would have thought back, had she been sleeping, had she not endured weeks of waking to the clown sitting perched on her nightstand. So instead the words hit home, and her eyes brim with tears.
She grabs the first toy she sees (a Barbie whose locks had been shorn and head popped off, now made whole and stylish by Lena’s tender hands). She tears it apart, limb from limb.
She grabs Cinderella, tears at the stitching, rips her open again. She grabs a marker from off the desk and draws angry scribbles across the ripped body of the doll. She tears and stomps and breaks, rips the posters to pieces (the posters were never hers but it doesn’t matter, she wants to hurt).
She feels a hand on her, Lena’s voice saying something, and she whirls and slaps the girl across the face. Her palm stings. Lena’s face reddens and for a moment she says nothing, only stares, aghast.
She slaps her again, palm still stinging, then pushes her, putting all her strength into it. Lena, unsuspecting, falls and lets go of the cloud-painted horse. Nerissa kicks her, hard in the ribs, and Lena lets out a mewling sound that pierces through the fog that has surrounded her thoughts.
She grabs the plastic horse - Velvet - and runs back to her house, leaving Lena in the wake of her destruction.
Cloud is aware of the destruction, hears the toys’ cries as Nerissa breaks them anew. Her feels her hands clasp around him and he looks wildly at Lena for a moment, but she has forgotten about him, curled up on the floor crying, which is how they leave her.
He does not get to say goodbye.
Nerissa’s heart gallops in her chest. She’s never hurt a person before.
She’s crying, soundless tears rolling down her plump cheeks. She looks down at the horse in her hand.
“I’ll clean you up,” she says softly, as if he could atone for what she’d done.
She takes him into the bathroom, stops up the sink. She opens the cabinets underneath and pulls out the gallon tub of bleach, fills the sink up. She dunks him in, scrubs him. Paint flecks off. The clouds, yes, but also the base coat. She scrubs, hands turning red, chapped. She knows Lena will tell soon, that she’ll be in Big Trouble.
It’s his fault, whispers Pennywise. He is still there. He is always there.
There is a way, the clown says. He tells her what to do.
The bleach burns. He feels his skin peeling away. His eyes are melted from the chemicals. He is blind. He can hear Nerissa crying. The pain is sharp and real, for he is no one’s again. No one loves him.
I am Sleaze, he thinks, reclaiming the name as he partakes in his chemical baptism, but the name is a sorry consolation prize for the loss of Lena, of the surety he felt as he chanted along with the toys: she loves us, she loves us, she loves us.
He is lifted from the bleach, the air cold and strange on his stripped skin. He feels terrycloth as she dries him. They walk into a musty smelling room, and Nerissa grabs a can, clunking and heavy. He hears something sloshing.
Then they are walking back outside, he can smell it, feel the sun. for a wild moment he hopes she is, beyond all reason, returning him to Lena.
Nerissa sets him down for a moment and he hears her lift the can again, hears the sound of liquid splashing out. There is a new stench in the air, one he cannot identify, but seems to coat his senses.
There is a scraping noise, a smell like sulfur. Then, a blast of heat, baking across his face as Nerissa sets fire to the housekeeper’s cabin.
They are not done yet.
Nerissa turns, grabs him, grabs the gas can. She walks quickly back to her room. They are running out of time.
Pennywise will be quiet, after this.
She runs up to her room. The clown is in the toybox, buried there under the plastic animals and other toys. She opens the lid. The clown is on the top, like he had clawed his way back up. She doesn’t think, empties the whole can in the box. She strikes another match.
The same smells, the same scraping noise. More heat. This heat is closer, and suddenly Sleaze’s hair is aflame. The purple and black tresses catch fire easily enough, and he is airborne, tossed back into the box, where it all began.
He lands next to the clown. He can hear the wet noisy breaths of it.
Hello-- Pennywise begins, but then he is screaming, as the fire touches the gas-soaked toys and sets them ablaze.
------------------yea, though I walk through the valley
Sleaze’s flesh melts and twists, the heat unbearable. He begins to pray.
He melts and merges with the other toys as the inferno continues, spreads to the rest of the pink and gold room as the air shrieks with smoke alarms and sirens and, distantly, the distraught cries of a woman with god’s hands who once made him whole. His flesh bubbles, boils. His face collapses in.
He is not Cloud.
He is not Velvet.
He is not even Sleaze.
He is gone, a mess of plastic.
------------------ of the shadow of death
(The fires burn down and the firefighters are eventually let inside. They are tactful and do not speak about the tragedy to one another. They clean out the ashes and debris. One of them notices a shape, a toy, surprisingly unburnt from the fire. He picks it up, wipes a gloved finger across it, revealing a white painted face and a Glasgow smile.
Pennywise's grin widens as the firefighter tucks him into his pocket.)
------------------I shall fear no evil.
sleaze
cancer x garbage
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