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By Maxwell Dudeck

I must have caught the club right in the temple. I remember her pale face against the inky blackness of the room, then a flash of searing white. And then darkness; total and complete darkness for what may have been one second or six hundred. When I remembered that I had a body it felt like it had been sick for days, had died on Thursday, and had been tortured in hell for an extended weekend.

When I could see, it was through a kaleidoscope; the pieces of the room and the shadow of her face ordering themselves through pulses of intense red and neon blue and radioactive green. Then the colors were gone and so was her face; and the gloom of the room shimmered in black and white, like a reflection on a cold lake through a thick midnight fog. It seemed cavernous, emptier than it had been.

And then I felt the floor beneath my skull and shoulder blades and knew that I was lying like a dirty suit on the rough, rotting boards, staring intently and without comprehension at the black void that climbed up the vaulting ceiling.

I lay still for a minute, planning my sit-up, and then pulled myself up with numb paws grasping at my knees. From the coarse-gravel groan that let itself out of my mouth, I remembered my voice. If it sounded like I’d had a rough day, I had.

I crawled to the cobwebbed baseboard of the plaster wall and leaned hard against it, like a sack of so many worm-eaten Idaho spuds. In my jacket I found cigarettes and my zippo, but my Hecate was gone, her holster hanging limp and useless. Two out of three ain’t bad, I thought.

As I lit the Marlboro the pinup on the zippo danced and I thought of the pale girl’s face. I could hold a pretty good picture of her for a few seconds if I concentrated, and then it’d shatter again, the way it had seemed to when I got hit by the golf club.
The Club. I could see what looked like it might have once been a pretty decent 3-wood in the flicker of the zippo, snapped in half like a matchstick. Something black and thick had grown around it in a grotesque slick. I’d seen enough of that particular brand of motor oil to know that it was blood. Blood. My blood. Fuck.

I touched my forehead too hard and felt a bomb go off, and the picture started to go fuzzy again. Sure enough, my fingers came back sticky red. The darker, sweet-smelling stuff that means you’re not just scratched.

The clues to the case: One bloody hand, my own. One broken fairway wood, not mine, in a puddle of half-dried blood; presumably mine. Elementary, my dear Watson. Someone who might have been but was not necessarily a very good golfer had put a hole in my fucking head with a golf club about five minutes ago. Maybe I’d pissed off Tiger Woods. Case closed.

Leaning against the rotting wallpaper I wondered if the girl had hit me somehow, it had been dark and I’d only seen her face. Maybe she was double jointed. I wanted to blame her; she was the only face that I had to blame. That fucking cunt had hit me with a golf club and then she took my lady from me, my Hecate. I almost had myself believing it by the time the Marlboro had burned down to my knuckles. I tossed it into the blood and listened to it hiss. I imagined that it was the blood hissing, and not the cigarette, but I couldn’t tell for sure.

Right now, I’ve got to get out of here. That’s the first move. Then, we’ll see. I can tell you it won’t be pretty. Blood will have blood – Willie Shakespeare wrote that, and he never even met me.

Tune in next week for the next installment of Vigilant by Maxwell Dudeck

By Allyson Castles

The thing that is really hard,
and really amazing,
is giving up on being perfect,
and beginning the work of being yourself.
Anna Quindlen
 
Your perfection is your destruction, he says,
before sneaking out the door,
my scale hidden stealthily under his jacket.
To believe him would be to give in.

In the closet, hard plastic hangers
rest solemnly, oblivious,
and are cradled by blood red, then pumpkin orange
and Steelers yellow.
Blouses and sweaters and tank tops and t-shirts
stand erect and ordered as
sticks of wax in a box labeled “Crayola”.
The door swings open
and I feel an insurmountable urge
to throw out a striped sweater I love,
because where does it fit?
 
My pantry is stocked like this:
Vegetables in watery crimson broth sit
stagnant in their aluminum prisons, next to
salty cardboard wafers, too fibrous and tough
for my intestines to tackle, next to
flimsy trays which house quarter-servings
of brittle noodles and tiny foil packets
of Thai spices. A contact-papered wooden shelf, and
then
bright cans of Folgers, unsweetened sugar in its
many Pepto-Bismol pink envelopes, a height-aligned
row of my friends Duncan Hines, Betty Crocker, Milton
Hershey,
who wait patiently in the tenebrous cupboard
until someone’s birthday calls for a celebration. And
the penthouse
is stacked and stuffed with the most fearsome items—
bags of evil starchy pommes de terre, spaghetti
and lasagna and linguini, innumerable
boxes of cereal that lurk around when the sun
goes down and prey on me.
 
He is gone, and I look through the glass at her
weary and dismayed countenance, at her
flawed skin and awful makeup, at her
strange body, whose cellulite responds to
neither asceticism nor exercise, at her
untoned belly, with its menacing threat to
rebel with one slip-up, at her
eyes, swallowed in an ocean of dark vessels
concealer cannot protect them from, at her
eyes, drowning her cheeks in tiny tsunamis of
salt and black charcoal, at her
eyes.
 
And I tell her, disdainfully,
the line that should have been delivered to her:
Your perfection is your destruction