Posted on September 17, 2005 at 23:49:00.
mon*stros*i*ty 12
By M Satai
mon*stros*i*ty 12
”The fortress of obscenity cannot be brought down.” –Jean Baudrillard
It was his sister Kathy and her best friend Jenna that came to the prison with his dress and heels and to do his nails and hair for his last “date”. That seemed fitting, somehow.
It was just like the old days, Jenna remarked as they chatted and fussed with his makeup, referring to the times when the girls would play dress-up with a 7-year-old Billy. They’d style his hair, paint his nails and make him wear one of their own outgrown dresses. Then they’d force him to totter around in mom’s high-heels or girl’s sandals. Over his weak protests, they’d show off their new little “sister” to the rest of the kids in the neighborhood.
Everyone laughed and teased and some of the adults even said how Billy made just a darling little girl. It seemed a harmless game at the time. Now, fifteen years later, they were playing their seemingly harmless little “game” for the last time.
Neither Kathy or Jenna said much about what would happen over the next three days. They kept the conversation light, confined to such concerns as whether to highlight Billy’s hair, what color to paint his toenails, to accessorize or not to accessorize. To Billy, it all seemed so surreal.
--Will mom come? He asked.
His sister brushes out Billy’s hair while Jenna tries to convince the guard to let them use an electric outlet in the pantry so the girls can operate the mini blow-dryer. They’ll need a basin of water, too. The girls have decided to give Billy blonde highlights, after all.
--Mom’s really mad at you Billy. But I’m pretty sure she’ll come to see you before, you know, the date. After all, she did pick the dress and everything. So its not like she doesn’t care.
It was a beautiful dress. The girls took it out and hung it on one of the cell bars to cheer Billy up: a long, white sheath cut sexily up the side to show off his pretty legs. The shoes his mom had picked out were dreamy: sequined high-heeled sandals in just his size.
--I guess you’re right, Billy says.
--You have to understand, his sister explains, Mom was really disappointed at the way things turned out. You being a sissy and all. And the way it effected daddy, well, you’ve got to understand that we’re all very upset with you.
--I’m sorry, Billy whispered, doe-eyes downcast.
--It’s not your fault, his sister relented. We all know that deep down, even dad, I’d guess.
--It’s that bitch Becca that did you in, Jenna says, returning from her flirty discussion with the guard. What a shameless whore.
--She didn’t mean it, Billy objects softly.
--Oh you silly girl, his sister says. When are you going to stop apologizing for that vicious bitch? She did too mean it. She knew she was betraying you. They made her a deal, for crissakes. She doesn’t love you at all you know. She never did. Oh what difference does it make anyway? You should never have come back here Billy. You should have never come back knowing what you are. Now let’s do your nails.
It’s March 2, no, make that March 3: and it’s 1.45pm on a Tuesday. The weather has grown warmer, the soil thawing wherever there’s soil, and you can almost sense the emergence of bald skulls, like cheap buried pottery, pushing through the sites of last year’s gardens.
Where is that girl I buried last fall? I lived with her for a while, keeping one eye open even while I slept, but the strain grew to be too much. I never knew when her appetite might get the better of her. I never knew when I might wake up one morning screaming and bucking with pain, finding her astraddle my waist and one of her arms up to the elbow in my abdomen, her greedy hand clutching around somewhere in my entrails, searching for…what?
The suspense itself was killing me, the suspense of waiting for her attack: it was too much. It was driving me mad. So I killed her.
If she were a disease, it would have been called an innoculation, or if she were a pre-cancerous polyp or cyst, killing her would have been considered a sound preventive measure—a form of prophylactic self-defense. And yet, being as dangerous as either a precancerous cyst or virus, being more dangerous than either, being the undead that she was, the zombie, it’s called “murder” what I’ve done and I must hide it under the dirt.
That’s the zombie “ethics” we’re coerced to follow…the doublespeak, the ever-running xerox machine of propaganda, the media reverse-image, the totalitarianism of hypocrisy that makes it impossible to stand up for the “real” among an empire populated, no, let’s say haunted by images.
You are under arrest for everything.
We’re supposed to harbor what will kill us. We’re supposed to pretend that it’s something other than it is. What? What is it?
Human, that’s what. We’re supposed to pretend it’s human.
Oh Christ…
This morning, it being rather warm and moist, I took a walk to where they’d crucified a sissy. Poor bastard, inadvertently writhing lasciviously on a cross and pissing and shitting himself for our amusement…how, in so many regards, I envied her.
Often, I wish I could die like that, too. One wishes, it seems, for a death so humiliating it would obliterate at once every last trace of the the urge to live at all.