Schizo-Normal
by: Crystal Joyce
My mother told me I would be murdered at the convenient age of 32. And 32 short years later, after I thought her to be at liar, she came back to kill me. I wasn’t bothered nor surprised that she kept her word, but the very audacity of that woman to admit that she wanted me gone, all while living, and as old as she was, was the picture of valor and stupidity.
She is what I sat thinking about, staring at a timeworn photograph of her leather clad face sitting adjacent to me, outlined in gold. Next to that one, sat a picture of the old woman’s shameless courtesan, my impression of him a reasonable one. The man’s head was literally shaped like a square, and he looked disgustedly starved. The old bastard looked like he came from the Cambrian Period and I could tell he had no backbone, which I suppose explains why he wore that cross around his neck. I’d found his photograph in a box of nostalgia and decay, and it was correctly labeled a false insurance of purity, Father David Martin Brennan.
I’d remember meeting him when I was around eight. He shook my father’s hand with his left, and took him for a ride in his tomato red TC Roadster, down Deidre Lane, the street of men with meaningless yearns and bare morals, who came and went from Carlene County, with one last obligated transgression. I watched my father smiling, gleaming, existing rush around the bend, dying and already dead. The sheer hustle of that old-fashioned exhaust split decaying leaves of every color into a rattle of tell all.
He came back without my father, trying to convince me it was a situation of abandonment, and I wanted to believe him, but mother’s embellished screeches revealed her elated delight that my father was now in the ground; and, when I failed to pretend convinced, it set in stone an understanding between us all, that we were now enemies, my mother nothing more to me than a pig in heat.
Streaked beautiful with death’s color of oil and smut, mouth and limbs open to a new kind of existence, he was found born again, but buried under the richly soiled earth in a grave of ants and maggots, giving them life and pleasure. His eyes still open for witness, had both awe to the purity of transition, but still a disdainful mortal touch that felt cheated out of living his human existence. I suppose his anger was still present because he took on the figure of a man. It had only been three short months after his murder that I’d found him not too far out of town in Cedar Woods. And to my delight the only thing my father left me was a request to make sure my mother lived in utmost misery.
I took her picture with concentration, staring out my window trying to trace the monument of her outline sown into the cedar outside. The day after she died I began to see it, her face now made of leaves and branches, drifted just close enough to observe me. Now three years from that day, in my 32nd year of existence, she had managed to neglect me from my entire home, all except the backroom, a guest bathroom, and an office. She’d almost managed to take up the entire house with three gun shots marking every transition she took.
I’d been arrested plenty times for allegedly shooting off the old Burnside carbine in the dead of the night, but that was mom’s way. Ridiculing me with fables of pity, she sent officials down trying to send me to a chaplain, providing me with the option of turning to God before my execution, but I flat out refused to see the man. I had no time to waste on something as uncertain as religion when the only thing proved to be true is death. I was ready for this execution, seeming that I and everyone have had millions before, and I could tell she was envious and ready to see me out of my human form as she chipped my shoulder blade with the hurtling of a brick at my body. I grabbed the brick and threw it back at what at first appeared to be nothing, but I could still envision the nauseating vile that seeped from her yellow encrusted lips, as she dulled over her clay colored smile of black and brown. Her smell, a thousand years of murdered bodies ripe under a vehement sun, the opposite of my father’s fragrance. The sight of her stabbed me through the temple and made each organ vomit, her presence the one of a filthy whore encased in suitable spew and manure. She charged at me, shattering a mirror that showed no reflection except my own, and I thought it strange because her presence was as real to me as if I were tasting her soiled and riddled goo of skin. She kissed my forehead and stuck her finger in my mouth, whispering to me how I’d die as I looked into her eyes, already too blind. Blazing with the popping of immense fire crackers, I heard not only three gun shots, but now a ceaseless infinite of blasts and roars, that were followed by the bleeding of both my ears. Her wicked laugh as she enjoyed this brought my organs’ bile up my throat and out of my mouth, and she took it in her hand rubbing it on every part of her skeleton, like a hot bath.
I didn’t love this torture of myself, but I refused to believe that something so vivid and tangible was just a fabric of a mind that functioned differently. She grabbed my throat and squeezed, and I could see the creases of her ugly face smiling in an upward direction, and feel the desert heat of my fiery neck closing, the only relief the spit fire of tears hazing from my burning eyes, which were even more ignited by the burning scorches of a dying flame in a desert-like sky.
Scripts of laughter and taunting wrote themselves on the walls, then splashes of curses and hexes, enchantments, jinxes budding inside my head until they spilled over onto the floor, wrapped me in their web of psychosis, with murmuring of how my father died a torturous death and Brennan reveled, hawking spit in his face telling him that I’d be taken care of. The story replayed with gaudy imagery, with the backdrop of twisted cedar and yellow sky that my father was revived in. My name continuously chanted, maybe a call of my mother’s final blow or from the external watching and observing. Voices raped, scratched their message, engraved it into my skull that my human life was not my best, that I was too naive to think that a mother would not classify as an enemy, that she wasn’t a part of the struggle for survival. They narrated cohesively, with the spewing of suicide, my mother’s spiteful voice singing me a curse at birth, and my betrayed confession of how I once loved her. The voices with a low rumble rose into a whine of protruding molten screams, all crying and impatient at my slow verdict to let them kill me. If this was a human mind, a mind split into two and at constant disagreement, then I would surely kill them both, because I would be streaked beautiful with colors of oil and smut, and I would give pleasure to those who wished to feast on my decaying flesh, and I would stare with awe at the transition of absolute truth, because when you are not human, that is the only life worth living. And when you are not human, everything is simple and everything does what it supposed to do. The flies were buzzing around my dead body, because that is what they were supposed to do.
My mother told me I would be murdered at the convenient age of 32. And 32 short years later, after I thought her to be at liar, she came back to kill me. Here in this pocket dimension between life’s transitions I dangle in pure space-time. My mother from another life is now not mine at all, but we are both just ground and earth. I feel matter that is no longer my own, mold and twist and cast into the next big thing. With this process that is anything but ephemeral, I am eager to start anew when my brain finally decays.
Over this illusion of time and reality, I mold into every type of living cell apart of the whole, but getting to visualize the entire process without the superior consciousness of a human, it puts me right back at dead, and my mother says it’s time to get up, because this dream has lasted long enough. I wake to her rattling my bones, telling me that I better make a goddamned good impression.
Pen and paper; cross and robe, Father David Brennan has come to perform a somewhat civil case of parting. He pisses on territory that’s already my fathers with the exhaust from his tomato red TC Roadster. With the shake of his left hand, he lies and spits in the face of every man who was foolish enough to assimilate to the cross of intimidation, and with his face, streaked ugly with the colors of a man who doesn’t believe in immortality his greed to gain just one more entity in his time, streaks my mother pink with blush as she is a dying being to.
My father knowing he’s alive, and was alive, and will be, signs the paper liberating him from grounded plights, and rushes around the bend all to be streaked beautiful with deaths color of oil and smut, and I, I will stay humbled here to carry out his request with the old Burnside carbine.