Susan: Terrorism of the Spirit

When Susan wakes, the morning air is cold and spidery; the cold air combing and tickling at her sweating temples. To Susan, the bedroom appears somehow off-balance, incongruous, leaning on its side.

She scoops up her phone from the nightstand and raises her eyebrows at a missed call from the police department. Her head starts spinning, and she calls the number but is put on hold by an automated voice system. Thinking it’s a mistake, she ends the call, lifts out of bed, and steps toward the bathroom.

Susan stumbles, struggles to walk straight. She’s feeling off-kilter, as if in a transiting, carrying motion, like she was standing on the deck of a ship in a choppy sea.

Wiping sleep from her eyes, she smells cooking gas. It’s a noxious, chemical smell. She gags, freezes in her tracks, and stomach acid bubbles up at her throat. Then she suddenly has a sense that she’s not in control of her body. Something pushes her. There’s something moving her limbs for her. Her movements are involuntary. Her legs kick out from under her, swing to the air.

A euphoria overtakes her. Her cunt convulses, and she senses a tingling, a heat hugging her like a blanket. She then submits to the force, submits to its sweet, awesome energy.

She levitates, floats toward the bathroom. She bows her head and has a fuzzy wet sensation between her legs and glances down to see she’s unloosed her bladder. Yellow piss drips down her inner thighs, pools on the hardwood floor.

The force tears her white robe from her body, eviscerates it into embers, ashes in the air, and she flies, like a patient carried on an invisible flying stretcher, into the bathroom, where she is shifted upright, erected, into the air, and then lowered to her feet, stood in front of the mirror.

Her arms begin swinging and whirling. Her teeth chatter. Her head spins in a concentric circle. Then she bites, compressing and grinding her teeth with the violent force of a rabid dog, and her teeth crumble in her mouth, crunch like crispy cookies. Salty blood drips in trails from the corners of her clenched lips.

One by one, starting with her toes, each and every one of her bones snap like twigs, breaking and popping, in a warm, beautiful surging wave, licking upwards, from her feet to her legs, to her hips, ribs, spine, neck, stopping at her jaw, which hangs dead from her face, held in place by only the sagging skin of her pallid face.

A bubble of black blood pops from her empty mouth, slathers down her chin and neck…

Her eyes bulge and her eyeballs burst, leaving only empty, darkened pits in her skull. Her body, once so perfect that it was sold as a commodity, now is simply a horrible bag of broken bones.

But she’s never felt happier. She’s never felt warmer and more alive, closer to the constellations, the glorious dots; planets of incandescent blue pierce through her darkness…

Then the merciful force again levitates her, and this time she’s floating belly up, into and out of the bedroom.

She floats down, over the stairs, the stairs moving, on their own, like a wooden escalator.

She floats into the anteroom, where she hears a banging on the door. The stink of the cooking gas grows overpowering. She feels a rush of blood to her head.

She’s then shifted upright and lightly plopped in the doorway. Her body begins to gesticulate, her arms swinging and whirling like windmills.

The front door of the house hisses open, on its own.

Two police officers stand on the front porch, arms akimbo. She can’t see them, but she knows they are there. She can sense them. She knows their postures, their reasonings, and that they are space debris, comets swishing past the planets of blue. She can feel their portals fixed to her naked flesh, her boneless body that’s jangling and moving like a puppet.

The police officers are gagging, coughing, awash in the putrid stench that surges forth like an open flood gate of raw sewage. The officers’ feet click; they step back a couple of paces. The police officers are speechless, aghast, to see… this… the creature facing them, the creature’s flailing… The creature’s inhumanity… The creature’s face rotted and dark as an overripe fruit…

Susan wants to speak. She wants to tell them to fly, to sail past, but she can only enunciate a choked sound, a wheezing rasp…

“Mmm… Ma’am?” stutters one of the officers, in a mortified tone, his voice straining. The officer, a tall, young, muscular Black fellow, with a shiny bald head, is wincing, stepping backward, and reaching for his gun with one of his big meaty paws.

From behind Susan emerges Kyle. It’s as if the young, slender man is tearing from her, like a severed Siamese twin.

In the young man’s hand is a .357 Magnum, and he points the gun, shoots the Black officer in the center of his forehead. The officer’s bald head explodes like a melon being smashed by a mallet. His headless body then tumbles to the porch with a crashing thud.

The officer’s partner, a short young Hispanic woman, with a sharp, exasperated face, her close-cropped hair giving a hint of androgyny, brandishes her firearm, but when she clicks at her pistol, it jams.

The young man hovers forward, his feet above ground, and he shoots the woman, in her left breast, stopping her heart, causing her to let out a pained whimper, like a dying dog, before she collapses next to her fallen partner.

The doorstep a bloodbath, Susan shifts her weight, turns her eyeless face to her son, who, himself is naked, his body covered in cuts; the cuts bloody, strange shapes, odd lettering that looks almost medieval.

Kyle grimaces and shoots Susan in the breasts, shooting each breast, and then shoots her in the cunt, twice, as she’s stumbling backward. She flops, a discarded sack of bones in the doorway. Her vocal cords emit a fricative grunt.

Then Kyle kneels over her, placing the gun under his mother’s chin and shoots upwards, sending a clump of blond hair, skull fragments, and a splash of blood flying up into the air, splattering on the porch.

Kyle rises and then kicks at his mother, rolling the fresh corpse from out of the doorway’s threshold, onto the porch. Then he shuts the door. Bolts and locks it. His face, scrunched in pain, deadens, becomes tight and somber. He bends to lay his gun on the floor and then picks up a canister.