A pack of wild dogs seem to have been set loose somewhere, it seems, in the vicinity of Chicory Lane.
Or maybe it’s wolves…
Jill is lying next to me, sleeping, naked in her brother’s bed, after some pretty good lovemaking. I kissed the tattoos all over her body, as if they were Catholic relics or something. I drank her tears, sucked them up as if they were blood. First time, since Sara died, that I’ve actually made LOVE to someone. Oh, I’ve fucked a few prostitutes, yes, since then. But that was all foreplay, prologue to the blood bonanza of course.
I have no urge to drain Jill. None at all.
I turn over in the bed to watch her sleep. I watch as her veined neck rises and falls. As she breathes. And swallows …
OK. Maybe there’s the tiniest bit of an urge. But I’m good right now.
I get out of the king-size bed as quietly as I can. Searching for my blue jeans on the floor, my crumpled pack of Marlboros. All the lights are off in the bedroom but I can see just fine, of course. And this, like the downstairs’ living room, is another space that just makes me feel nervous and uncomfortable. It seems to be a shrine to fucking Walt Disney of all things. Really. On the stucco walls of this narrow room there are three or four posters honoring that fantasy factory. Mickey, Donald. Goofy. All smiles and caprice. There is a framed map of Disneyland (apparently from the park’s first season) hanging above the bed. It looks like it may be in mint condition. Probably worth a small bundle of scratch.
Fucking Disney. I went to the one park in Florida. A long time ago, when I was still human and bumming around the country. Don’t even know how I got the dough for it. Don’t even know why I went. Mostly walked around in a daze. Like some diabetic suffering from sugar shock. Everything cute. Everything nice. A forest of plastic trees. A whitewashed Trail of Tears.
Shoulda gone and looked at the ocean instead…
Jill turns over slowly in the bed, pulls a pleated comforter up around her bare shoulders, mutters something in her sleep that sounds like “Mark, I told you…that is not your Christmas gift…”
Mark was her brother’s name.
Jill Porsino. I really am still marveling at this development in my tale. Of all the gin joints in all the world, she had to walk into mine. Well, the opposite. I walked into hers of course.
Outside, in suburbia, a host of dogs continue to bark and bray, as if the canine apocalypse were now now upon us all. As I put on my pants and extract my smokes, I wonder what the HELL is up out there.
And then, it hits me. Duh. It’s me. I’m what’s up. They smell an honest-to-God vampire here in Chicory Lane.
It’s not the first time I have encountered such phenomena. When I first moved into my little house, the family manse that my asshole father deemed to pass on to me in his will, all of the dogs in the neighborhood barked the same symphony night after night. Made it really hard to concentrate on writing. Or anything else for that matter. It seemed to go on for months until, finally, it stopped. Maybe the dogs got used to my stink. Maybe they just got tired of barking.
Well, I don’t intend to stick around long enough here to see if the same thing happens or no.
And then I turn around once again to look at Jill, lying there so peacefully in her brother’s opulent bed. At her long hair, spread out on the burgundy pillows like (to paraphrase yet another poet) some sleepy black storm. At that Ankh on her arm, blazing up at me like some turquoise cross. Not scary at all. So inviting…
Well…
We’ll see…
I smoke and I smoke, thinking. There’s a long oak dresser flanking one wall of the room. On that dresser, another fucking Disney artifact. It’s a Mickey Mouse clock—the dopey rodent grasping a black clock face in his weird white three-fingered gloves. As the clock ticks, his eyes move back and forth back and forth, like some weird avid metronome.
This this is my idea for the opening of some horror tale. Absolutely. Three-fingered Mickey, his eyes constantly shifting, taking in the coming Apocalypse. Two minutes to midnight and counting…
There’s some kind of card propped up against this weird avatar and I pick it up and glance at it. The front has like a sepia background and smack dab in the middle there’s a photograph of a young man in a smart business suit. He’s grinning in the pic like Mephistopheles: immaculate teeth, flared eyebrows, dimples you could probably wedge a few quarters in. Handsome. But there is something sinister, something strained about the profile.
It’s Jill’s brother, of course. Mark Posrsino. The late Mark Porsino. It’s one of the cards for his funeral service. Jill told me he was some kind of IT hotshot for a bank downtown. Had worked there for twelve years or so.
Sounds like another fucking horror story to me…
I open the little card and scan the elegy info inside:
In Memory of Mark J. Porsino
Born
July 22, 1983
Detroit, Michigan
Entered into Rest
Sept. 8, 2017
Detroit, Michigan
Funeral Service
Saturday, September 14, 2017
3:00pm
Blake Dickinson Funeral Home
Ford Chapel
Officiant
Rev. Norman Walker
And on the preceding page, opposite this scant info, this bookend biography if you will, there is a Bible verse centered, written in italics. I know it well. I think I may have actually quoted it in some story I wrote long ago. A story unsold, now lost to the ether of savage time.
It’s that quote from Ecclesiastes:
“But if a man live many years, and rejoice in them all; yet let him remember the days of darkness; for they shall be many. All that cometh is Vanity.”
Indeed.
Behind me, Jill murmurs once again in her sleep. Something frantic, but completely unintelligible this time.
And outside, the dogs continue to wail and bark, as if it is indeed the end of times.
I very carefully place the funeral card back, prop it up against the black bosom of Mr. Mickey Mouse.
Look around for a place to extinguish my smoke…