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EDITORIAL

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LAGNIAPPE

MAST

SUBMISSIONS

Story
by Alissa Nutting


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     “You blew my ear out. I’m hanging up.”
     Sis does not understand that her ears are already worthless. Their multiple defects predated my scream by decades.
     “Sis, if I want to ingest the most powerful hallucinogen the Worm Eternal has provided to earthlings and copulate with my soul mate beneath the desert stars, that is my business and my right.”
     “The balcony of your Vegas hotel suite is not the desert! Do you know how many photos there are of you plastered everywhere, how many videos? How is continuous sex for that long even possible? Did police really have to break into your room?”
     The vital fluid allows for radical love-energy. Management was charged for the cost of the door. “Sis, no harm, no foul.”
     “No HARM? You look like sex freaks to the entire world! You should see the faces you’re making! They’re not even attractive. I’m saying this objectively. You look carsick and blinded by headlights.”
     “It’s not about how we look to other humans, Sis. Third eye. There’s more to see than you think.”
     “Jesus, it’s on the TV now. What the hell is that, a tattoo?”
     I decline to answer as Sis wouldn’t understand. I have a jug of wine tattooed on my mons.
     “We got married,” I offer.
     Sis hangs up then calls back and hangs up again, then finally calls back and is sort of able to speak through the wheezing. “That creep,” she sputters, “that pervert hustler? Do you know he hit on me at Thanksgiving? I was putting the cranberry sauce into Tupperware when I felt a stiffness on my leg and turned around. He was down on the floor like a crab rubbing his...his...extension near my ankles. His pants were that new kind of denim, the stretchy stuff. I could feel everything.”
     “He is a wonderful lover, Sis.”
     “I’m done here,” she says.
     I stay on the phone and let the open dial tone be a sort of beacon-call, a homing signal for CT to return, bowels empty, groin hungry.
     I should mention that Sister is my sister, but also somewhat my mother. When mom died she was nineteen and I was four. As a teenager I’d call her “Smother” whenever she was being overbearing—a combination of sister and mother.

                                                                    *

     “Sustainable,” replies CT, “so bitching.” We’re at the home of a fashion designer whose mansion had been built into the side of a cave. One room of his house is actually filled with bats; when I grabbed a flashlight sitting by the door and shined it up to the ceiling; there were tons of bats instead of popcorn paint. The room has no furniture due to “Ze guano, yeesh, ze guano,” but there is a mounted television on the wall that plays looped footage of a young girl feeding a loaf of French bread to a Dalmatian dog over and over again.
     We came to the designer in order to get full-body fitted leather suits. “Ju can wear zees forever,” he said, “Drink en zhem, sex en zhem, die en zhem.” They have zippers and ties all over the place so they can stay on during a variety of activities, like going to the bathroom or getting an immunization shot in the upper arm.
     CT raises his glass of wine up to the ceiling, a kind salute. The wine is red and has 10-15 drops of bat blood in each bottle; it’s the designer’s own vintage from his own vineyard and his own bats. Their blood makes the wine darker red, almost blackish.
     CT, who is very pale and pretty always, lifts the glass to his mouth and sucks in with this cheeks so the wine glass stays attached to his face like magic. He looks at the ground and puts his arms out in a crucifixion pose, then begins moving his arms so that the wine glass is a sort of flute-nose and he looks very, very much like a hummingbird that has been transported to a different world where the environment is too harsh and there are no flowers so it has to fly around all the time with its own personal glass vase of nectar attached to its face.
     It strikes me that the cave home we are in is one such environment; a hummingbird could not live inside here without a nectar appendage-bottle.
     The designer disappears for a minute and comes back holding three pairs of night vision goggles. “Let us go back inside ze bat cave,” he suggests. He is no longer wearing a shirt.
     The goggles make everything green and give everyone emerald eyes, the bats and CT and the designer. Several battery-operated floor cleaners roam around the cave’s paved cement and eat the guano. They look kind of like stingrays or giant moving sand dollars, very flat and white.
     “It’s like we’re underwater,” I say, “an underwater cave.” But in the cave, as in water, my voice does not seem able to travel.
     The designer kneels down onto the floor and begins untying CT’s new leather suit-fly. For a moment there is a sting of panic in my stomach; my mellowness suddenly like a balloon full of water being poked with a stick; I’m not sure if it’s going to burst open or maybe just spring a tiny leak or perhaps not puncture at all. The free love of the Worm Eternal seeks for us to see one another as fellow worms, genderless, openings identical and indistinguishable.
     But sometimes I fail the Worm and grow jealous.
     Suddenly CT hands me a bottle of bat blood wine. “My cherished one, please pour this on top of Gustav and I, pour it slowly so that he and I are like a primordial fountain flooded with the blood of cursed statues, unholy stones.”
     And then the stick poking my balloon turns into a feather, and I am tickled. I feel my Inner Worm remind me that the Intensity comes when I forget that life is art, and Intensity is what clogs the path to enlightenment. As CT likes to say, “The boy at the top of the mountain of knowledge, the one standing like a flamingo with one leg straight and one leg bent. He is a mild child.”
     As I ready the bottle at the top of CT’s golden locks, dead center in the middle of his part, Gustav’s head lifts up and gives a half-hearted protest, “Don’t spill, ze suit, ze suit,” but CT gently moves Gustav’s head back downward, the way a parent might guide the cheek of a son who has just had a nightmare back down to the pillow.
     “How can I wear a leather suit that does not carry the stain of wine and blood,” asks CT, and Gustav does not answer; of course it was rhetorical, and the wine pouring over their green night-vision bodies looks completely black. I feel more powerful than ever, a goddess who has shadow-juice as one of her many weapons. I streak parts of their bodies with the unseen, a liquid lifedark cloak that the bats, despite their great number and giant ears, do not, cannot, hear.
     When my cell phone rings there’s about a fourth of the bottle left. I tap the opening at CT’s mouth and drizzle the rest of it inside until he makes a happy noise.
     My phone’s screen is so very green beneath the goggles that it seems interactive. I speak to it for some time before realizing that I need to open it. Luckily it’s just Sis, who calls again and again and again until I answer–one time when I had a few squares of acid beneath my eyelids, I finally distinguished the source of the music but mistook the phone for a fetal orb–not an orb from the beginning of time but a baby one, one that has only been alive for a few million years, and so I sang children’s songs to it and told it bedtime stories hoping that its musical electronic crying would please, please stop. I later got distracted by CT taking me to a hammock that had been stretched over top a hot tub at his request by the really expensive hotel’s staff, but the next morning I saw that I had eighty-seven calls, all from Sis.

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