WELCOME TO THE VACUUM OF REMORSELESS SADISM
Ear infection with a child wrapped around it, prank delivery stillborn prolapsed into DNA, longtime head wound devotee prospering marginally, on occasion, by the sacerdotal defects of civility that came to mask evolution, I could behold, nonetheless, through one hell of a glaucomatous squint, much must behind skylines, psoriatic attempts at weather, or the incontinent asbestos of a cloud. Memoirs commenced, my bullhorn against piss, gargled afterthoughts already ready to be retired before puberty. I played in alleys, picking through the torpedoed filigree of a neighborhood, doggy paddling inside dumpsters, shambling like the sheriff of lice. Homeowners once tucked their spillage out of bounds. Husky vermin rollicked in the overgrowth. Sunlight stooled over our state and took the shape of an ass-wiped mitten. Our house reached its expiration date in the long gone prosperity of a neighborhood. Everyone lived under the same ghost’s gown. The whole foreclosed pornography giggled with spiders. No one waited for Devil’s Night anymore. Sirens skipped through the gentrifying mist like a goat baying at its clitoris.
Even my toys had blood on them. I understood trade, brokered closets full sabotaging every gain via the Pyrrhic victory of its acquisition, dipping the pointiest guys in feces – we were playing catch with punji sticks – pieces of plastic made famous across everyone’s allowance, now promoting blunt force trauma. Likenesses raining all around, I mortared an enemy shadow through the fence and felt the object connect as if we shared an umbilical straw. The boinked eye of an injured party next door had to be refilled with lactate. Older siblings vaulted the partition between properties and brought me to a waffling close. Brandishing armament from pre-weapons ban Toys “R” Us, I was promptly smashed in the brains with a rock. I woke up saying glossolalia through a stretch of bloodied tongue swollen fatter than my head and thought I’d licked the whole sidewalk, high off pavement reek, performing cunnilingus on each crack till their mom had to bury the family hair dryer in her lap. Cognizant in hemorrhaging layers, consciousness another perpetual bloodletting, clouds tinted grayer than before were chased by pinks I invented on the spot.
A babysitter sat me up through scallops of copper oozing renewed. Her scream placed so well the mother of my assailants found us and promised free service. She was a nurse tidied by the requisite amount of speed to stitch my scalp back on with a shoelace. Her boys skulked around the faltering periphery. One hand free, she switched between smoking and striking them. I was fed a dangerous amount of cough syrup and told to hold still. She seconded the hole in my skull with this crimson elixir and mentioned how her husband rested beneath the driveway’s oil spots. He would arise if I snitched. I removed an action figure from the freezer and scraped him along our other neighbor’s driveway, prismatic engine sludge a conduit to hell. Looking up into a car bumper, I was on a couch, stripped of my clothes and weapons, adult outlines looming. Their son always hid in his room, decapitating daises, singing: momma had a baby and its head popped off. That summer I dug a lot of holes for no reason. Vague shortcomings occurred between spatial relation and impulsivity. They banned me from karate. I noticed life had many a charge to trump up and compensated by purchasing knives.
My dwindling supply of soldiers and wrestlers got scraped in their paint. Dismemberments were chanced upon. I kept a guy tied upside down, question marks crayoned on his codpiece. He had wrestled a lit crack lighter. I spoke blasphemies to his roided body, would hacksaw the womb that shat him till his mother lost the letters of his name over a toilet and had to limp to know her son. I hate-crimed my own homoerotic programming. Our branch of ghetto had the sole playground with a Sherman on retainer: its ventilated cupola soldered shut, impervious to anything save gang tags, the hull a hospice where squirrels deposited themselves beside hieroglyphic graffiti. Models with cigarettes stubbed between their thighs tried to enlist me in a latex gravesite long before internet porn made standing up existential. I grabbed hold of her pubis and detonated the neighborhood, project by project, like a reverse engineered miscarriage.
A Doberman with a bent gait trotted behind me. I tried training him with the chemical ham foisted at kids under the guise of lunch. Anything that could be gagged out of a lunge and kicked level would ultimately submit. I gagged shit freely, kicking objects nine to five, and for fun, praying to plug a dog or person into that equation. A security-mobile hit the curb next to us, warning me via speaker to quit teasing beasts. The officer, short of breath, rehearsed the sensitive oaths on his badge. He qualified executive precognitions with a little tariff against what I wasn’t educated enough to be. Who had wedged his land beneath me? Between him and the occasional mugging, neither end of going outside – here or anywhere, I later noticed – was satisfactory. Both gangs, cops and robbers, were outfitted by their commensurate industries. They cancelled each other out inside our pockets. Too bad the lint left them wanting.
Considering that one pet, an inutile cat, took to hiding from me in the warmth of car engines and was subsequently smeared across a length of street, its mangled limbs periodically coughing from the vehicle’s undercarriage, my parents adopted the Doberman and turned it fat. My pillow talk gave the thing rabies. We had to separate the Doberman from our less aggressive mutt, also salvaged, but they made short work of the barrier, and the aftermath of hide seemed yanked out of a blender, plasma on the ceiling, teeth under the couch. I caught the killer alone, flogging his hindquarters with a thick bar of soap, keeping pace alongside each terrified loop for escape. He failed to comprehend, snout tucked low to reduce the body as a target: a shriek best in show, a spectrum of agony echoing enormous, with corporeal density. I meant to flatten his corpse into a charcoal drawing on the floor. Whenever he closed in on recovery, I worked the back-ass again, either hock, recommending he consign himself to the idea of a wheel chair, taking care to mention how my spite had nothing to do with the dead mutt. Later we put the Doberman to sleep for an inability to totter very far from the dung we were sick of cleaning.
by Sean Kilpatrick
Sean Kilpatrick studied forensic photography, holds a Master's in writing, is published or forthcoming in: Boston Review, Columbia Poetry Review, evergreen review, NERVE, FENCE, LIT, VICE, BOMB, DIAGRAM, New York Tyrant, Sleepingfish, Obsidian, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, The Quietus, Hobart, young mag, La Petite Zine, Pindeldyboz, Expat Press, tragickal, fluland, Terror House, NOÖ Journal, Jacket2, Exquisite Corpse, MiPoesias, Tarpaulin Sky, Forklift Ohio, Arsenic Lobster, Melancholia's Tremulous Dreadlocks, Sixth Finch, Epicenter, Skidrow Penthouse, The Lifted Brow, Black Sun Lit, elimae, Alpha Beat Soup, Countere Magazine, and completed several small books with various presses - https://shucksaboutpod.wixsite.com/everything
Accompanying image courtesy of @jatnott)