Sex and Murder Magazine

By Julie Ann August

“I have all these dead women on my back,” I said. “They’re starting to feel heavy.”

“You missed a spot,” Jill said, turning the page of her Mother Earth magazine.

We sat on the cement stoop with our beers perspiring in the August heat as I brushed over her last toenail with black polish.

“Why do you always have to make people feel uncomfortable?” Jill asked.

“I don’t mean to,” I said.

“I think you do.”

Maybe I found some irony in having two dead girlfriends. It made me someone special—memorable even.

“You’re commercializing on your own tragedy,” she said.

“How?” I asked.

“That pottery class you took last year. You brought in pictures of your dead girlfriends.”

“So?”

“Then you dropped out, because you felt like an outsider.”

“Pottery stressed me out,” I said.

“It’s fucking clay,” she said. “And what about that grief support group you joined?”

“What about it?”

“You made everyone else feel bad because they only had one dead spouse.”

“I think I’m going to get my tattoos removed,” I said, rubbing the seven year old tramp stamp.

“You’ll still have a scar,” she said. “Try a shrink instead.” She finished her beer in one last gulp. “See you tomorrow,” she said.

She walked two houses down to her own cramped apartment. And I was left in my mostly empty three-bedroom house. It looked like I had been robbed, but I hadn’t been. Bare walls. Rooms sparsely filled with second-hand furniture. Wide open spaces ready for sentimental knickknacks. I had asked Jill to move in with me, but she said she was afraid of becoming a statistic. I said I didn’t think about her in that way.

*****

The next morning, I turned the hot water on and stood under the shower. I raked a terracotta foot scrubber across my back. Pushing and pulling as the water turned pink with blood and my back burned.

I could only see the tattoos in the mirror after I wiped the fog away and twisted around, contorting my body and fat rolls in an uncomfortable position. Maybe Jill was right. Maybe I did need a shrink. The black fairy was crying blood tears on my skin where I had tried to scrub off her somber face. Her colorful wings were full of bloody scratches. The foot scrubber rested on the counter. Pieces of my skin clung to its rough surface, but the ink was imbedded deeper than that. That was Kali’s piece of skin. It hurt the most. She had died while we were still together. I think she owned most of my back by now—the muscle, the bone, the nerves—down to the very last cell and mitochondria inside those cells. I could feel her compressing my spine and setting fires. I could hear my bones crackling at night like dying embers.

Kali wouldn’t let me forget that she had been here first. Her mother took everything that was hers and everything that she had touched. Kali’s mother had almost taken the wooden box that she had made in shop class, painted in varying shades of brown with crude feet carved into the sides. “Happy Feet” it proclaimed. But she dropped it when the box started vibrating and a bright orange jelly dildo jumped out. Kali’s mother said that obviously we had shared some things and that she would back for the box after I emptied it out. She never came back, and I never emptied it.

I tried pulling and tugging at the skin on my back, trying to separate it from the fat and the muscle. I hoped that if I pulled hard enough I could stretch my skin over me like a tent. And then maybe I could see behind the ink. But I couldn’t get a good grip. My hands were full of blood.

Vida owned the skin on my right shoulder where a Rastafarian sock puppet sang out “We love the Mexican.” She would send shooting pains up my neck and down my arm. I think she punished me, because she had been the transitional girlfriend. When she was alive, she blamed me for comparing her to a dead woman. But she was the one competing. And she was still jealous—wanted a better tattoo and more skin. I was the one who broke up with her. I had packed all her things in boxes and sent them with her. There was a car accident a few months later. Now that she was dead, she wouldn’t leave.

*****

Jill sat on my stoop reading the paper. We were friends because of proximity and convenience. She listened to my stories, and I fed her breakfast. Jill was some type of Emo-Neo-Hippy. Her face was full of silver piercings, and all she ever wore was black. She was a strict vegan and grew heirloom tomatoes on her balcony. I had to make sure I had Silk milk and organic rice puffs. Sometimes I felt generous and made a tofu scramble.

Hardly anyone worked down our block. Many of the houses were for sale or for rent. At every other house someone was getting a check of some kind. I think Jill got the certified kind of check, but she told me she was a freelance writer. She also told me that she worried about me and tried to give me motherly advice. Secretly, she was probably using me to get to my story about my dead wives.

*****

My back was burning through to my chest. I felt the women screaming in my stomach and up my throat. So I decided that it was a cereal morning. I brought out two bowls of cereal and two cups of coffee.

“You look like hell,” Jill said.

“My back,” I said.

“The women on your back or your back?”

“Both,” I said.

“Maybe it’s not the women at all,” she said. “Maybe you should have an MRI.”

“No, I’m pretty sure that it’s the women.”

“Jesus, you’re bleeding,” she said.

I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want her to be overly concerned.

“You’re bleeding through your shirt!”

She lifted up my shirt, and I tried to swat her away.

“I had an itch,” I said.

“An itch?”

She made me lie down inside while she washed my women with salt water. I could hear them fizzle out like miniature Wicked Witches. Then she brought over an aloe vera leaf from her apartment and covered my back with its cool salve. The screaming stopped. They slept.

“If the tattoos are really bothering you,” she said, “they have laser removal now.”

I didn’t have money for that sort of thing. I was getting a check like everyone else. Mine was the unemployment kind.

*****

Much later that night I was laying on my stomach inside a purple building airbrushed with gremlins. Some kid with discs in his ears and tattoos on his neck held a scalpel over my back. He gave me a discount, because I knew Jill. They called it scarification. I called it a vacation.

“We don’t normally remove this much skin,” he said.

He didn’t think I was making the right choice, removing the women. Maybe they were talking to him too. Pleading with him. Making bargains.

“We do great cover-ups,” he said.

“Cover-up implies they are still there—hiding,” I said.

“What about a design?” the kid asked.

“I don’t care. They’re killing me.”

Finally I told him I wanted a headstone and a moon.

*****

When I came home that night, the house rejected me. The key wouldn’t turn the lock, and the door was stubbornly swollen. I walked around back and started to climb over the stone foundation. My arms and legs scraped against the jagged edges, as I dragged myself through the window. I landed with a thud on the floor of the spare bedroom. When I flipped the light switch, the house refused any light. It owned every inch of frail 1928 wiring. So I climbed the dark stairs to my dark room and tried to sleep. But it was too quiet. And my back, even though it was cold and empty was heavier than before. I couldn’t hear their voices anymore. My throat tightened up, and I could hardly breathe. I drank water from the bathroom faucet. I couldn’t sleep with all this quiet. They had left me. My women had left me.

*****

The next morning, Jill sat on the stoop, knitting. Faithful as always. I brought one bowl of cereal and one cup of coffee.

“I can’t stay,” I said.

“Where you going?”

“A funeral,” I said.

“Who died?”

“Two women I used to know,” I said.

“How awful,” she said. “They died together? In an accident?”

“Murder,” I said.

“Fuck,” she said. “You shouldn’t be driving. I can drive.”

“It’s been a long time since I actually saw them. We weren’t that close anymore,” I said.

“Still,” she said.

I left her on my stoop with her breakfast.

*****

I drove north to Pentwater, a small town near Lake Michigan. It was over an hour drive, and the whole way I could feel my skinless back rub against the seat. A quiet burning sensation. I could tell that they weren’t dead. Only angry. They were giving me the silent treatment. But I was angry too.

There was only one cemetery in Pentwater. So I spent the morning and a good part of the afternoon walking between the rows of headstones. Vida’s was a modest one on the Catholic side. I decided I would come back after dark.

Just after 10 p.m. I brought a shovel, crowbar and pick axe. I could hear Vida laughing at me from six feet under. She had only been playing dead. I attached a rope ladder to my car that would reach eight feet if necessary. I started digging. The first layer was clumps of grass and dark dirt. The next layer I piled sand all around me. Her laughter grew louder. Patchouli wafted up from her dreads. And I swear her mother was making tamales one section over.

Then I hit cement--the heavy lid of the burial vault. I slammed into it several times with the crowbar—the reverberations bruising my hands. I wedged the crowbar between the lid and the vault hoping to inch it off a millimeter at a time. But I couldn’t do it. I rested on the cold cement for a while, listening to Vida.

“You can’t get rid of me,” she said. “I’m inside you now. You only pushed me in deeper.”

I climbed out of the hole and brought down a chain attached to my car. It was my turn. When I hit the gas, the engine raced, but my little car didn’t move. I slammed down onto the gas again, and I lurched forward. The cement had cracked and fallen to the side, so I could get inside the casket.

I grabbed Vida by the neck. Her skin gave way and a stinking slime oozed from her mouth and her neck.

“Cunt,” I said as I shoved my fist deep inside her. “I told you to leave.”

It was like sticking my hand into a rotting pumpkin—strings of membrane and clumps of seeds clung to my hand. I wanted to show her how I had felt these two years. But as always she got the last word. I was rocking back and forth, in and out, laying on top of her when the skin over her entire body broke wide open and she whispered one last profanity in my direction.

“Pero, mi mujer hermosa,” she groaned.

I found myself lying in a pool of sludge and bones.

The sun was just starting to give some dull light when I climbed out of that hole. I drove south until I thought I was far enough away and stopped at a cheap motel to wash and rest before I drove to Chicago. Death has a way of clinging to everything. I had to throw my clothes away and bathe in tomato juice.

Montrose was a much larger cemetery. It would take me days to find Kali’s grave site: acres of stone statues depicting grieving women, angels and the crucifixion. How many of them demanded attention like my women? I visited an internet café and paid twenty dollars with my tired credit card to find where her mother had her buried.

Kali didn’t talk like Vida. She was better at inflicting pain in silence. When I opened the casket, there was nothing but feathery grey ashes. They disintegrated upon contact. I lay waiting in her empty coffin for over an hour. But seven years—not even dead people waited around for that long.

*****

Four hours later, I was sitting on my stoop with Jill. We were both eating Ben & Jerry’s ice cream for breakfast. I told her I was celebrating.

“I thought you went to a funeral.”

“It was a good funeral,” I said.

“I didn’t think there were good funerals.”

“It was the way they would have wanted it.”

“I see,” she said.

She licked her spoon and looked at me.

“What?”

“Don’t you smell that?” she asked.

“No.”

She tilted her nose upward. Then she moved closer and sniffed at my clothes.

“It’s you. What’s that smell? You fucking reek.”

I didn’t like where this was going. She was trying to figure me out, so she could write it all down. Maybe she had followed me and watched me.

“I’m tired,” I said. I gave a fake yawn and let myself in. Jill continued to stand on the front stoop, staring at me through the window.

I whistled all the way up the stairs and sang a little song. I was going to sleep all day. No interruptions. No voices. My back even itched a little like it was starting to heal. I could feel myself falling into a rhythm of sleep, but the bathroom faucet dripped embalming fluid all night, filling my mouth with mothballs and fluoride treatment. Every time I tried to sleep, it was the same. I woke up with blood on the sheets where their hands had clawed through my scars.

I stopped having breakfast with Jill after that, and started making plans.

I bought an economy-sized pickle jar. I picked out all the pickles and kept the juice. I bought a pair of scrubs at the Goodwill and started hanging out at the hospital. I acted like one of the cleaning ladies and got to know their routines. And then I found the surgical suites--the ones that weren’t in use during the night. And the machines that pumped the gases to make patients sleep.

It wasn’t my back at all. Their voices gouged my brain, and I had to get them out. They were making a mess of things up there. Cutting and tangling connections, so that nothing made sense any more.

I hid myself on the linen rack before security locked up the surgical suite for the night. When everything was quiet, I slipped into a patient gown with an air-conditioned back. I placed my pickle jar on the stainless steel table ready for its specimen. I flipped a switch that made everything light up on the anesthesia unit and pressed a few more buttons until I could feel the gas flowing out of a mask. I stretched myself onto the surgical table and stuck twenty electrodes all over my chest, like extra nipples. I had watched surgeons do this on TV. Drill, saw and forceps were all within arms reach next to my specimen jar. The room was cold and smelled of bleach. The fluorescent lights blinding. I could feel them crawling inside my head getting nervous. I strapped on the mask. I tried not to breathe too deeply so that I could still operate the saw which was whining close to my head. Then I wondered if I was supposed use the scalpel first. I watched the saw drop from my hand, and figured it didn’t matter much anymore.

The gas tasted like saffron, and I drifted into a feathery silence.