King of the unsightly, p.11
ANTIFA SPLATTERPUNK, page 11
Kayleigh turned her head this way and that in the vanity mirror, folding and refolding the peach-stained wipe between her nails. She sniffed. “Who are you gonna say it was?”
Florence tsk-ed at her obliviousness. “Antifa.”
“Nah. You need to go specific. A paki or a pronoun cunt.”
“Kayleigh.”
“Sorry. Pronoun vagina. Beard and a dress anyway.”
Incorrigible. Florence giggled despite herself. It was nice. Here in the minibus with Kayleigh, up to tricks. It was just nice. Kayleigh dropped the soiled wipe out of the window and turned to Florence. Offering her clean face with its inky clouds and a big plump jowl on one side.
Florence reached forward and took the other woman’s nose between finger and thumb, just under the bridge. She rolled and pressed like it was a piece of clay. Kayleigh’s nails dug into the grey seat. This was pain she could get a handle on at least. The shape of it. Knowing it would definitely end as soon as she bled. Not like when she was on her living room floor with her nose feeling bigger than her face. Ollie’s rings vampire-biting. The noise she couldn’t make a filthy salt soup at the back of her throat.
She didn’t bleed. So Florence reached into Kayleigh’s nostril with a little finger, probing up there with her sensible nude manicure, till she found some resistance, a crusty, grainy slope which she worked at gently like an archaeologist, leaning in close, close–
“Were dere dogs in here?” Kayleigh asked.
“Yeah, Marshall brought Blut and Boden with him. Do you need some antihistam–”
Kayleigh sneezed.
A quivery silence. Kayleigh’s nostrils were streaming blood now. Fat red droplets sat on her lips, cheeks, and chin. She also wore an expression of mortified horror.
“...well,” Florence said, “that’ll do it.”
Kayleigh burst out in shrill terrified laughter. “Oh god I’m sorry! Oh no–I got it on you–ew.”
Florence laughed too, more comfortably. She could feel the warm wet freckling her own face but she couldn’t be cross; Kayleigh looked wonderful. Like she’d literally just been saved from the clutches of some unwashed degenerate.
“Can’t argue with results. Ok. Cry.”
“Huh?”
Florence held her phone up. “Just start crying and I’ll take a few.”
“How?”
Florence realised she could not tell her. How do you cry? It was like telling her how to put lipstick on.
Kayleigh tried to think of enough pain, but found she could only remember that she had been in enough pain. The pain itself was harder to call back. She tried for emotional pain but that didn’t work either. It was way down low beneath inches of cicatrisation, hot and wet and unsurvivable as the core of the earth. She couldn’t reach.
She remembered release. Dragging in a big breath. Metallic and snotty. He’d climbed off her and got to his feet so sudden she thought, briefly, someone might have turned up. Popped over for a dawn cuppa. His Mum did have a key. Kayleigh was crying, then, pathetic but she couldn’t help it. It felt like he’d split her skull.
Ollie had left the room, his feet soft on the carpet. Then nothing. She might have blacked out but just for a second. There was the toilet flushing and the sink running. Then he was back. He had a cold wet towel. Shh, you’re ok. Kneeling over her, thumbing her mouth open. His fingers inside her. Checking her like a horse. Nothing broken. No harm done.
The towel clammy and slack on her shoulder, suddenly. Thuds. She cringed. But it was Ollie punching himself. Shit, shit, he was saying, piece of fucking shit. She took his wrists in her hands gently, careful of her nails. He collapsed into her breasts. She held him while he wept.
In the minibus now she gurned and heaved as best she could, and took the clicks as proof of Florence’s satisfaction.
* * *
Florence brought a blisterpack of Loratadine and a minipack of tissues out of her handbag, took one of the latter for herself, and then handed both to Kayleigh. Florence didn’t have allergies, which she took as proof of her own mother’s good sense and lack of snowflakey neuroses, letting her play in the mud and whatnot. Odd then that her nose felt tickly when she wiped it, cleaning off the blood Kayleigh had covered her in.
She lifted her phone from her thigh. Kayleigh looked back at her from the screen, all contortion and damage. Beautiful. Of course, some smart alec somewhere might check the time it was first posted and then sift through some of the other members’ social media like Zapruder footage for a chance glimpse of Kayleigh already bruised. He might read her injuries and say that under their dazzle of blood they didn’t look brand new. Let him. Let them all sputter and wring their hands, let them prove beyond a shadow of a doubt it didn’t happen. It did not matter. The lie had gotten there first and would always be there first, gold medal in its fist.
She opened the relevant Facebook page and selected the best photo, where Kayleigh had looked up, her open eye limpid and imploring as a saint’s. She started typing, Religion of peace, crying emoji, angry emoji–
A bead of blood landed on the screen. She swiped it away. More replaced it. A quick little patter in a triangle formation. Must’ve missed some–
She looked at herself, strangely reflected. The planes of her jaw and cheeks half-visible in Kayleigh’s temples, in the squinch and shine of her eyes. And just above, in the black dark-mode screen that Florence preferred, she could see a shiny bead of blood crawling from her own right nostril.
As she took another tissue to wipe it away she felt it creep, distinctly, over her top lip. There was no pain but it was definitely coming out of her; it wasn’t Kayleigh’s. She was about to turn to her and say something like I’ve heard of women coming on at the same time but this is ridiculous, when Kayleigh’s hip pocket buzzed against the seat. Kayleigh wiped her nose hurriedly, licked her lips and tossed her hair.
“It’ll be Ollie, he’ll just want to know where I am.”
“He knows where you are.”
“Yeah but he’ll want proof.” Florence realised Kayleigh had made herself camera-ready. She smiled with her crust-lined, spit-glossed mouth. “It’s just a thing we do.”
“Oh for goodness sake, if you shouted he could hear you.” Although that might not be true. It was getting loud over there, an indistinct roar without the beat of their normal chants. Kayleigh was frowning lightly at her.
“...no,” she said. “He didn’t come. I was gonna tell you before. He’s still, you know. A bit. I didn’t even see him this morning. He was still in bed. I got a lift with Sally–” her voice faltered, looking at Florence. Her working eye went wide.
Florence touched her upper lip, either side of her philtrum. Both fingertips came back scarlet.
Kayleigh looked stricken, torn between Florence and her phone. And she was bleeding again. She croaked, “I have to, I have to g-get it–” and fumbled her phone out of her pocket. Florence was dealing with her own nose, bowing her head, pinching just below the bridge. So she didn’t see Kayleigh frown at the name on the screen, choose answer rather than video call, but she heard what came out of the phone, a woman’s voice, no, a woman’s noise, syllables broken up by whooping sobs. “Irene?” Kayleigh said haltingly.
There was a dreadful weight settling between Florence’s eyes, a pressure that her clamping fingers did not shift, that the flow of blood did not relieve. Her free fingers were suddenly greased with blood that, however hard she squeezed, would not stop flowing. She felt the first uncoiling of terror. She’d heard, with rhinoplasty, sometimes the surgeons made a mistake. They left a big old clot of scar tissue up there which would lean into some artery quietly for years until one day whoosh. Like the boulder in Indiana Jones. Taking you with it. It had to be that, right, some medical malpractice, someone she would sue, it had to, you couldn’t catch a nosebleed–
There was a crack from her left as, slick as soap, Kayleigh’s phone slid into the footwell. Fat droplets, cherry-dark, cherry-sized, pattered down onto her palm, slicking the heel of her hand and then disappearing into the black of her polo neck and jeans, unceasingly. Kayleigh’s face was pointed forward, but she didn’t seem to be looking at anything. “What have you done to me?” she whimpered.
“Me?” Florence hissed. Hadn’t Kayleigh just sprayed her filthy dirty blood into the most vulnerable, most inside-out parts of Florence, her mouth, her tear ducts? The revulsion of it was unbelievable, like that time some poof had opened his AIDSy veins into the ketchup dispenser at McDonalds or Burger King or whichever worked better for the story, which is why they only have sachets now. But Kayleigh was repeating her question, her head balloon-bobbing and not looking at Florence, and she was saying Baby. “Baby, what have you done?”
“Just–calm down.” Florence pressed down on Kayleigh’s back, trying to make her lean forward. “Who’s Irene?”
“Ollie’s Mum.” Kayleigh’s white eye rabbit-rolling, full of horrors. “You see. It wasn’t Mike.”
And then as Florence frowned at her, Kayleigh’s eye changed from white to red, as swiftly and neatly as if a bubble had been blown from within, or a slide had been changed. She reached up to her face, her breathing quick and violent.
“It’s–it’s ok, it’s nothing to worry about, it happens, it’s normal.” Florence leaned closer, getting bled on again. They were both caked now, although more obviously in Florence’s case with her champagne blouse, her mushroom slacks. “Eyes, nose, it’s all connected, isn’t it–”
Kayleigh’s laugh, again. High and joyless as a scream. It went on and on. The blood spurted from her in time with the noise. Keeping her eyes on Kayleigh, Florence groped for her phone, where it had landed against the gearstick. As she jabbed 9s, she looked up where Kayleigh was looking, out of the windscreen. Her eyes caught a dash of blue against the Portland stone of the memorial. Dave, backing away up the steps. She could see his deep pink face, and his mouth a little dark goldfish gape. At the foot of the steps, they all seemed to be fighting, turning on each other. Then she realised they were clinging to each other. Flags pooled on the ground. Marshall fought his way free, stumbled, turned towards Dave. Sneezed a parabola of blood into him.
Dave sat suddenly like a baby still getting the hang of walking. He lifted his hands to his face and brought them away with stringy, red ropes from his mouth, nostrils, eyes.
Her phone was gone from her hand. Like Kayleigh’s, somewhere down by her feet, behind the brake, or the accelerator? She folded herself down there to grope for it, which brought a wave of nauseating pain. Her vision swam. She came back up empty handed, retching strands of dark, ferrous spittle.
“See what I think is Ollie didn’t know him but he knew Ollie.”
“What?”
“Outside Silk’s.”
“What?”
“Connected, you said. You said–” Kayleigh’s voice burbled and hissed, a straw in a milkshake, “it’s all connected. All hidden. I just, you know. I was looking forward to it. I wanted to have a good one. So.”
Again, that terrified, abject, begging laugh. She held her hands up before her like a shrug or an offering. Her nails looked like her teeth. Her silver bracelets clinked. Florence noticed one of them in particular, one of those big ones with the excessively chunky clasp that could open secretly at the side like a book. Her palms were filling with clots, then a tooth, then another. “And then when you told me I wasn’t going I thought. Share the wealth. You know.”
It occurred to Florence that this was all her fault. Whenever anything didn’t go to plan it was always, when you got down to it, something Florence should have thought of, some angle she should have considered, something she hadn’t asked. It was very easy for Florence to understand this, so it was particularly aggravating to her that she’d only just realised it, regarding this situation. She knew about Kayleigh’s allergies, and her weaknesses, and she had assumed and she had not asked, and it had been Florence’s fucking fantastic idea. All her fault.
But I can, yet, Florence thought, I can. There was nothing after those words, but she was sure she could do whatever it was. She always adapted and multitasked and fixed, she made do and made the best of. She was just so good at that sort of thing. She grabbed stickily at the door lock but her hands, white and red and flappy as flags, didn’t seem to work right. There were little voices. Irene, still, or the 999 dispatcher. Her phone, Kayleigh’s phone, distant as moons. She thought, Phil, and she thought I did hit Post, right? I must’ve.
Then the minibus door opened and she fell with it, and then there was only the pain, through the middle of her head like a lead-lined well, an endless, open, clanging plummet. Nothing else possible.
Florence was cold, suddenly. A burnished black-red puddle on the tarmac in front of her. She dropped to her knees–one knee; her other leg was wrapped in the seat belt–then her elbows in it. It grew with her every move, until she could not move. She sunk onto her face. She heard Kayleigh’s milkshake noises behind her, heard them gutter and stop. She saw her blood, vibrant on the painted line beneath her eyes. And last of all a flood of bubbles tiny and orange as caviar, popping into nothingness. Her lips half-forming soundless, orphaned words. They only have sachets now.
Blood & Honor
by Sam Richard
As Randy walked up to Phil’s derelict house, she was unsure what to anticipate. They hadn’t spoken in over two decades, and she didn’t know what had drawn her to him. She even ignored his initial message. Her past was best left as bad memories she suppressed, but his second message gave her chills, so she called the number he’d sent. There was something about the panic in his voice, the way he spoke with such exhausted intensity. When she was honest with herself, she recognized that the slur in his speech really worried her.
Like he might not live to tomorrow.
Reluctantly, she got in her car and drove as quickly as she could. Fortunately, it was only a few hours from Minneapolis to just outside of Lamberton. Not a place she anticipated spending her Sunday, but perhaps family was family. And Phil had been the only one who was truly decent to her growing up.
A series of putrid smells hit her as she pushed open the already cracked door. Coughing and gagging, she did her best to call out to Phil as she stepped inside. Dense clusters of flies covered the various surfaces of the kitchen; dark brown splotches and streaks covered the floor, countertops, and cabinets. More the scene of a grisly murder than a livable home.
Something tugged in the back of her brain. It told her to run. To get in her car, lock the doors, and call the police. Before she could, a voice called her name from deeper within the house.
“Randy, is that you?” It was hoarse and quiet, barely louder than a whisper. She imagined it belonging to someone approaching their hundredth birthday. “Fuck, I’m so glad you came. Can you come in here?”
After a beat of hesitation, Randy decided that she had come this far, might as well see if there was something she could do to help. Given their vast years apart, she didn’t know if Phil had a partner or children, or if he was disabled or living with a chronic illness or trying to overcome a disease. She wondered if whoever had been helping him had left or passed on themselves. And given the state of the place, she figured whatever it was had been going on for quite a while.
Holding her breath, she stepped into the darkened room off the kitchen. Even with her nose closed off, she could taste it. Not merely the scent of illness, but of infection. Rot. Decay. The sickly-sweet smell of sunbaked roadkill or dead squirrels trapped inside the walls. But larger. Human.
Dim sunlight peeked through the heavy curtains, sending a few lines of light cascading across the filthy wooden floors. She was standing in the dining room, beyond that the living room. A figure sat on a large couch, staring at her in the relative darkness. Doing her best to avoid stepping in any of the debris that littered the floor, she slowly walked toward the figure.
“Phil, is that you? Are you okay?”
“Yes, yes. Please, come have a seat. Thank you for coming on such short notice,” he paused. “...honestly, I can’t believe that you actually came.”
Randy spotted a clean, empty chair across from the couch, directly facing her cousin. Like it was set up for an interrogation. Between it and the couch sat a small, cluttered table, though Randy couldn’t make out what was on it in the dark. A handful of boxes were on either side of it.
Angry flies swarmed everywhere.
She sat and studied Phil. He was covered in a pile of blankets, more mass of cloth than man. His features were difficult to discern in the dim lighting. The brutal stench wrapped itself around her, and Randy forced herself to not gag. The world could be so cruel to people with medical conditions, and she didn’t want to offend him; she didn’t want to make him feel less than human. From the state of things, it certainly didn’t look like he wanted to be living like this.
“I don’t know what to say, and I don’t mean to offend you at all—so please don’t take it that way—but do you need me to call a doctor, or a nurse? Is that why you tracked me down?”
Without a beat he started speaking. “So, my dad died a few years ago, lousy fucking bastard. Managed to hang on for a good decade longer than we all thought he would. Coronary Artery Disease. Had that shit for ages. Wouldn’t stop smoking, never took care of himself, drank all the time. I always thought he’d pop young, but the old fucker just kept going, kept pulling us down around him, too. Do you remember what he would say to us when we were kids?”
Randy let her guard down. It was wholly unpleasant to revisit that era of her life, but she also rarely had the opportunity, especially with someone else who lived through it. She cleared her throat, “Uhh, yeah. He always told us that we were the future. That they were fighting to give us the keys to the kingdom of heaven or some shit. It always felt Arthurian, but I can’t recall how he phrased it.”
