Me and my Imp

My imp shakes on the floor like a go-go dancer—enthused by the knowledge that my eyes are on her. She’s quite shameless in dress and manner, though so it doesn’t really matter how little that little thing conceals. She’s all fuzzy. She’s also a gangly girl, clumsy and abundant in possession of that charm unique to one thriving in the failing. Like a babe, she shuffles out of rhythm—smiling, unselfconscious, in tune only with the truth of chemicals telling her synapses “yes, yes, yes”. 

She doesn’t know her body’s symbolic while she proudly plays the fool. Since I found her hiding under my bed, she’s treated me as her divine. I’ve never been treated with such intoxicated adoration. High on hubris as I fear I have been, my recklessness may be blamed for the danger in which she finds herself. 

Repressing my joy, I open the bag and say, “in”. 

She makes the pouty lips. The mousy creature sees no difference between the public and the private. To her, play doesn’t signify. When play attracts the jealous gaze, however, it does so by expressing an abundance that could only exist as the product of some transgression. What more dangerous significance could be assigned? I’m left to wonder: how oh how am I to educate this imp? If I fail to do so, I fear she shall receive the unamused instruction of a Hillary. 

At least my imp is obedient. Begrudgingly, she hops into my bag just before my Hillary returns from the restroom. The creature’s eyes glitter up at me from the dark recess, soft like my heart, and I give her a brief flash of that which she desires if only to show her that keeping secret is a strategy that pays. 

“At what are you smiling?” my Hillary asks. 

“N-nothing,” I, the criminal caught in the act, stammer before she snatches the bag from off my shoulder. 

I yell and plead, but my Hillary throws open the bag and out tumble’s the imp, landing butt-side up. She giggles until she sees the look of horror that distorts my face, then she notices a nightmare in grouchy gray. 

“AHH!” my imp yips, then scrambles to hide behind my calf.  

“Give her here!” my Hillary demands. 

I shake me head in refusal. 

“Now!” 

I know Hillary’s intentions and I fear what I know. Turning swiftly, I scoop the harmless mass of evil into my arms. It coos and rubs its head against me in an expression of boundless trust. I resolve to never betray her, no matter the cost. 

Leaving Hillary to scream her threats, I run. 

***

I bear the unbearable upon my shoulders. It is impossibly light for something so burdened by the resentments of a generation. Yes, she is small, but I’ve checked her from head to toe and found that she is quite puffy. Twiggy though she may be, she eats indulgently and only ever junk. She’s got a soft little belly into which my poking finger has disappeared. Her thighs touch like chonky cuts of ham whenever she sits. I sometimes call her my little chicken fat. She just smiles at me mischievously and keeps licking her sugar-sticky fingers. 

A Hillary can’t see this fallibility that characterizes the charm of the imp. They’ve got it all twisted. The Hillarys don’t really look at the world. They read it. 

One Hillary saw us eating fast food on a park bench. “Skinny bitch”, I heard her say as she walked by. Concerned that perhaps all the Hillarys of the world were in cahoots—for who knows what they get up to when they’re not pecking at us like hens—I wrapped up the uneaten portions and threw the imp over my shoulder. She bounced up and down as I made a run for it, her softness going plop plop plop. 

Perhaps my Hilary was just extra vigilant. Perhaps I had at some point erred before she ripped the bag out of my hands and initiated the hunt. I suspect art is to be blamed. I should have kept the paintings I made of my imp turned against the wall. The creature, smiling so broadly in that compromising pose, was rendered too realistic. It was risky, but I had to depict her as she presents herself to me. I thought others would find her alien form equally compelling. She was eager to share. I was a fool to believe I could share my joy while keeping it secret. 

But I did depict her, flirting with the idea of living unafraid. I should have known better, been more cautious, but the sights my imp made possible dazzled me and I forgot my wits. I didn’t see the difference between painting her and painting myself. Since meeting, my imp and I have been extensions of the same system: a brand new species the likes of which the world had never before seen. 

That’s the trouble. I can’t become a new thing. I’ve got responsibilities to Hillary.

Then again, Hillary doesn’t put her novels down long enough to look at my paintings. Every now and then she pops her head in just to remind me that I am not to feel at ease. She doesn’t engage. If I were to make a landscapes out of words, fields of white dotted with black characters reading “tree” “sky” “grass” “scissors” “lovers”, she’d sing of my genius. What I do with my fleshy blobs of color is too childish to merit attention. 

Maybe Hillary heard my imp howling when I pinned her down and subjected her to a relentless tickling. A noise is enough for an expert identifier. My imp was too unembarrassed. Hillary, the sharp hunter, heard her blissful call and knew her kind. Instantly she suspected I might be imbibing a surplus of enjoyment. 

I was playing with fire. I had heard of imps prior to finding mine. Hilary would rave about them over dinner, claiming imps to be the embodiment of vanity. How vulgar. How arrogant to think that they possessed all that the Hillarys lacked. 

How wrong my Hillary was. Imps possess nothing. Thriving in the failing: that’s what my imp gives like no one else. Wonky body nowhere near perfection and thus perfected. Willing to try despite. My girl. My boy. My boyish girl—what a horrible girl she is. She failed as a real girl, really, though I call her a her for her efforts. I applauded as she invented herself, pulling herself out the realm of phantoms, putting on her ill-fitting skirt and skipping about. 

The challenge from the start was that words clung to my imp’s flesh like brands. Words like “bitch”. I scrubbed and scrubbed but the semiotics didn’t wash off. 

I don’t think she understood the stakes. She giggled while I scrubbed, harder harder, and she arched her back. 

“This isn’t for fun!” said I.

“I just can’t help myself!” said she. Ohhhh she broke my heart with her little noises. 

We tried a different approach. She stretched out wide and I painted her tromp l’oleil, concealing her fruit behind a curtain. I tried in many colors until it stopped looking like mine or yours but hers and hers alone. A glowing oddity. It does so many tricks, I couldn’t even imagine. It accepts and emits, surrenders and grips. 

I called the results of my work a bag, and I made my imp hide therein. So confident was I that I began taking her outside, letting the sun shine upon her puffy pink cheeks. I thought the disguise I invented would protect my imp, but Hillary always has a keen eye out for any new accessory. Hillary is always vigilant. She seethes and puffs out smoke. 

Now I wonder if perhaps some of my imp’s hair did not fall outside the back and betray her presence. It was my imp’s wild hair that howled loudest. No one could control it. I tried, but the strands flew about madly as the tongues of ornery fire. As had the ancient fields in which her primordial line once ran free and giddy, it overgrew. How doggy she was, shedding all over. That hair was her way of laughing at me, of making us laugh together at the absurdity of our wants. My furry freak. 

My lip trembled as I told her we needed to cut it, but she wouldn’t. It was her pride and joy. I could happily drown in those knots and kinks, but I wanted so to save her—turn down her volume. “Uh-uh” went her moon-being eyes—the sweet loon—and I set my mind to finding another way. But there wasn’t another way. 

Oh how it all seems so perilous in retrospect! There were too many clues. Even my smile proved a clue. What matters is that Hilary found us out. Hilary will find our hideout. Hilary will make her will known.

***

My imp and I hid in an abandoned carnival. We slept in a boat parked within the love tunnel. The cold made the feeling of her warmth upon my feet all the more pleasant. We were comfy in our little den.

One night, I was jostled unpleasantly. At first I thought my imp was playing a game, but there she was, curled up at my feet as ever. By the time I gathered my wits, we sailed into a papier-mâché cavern all aglow with red. Red: the color of love. The color of violence. 

Violently, we stopped, and I was thrust forward. I landed on top of my imp, who was as agiggle as always. Looking up, my eyes traced the stilettos, the garters, the corset, the bowtie, the pointy glasses behind which were the pointy eyes that glowed red with a lust for vengeance. 

She took us. 

In a dark place, I cry. Oh Hilary, am I, too, enlisted? Social contract gobbledygook? Hell is other people and what not? You have your cross to bear, and I have mine? The yin to your yang, I must? Must we be at odds? Must you hunt the imps?

Let’s leave her in the dark room, then, so she can curl up in a ball, whimper and die. What will you do as the light goes out? Smile as thus perishes the pathetic creature. Laugh at its neediness as it calls out my name? Sweep under the rug any evidence of that potentiality it represents? The gall of the gal, to let herself be pet. A wimp of an imp. Didn’t she get the memo? 

“Don’t entertain! Don’t charm! We are enlisted!”

But no. The great un-enjoyer does not smile. This is what enrages me most. Not happily does the sharp face settle as it gazes at its prey. Hillary’s tongue pops balloons and ends parties at the slightest flick. Still Hilary calls my imp a bitch. A “bitch” alienated. Not the type you pet, but the type you beat. 

One way or another, my Hilary had to beat her. Hilary has to beat all the imps—the bitches. She has to beat me. We are, all of us, enlisted. 

After days of watching my imp turn limp from malnourishment, chicken fat all spent, I hear a noise. Snip snip go a shiny set of scissors. Hilary forces me to watch as they are unleashed upon the illicit thing’s fur. 

Death to the species, and a just revenge, no? 

My imp’s eyes well up with gooey tears the likes of which Hilary had never allowed drip down her face. Those scissors cut at my heart and my Hillary knows it. 

“Well then cut mine off, too!” I yell. I can’t stand the idea of my imp being made bare against her will, but that cannot be helped. I’m a weak man. I can, however, help her feel less alone. 

Taking an aluminum chair from out under a joyless table, I begin beating the thick glass I had allowed separate me from my dear friendliest of friends. I beat it till it breaks. 

My Hillary rolls her eyes and throws the scissors away. Other Hillarys come to drag me to my cell, wherein I will be given less colors with which to paint. Perhaps it is a defeat, but not one without value. The warmth had been conveyed. My imp gives me a little smile as I gaze on. I give one back, and through it I try to say that she has been made all the more lovely. This is just another way of failing, and she fails so lovely. 

DESTROYER

She poured her third glass of straight vodka. When younger it was Budweiser or wine, until it turned into white Russians, then vodka over the rocks, by her sixtieth birthday she’d been drinking vodka straight from the glass for several years. 

Her husband, Michael, died three years earlier from a drunk driving accident. They’d been married for twenty years, but she had had enough of the married life several years before he wrapped himself around a tree after a night of gambling on NFL games. 

She grew increasingly distant from her sisters and brother. She retired from her job as a computer analyst early, took her dead husband’s money and locked herself up inside her house. One time it had rose bushes, garden statues of fairies and leprechauns, and every blade of grass meticulously kept in uniform by Hollins Landscaping. Now, dead leaves collected on the driveway, walkway, and lawn. A pane of glass knocked out by a storm hadn’t been replaced in a year. Her only recourse to the life she lived was to drink every day until the pain she caused turned into justifications. 

The house was cold, matching her skin, lips, and pursed face. She put on, “Let Your Love Flow,” by the Bellamy Brothers and sat down in front of a mirror. Long red hair from youth turned into a short greying mess. The song traveled through the cold halls, and stacks of newspapers, bills, and dust collected on the once obsessively polished furniture. A once warm house turned into a tomb, a waiting room, a fortified compound. 

Arthritic fingers reached out to the Styrofoam head set to the left of the mirror and picked up the red wig with side swept bangs and fastened it to her skull. She looked into the mirror and with slow moving hands she painted on blue eye shadow, then glued on fake eye lashes. She didn’t need to convince herself to pour another vodka it had become ritual. Next, she applied foundation to hide her aging spots, followed by a powered red lipstick. The look wasn’t for anyone but her, a way to convince herself that if she were beautiful then all would be forgiven.

The grandfather clock in the living room worked, but time was no longer a concern to her. She only ate a meal a day to keep herself alive and thin. If she didn’t value her own neck she’d stop eating altogether, food had become an annoyance she had to deal with daily. A pest asking questions about the future when she was trying to travel backwards. 

“Always Dusty Springfield,” she said, “I Only Want to Be with You.” She played the song again, allowing her body to contort in joy and happiness across the scuffed marked wood floors. Along with walls, the man hater thrust her body like a 1960s pop star in a psychedelic dream. Skin like lily white boneyard markers placed the glass on the fireplace mantle. 

Her photographs in silver frames stood in the same spots for the last twenty years. One of her honeymoon in the Florida Keys, back when cocaine and speedboats were a part of her collective consciousness. One of her father standing next to a swimming pool not long after he returned home from fighting the Nazis. The last photo was of Jack in nursery school. His fine blonde hair parted to the side, eyes young and blue, full of hope. She’d dressed him in a black V neck sweater pulled over a white mock turtleneck. When he was little, she called him, “Jackie.” 

By the fourth play of Dusty Springfield, she poured another vodka, and spit on the photo of Jackie. She didn’t like that he decided to grow up. When he was a little boy, she dressed him up in girl’s clothing. One time, in the aisle at Zayre he cried when she bought him an Easter dress. Customers looked at her, wondering if she was going to do anything about it, she did. She made him stay home from school for three days and wear nothing but the dress. If he cried about it, she beat him with a belt. His tiny body black and blue, red heat marks across his butt and thighs. 

“Only babies cry,” she said, clenching her teeth at the photo. “Only babies cry!” 

Years later, when Jackie reached puberty and stopped wearing dresses, she started sneaking into his room at night. He could fight her off most nights, until he couldn’t. Of course, to her, none of those things happened, a figment of Jackie’s imagination. If no one saw it, then it wasn’t true. She told herself that every day until she believed it. She cut her son off. Took him out of her will and never picked up the phone. By the next drink, she convinced herself that there never was a child. In the throes of denial, the music sounded good enough to dance to. 

The fall wind outside slammed the phone booth on the corner. She looked through her window and saw a man with a long black coat inside. A running black Caddy parked next to it. She narrowed her blue eyes like a serpent, studying the man. She couldn’t make out his face but could see his thick head of silver hair slicked back. He moved around inside the booth, mouth moving, hands up and down. Then he hung up the phone and stood there.

“What’s he waiting for?” She thought. 

She walked to her makeup desk, snatched the bottle, and poured another glass. By the time she returned he was back on the phone, hands moving and he was pacing back and forth inside the booth like someone had told him shocking news. She wondered what bad news the man had received, it excited her. 

“Good for you honey,” she said, thinking a woman had left him.

When the grandfather clock chimed four, she nodded off. When she woke thirty-two minutes had passed. The man was no longer in the phone booth. She stumbled across the floor, and put on “Out of Time,” by the Stones and quickly poured another drink before the shakes had a chance to set in, then sat in front of the mirror to freshen up her make up and straighten out her wig. 

She staggered to the kitchen and opened the freezer, pulling out a package of frozen breakfast sausage links, and tossed them into the microwave above the marble countertop where she once had a bar, now littered with empty vodka bottles, and prescription Xanax bottles. The Xanax was to counteract the hangovers and shakes she had every morning. Once it settled in, she began drinking and repeating the same ritual every day. Day in and day out, blaming everyone but herself. It was her father’s fault he had PTSD. Not the year he spent leading a tank brigade across Europe fighting Nazis. It was Jackie’s fault that he didn’t want to wear dresses as a child. It was completely his own doing for crying into the night and hugging himself after she left his room naked. 

She’d lost count of how many drinks she’d had and fell to the couch. The record player scratched. The ceiling lowered down on her and the walls closed in. She’d become a photograph of flesh. Her silver sequence party dress glowed underneath the chandelier glass bulbs in the shape of candles. Her wig and makeup both immaculate. She spread open her pale dagger like legs and set the glass in front of cotton blue panties hanging out from the short party dress. She tried to kick off her shoes, but she wasn’t wearing any, the ankles fought for supremacy with heels and toes across the museum floors.

The grandfather clock chimed seven when she woke up. The tremors set into her soul and rattled her bones like a locomotive hell bent on early arrival. She picked up her glass and downed the last of it, then picked herself up and touched up her makeup in the mirror. Her eyes fixated on the expensive bottle of unopened vodka. She couldn’t recall if she had delivered it but was too drunk to remember. She tried to recount her steps, wondered if she fucked the delivery man. It wouldn’t be an insane thing to have happened. She fucked the landscaper the year before and jerked off the mail carrier when he dropped off a box with new socks inside. 

“That’s the kind you used to drink,” a calm and even voice said. “If I remember correct.” 

She slowly turned around and, in the chair, next to the door the man in the long black wool coat sat with his legs crossed. She studied him for a moment, his silver hair slicked back, cut barbershop fresh. He had a matching silver goatee neatly trimmed under his nose and chin. The rest of his face, shaven razor smooth. Bright blue eyes leered at her like he wanted to tell a punchline to a joke. He held up his hand, inviting her to a drink. 

Her reaction was to say something, anything, but sickness aligned with her veins, gut, brain, and skin. She took a swill from the expensive blue bottle of vodka, then poured some in her glass. She took notice of his black shoes, shined up like mirrors. Pressed black pants, and white shirt tucked into them. She figured his waist must’ve been a thirty-four. 

“Couldn’t wear a tie?” she said, shoving more of the liquid down her throat. 

“Feel better?” He asked. 

“How did you get into my house?”

He pointed back at the busted windowpane and smiled. 

“Need to get those fixed on occasion,” he replied. 

She huffed and downed another mouthful, her brain let up on the nerves and skin.

“I’m…I’m…going to,” she slurred, “call the cops if you don’t get out…”

“Destroyer,” he interrupted. 

“Excuse me?” she replied. 

“You’ve been a destroyer of lives for as long as I can remember.”

“Who the fuck are you!” she screamed.

He got up out of the chair with a gentleman’s ease and walked over to her. Their eyes met as he placed his wide hand across her mouth. 

“Don’t scream.” 

She studied his eyes. They appeared lost, but also eyes covered in years of humor and well-built armor. When her throat settled down, he removed his hand and stood in front of her.

“Still playing the same records I, see?” He said, walking over to the stack of albums. “I like this one.” He put on “River Deep Mountain High,” by Ike and Tina Turner. 

She poured herself another drink and poured it down her throat fast, then poured another. She had no idea where she was anymore, the faint smell of burnt breakfast sausage rotting in the microwave hit her nose. She recognized the eyes standing in front of her. 

“I’ve always loved this song,” she said.

“It’s a good fucking song,” he told her, his hair unable to move from the hair tonic the barber had put it in earlier. 

“Where have you been all these years?”

“Around. Man, I tell ya, Los Angeles, Paris, New York City. You know, just last month I was in Frankfurt Germany. “

“You leave Boston?”

“I come here all the time. Work for people over in Southie on occasion. You wearing a wig now I see.”

“People don’t like a woman without looks.” 

“No, people don’t like you.” He told her with a warm smile. “You got exactly what you wanted after all, didn’t you?”

She shifted her body on the couch and snapped into attention. He walked back and forth across the deadweights of the floorboards. 

“And what’s that?”

“You are finally alone. After ruining everyone you met you got to build yourself a little temple of the damned to rot away in. No more husband. No family, just you and the denial you love to suck off whenever you get the chance.” 

“How dare you speak to me like that. I’m your…”

The blast from the sawed-off shotgun inside his long coat lifted her up off the couch and threw her back onto the floor. The music from the song played in the background as he walked around the couch and looked at her. The silver sequence of the dress soaked up the blood red carnage, staining the stomach with the hand of death. Her eyes, wide open, fixated the glossy whites awaiting the nothingness inside the return of his gaze. 

  “You don’t ever get to say that word to me,” he said.

On the way out he grabbed the picture of young Jackie from the mantle and made his way down the long driveway. He started up the Cadillac and took a handful of quarters from the console. The phone booth provided relief from the dark streetlight wind, he dropped in several quarters and dialed a number. 

“Who’s this?” A voice said.

“It’s me,” he replied. 

“Did you find her?” 

“I did. Send over Archie and Lenny. There’s a mess to clean up.”

“What do you want em to do with her?”

“On Colony there’s that abandon strip mall. At the end where the Zayre used to be?”

“Yeah, I know it.”

“Bury her there in the ugliest Easter dress you can find.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah, did you find the location of the priest?”

“Costigan?”

“Yeah, that cocksucker.”

“I did.”

“Give me the address.”