Motel (wip)

Cancer sits on the hood of the car, his sweaty ass sliding down the stovetop steel like an ice cube. Black bikini rides up his bug-bitten crack, dollar store swim top for a 12-year old sticking to his skinny teen body, the flounced training bra-style top soaked to his flat chest, clinging to his pointy brown nipples. Cheap ruffles flutter and irritate his hips.

The ex-boy scout with a braceface overbite, stupid with sleep deprivation and starvation. He kisses the man who kidnapped him, tongue slimy on his braces, trying not to throw up from the revolting taste of those lips burning with a fever that would kill the man if he could die.

The disease hits him like a bacterial roofie, slamming his white blood cells into the wall and choking them out.

✦

He lays around the trashy motel, dizzy with unventilated heat, bug-egg humidity, and the drugs the man got him hooked on. Hard drugs, pounding him harder than dick.

Riparian sits by the window, face covered in bandages. He tells people he got burnt. Got sick. Got surgery. Doesn’t matter. People don’t wanna know.

He crosses his legs and exhales, clove cigarette held between two delicate fingers. Serving invisible man cunt. His eyes are pink as rose quartz or strawberry candy, add conjunctivitis cunt to the list. The bandages frame his smile real big, yellow teeth from his internal rot and the nonstop cigarettes and coffee. He can’t die, and he takes deep advantage of it. The only cancer he can get is the boy chained to the motel safe, ass chafing on the beige negative 1000 thread count polyester carpet.

Cancer Prize. He flips the boy’s school ID in his fingers. What a sweet face in that INNOCENT school uniform, white and lacy with an iridescent cross nestled in the silk. Had to throw that uniform away after two hard months, no showers. The stains had stains. The rashes were nearly infected. New outfit. Two dollar swimsuits. The hot vinyl of the car seat burns Cancer’s bare ass. If he wants to numb the pain, there’s coke on the dashboard. Coke on a gloved finger. Coke everywhere it burns. Pink from food coloring.

Traffic jam, downtown, doesn’t matter. Smoked glass, the smoking mirror, traps them in a private universe, a rolling cage. Emergency clothes for the Human Interfacing Project (entering or exiting a motel). Both have dark hair, so people assume daddy and his baby boy (or baby girl, hair growing out) on the way to a convalescent spa town.

Too much sun coming through the window. Riparian draws the blinds and the man and the boy are alone in the dark together, in the cigarette smog. He’s naked besides the bandages, his angular body stained with purple clouds of disease. His antennae come out like straws sucking up the shadows. His pink eyes seem to glow in the dark, floating Cheshire for his treasure. The androgynous shadow slides his foot out, poking Cancer’s emaciated ribcage.

Playtime, Cancer?

He uses Cancer’s stupid wet mouth as an ashtray. He puts that glowing cherry out on Cancer’s tongue. The agonized stretch of those braces, wired chompers like checking a pony’s teeth. Gold brackets stained with blood, ash sticking like dirty snow. Colored bands like silly string, teen pastels rotting.

He lights another. The floor is littered with crushed packs and compulsively-picked apart foam from the complimentary coffee cups. He blows smoke in Cancer’s asshole. He puts it out on Cancer’s ass. Permanent bug bites cover that skinny girly butt.

Cancer starts laughing from how much pain he’s in, face shining with cigarette-stung tears. Riparian laughs with him, yellow teeth chattering. Creepy fucking laugh. He runs his finger around the inside of Cancer’s collar. Used dog collar with bite marks on it, still smells like dog. Let’s take it up a notch.

Throat tight?

You’ll get used to it.

Smoke in his face, making his throat strain against the collar. Taking it for a test drive.

Eat the cigarette.

More vomit on the carpet, watery and ashy. No food in that stomach.

The pack is out of cigarettes. Riparian stares into the cardboard box, then crushes it. And looks into Cancer.

Time for your reward.

Antennae tickle Cancer’s armpits and a gelatinous tingling squishes down through his chest into his guts.

You and me, we’re going to infect this world. They are nothing and we are everything. I’m going to put you on a throne. Or a sharpened stick. Either way you’re going to feel it, right, here—

He pulls on Cancer’s thong, sawing it up and down until the friction-stink of Cancer’s sweaty ass fills the air. He isn’t allowed to touch clean water. All part of the deal. Some greasy geas, the geesh at the end of this 18 foot leash.

Riparian’s tongue dangles like a skinned penis, watering (too thick to be water; viscous, semicolonic, mucoid). I didn’t mean it, Cancer. I’d do anything for a kiss.

Those lips look almost innocent framed by the dirty bandages, a crimson apple fairy tale flush with worms at the center. Nose flattened by bandages, eyes cartoonish. But stare long enough and the long lashes catch you like flies.

Riparian’s wings come out, diaphanous blades slicing from his back. Their hum is hypnotic, vibrating melting the boy’s skin and brain. They kiss for hours, fever flowing into the boy’s body til he could burst, sweating like nitroglycerin.

Fey, fly. He granted your wish. How carelessly you uttered it.

I wish they were dead.

Your foster parents got really sick. Blood cells ripped apart. Organs dissolving through every orifice. He took you on the road.

Huge smile, glowing in the TV static. I’m but your humble servant.

With those gloves, he almost seems like a burn victim butler. Hell’s valet. Anything for you, Cancer. Yes, Mr. Prize. One familicide coming up.

✦

I’m thirsty, Cancer says.

The man raises an eyebrow. We have a toilet, don’t we?

Cancer tries to lift the heavy porcelain lid but he’s too weak. He barely manages to get the seat up and slurp like a puppy at the warm water, tepid and floating with flies. Bleach stings his mouth, and the taste of dark brown patterns of fecal spatter all around his head like new land formations, putrid peninsulas, colonic inkblot tests. He’s not strong enough to push the toilet seat lid up all the way so it crushes his head, keeping him in darkness, gross on his hair and his back, sticky with septic plume. His gagging echoes in the bowl, high and elfin. He doesn’t know the next time he’ll be allowed to drink so he swallows until he’s sick.

Folded up on the bathroom floor with cramps, he throws up toilet water.

You’ll clean it, won’t you?

This filthy mess?

No, that’s my towel.

And Cancer’s towel, of course, is very dirty. Crunchy, even. He was sitting on it and something bad was happening. And the bad things have dried and made it brittle. It is a sinister banner, vampiric carnage and deep-fried eruption.

So he uses his hair, long enough to remind him how much time is passing, swallowed up by his own dirty hair prison, archival strands of darkness, roots itchy with dirt, sebum, pesticides, semen, and tips heavy with blood and digestive chunks. He drags his head across the cracked pink tiles like a mop, ass in the air. Oily black hair sweeping until it lurches with toilet water, sticking to his face.

The nightstand has a cabinet door and when the shelf bisecting it is slid out, and the bible removed, Cancer can probably fit inside. Why don’t you try?

He can’t move at all. Hard to breathe. Then the door squeezes, with great difficulty, against his knees and face, crushing one nostril, making it even harder. And with that one nostril he can smell shitty toilet hair, even more nauseating from the cold wet dilution of it, and he is in the dark with the psychedelic panic perfume of his week, drying and crusty and pervading, hotboxing his stink.

Good night, Cancer. That hand rests on the nightstand, tapping gently through the wood, tapping from heaven.

✦

In the yellow light of the bathroom, tub creaking under his back as he lays there, waiting. It still feels strange, being in a bath with no water, like an empty swimming pool, the air curiously cool and reverberating. He can’t see over the rim. A sanitary coffin. Sinking, sinking into the pit of his own stomach, time and space distorted by starvation.

Bloodpink eyes crawl over the rim, conjunctivitis moons in clouds of dirty bandages. It’s too much, just the eyes. He’s grateful when the man finally rears to its maximal height, all its plotting parts exposed, swaying in that body it pilots from the guts, the blinking skull a parasite periscope.

The cherubic, blood-starved penis is gripped like a lady’s derringer. Urine rains on Cancer, landing like chemical weapons, or something you use to dispose of corpses. The sick feverish stream is hot as molten gold and it’s the closest Cancer has gotten to a shower in nearly a year. So despite the revolting smell and the gross clinging wetness and the way it hits his eyes before he can react, blinding him which makes it even more overwhelming, not knowing where the stream is coming from next, and despite it going up his nose which makes him gag, and despite it splashing the inside of his involuntarily opened mouth and making him choke, a taste he knows he’ll be tasting for a long time, despite all that, his body pathetically craves it, this running fluid on his filthy hide, eroding the stains from last year which he carries like bruises and scabs.

The gloved hand in his soaked hair, petting this reeking ammoniac slave. You’re marked now, the fever breathes between them. The boy can feel it, this hazmat urine like a bleach burn, rashes blotching his skin like a shaved puppy at an animal testing lab.