Stab Wounds Everywhere

Lillian

The caustic rain of lacerations began as soon as Lillian burst awake at six am. The memory of that morning’s coffee would wound her two hours later. A baby in a stroller wounded her on the way to the bank. She tasted blood on her gums. A bus with mute, mutated faces in the windows wounded her as it passed. A hit-and-run. All car exhaust may as well be Zyclon-B. The sidewalk with its pebbles and fissures was as traumatic as a blunt-force homicide. Like intestines bursting through a sloppy incision. The smell of a morning McDonald’s wounded her. A matronly woman walking two happy, energetic corgis wounded her like a knife to the brain. A tear traveled down her cheek to her jaw and hung there like a saline icicle. She wiped it off and checked her fingers to make sure she wasn’t shedding blood (she wasn’t). A car horn in the distance wounded her like a felled elk during hunting season. She continued her walk to work, letting her tears of internal pain trickle like a weeping, infected abscess.      

Julian

But I was just thinking out loud. A guy’s gotta be capable of daydreaming while sitting here in one spot peeling fish. I guess scaling is what they call it. I’d call it scraping if I were writing a guide to this nasty task. I don’t know what possessed me to use the word “peeling.” Excuse the faux pas. As I sit and scale the “yellow” perch Cynthia caught, I register Lake Geronimo in my peripheral vision. The lake is brown due to the raw sewage draining into it and toxic sludge from the big malodorous paper mill—Pappy’s Pulp & Paper. I used to work at the paper mill and have the chronic barking cough to prove it. I was a child in the 90s and used to swim in the lake with my friends. We were fearless. And stupid. I caught nasty infections every summer. I probably planted cancerous seeds in the eleven systems that comprise me. I can’t believe fish still live in that giant swarming Petri dish. I’m surprised the perches don’t explode when we cook them—the chemicals in the flesh igniting into gaseous flame. Here’s how Cynthia and I prepare the malignant, mutated  perch: 

         Ingredients:

• 4 medium sized perch, cleaned 
• 1/4 cup olive oil plus 1 tablespoon
• 1/3 cup fresh chopped parsley 
• 2 cloves crushed garlic 
• juice of one lemon 
• zest of one lemon
• 1/2 lemon (sliced)
• salt and pepper to taste

Lemon Parsley Sauce:

1. In a small saucepan set over medium heat, add 1/4 cup of the olive oil, parsley, garlic, lemon zest and juice of 1/2 lemon. Bring to a simmer and remove from heat.

The Perch:

1. In a large skillet, set over medium heat and add a tablespoon of olive oil. Heat oil for a minute then add the fish. Cook for approximately 5 minutes, then turn. Add lemon slices to the pan and pour over remaining lemon juice. Cook for another 6 minutes or until the fish is cooked through.
2. Remove from the skillet and drizzle with the lemon-parsley sauce.

Bon appetit! 

Gustav

Those fucking punks on Torpedo Street always activated a nasty clamoring in Gustav’s head. Like screaming monkeys being eaten by a streak of cheetahs. Gustav lived in the alley at the intersection of Torpedo and Rosary streets. It was his living room. He pissed behind the Dumpster. He spilled his bowels at the McDonald’s on Rosary. He slept under heavy, corrugated cardboard beneath a rickety fire escape. He drank generic vodka on a stoop that climbed to a boarded-up door. The building had been abandoned for years but the fucking punks sometimes squatted inside so Gustav refused to seek shelter there. Even when the sky dumped hostile weather on him. Even when the temperature dropped to 0° and his extremities went dead. It wouldn’t be safe for anybody if he had to remain in close proximity to those fucking punks. They would beat Gustav dead. Or he would murder them with his gun and steal whatever meager assets they carried. Probably only pocket change and empty syringes. Fucking punks. Gustav sat and daydreamed about killing those fucking punks while enjoying his breakfast of strong vodka, working toward his usual early-morning stupor. Goddammit, life was a grand cesspool.   

Clara

Clara Bonita Overstreet still lived at home with her parents. She was 48 and never left the house. She slept on the same bed her mother had birthed her on (different mattress of course—the original mattress was in the basement, stained with faded burgundy from the bad day Clara unexpectedly entered the world). Clara kept to herself. She did not read. She didn’t own a computer. She didn’t watch TV or listen to the radio. She kept the shade over her window down. Almost nothing was of interest to her. She practiced philosophy, working it all out in her silent mind while time poured out around her. She studied the stains in the carpet. The arthritic pain in her joints and the churning cries of her internal organs kept her company, sending cryptic messages she had learned to decode as a child. Her parents had a cat named Spitball but she never interacted with it. Sometimes the odd spider or errant fly would invade her space. She killed the flies. She spared the spiders. She collected the dead flies in an old matchbox. She had fifty-two crispy little insect corpses saved. She was still working on a plan to utilize them for her Art, for Clara was an artist. She used Elmer’s Glue and recycled tinfoil and the dark hairs she shaved from her legs. She used pinpricks of blood from her calloused fingertips and recycled wax paper and little tufts of dust collected from under her bed. The bed she’d entered life upon and would (God willing) die upon. She smeared things, ripped things, crumpled, distorted and moistened things. She expressed herself with her rasping lungs and the ugly taste in her mouth and the rancid anger in her heart. She was creating something GREAT. And it would all be lost once she set the house on fire and burned to death on the bed—the dual crime scenes of her disastrous  delivery and the spark that would signal her final arrival in Hell.

Jim

I used to have seizures. Pretty good ones too. I’d be doing something innocent, like walking up stairs or eating oatmeal, or going, “La la la…” and then I’d be in the back of an ambulance and my muscles would hurt from contracting so hard. I used to take a big black capsule called Depakote but don’t anymore. I once had a seizure so severe that it made my nose gush blood and my eyeballs turned purple from the strain and I gagged on my own tongue and that’s how I met my girlfriend, Joan. She was a paramedic and thought my frothing, brain-bashing seizures were kind of sexy. She was my sweet ambulance companion. She told me once, “I was hoping you’d have another seizure so I could see you again.” That was my Joanie. She left me after my successful brain surgery.      

Final Weather Report

Grim. Bleak. With a chance of disaster.