Read Online Needles & Sins by John Everson - Free Book Online Page B

again, running hard through the carts of half-rotten potatoes and kicking up clouds of carrion flies and sewer bees in her wake. I thought I might slice myself a meal from the weakened souls in the gutter, but first I reached down and found a healthy apple, and took a bite. Its juice was pure and sweet, its pulp hard and crunchy in my mouth. I enjoyed several bites, and then spit the last one out, and dropped the core of the fruit on the ground to rot.
    Balance.
     
    ««—»»
     
    It took me a long time, I remember, to become acclimated after being born again, so many years before. My skin was flensed the first time I fell in love after death, to a black-haired girl named Rhee. My heart tore to shreds when she bore us a baby with cloven hooves and a rattlesnake tongue. I couldn’t believe that such a beast was mine, yet, how could she have endured the pain and disintegration of sex with anyone but me? I would have known if she’d had another; skin doesn’t grow back in a day.
    One night, as Rhee kissed our twisted child goodnight, its newly sprung rattlesnake teeth poisoned her, offering death even here beyond the grave, and she took the bait and faded before my eyes. I took the beast up from its steel crib with tongs from the kitchen and flushed it down the toilet. I still wake to the echo of its hideous, accusing screams in my dreams.
    I never fell in love again. Too dangerous.
    There are ways to live and ways to die. I keep to myself and don’t bleed much that way. The physique I died with doesn’t hurt my chances of being left alone; I stood six feet four when the reaper, dressed in the grill of a green Ford took me down on earth. Here, I find my steroid-enhanced forearms, embellished in a living artist’s depiction of the depravities of hell, serve me as well as they did in life. My tattoo artist could have really found some inspiration here, I often think, but he did ok. No one fucks with a guy who looks like a killer.
    Never mind that the worst thing I ever killed was a dog that had two broken legs. Don’t ask me how long I had to hold it underwater before it stopped kicking with its good ones. I’ll go through eternity with the scars from where its desperate toenails cut into my gut. The damn thing would never have run again, and still it struggled desperately to stay alive. It wouldn’t let go. Stupid beast.
    I live now in a tiny room just above the Chinese grocery. That doesn’t tell you much; there’s a Chinese grocery on every corner here. But that’s where I live, just the same. I keep some things there to write, to eat, to drink. But never much.
    Corruption here comes fast and unexpectedly. I only had to clean up once after a scourge of roaches descended on my canisters of flour and cereal to know better. One night, I went to bed with a fridge full of milk and meat and fruit, the next, I was spraying ammonia on every surface of my kitchen, drowning thousands of tiny black roaches, smothering the maggots that looped and leered at me from the fouled mess that had been a raw slab of soul meat on the top shelf of the fridge. When I opened the milk, my stomach released itself instantly, hot acid dripping over the hair of my hands and into the opening of the gag-inducing jug to join with its spoiled contents in a stew of sour. When I poured the foul mess down the sink, it gathered at the drain in clumps so large I had to pick the clotted remains up and throw them into a garbage bag with the meat and the dustpan piles filled with skittering, dying roaches.
    Corruption here comes without reason or warning. I keep my house empty. Like my heart.
     
    ««—»»
     
    I saw her next at the Wall of Life.
    I don’t normally go there; I’d advise anyone against it. Nothing good can come of spying on the living. All that it brings is disappointment and bleeding. And once you start bleeding, you’re prime prey for the thrashers, and eaters like myself. Food is food. Here, you bleed whenever an emotion stretches