To wake from a sleep brought by a bitter crying jag is to taste dry salt on the lips, to feel eyelids swollen, as hard to pull apart as if they had been sewn. And for a moment, Leah also felt a blessed, amnesiac oblivion. Then the night dreams completely fled in the light of waking and the memories came crashing down upon her like an avalanche.
The Junkie Stone heavy in her hands, her chest, her gut - elongated arms, clawing grabbing at her - a syringe in the neck - Siekan's kisses, poison-sweet - the wrenching, tearing unbearable pain, at the moment of giving birth...whether to monster or baby.
She shuddered. Never ever to feel that pain again, for the rest of her life, that was what she wanted. A small resolve, but it was something to cling to, like a lifeline. Hand over hand, she pulled herself actually and emotionally to a standing position, ready for action. Any muscle with the remotest connection to her stitched belly turned torturer here, but she gritted her teeth, got herself finally upright, feet on the cold, dusty concrete floor. She spat into her hands, ungummed her eyes. Light came from a trap door at one end of the cellar, beneath it a twisted flight of stairs. She climbed up, into the familiar urban wasteland, the half demolished warehouse, shadowed by a freeway overpass, even at this early morning hour thundering with commuter traffic. Naked as she was, she squatted and pissed a yellow river. Car horns sounded from the overpass, and she lifted one hand without looking up, gave the commuter pervs the finger: May-you-crash-in-flames!
From the sound of it, they did.
She grinned, something she had not done for a very long while. Then using any muscle except those in her belly, she stood again, walked stiff but proud back to her lair. In the cellar again, she hooked the filthy blanket up with her toes, pulled it around her, and stood for a moment regarding her reflection in the shard of mirror that hung dagger-like over her cot. Well, she'd looked worse. The reflection was death pale, except for the hair, even the dyed red ends darkened by dirt, and the river-trails of kohl down her face. But her eyes were angry, their grey tempered into the hardest of steel.
"Mother," she whispered into the mirror.
A flash of light, a figure appearing over her shoulder. Karolin/Caroline, the Trashwife.
"Watch my back, Mother, with the sharpest, deadliest, dirtiest of your blades. Because I'm going after them. To get them, give them a taste of their own medicine. The drugs they sell, they'll feel in their arms, their gut, their brain. Never enough, a continual withdrawal, worse than any birth pangs because they last forever, and ever and ever. Amen."
The figure over her shoulder mouthed a word at her, then vanished.
"Unsex? Myself? Why gladly, Mother."
(Lucy Sussex)
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