Joel Arnold - Fetal Bait Apocalypse - 3 Collections in 1

So many ways of paying for your sins, he thought. And when does it end?

Finally he was able to stand again, but he still felt weak and dizzy. He looked at himself in the mirror. Looked at his big ugly stain of a birthmark. Maybe some people are made for paying. Make up for all the ones who never have to pay a goddamn dime. Cause I been paying since the day I was born.

He couldn’t play like this. Not tonight. He shuffled out from the bathroom. Went straight to the bartender.

“Sorry, man, but I feel like shit. I can’t play tonight.”

“What’s wrong?”

“I don’t know. Fever I guess.”

The bartender looked him up and down. “Can you make it home okay? Need a shot of whiskey before you go?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Let me know about tomorrow. If you can’t make it, I’ll send Lydia over with some chicken soup.”

“S’alright if I leave my amp here?”

“Course. I’ll stick it in the basement.” The bartender winked at him. “Sucks getting old, don’t it?”

The life of a musician.

When John pulled up to his trailer and yanked the Gibson out of the back of his pick-up, part of him expected to see Chryse waiting for him at the door. But there was no one. He went inside and looked around just to make sure. He sat down on his couch and laid the guitar across his lap, closed his eyes and began to play. At first, he plucked nimbly at the strings, quick staccato notes that disappeared into the trailer’s crevices. Then he strummed the strings with the tips of his fingers, tossing the pick aside. He saw Tom Pike’s face as he improvised, saw Chryse’s face, both of them part of an audience in his mind.

The notes stretched, grew louder as he culled the vibrations of the instrument into a long series of sustains. His emotions were a hurricane in the hollow of the guitar.

As he played, his eyes shut tight, he relived the night he killed Tom Pike, relived the feel, the sickening, satisfying feel of slicing him belly to throat with his father’s fish scaling knife. Relived the warmth of blood on his hands as he strummed chords that weren’t meant to be, chords of disharmony and pain.

The warm feel of blood. A momentary satisfying feeling. An eternal painful feeling, and he could not forget it, could never forget that feel, even though as he cut through Tom Pike’s skin, the revenge was so damn sweet. Because even without him around, life never became any easier.

He opened his eyes. Looked down at his hands as they froze in mid-strum. He’d been playing so hard, his own fingers, fingers that were hard and callused from years of pressing steel string into wooden frets, were bleeding. The strings dripped with it, with his memory, his passion. His blood.

He stood. Held the guitar by the neck. Faced the television. He saw himself reflected on the screen, an obsidian shadow teetering back and forth on scuffed black boots. He raised the guitar. Held it in the air. This was his lifeblood, the thing he earned his meager living with. But wouldn’t it feel good, wouldn’t it feel just goddamn fantastic for one incredible instant—

He swung the guitar, felt it smash into the TV screen. There was an explosion of wood and glass. Smoke poured from the ruined set. John’s irises danced with the image of a small flame forming in the electronic components. The smell of burning plastic made his eyes water, made the snot loosen and drip from his nose. He clenched and unclenched his right hand, trying to hold onto that feeling, that momentary feeling of the guitar exploding into the screen.

There was a knock on his door.

He forgot for a moment that he still held the broken

neck of the guitar in his left hand. He looked at it as if he wasn’t quite sure how it had gotten there. He dropped it onto the floor. Knew who would be there even before opening the door. A tremor ran through his body. A tremor that wouldn’t stop.

“I’m sorry,” Chryse said as she stood on the front step. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

“What did you do to me?”

She looked down at her feet. Her face was so pale, so white it almost glowed within the frame of her stark black hair. Her eyes glistened, two bits of shiny hard coal pressed into her face. John reached out and tilted back her head. Looked deep in those glittering eyes. The blood from his fingers smeared across her chin.

“I want you to finish it,” he said.

He stepped aside as she entered his trailer.Followed her into his bedroom.

The room smelled of sweat and mouthwash and cigarettes. John quit smoking over a year ago, but some things never seemed to go away. They undressed in silence.

“Close your eyes,” Chryse whispered. John lay on his back on the bed, his one pillow thin and hard beneath his head. He sensed her standing over him, could smell her skin, the dim light beyond his eyelids blocked by her form. He felt her squatting over his face, could feel the short soft wisps of her tiny black hairs on his forehead. He opened his eyes as she spread herself for him.

And he saw it. It shined inside of her. A swirling bright red river full of clots and pieces of bone. Her ribs glowed through it all like the framework of a cathedral. She squatted closer, squatted onto his eyes. Forms floated inside of her. Forms of men. So many of them.

He understood.

“We all pay a price,” she said. “Just for being who we are.”

She began to bounce.

“I’ll take the pain away.”

So many of them. All the old blues men, the rock ’n’ rollers, the jazz musicians, all of them dead and gone to the world, all of them overcome by the pain of their world.

And she bounced faster. Harder. The bucking movements, the weight crushed John Baxter’s skull, broke his windpipes, snapped his neck. Yet he was still aware.

He understood.

John Baxter knew where he was going and where all the others had gone before him.

Chryse groaned.

John Baxter, his music, his soul, his pain, was sucked inside.

“Burn, baby, burn.”

The forest looked surreal. Ann Leroux lit a cigarette and inhaled. “Guess it doesn’t matter too much if I toss my butts wherever I feel like it.” She blew a wavery ring of smoke that dissipated over the slow moving vinyl of the Wakkamungus River.

Patchouli rolled his eyes.

“Just kidding. Geez,” Ann said.

Charred skeletons of pine trees stood black and velvety against the early morning sun. Jagged stumps protruded from a thick layer of ash like rotted teeth. Renegade clusters of cinders floated on the river’s surface. It was only a week ago that the inferno had swept through the area. Small patches on either side of the river continued to smolder on the forest floor. The smell of burnt wood was thick.

Jay set down a cooler full of beer and soda on the river’s edge. “Will you look at that. It’s like we’re on another planet. Are you sure we’re allowed to be here?”

Patchouli shrugged. “I don’t see any signs that say we can’t.”

Kelly Lambert pulled back her auburn hair into a pony tail and secured it with a purple binder. She handed a bottle of sunscreen to Jay. “Rub this on my back?”

He shook the bottle and squirted it directly onto her skin. Kelly flinched.

He wanted to tell Kelly over a month ago that it was over between them, but he couldn’t do it. Whenever he tried, he imagined her breaking down, crying, yelling at him, throwing a fit. Hell, he didn’t know. He just couldn’t bring himself to find out. So instead of saying the things he wanted to say, he swallowed the words and let inane things bubble up from his mouth instead.

But not today. Today he was going to tell her. He couldn’t keep leading her on like this. Especially when she was already talking about things like engagement rings and bridesmaid dresses. He didn’t want to waste his last year of college on a dead-end relationship.