Chuck Palahniuk - Invisible Monsters

Flash.

What we have is Evie's enormous fashion inferno.

Which is dazzling.

Which is just too much fun! I try the bedspread, it's this antique Belgian lace duvet, and it burns.

The drapes, Miss Evie's green velvet portieres, they burn.

Lampshades burn.

Big shit. The chiffon I'm wearing, it's burning, too. I slap out my smoldering feathers and step backwards from Evie's master bedroom fashion furnace and into the second-floor hallway.

There are ten other bedrooms and some bathrooms, and I go room to room. Towels burn. Bathroom inferno! Chanel Number Five, it burns. Oil paintings of race horses and dead pheasants burn. The reproduction Oriental carpets burn. Evie's bad dried flower arrangements, they're these little tabletop infernos. Too cute! Evie's Katty Kathy doll, it melts, then it burns. Evie's collection of big carnival stuffed animals—Cootie, Poochie, Pam-Pam, Mr. Bunnits, Choochie, Poo Poo, and Ringer—it's a fun-fur holocaust. Too sweet. Too precious.

Back in the bathroom, I snatch one of the few things not on fire:

A bottle of Valiums.

I start down the big circular staircase. Manus, when he broke in to kill me, he left the front door open, and the second-floor inferno sucks a cool breeze of night air up the stairs around me. Blowing my candles out. Now, the only light is the inferno, a giant space heater smiling down on me, me deep fried in my eleven herbs and spices of singed chiffon.

The feeling is that I've just won some major distinguished award for a major lifetime achievement.

Like, here she is, Miss America.

Come on down.

And this kind of attention, I still love it.

At the closet door, Manus is whining about how he can smell smoke, and please, please, please don't let him die. As if I could even care right now.

No, really, Manus wanted to be cremated.

On the telephone message pad, I write

in a minute ill open the door, but i still have the gun.

before that, i'm shoving valiums under the door, eat them, do this or I'll kill you.

And I put the note under the door.

We're going out to his car in the driveway. I'm taking him away. He'll do everything I want, or wherever we end up, I'll tell the police that he broke into the house. He set the fire and used the rifle to kidnap me. I'll blab everything about Manus and Evie and their sick love affair.

The word love tastes like earwax when I think it about Manus and Evie.

I slam the butt of the rifle against the closet door, and the rifle goes off. Another inch, and I'd be dead. With me dead outside the locked door, Manus would burn.

"Yes," Manus screams. "I'll do anything. Just, please, don't let me burn to death or shoot me. Anything, just open the door!"

With my shoe, I shove the poured-out Valiums through the crack under the closet door. With the rifle out in front of me, I unlock the door and stand back. In the light from the upstairs fire, you can see how the house is filling up with smoke. Manus stumbles out, power blue bug-eyed with his hands in the air, and I march him out to his car with the rifle pressed against his back. Even at the end of a rifle, Manus's skin feels tight and sexy. Beyond this, I have no plan. All I know is I don't want anything resolved for a while. Wherever we end up, I just won't go back to normal.

I lock Manus in the trunk of his Fiat Spider. A nice car, it's a nice car, red, with the convertible top down. I slam the butt of the rifle against the trunk lid.

Nothing comes back from my love cargo. Then I wonder if he still has to pee.

I toss the rifle into the passenger seat and I go back into

Evie's plantation inferno. In the foyer, only now it's a chimney, it's a wind tunnel with the cold air rushing in the front door and up into the heat and light above me. The foyer still has that desk with the gold saxophone telephone. Smoke is everywhere, and a chorus of every smoke detector siren sirening is so loud it hurts.

It's just plain mean, making Evie in Cancun lay awake so long for her good news.

So I call the number she left. You know Evie picks up on the first ring.

And Evie says, "Hello?"

There's nothing but the sound of everything I've done, the smoke detectors and the flames, the tinkle of the chandelier as the breeze chimes through it, that's all there is to hear from her end of the conversation.

Evie says, "Manus?"

Somewhere, the dining room maybe, the ceiling crashes down and sparks and embers rush out the dining room doorway and over the foyer floor.

Evie says, "Manus, don't play games. If this is you, I said I didn't want to see you anymore."

And right then:

Crash.

A half ton of sparkling, flashing, white-light, hand-cut Austrian crystal, the big chandelier drops from the center of the foyer ceiling and explodes too close.

Another inch, and I'd be dead.

How can I not laugh. I'm already dead.

"Listen, Manus," Evie says. "I told you not to call me or I'll tell the police about how you put my best friend in the hospital without a face. You got that?"

Evie says, "You just went too far. I'll get a restraining order if I have too."

Manus or Evie, I don't know who to believe, all I know is my feathers are on fire.

Jump way back to a fashion shoot at this junkyard full of dirty wrecked cars where Evie and me have to climb around on the wrecks wearing Hermaun Mancing thong swimwear so narrow you have to wear a "pussy strip" of surgical tape underneath, and Evie starts in with, "About your mutilated brother ... ?"

It's not my favorite photographer or art director, either.

And I'm going back to Evie, "Yeah?" Busy sticking out my butt.

And the photographer goes, "Evie? That's not pouting!

The uglier the fashions, the worse places we'd have to pose to make them look good. Junkyards. Slaughterhouses.

Sewage treatment plants. It's the ugly bridesmaid tactic where you only look good by comparison. One shoot for Industry Jeans Wear, I was sure we'd have to pose kissing dead bodies.

These junked cars all have rusted holes through them, serrated edges, and I'm this close to naked and trying to remember when was my last tetanus shot. The photographer lowers his camera and says, "I'm only wasting film until you girls decide to pull in your stomachs."

More and more, being beautiful took so much effort. Just the razor bumps would make you want to cry. The bikini waxes. Evie came out of her collagen lip injection saying she no longer had any fear of hell. The next worse thing is Manus yanking off your pussy strip if you're not close-shaved.

About hell, I told Evie, "We're shooting there tomorrow."

So, now the art director says, "Evie, could you climb up a couple cars higher on the pile?" And this is wearing high heels, but Evie goes up. Little diamonds of safety glass are scattered on everywhere you might fall.

Through her big cheesy smile, Evie says, "How exactly did your brother get mutilated?" You can only hold a real smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.

The art director steps up with his little foam applicator and retouches where the bronzer is streaked on my butt cheeks.

"It was a hairspray can somebody threw away in our family's burning barrel," I say. "He was burning the trash and it exploded."

And Evie says, "Somebody?"

And I say, "You'd think it was my mom, the way she screamed and tried to stop him bleeding."

And the photographer says, "Girls, can you go up on your toes just a little?"

Evie goes, "A big thirty-two-ounce can of HairShell hairspray? I bet it peeled half his face off."

We both go up on our toes.

I go, "It wasn't so bad."

"Wait a sec," the art director says, "I need your feet to be not so close together." Then he says, "Wider." Then, "A little wider, please." Then he hands up big chrome tools for us to hold.