Penance by Aleathia Drehmer

He woke up under the urinal with his front tooth chipped and lips bleeding. The blood was congealing to him to the surface below. He realizes he must have been here awhile. The place where his cheek is making love to the floor smells of other men and he wishes he had the mind to get up and run from this place or at least wash the stale piss from his face.

He didn’t give a shit about anything anymore. Look what that stupid bitch had done to him….again. Why the fuck does he continue to go back to her for more? His dick knows the answer and somehow never relays this to his brain because hell if they would do this over and over again if they were on the same page. Or, maybe they would. At this point he was unsure of anything.

He looks over at his twisted fingers and bruised knuckles. In their grip is a tiny magazine he remembered picking up from the top of the urinal. It wasn’t full of Jesus like the usual ones, but little poems. He thought that was weird. What dude wants to read poems with his cock in his hand? What dude wants to read poems while he is drunk for that matter? Apparently, he thought, I’m that sort of dude, but look what it got me….busted teeth and a mouth full of urine water.

The little magazine stared at him in his dead eye from his mutilated hand. He wondered if his neck was broken and maybe he couldn’t get up or if he was just sick to death of repeating his miseries. He just lay there breathing in the disrespect of other men, men just like him and thought considering his actions in life, this was as good a penance as any other.

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Bomb the House by Aleathia Drehmer

We run from the men with guns again.  My stolen children hide in a stolen vehicle and there is nothing we can do but keep running through dimensions.  The children are silent, hunched in the floor wells behind the seats.  I feel how they want to cry, fear seeping through the leather bound to my back.  I talk to them and tell them these feelings will pass.  We will all be ok in the end.  I know they don’t believe me. 

The girl next to me orchestrates this fugitive blister across dimension lines—a secret migration from the hands that always find their way around my neck.  The men with guns will kill us without blinking.  Their hearts shattered and rotten years ago; minds blindfolded to the truth, easily manipulated like warm clay.  They move through space for money and notches in their belts.

The girl points to a dark house in a worm hole.  The children will be frightened of this place.  I am frightened of this place and I am old.

“Children we have to get out now, quietly.  We are mice remember.  We are deaf mice.” I tell them.

Their bones creak as I lift them from the recesses.  Their hearts cry for something soft and still and warm.  I know I cannot provide that, not here, maybe not anywhere and for this I feel like a failed mother.

The porch creaks under the weight of this entire movement through time.  It makes the children hold their breath.  I touch their heads, the hair like silk from summer corn.  It feels wholesome under my dirty hands.  I want to lean down and smell them, to smell their purity, but there is much to be done and little sleep to be had this night.

Through the door we go blind into darkness.  My heart is racing.  Our shoes scrape on the wood that sounds of scurrying mice.  Yes, we are still mice, never to know the true meaning of men.  The room is empty of life.  We sit in the corner, children clinging to my breast with hope of sleep that may be touched with dreaming.  I want to sing to them and let them drift to the vibrations in my chest, but it is dangerous.

We wait.

The men with guns will find us.  I am sure we will not survive.  I am a failed mother.

The Desire to Escape Gravity by Aleathia Drehmer

Samantha awoke slightly startled from a dream.  Her chest rose and fell with a stutter as it often did in the throes of uncertainty.  Her eyes darted around the barely lit room.  She could make out the shadows of familiar objects.  She decided she must be in her room.  Sam sat up slowly, looking and listening for the canary with its yellow sun body and shifting melody.  It was there, she knew it…had just heard it and stretched her arm through the darkness to the bedpost where she thought it must be perched.

 

Her body folded nearly in half before she felt the cool, round ballast in her hand.  There was no sign of the bird; no tiny feet clinging to her index finger like in the dream.  She rolled her body back to its original position and leaned back against the wall.  She touched her finger to again find nothing.

 

Frank had not woken up during all of this.  He was an impossible sleeper and Samantha knew that he must never dream in a stoned state, in that rock-hard heaviness that proliferated in his limbs. She curled up into the side of his body listening to the glory of his peacefulness.  How she wished she could disembody her soul that way and just sleep, but her mind never allowed it.  Sam lightly traced the shape of Frank’s ribs counting each one’s desire to escape gravity and propulsion.   He was her savior and he didn’t even know it.

 

She let herself be quieted in his steadiness; in his world of sleep; in his world without dreams.  She let her breath follow his and lead her down the dark, narrow path forming beneath her eyelids.  She let the beating in his chest rock her.  She let the expansion of his bones touch her face like wings, brilliant soft wings.  She knew in that hollow place in their togetherness where she was not in his place and she not in hers, that she would never be free of this.

Sugar City Reverb by Aleathia Drehmer

My life is a series of submersions into noise.  It all creeps into the psyche and take up space in my relatively un-crowded gray matter.  The noises register there like squatters—alarms for work, alarms at work, the sound of my child breathing, the cat’s impossible half cry, the washing machine, the balloon stuck to the heating duct—all of them attached to some innocuous memory or feeling that never seem to elevate the heart rate or cause a sense of fear.  But the noise of too many humans crammed together in a small space serves to derail every nerve ending in my body.  It causes all synapses to go into high gear and the world around me becomes amplified.  It causes me to become hypersensitive to every noise being created; it causes me to hear them at once.  It is sonic chaos.

I do my best to keep my cool and look professional when all I want to do is float to the ceiling to get away from them to save me from trying to steal their voices with my bare hands.  Gradually I go from hearing everything to hearing nothing in a state of lucid cataplexy.  I see people talking, machines working, movement for which I know is accompanied by sounds, but I can’t register any of them.  It is a struggle to recover the rest of my senses, a struggle to get them to convince the ears to work again.

I stepped into the evening air.  It is cold and suddenly there is a silence I can hear. I feel every lost thought to drip from a brain. I am maddened to the point of reality.  I am unsure how it will all continue.

Belltown by Aleathia Drehmer

She heard the hookers taking johns up against the wall.  She couldn’t see them and from the sounds of it she didn’t want to, but she listened as these men ate of their flesh; listened as these women endured their mental and physical filth for another fix.

She heard the crack vial crush under her sandal.  The grinding glass felt like a small torture that ran up her leg and lodged into her throat.  She wished she weren’t so high.  She wished she could stand up from the condom strewn bench and scream.  But, she could only sit there in the secretions of strangers with empty dreams under her feet and hands docile in lap unsure of the next moment.

Collusion by Aleathia Drehmer

“Tell me where he is!!!!!”

 “He is in my back pocket,” she told him with a smile that covered her face as she imperceptibly began twisting her hands from the ropes that bound them.

 “You are fucking delusional, absolutely delusional.”

“Delusion is all I have left,” she spit back to the agent standing there in his company issue suit that meant nothing to her.  His supposed authority laughable at best in the face of everything she had seen up until now and the best part was that he assumed he was in control.  She let him continue thinking that as he stepped in front of the flood light that was shining in her eyes.

The agent put his hairy hands on either arm of the chair she was bound to.  He moved his face in close to hers so she could see the serious business written all over his face and the strength in his eyes.  He wanted her to know that he meant business.

She felt his hot, stale breath in her face.  It smelled like the stink of corruption.  It smelled like government.  It smelled like Big Brother.  It made her angrier by the second.  Each inhalation an attempt to suck the life out of her, to coerce the answers to his questions; each exhalation fueled her hatred of him. 

 “Tell me where he is!!!!”

She felt his spittle spray onto her chin, part of it touching her lip and she snapped.  She pulled her head back and butted him in the mouth.  She felt his teeth pierce the flesh of her forehead, felt the teeth break at the solid fortitude of her skull.  She felt the blood running down her face like a river.

 “He is in my back pocket you prick!” she yelled splattering blood all over his nice crisp white shirt.  “He’s in my fucking back pocket.”