You Identify As Haunted 

He is a professional, an urban planner, nestled among amateurs (college students) in a Spanish Revival chopped up into apartments.  Lives on top.  

The depressed blonde bisexual artist you fuck (tutors you in college algebra) lives directly below— painter who came north to Pensacola  “for these trees” leaves to fall into a Miami grave. Calls you once before he does just to say “I’m driving there to fuck you.  Be ready.”  

Shave your pussy.  Touch to thoughts of being hurt then held again by someone so blond, herringbone tweed perfect who sees art in all your freckled southern gothic baby fat flaws.  

No idea when he’ll arrive except it’s too long a drive to be today — ten-hours.  Tomorrow? This week, certainly.  There’s desperation behind his bravado of clipped commands. 

Months pass.  The silver Karmaan Gia convertible never appears.  That tingle of power you savored, his palpable long distance need,  on the phone recedes —  perhaps he didn’t regret your abandonment at all.  The hole he left inside you is dug deeper by his second ghost.  

The time in which he’s twice disappeared, you fill with computer sadists, online doms, big city professionals.  Some come much farther than Miami to Pensacola to see you cry.  Pay to convey you to painful parties.  Decorate flesh with their anger and desire.  It is a comfort wearing crudely crafted marks in Pensacola bars returned from hotel suite sex shows and brownstone liaisons — returned to your small southern stars with metropolitan tear drop scars.  

Whiskey sours, jukebox drum licks, guitars and a voice that demands you rock the boys wafts over welts beneath a floorlength sundress — spaghetti straps and shooting stars.  Lock eyes with the planner neighbor, paying out at the bar.  All you see is the boy who used to live beneath this man, the one studying you, grinding his teeth.  Beckons you with a subtle nod.  Though you should retreat, legs carry you closer. 

Troy, his name you remember, and that unusual occupation, though you’ve met maybe three times, at most, in the artist’s apartment.  Just a few small overlaps of pleasantries before you climbed onto the lap of your host, and this one puts down an empty Corona to climbed a flight of stairs home.

Booze on his breath, his fingers trace the first cleft of you, exposed and quivering, a dimpled chin.  Tells you tonight it is time to go home with him.  

Takes you by the hand as your heart starts to race.  You cannot say no to going back to almost exactly the perfect place.  Climb stairs that trace memories so many nights to such blissful states.  Pass a door you won’t go in anymore on your way to his neighbor’s bed where he lays you on your back, lifts a dress to inspect the rest achingly slow — every stray mark in any furrow, crawling over your timorous form.   Turns you over on your skittish stomach and traces your goosebumped back towards the red raised evidence of your assignation with the most recent handsome maniac.  

Hear him gasp and finger each welt then trace some with his tongue.  He’ll ask for a detailed recitation of how it was done before he pulls you by your long hair up onto your knees.  Slams into you while you whimper please. 

After he’s silent as ever but holds you close, a new body you’ll cling to after it has hurt you almost as much as the one who made those stripes on your ass.  In the darkness and quiet, you finally work up the nerve to ask, “Do you ever hear from him — Matthew? He was supposed to come see me months ago, never showed.”  

Turns you over  with a different expression, human and hurt.  His hand covering half of his face as he manages.  “You don’t know?”

Shake your head, tears dripping as he strokes your sweaty, disheveled hair. 

“He killed himself.”

Words weigh down the sex soaked air.  Press you low into his crumpled sheets, a shadow that sobs while he continues to speak about how special he was, how talented, sweet.  Feel rabid heartbeats over you.  Turn to look him in the eye — two lovers, you realize, abandoned  by the very same guy, who died instead of returning to either of you.  

Because you ask him, “Did he tell you he was coming back too?

This nod makes you hold him tighter, this pain you suddenly share.  Both bisexuals, haunted.  You will feel the other one there, the ghost — almost see him in the haze when Troy chokes you with his belt pulled against your throat tight.  Sometimes you each tell your respective ghost stories when he turns out the lights.  

Sometimes they are goofy, other times grave. 

“I should have known by the jokes he made on the way to class —- dumb riffs he repeated  about driving right over the tree-covered cliffs.  He laughed when I’d call him dramatic, blamed  his artistic temperament, big city sardonic wit.” A ghost is composed of such details you can never forget.  

He didn’t drive off a cliff in Pensacola, hung from a rope in Miami alone.  Waited for him, ready, and might never have known until you were summoned by a lecherous older neighbor to a wrought iron bed above the place you once frolicked with one who is dead.  

The professional will hurt you in physical ways no amateur could.  He will make you strip for his friends.  Push you harder than he should. Yet you’ll feel a tenderness even tied to his bed that is less about this living man than a boy that is dead.  Artistic young fingers you feel on your pulsing flesh while the professional uses a body the other one left.  

You both identify as haunted.  Feel him with you inside of this bed.  It is why you submit to this living sadist to hold on to something tender and dead. 

Wake Me Up When I’m Famous

“Who the hell are all these people and what are they doing in our house?”

“All these people? It’s only five friends in my house. They wanted to meet you. They’ve read all your books and wanted to meet the famous Santiago. I met them at the bookstore when I was going over the information for your reading Saturday with the manager. You were suppose to have been there.”

“Wait! What reading? When? Where? First, why is this mob of strangers here?”

“They saw me with one of your posters and asked if I knew you. I said not only do I know you but we live together,” he continued. “They asked if I could introduce them to you. I told them yes to follow me here.”

“You invite a bunch of strangers here? You don’t know who these people are. They could be escapees from some psychopath support group. Maybe they’re Republicans or Christians out to kill me for my writing for all you know. Like the Sandman Muskey incident with the Iranian Muslims.”

“You mean Salman Rushdie?”

“Ya, him too.”

“That imagination of yours, running wild. You’re so dramatic. Why do you hide from the world? Fame isn’t like a tattoo, it doesn’t stick around for long.” 

“So now you want me to get a famous tattoo?”

“What? No! You know what I mean. Don’t start with that shit. Come in the living room and meet them. Three of them work at the bookstore. It could be good for book sales. Now put on some clothes. They brought a bottle of Johnny Black and they have some Cocaine. Hurry up!”

Damn it! My life has taken a turn down the wrong street. There was a time when people did all they could to ignore me. Now I’m some writer slob doing public readings to sell a few books. 

I don’t enjoy reading my own work, especially in public out loud. It scares the shit out of me. There’s times when I read something I don’t remember writing. It isn’t familiar to me at all. It’s a creepy feeling as though someone is channeling their thoughts through me.

And then I have to autograph the books as well.

“Can you sign it to my good friend Cecil? Always a pleasure to see you.”

“Sign it Desdemona you’ve ruined me for any other womman.” 

“Desdemona. Othello’s wife was named Desdemona,” I tell her.

“Who? Wait, you spelled my name wrong.” 

“Fuck!”

So I write what they ask me to  write for a couple of bucks and an afternoon at the bar with Chloe when we are done. She loves the attention and answers most of the questions people ask. I just sit there, smile and shake my head yes. People buy me drinks and tell me how much they enjoy my writing. Chloe doesn’t say a word about me getting drunk, she’s too busy being my agent. I think I pay her but I’m not sure how much.

I walk in the living room to meet my admirers. 

A horn from a semi shakes me awake from my dream. Good, it was just a nightmare. Back to sleep. Wake me up when I’m famous.

“You have very little to do with fame. You’re not the one who makes you famous, it’s the people who like what you do.”

Grub

Ben stirred from a deep sleep to a centipede scurrying up the slope of his cheek. The bug turned toward the entrance of Ben’s nose before retreating and tickling along his lips. Ben tried to move only to realize he was chained at the wrists and ankles. The vile thing crawled from his face to his ear, vanishing off the ledge of the rock altar which Ben lay on.

He glanced around. Dirt walls surrounded him, illuminated by a string of dim bulbs woven throughout the ceiling. It looked as if he was in an old mining shaft. A subway train approaching and then passing somewhere beyond the dirt shook debris from the enclosing.

A rickety wooden door opened. Several darkly-cloaked figures stood at the entry. Their faces were consumed by the shadows of their hoods. It took two of them to move a large stone funnel. A few others followed in tow, holding a cauldron of foaming vomit-like-slop. Though their shape appeared manlike beneath their robes, the group’s movements were non-human and rhythmically in unison.

“Where the hell am I!” he croaked with a desiccated throat. “Who are you people?” He strained to fight the chains but was too weak, discovering that fear was masking starvation.

“Answer me, damn it!” There were no words, only the sound of crawling from the darkness of their cloaks.

They circled him as did the crawling. Ben’s mind blanked with terror and his heart screamed from his chest. The captors held his head still while the funnel was aligned with his mouth. The tip was crammed down his throat. Ben tried crying out but it was corked by a rush of blood, teeth, and stone. The cauldron’s contents were emptied next. The clumpy liquid tasted like a warm meat and shit milkshake. The slush filled his gullet and then gushed from his nose before he passed out from over-consumption.

***

Ben awoke with his stomach turning and to the realization that he was not in a nightmare.

The crawling throbbed from behind the walls, followed by the subway train screeching in a tunnel nearby. Through the fear, he remembered taking the seven-thirty, five mornings a week to work for the last decade. Ben felt a bit of hope for escape surface in the sea of sickness tossing in his gut.

If I could only break these, he thought, tugging the bonds at his wrists. The action made Ben aware his limbs were discolored and swollen. The pain was fading, quelled by a hunger erupting in his stomach and surging throughout his body, consuming everything like a dead-star. Thoughts of his children, Laura and Rose, fought back the darkness from fully taking his mind.

The door flew open. The cloaked figures carried in the feeding apparatus and cauldron of muck.

“Why are you doing this?” He wanted to rattle on about how his family needed him, but they plugged his mouth with the funnel and began the dispensing.

***

The train moving behind the dirt woke him. He realized the chains were gone. His body had ballooned. Merging with his torso, neck, and head, Ben’s hands and arms were gone, rendered useless flattening stumps. His legs were fleshing together, left fat pegs that felt close to nonfunctional. The hunger raging in his stomach was suppressed by an overwhelming feeling that Ben no longer felt like himself. He searched his mind for something to hold on to.

Memories of Rose and Laura smiling and laughing, pierced like light into the void. If I could find the train tracks, he thought in that moment of clarity, I can follow them home. Ben rolled from the altar, throwing his lower half around to position what was left of his legs to the ground. He landed stumbling before wobbling his plump form toward the door.  He fell short and his blubbery body planted face first in the dirt. The hunger grew, devouring the thoughts of his girls, keeping Ben from acknowledging he was thirsting for the taste of the shit they were pouring into him.

The door opened. The cloaked ones entered as did the crawling that pulsed from their bodies. They turned him on his back. Ben shamefully opened his mouth ready for his daily dose.

***

Ben woke to the hunger tearing at his insides. He still lay in the dirt. His head and torso were now one round mass connecting to a long curled posterior. Though he had lost most control of his physical and mental self to the hunger, he had gained a new sight in his transformation. In his mind, hearing and feeling became panoramic images of his surroundings. The ability revealed the crawling to be trillions upon trillions of legs to arthropods moving within the dirt.

The hooded ones returned one after the other in their rhythmic synchronized steps. They were empty handed. Ben shouted for more muck from a tongueless and toothless hole where his voice once belonged. The sound came out like the whine of an insect in the dark. Their cloaks dropped, showing their true forms to be mass groupings of centipedes. They fell to the ground in clumps where a rising-tide of their brethren met them.

Ben found himself swept away by waves of centipedes through the door and down the hall. He was pulled into a massive chamber with a mountain of dirt erected at the center. Keeping Ben afloat, the ocean of centipedes filed into the chamber as if it were their synagogue.

Beyond the reach of his newly found sense, the train roared from deeper in the earth. The ground exploded with a colossal creature emerging. The beast flopped its corpulent frame onto the mountain of dirt and nestled into its throne.

The congregation of arthropods swelled beneath Ben, lifting and presenting him to their emperor. Claws the size of bulldozer scoops clamped him from the sides, relieving the centipedes of their offering. A pair of blank, black, eyes, disproportionately tinier than the beast’s head, stared atop a mass of fur. The creature snarled and probed Ben with a nose equipped with nineteen digits in the shape of tendrils, groping and enveloping Ben’s enlarged state. Ben’s last thought before being shoveled into the creature’s salivating maw was a craving for the slop.