Me and my Imp
My imp shakes on the floor like a go-go dancer—enthused by the knowledge that my eyes are on her. She’s quite shameless in dress and manner, though so it doesn’t really matter how little that little thing conceals. She’s all fuzzy. She’s also a gangly girl, clumsy and abundant in possession of that charm unique to one thriving in the failing. Like a babe, she shuffles out of rhythm—smiling, unselfconscious, in tune only with the truth of chemicals telling her synapses “yes, yes, yes”.
She doesn’t know her body’s symbolic while she proudly plays the fool. Since I found her hiding under my bed, she’s treated me as her divine. I’ve never been treated with such intoxicated adoration. High on hubris as I fear I have been, my recklessness may be blamed for the danger in which she finds herself.
Repressing my joy, I open the bag and say, “in”.
She makes the pouty lips. The mousy creature sees no difference between the public and the private. To her, play doesn’t signify. When play attracts the jealous gaze, however, it does so by expressing an abundance that could only exist as the product of some transgression. What more dangerous significance could be assigned? I’m left to wonder: how oh how am I to educate this imp? If I fail to do so, I fear she shall receive the unamused instruction of a Hillary.
At least my imp is obedient. Begrudgingly, she hops into my bag just before my Hillary returns from the restroom. The creature’s eyes glitter up at me from the dark recess, soft like my heart, and I give her a brief flash of that which she desires if only to show her that keeping secret is a strategy that pays.
“At what are you smiling?” my Hillary asks.
“N-nothing,” I, the criminal caught in the act, stammer before she snatches the bag from off my shoulder.
I yell and plead, but my Hillary throws open the bag and out tumble’s the imp, landing butt-side up. She giggles until she sees the look of horror that distorts my face, then she notices a nightmare in grouchy gray.
“AHH!” my imp yips, then scrambles to hide behind my calf.
“Give her here!” my Hillary demands.
I shake me head in refusal.
“Now!”
I know Hillary’s intentions and I fear what I know. Turning swiftly, I scoop the harmless mass of evil into my arms. It coos and rubs its head against me in an expression of boundless trust. I resolve to never betray her, no matter the cost.
Leaving Hillary to scream her threats, I run.
***
I bear the unbearable upon my shoulders. It is impossibly light for something so burdened by the resentments of a generation. Yes, she is small, but I’ve checked her from head to toe and found that she is quite puffy. Twiggy though she may be, she eats indulgently and only ever junk. She’s got a soft little belly into which my poking finger has disappeared. Her thighs touch like chonky cuts of ham whenever she sits. I sometimes call her my little chicken fat. She just smiles at me mischievously and keeps licking her sugar-sticky fingers.
A Hillary can’t see this fallibility that characterizes the charm of the imp. They’ve got it all twisted. The Hillarys don’t really look at the world. They read it.
One Hillary saw us eating fast food on a park bench. “Skinny bitch”, I heard her say as she walked by. Concerned that perhaps all the Hillarys of the world were in cahoots—for who knows what they get up to when they’re not pecking at us like hens—I wrapped up the uneaten portions and threw the imp over my shoulder. She bounced up and down as I made a run for it, her softness going plop plop plop.
Perhaps my Hilary was just extra vigilant. Perhaps I had at some point erred before she ripped the bag out of my hands and initiated the hunt. I suspect art is to be blamed. I should have kept the paintings I made of my imp turned against the wall. The creature, smiling so broadly in that compromising pose, was rendered too realistic. It was risky, but I had to depict her as she presents herself to me. I thought others would find her alien form equally compelling. She was eager to share. I was a fool to believe I could share my joy while keeping it secret.
But I did depict her, flirting with the idea of living unafraid. I should have known better, been more cautious, but the sights my imp made possible dazzled me and I forgot my wits. I didn’t see the difference between painting her and painting myself. Since meeting, my imp and I have been extensions of the same system: a brand new species the likes of which the world had never before seen.
That’s the trouble. I can’t become a new thing. I’ve got responsibilities to Hillary.
Then again, Hillary doesn’t put her novels down long enough to look at my paintings. Every now and then she pops her head in just to remind me that I am not to feel at ease. She doesn’t engage. If I were to make a landscapes out of words, fields of white dotted with black characters reading “tree” “sky” “grass” “scissors” “lovers”, she’d sing of my genius. What I do with my fleshy blobs of color is too childish to merit attention.
Maybe Hillary heard my imp howling when I pinned her down and subjected her to a relentless tickling. A noise is enough for an expert identifier. My imp was too unembarrassed. Hillary, the sharp hunter, heard her blissful call and knew her kind. Instantly she suspected I might be imbibing a surplus of enjoyment.
I was playing with fire. I had heard of imps prior to finding mine. Hilary would rave about them over dinner, claiming imps to be the embodiment of vanity. How vulgar. How arrogant to think that they possessed all that the Hillarys lacked.
How wrong my Hillary was. Imps possess nothing. Thriving in the failing: that’s what my imp gives like no one else. Wonky body nowhere near perfection and thus perfected. Willing to try despite. My girl. My boy. My boyish girl—what a horrible girl she is. She failed as a real girl, really, though I call her a her for her efforts. I applauded as she invented herself, pulling herself out the realm of phantoms, putting on her ill-fitting skirt and skipping about.
The challenge from the start was that words clung to my imp’s flesh like brands. Words like “bitch”. I scrubbed and scrubbed but the semiotics didn’t wash off.
I don’t think she understood the stakes. She giggled while I scrubbed, harder harder, and she arched her back.
“This isn’t for fun!” said I.
“I just can’t help myself!” said she. Ohhhh she broke my heart with her little noises.
We tried a different approach. She stretched out wide and I painted her tromp l’oleil, concealing her fruit behind a curtain. I tried in many colors until it stopped looking like mine or yours but hers and hers alone. A glowing oddity. It does so many tricks, I couldn’t even imagine. It accepts and emits, surrenders and grips.
I called the results of my work a bag, and I made my imp hide therein. So confident was I that I began taking her outside, letting the sun shine upon her puffy pink cheeks. I thought the disguise I invented would protect my imp, but Hillary always has a keen eye out for any new accessory. Hillary is always vigilant. She seethes and puffs out smoke.
Now I wonder if perhaps some of my imp’s hair did not fall outside the back and betray her presence. It was my imp’s wild hair that howled loudest. No one could control it. I tried, but the strands flew about madly as the tongues of ornery fire. As had the ancient fields in which her primordial line once ran free and giddy, it overgrew. How doggy she was, shedding all over. That hair was her way of laughing at me, of making us laugh together at the absurdity of our wants. My furry freak.
My lip trembled as I told her we needed to cut it, but she wouldn’t. It was her pride and joy. I could happily drown in those knots and kinks, but I wanted so to save her—turn down her volume. “Uh-uh” went her moon-being eyes—the sweet loon—and I set my mind to finding another way. But there wasn’t another way.
Oh how it all seems so perilous in retrospect! There were too many clues. Even my smile proved a clue. What matters is that Hilary found us out. Hilary will find our hideout. Hilary will make her will known.
***
My imp and I hid in an abandoned carnival. We slept in a boat parked within the love tunnel. The cold made the feeling of her warmth upon my feet all the more pleasant. We were comfy in our little den.
One night, I was jostled unpleasantly. At first I thought my imp was playing a game, but there she was, curled up at my feet as ever. By the time I gathered my wits, we sailed into a papier-mâché cavern all aglow with red. Red: the color of love. The color of violence.
Violently, we stopped, and I was thrust forward. I landed on top of my imp, who was as agiggle as always. Looking up, my eyes traced the stilettos, the garters, the corset, the bowtie, the pointy glasses behind which were the pointy eyes that glowed red with a lust for vengeance.
She took us.
In a dark place, I cry. Oh Hilary, am I, too, enlisted? Social contract gobbledygook? Hell is other people and what not? You have your cross to bear, and I have mine? The yin to your yang, I must? Must we be at odds? Must you hunt the imps?
Let’s leave her in the dark room, then, so she can curl up in a ball, whimper and die. What will you do as the light goes out? Smile as thus perishes the pathetic creature. Laugh at its neediness as it calls out my name? Sweep under the rug any evidence of that potentiality it represents? The gall of the gal, to let herself be pet. A wimp of an imp. Didn’t she get the memo?
“Don’t entertain! Don’t charm! We are enlisted!”
But no. The great un-enjoyer does not smile. This is what enrages me most. Not happily does the sharp face settle as it gazes at its prey. Hillary’s tongue pops balloons and ends parties at the slightest flick. Still Hilary calls my imp a bitch. A “bitch” alienated. Not the type you pet, but the type you beat.
One way or another, my Hilary had to beat her. Hilary has to beat all the imps—the bitches. She has to beat me. We are, all of us, enlisted.
After days of watching my imp turn limp from malnourishment, chicken fat all spent, I hear a noise. Snip snip go a shiny set of scissors. Hilary forces me to watch as they are unleashed upon the illicit thing’s fur.
Death to the species, and a just revenge, no?
My imp’s eyes well up with gooey tears the likes of which Hilary had never allowed drip down her face. Those scissors cut at my heart and my Hillary knows it.
“Well then cut mine off, too!” I yell. I can’t stand the idea of my imp being made bare against her will, but that cannot be helped. I’m a weak man. I can, however, help her feel less alone.
Taking an aluminum chair from out under a joyless table, I begin beating the thick glass I had allowed separate me from my dear friendliest of friends. I beat it till it breaks.
My Hillary rolls her eyes and throws the scissors away. Other Hillarys come to drag me to my cell, wherein I will be given less colors with which to paint. Perhaps it is a defeat, but not one without value. The warmth had been conveyed. My imp gives me a little smile as I gaze on. I give one back, and through it I try to say that she has been made all the more lovely. This is just another way of failing, and she fails so lovely.
Horror Sleaze Trash 