Coastal Feed Stall, Land Whale Finishing Lot, Z-Positive
Becky was beautiful from every angle, but especially from behind when she brushed her hair before the mirror.
The eaters were echoing downstairs: a debate over Fractured Prune and Dunkin’ doughnuts, bacon fat levels and the moisture content of the coleslaw…
Brit’s inner siren sang like a broken computer trying to ring like a church bell.
‘God, she is beautiful—thank you. I might get religion on her account…’
The ringing in his inner ears became so loud it drowned out his internal muse of a prayer, actually shut down the inner concourse of thought.
‘Something is wrong. I feel wrong, of a sudden wrong for this place—am I even a part of this human race?’
Brit was drawn like a magnet to Becky’s beautiful form. Walking into the bathroom he saw her goddess form of a slight figure-8, almost athletic, almost buxom, perfect as she stood apparently in a trance before the mirror.
He saw her reflections before she saw him, for he stepped from an angle left to right.
She had three reflections, her to the left, an older version of her to her right and another…
‘What?’
Slack-jawed, Brit stepped into view behind Becky, just off to her right and saw that the rightmost figure was an elderly version of Becky: still beautiful, still Becky, but thin with graceful age, hard in the face with lines of care and worry, steely in the crow-footed eyes now gray…
All three of them looked past soft human Becky, who shuddered in the mirror.
Becky’s most youthful reflection to the left, ruby lips pursed like a may bud, open blinking her silvery eyes and then hid her face behind her hand, a willowy hand now wet with a running tear.
Still beautiful, but disturbingly stern, middle aged Becky, looked into Brit with steely eyes and spoke with a steel-lipped mouth, spoke words he could not hear through the ringing din in his head, spoke to him, not to Becky, but past her quivering body.
His mouth gaped and his eyes opened in a question as liquid as years and as insipid as all baby fears.
The old, thin-lipped, gray-eyed Becky looked with utmost wintry cold into his soul and spoke an unheard word that could be read on on her narrow lips, “Go!”
‘What?’
“Go!” howled the steely matron and the frigid crone into his ringing head like it was an open podium. He could hear, hear in an echoing over-sound of shuddering proportions.
‘Maybe they put something in the beer? This is way messed up. Get it together, Brit: get...it...together.’
“Go!” they howled like two indicting bitches of winter, cutting through the ringing in his mind.
He halted, for Becky was now bending to the sink and throwing up into it while the beautiful young version of her now pressed her hands to her ears and closed her eyes gushing with tears.
“She is ours” they moaned, their voices slightly out of time with one another, one full of confidence, one worn with a craggy permanence.
He clenched his jaw in stubborn disbelief, wanting to put this illusion from him.
“She is not for you,” they oathed, holding up their open hands within which a wisp of gray cloud eddied in each palm.
“You are not real,” he snarled.
Becky puked in the sink as her body shook and the three reflections, somehow still reflecting there with only the top of her red-dressed locks, now all held hands, the young one on the left blowing him a kiss with her right hand and the old one on the right clenching her liver-spotted hand into a fist, as they all howled like a hollow autumn wind, “She is us!”
The mirror burst outward, showering Becky with glass and she pulled away from the sink and collapsed into a sitting position, acing him, gasping up at him with disbelief welling in her eyes, still beautiful with vomit staining her fruitful breasts and besmirching her perfect chin.
Disbelief, tinged with anger flamed across her face, “What the hell, Brit?!”
“Becky?”
“Brit, when I said rape, I meant it playfully. What kind of sicko are you—throat fuck me until I puke and...what the hell..’” as she looked at the glass covering her hair and thighs, from between which she bled slightly as if she had just lost her virginity… “You dry fucked me and smashed my head into the mirror—Get the fuck out! Out, asshole—out!”
‘This cannot be happening.’
“Motherfucker, piece-of-rapist shit!”
Becky was now standing, bloody and vomit covered, festooned with shattered glass in a towering rage.
“Becky,” he pleaded, with his hands up, as she snarled like a she-devil, looked about, saw her smartphone, picked it up and screamed into it, “Rape—I’ve been raped and beaten by Brit Johnson at the Swan Sea on 58th Street! He’s a dangerous man—please, help me!”
The damned phone actually began calling the cops and repeating the crazy stuff she had said—
“That is even an app? Am I imagining—is this acid or something?”
“He’s killing me—rammed my head through the mirror—help, help, oh My God—Dad!”
People were trundling up the stairs like two legged livestock.
‘Holy shit!’
Brit, half hoping this was a dream, and determined not to get arrested or beaten even in a dream, turned for the door, saw two big squishy eater brothers or cousins and Dad huffing and puffing as the largest one ripped open the sliding glass door with one hand and stood holding a two foot long two-pronged grilling fork in his hand.
“What the fuck!” screamed the big fatty.
‘Oh, hell no—I’m not going out like this.’
wanting to get by these goons so he could talk sense to the cops, Brit launched his 185 pounds and six feet and one inch, at this mounded up piece of super-heavyweight lard, and hit him in the pelvis with a front push kick. The effect was a lot worse than he would have thought. The man’s balance was so off that he hurdled backward, all 400 pounds of him, crashed through the deck railing—
‘Oh shit!’ he startled inside as the ringing in his ears wailed like an electric tempest and the fat bastard fell twenty feet to the concrete sidewalk below to a sickening crunch, screams of men and women and children, and Dad—damned Dad was having a heart attack, stroking out not three feet from him!
‘Just like that? My life is over—like that? I’m a killer—my semen is inside of her—I’m done.’
The other big eater was babbling and staggering and breaking out into a sweat and crumpled into a plastic chair that melted like liquid under him.
Becky was screaming and a heavy dollar store plate shattered on the back of his head and he turned and saw her raging there—and she stopped, looked into his eyes, and saw something there that squashed her rage, a rage that turned into fear, the trembling fear of a toddler girl that has seen something far beyond her emotional threshold.
Becky swooned, falling quietly to the floor as all hell broke out below and men and women screamed and cried and blubbered and called the police, the police, the police, more police…
Brit thundered down the stairs and no one barred his way, knots of eaters—some still with unchewed food in their open mouths—looked up sheepishly at him like giant fat Japs at a miniature Godzilla.
