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He mumbled words like his mouth was
full of food. Phrases came out like wet dog snacks, the
jargon of a drunk. His breathe was hot against my face and
stunk of whiskey. Thousands of deep crevices and wrinkles
stared me down, a crow’s complexion reflected. He was an old
black man, at least what I could see of him, and his brillo
pad hair puffed like a blow fish. There was no escape for
me.
My one knee ached against the cement,
digging further into the bone, fresh blood trickled over my
shin like a slow leaking faucet. I looked at the man
desperately, but he took no pity upon me. A supercilious
stare, one of shame, of inquisition eyed me down. What did
this man want?
His hands were clammy and rough at the
same time, like a bucket of wet sand. Then he finally spoke,
and the trembles in his voice said that he was not here to
harm me.
“Don’t go in that store, boy,” he said
“But, I—“
“Shh! You do not go in that store, d’
ya hear me?” His lone eye peered into mine.
“All I want is a pet, nothing else, I
have the money for it, honest,” I said, nearly pleading.
But the old man’s grip grew tighter.
His hands pressed down on my shoulders with bony, razor
fingers. The tips bit into my body like hamster fangs, and
the force of him keeping me kneeled further opened the gash
on my knee.
I saw a dark pool of magenta sliding
through the cracks of the cobblestone, shimmering violet in
the lamp light. I tried to remove his hands from my
shoulders by attacking them with my nails, but he kept to me
like a blaze atop a pool of gasoline.
“Ya’ not undastandin’ me boy, if you go
in the place...bad things happen.”
“I...please sir,” I was at his fingers
again, but they were glued to my shirt.
“Boy, don’t ya’ undastand English?”
His face met mine now, cracked, thick
lipped. He came to my ear lobe and exhaled hot air into it,
telling me to never go in that store. It tickled for a
moment, and then went on to be a nuisance.
“If you buy something in there boy, it
will stay with you forever, trust me,” He was beaded with
sweat, giving it a dull shine.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Say you won’t go in that store! Say
it!”
I swallowed hard, my throat scratchy
from thirst, “I-”
“You won’t go!”
And at that last statement he was gone.
As the blood returned to my arms, I became dizzy. A thin
black cloud of confusion fogged my judgment, and using that
as my fulcrum of an excuse, I walked to the store he
desperately did not want me to enter.
When I came to the door, I brushed off
the blood which had begun to stick to my pant leg. The wound
sucked back like removing a cap from an air tight jar. A hot
spike initiated as my skin parted from the kneecap. The dust
bowl street was clear, so I weaseled my way to the window. I
saw nothing though, as if a smoke machine had been overused,
shooting its white plumes in mass production to block the
contents within under a white haze.
The street was visually pitch black
aside from the two lamp posts on either corner which lit a
vicinity of three square feet. No light made it to the
middle, where I stood was as dark as lighting coals. I saw
the sign then as my low eyes came back, it read,
“Itapallu’s.”
I pushed the handle, which met my hand
coldly, and peeked in with hindrance. The shop was indeed
foggy, smelled of stale cat piss and frankincense, two odors
that did not belong in the same room together. The floor
was soggy as my foot tested it. At that moment my legs
decided not to listen to my brain, they remained as stiff as
the Tin Man after a rain fall, as stubborn as a frightened
cat hiding under a bed.
My blood warmed, something in here
naturally frightened me. Mother Nature had definitely found
a makeshift home in this shop. Then silence, absolute and
virulent, all I could hear was the movements of things I
could not see. Ticks commenced above my head, scratching
initiated to the left of me, cooing from the back of the
store.
My own breathing was a catapulting
wail. Mice could have been heard scuttling across the spongy
floor. You could have heard grass growing. The tranquility
was as dead and still as a graveyard at noon. I squinted to
try and get a better view through the haze, as best as my
low green eyes could.
I moved my bad knee first and a blaze
of pain sailed up leg, to my arms and then my entire body,
felt like fishing hooks dragged across my skin. I dug my
teeth far into my bottom lip so not to scream, still a tad
bit dizzy from the man’s earlier rant.
My blood tasted like rusty water as I
tore my lip in the heat of anxiety. I should have run, but
my brother Ivan’s image kept repeating like a bad film in my
head. His loneliness and acquiescence, the worthless life
and the constant pissing and shitting in the bed, I saw my
momma heaped in the hot excrements, and the ignorance of the
dedication to his ailing body.
That made me think clear again, and as
I hobbled around on one foot, fishing my hand around for
something to lean against, I found a near by wall and
grabbed for it. Little did I know I hit the switch for the
ceiling fan. Warm wind swished around me, reminded me of
muggy summer nights in the south before my family moved to
New York City. When the smoke backed away into the far
recesses of the store, my eyes gaped at the endlessly
colorful sights in front of me.
At the same time, as if I had opened a
curtain to begin a show, a cacophony of chirps and coo’s
ricocheted against the walls in the shop like an evil
cadence. Sinfully black crows flew over head, as big as
vultures, and did a u-turn to sit back on their posts that
looked like old human bone. Large silver cages spanned the
walls, mammalian growls and reptilian hisses formed a stew
of music that I could not understand. Rodents ran across the
floor and slammed into one another, leggy insects the size
of my palm stomped pompously behind them.
Lush vinery spread across the walls
like they do on houses in warm climates. Grapevine entwined
in itself on the ceiling, each one veined with a glowing
scarlet stream like a blood vessel. The pulsed and pumped as
if they were full of life, like an asthma attack
A lattice of dark branches covered
every wall, and out of each came an ambrosial smelling slew
of maple leaves. The color of the rainbow was inside this
room, and hybrid species of plants, animals, perused the
lucid sections of grass that were planted into the
floorboards.
Itapallu’s shop was truly the best
illusion I had ever seen. The Amazon was certainly within. I
began to walk in further, dodged snakes longer than most
belts and black shinning creatures with legs longer than
most adult fingers.
The red and green vines throbbed above
me, seemed to beat faster and harder than my own heart as I
walked into the. My ears fluttered along with it. Drums
commenced then, low and feeble at first, but with each
creeping step, they became louder and more violent.
The walls vibrated as the drumming cued
chants, the floor quaking. I looked around for answers, and
the vines above transcended into true pulsing vessels. The
spiral of leaves and tree branches grew exponentially around
the walls, meeting the vessels of greenery above, forming
one giant plant.
Fear consumed my mind and ate it like
dessert. I could not control my bladder then, and as urine
ran down my leg like a smelly yellow bath, I closed my eyes
to rid the shrill of sight and sound from my mind. When I
opened them, a man stood before me dressed in traditional
Amerindian gear.
A feather cap hung low over his ears,
his hair sacral long and raven black. His skin was the color
of mint almond, his perpetual frown that of a history of
colonization and menacing. He conveyed no emotion to me,
just your everyday compliance to his new customer. He was a
Quecha.
A brilliancy of war gear covered his
entire body as if he was ready to spar. At each joint, from
the shoulders to the elbow and to the knee, a thin patch of
brown leather was stitched, as if to cushion them when in a
resting position.
He walked away from me without words,
his bare feet sucking at the wet floor like a bed of rotten
cooked spinach, then turned around and raised his big hand.
“I...Itapallu,” he said.
“…hello, I’m Sam,” I managed to say.
“You come here for pet, no?”
“Yes.”
“And you want...different kind of pet,
I know this. Itapallu’s accent was irrevocably heavy, might
as well been his natural patois.
“How did you—”
He cut me off with a wet grunt.
Itapallu’s giant hand came up like a
stop sign again, ordering me to hush. He did not speak, just
heaved his chest slowly back and forth. As my mind swirled
from the silence, so did everything else in the shop. We all
fell into the mouth of quietude. At his command, the insects
above my head stopped their bizarre movements. Itapallu’s
face stayed glued to the ceiling.
The vines lit the room up with a coil
of pale crimson and celadon light. His eyes shone in the
projection above, the blackest orbs, opaque marbles of
creativity looking up at a sky of blood and nature. He began
humming then, an unnatural coo harmful to my American ears.
Suddenly words flew from his mouth
weightlessly, a rasp that singed my brain, caroming through
the shop to make the ceiling truly pump with life. The
unnatural beating life grew effortlessly once more, placate
with onyx creatures.
When he hit the final note as sour as a
bag of lemon juice left out in the sun, my ears bled a fat
red worm, which trailed down my neck tepidly. His big hand
reached into the greenery, punching the vines as if to break
open a treasure chest.
When hi hand returned, an obscene
creature was wrapped around his wrist, nibbling his finger
tips with rigid fangs. My eyes lit fervidly. The creature’s
length did nothing to supersede its giant, obsidian fangs.
The wet mouth sucking at the small drops of blood from
Itapallu was insatiable, like a newborn to a mother’s milky
nipple.
Flat portions of gray body tissue kept
scaly black body compartments together like the fascia on
human muscle. And as the bug elongated down its caretaker’s
arm, its length seemed to never end.
The legs resembled that of a
caterpillar faceted with curved claws, accentuating in the
lime light of the room. Vice grips like scorpion claws were
held up by two tiny arms. Golden pincers sparkled against
its dark mattered verdure.
Itapallu cupped this monster in his
palms, proffered it to me and said one word, “Manchakuy.”
The enunciation was instantaneously ominous, gooseflesh
trampled across my limbs.
“Manchakuy eat, you feed Manchakuy,” he
said.
<hr>
I knocked on the door to my
tenement and momma greeted me in her cooking apron, stained
with greasy fingerprints. She kissed me on the cheek, and
rubbed her wet lips across my dry face as she always did.
The box that held Manchakuy was trembling in my grip.
“What’s this you got, Sammy?” She
asked, leaning into me.
“Momma...now please don’t be scared,
you know I had been wanting a new pet. So I bought this from
that store owned by the Qari”
Momma scrunched her caterpillar
eyebrows, batted her hazel eyes in contempt “you did what?
Don’t you know that store is for people who are into weird
things? We ain’t that type o’ family.”
“I know momma, it’s just with Ivan
sick, I figured this thing could make us some big
bucks...kinda like sideshow freaks?”
She took the cage from me abruptly,
“now let momma see what ya’ got then.”
Her hands went for the cage, toyed with
the latch until it unlocked, and she pressed the nodule to
open the latch. I tell you that I should have never let her
do it. As her hand felt the inside of the box, my momma’s
eyes crossed to the inside of her fat, cherubic face. She
let out a shriek that I had never heard before, like a sound
she had been saving, embedded at the bottom of her throat,
stored away for unfathomable pain.
She pulled her arm out the box, flailed
it like the men who direct airplanes to runways with glowing
orange sticks. I saw Manchakuy then, gnawing her hand,
stabbing my mother with his thousands of up curved claws,
clinging to her fingers with its blackened fangs, the crab
vices steadfastly held on her frail wrist.
Momma swung herself around in many
directions trying to break the hold of my new beast. Blood
exploded from the bite as if a piece of dynamite blew up in
her hand. It streaked the walls and colored the floor in a
dull crimson. The creature made awful gurgling noises as if
it was choking.
When Manchakuy finally decided that
enough was enough, he jumped off my momma and scuttled back
into its cage, tiny tracts of blood imbedded on our white
kitchen table. Momma’s pointer finger was severed at the
knuckle, the stump glossed with blood and the moonshine of
exposed bone. Blood crisscrossed her arm like bines.
She ran to the sink, helplessly
ranting, and flushed the wound with tap water. I proffered
her a rag, albeit her good hand had been caught by a nasty
tremor and could barely take it. I went back to Manchakuy’s
cage and sealed it, and he began to tick, the kind I heard
at the store, like grandfather clocks. I found a piece of
momma’s finger nail rimmed in slimy red on the floor, picked
it up with and then dropped the red half moon in the cage,
not knowing what came over me.
Momma didn’t talk to me for the rest of
the day, no matter how much I pleaded. When pa’ came home
that night, I knew I was in for it, I would be beaten until
the cows came home. Bolting red welts on my ass were my
destiny, and I knew that nothing I’d say would lead him to
do otherwise.
But as momma explained the story over
dinner, her finger still suffusing blood onto many rags and
cloths, pa’ was unnerved by the situation. All he conveyed,
in a stare with his hypnotizing icy eyes, was that he would
take my pet back to the store.
I begged him to let me keep it, that I
would make money with it, lots and lots of money to help
with Ivan’s medical expenses, and momma’s new one as well. I
swore I’d make everything right, beseeching for another
chance.
As the words slipped from my stupid
mouth, he reached over the table and smashed me square in
the jaw with the side of his fist. An immediate tepid sludge
entered my mouth as my cheek fell apart on the inside.
“Don’t give me no fuckin’ lick boy,”
Pa’ said.
I couldn’t say anything, or I’d risk
another punch.
“If that thing is not gone by the
morning, I will kill it myself. What was you thinkin’ when
you bought that? Look at your momma’s hand!”
I had no choice but to pretend to
listen, and as the tears rolled over my cheeks, burning
every step of the way down the raw print of his fist, pa’
lifted my chin and told me that “boys don’t cry.”
<hr>
I never got rid of Manchakuy; rather I
hid him in the cellar of our tenement, next to the old
boiler that made clenching noises like a knife scratching
along the surface of a car, or like teeth chewing on
hundreds of staples, when in the process of heating.
I built Manchakuy a home out of chicken
wire and a lot of old bicycle chains. I used the door from
his original cage and fastened it to the new wiring. Now he
was able to exercise his many, many creepy legs whenever
necessary.
He made rat-a-tat-tat sounds like they
were something nice, something melodic as I slipped him into
his new home. But all those clicks only boosted my annoyance
towards him, reminding me of my momma’s finger. He did not
stop, as if his purpose was to drill into my ear drums and
let my equilibrium spill out its contents to the atmosphere.
Then I remembered what the old Qari had
told me about feeding this creature, so I knew I had to do
just that. Little by little, I spread the word of my one of
a kind insect. And when I began to share my story of the old
Indian shop, the kids began flocking in.
Everyone came to see it but Sarah
Brightman, the one who I wanted there the most. Word spread
like wildflowers, of its snake scale body, of his assortment
of thin legs, giant chelipeds and unchangeable eyes. I
racked in a dollar a viewing, most coming back five or six
more times.
I snuck people in and out of the back
room of the cellar, allowing my parents to keep their
ignorance, and when they paid the fee to see it, they became
flabbergasted at the grotesque display of insect. But soon
Manchakuy grew more vicious to his constant visitors,
hissing and attacking the cage, translating his hunger into
anger. The newest viewers were required to bring food.
Slabs of old liver, chop meat, and raw
chicken is what they offered, but the fastidious glare from
its eyes told me that nothing was tastier than my momma’s
finger, than human flavor.
After some time my jig was up. Sarah
had told momma what I was up to, said that I had been
pilfering money from people and making them bring fetid meat
to the cellar. With those words momma found me and Manchakuy
hanging out. She gasped, cursed the lord’s name and stood
fixated on the teeny and ravenous bubbles that fell from its
mouth as he saw her. She looked away from him as she dragged
me out of the basement, slapped me a good one and closed the
door.
Momma took every penny I had made from
my little circus of horror. Forty dollars flew out of my
bedroom like I had never earned it. Why? I asked her, but
received no answer. If Ivan wasn’t a continually sleeping
cripple, he would have been proud of me.
As I lay helplessly alone in my
bedroom, punished from the lies to my parents of getting rid
of the bug, my rump aching from belt buckle marks, I did not
want my parents in my life anymore. I could not see it fit
them controlling my payments. I only wanted to make money
for my poor, vegetable brother!
As I laid down, contemplating how to
not let my parents kill my creature, I heard Manchakuy
through the rusted pipes behind my paper thin walls. He
whined like a newborn through the sagging floor boards, and
ultimately into my ear drums again. At first a low whimper,
like a dog suffering separation anxiety, but after a while
it transcended into a deep, grueling tick-tock of his teeth
and the rat-a-tat-tat of his legs and pincers.
My head, my sanity, all of it began
halting, transforming, blending into one twisted psychosis.
His noises reverberated all around me, in the shower and in
the living room. They were relentless. They began to
disintegrate my will. Then came night sweats, the pissing in
my bed, the exasperating insomnia, and the blue black bags
beneath my eyes. I began to think of myself as a prisoner of
noises, until I learned I had become a slave to the clicks
and clacks.
<hr>
On the night I gave into Manchakuy’s
nefarious coo, Sarah Brightman came into my mind. My head
imploded, and all rational decisions became futile. I wanted
to get back at her for the sly thing she had done, forcing
me to listen to the tick-tocks, the dissonant whines, the
gurgling of its belly.
Since my stream of money was no longer
flowing, I had to do something to shut those noises up. Why
was I the only one who could hear them? I found her one day
at school and cajoled her into coming back to my cellar.
“And where is it now?” she asked as we
sat under the awning of our school, hot breezes cooling
within our shadows.
“Pa’ killed it,” I lied, “So won’t you
please help me out and clean the space with me since momma
can’t with her bad finger and all?”
She complied, told me that I should
have been ashamed for having that ugly insect in the first
place. I could not stand one more night of his cries, they
were worse than the sounds that the cranking boiler made,
worse than dull blades scooping out the soft spot behind
your ears. Nothing could have compared to its continual
Chinese water torture. It had to be stopped, to be fed!
I finally decided that Manchakuy would
in fact eat, and eat well. And since Sarah had done me
wrong, she would be on the menu. We entered the cellar,
passed a blockade of dangling broken cob webs, and opened
the old wooden door to the boiler room.
For everything she had done to me, for
the tattle tale that she was, for the Benedict Arnold of my
life, she was going to get hers. I knew that at two p.m.
everyday, Manchakuy would be on the ceiling, trying to live
the life he once did in the pulsing vines. Then I led Sarah
to the cage, the light so minimal you had to squint for
sight. I inched her forward, to which she took my hand.
“I’m nervous,” she said shakily.
The touch of Sarah’s little pale hand
almost coaxed me to turn her around and allow escape. But
those thoughts halted as the fuzzy bubble static that would
not leave me alone commenced.
“Just go on in,” I said.
My ears told me exactly where the beast
was, wriggling his scaly body above our heads, muttering the
low pitch sounds of crickets. As I opened the makeshift
door, I saw Manchakuy’s shadow trail down the wall, his many
legs like rattle snakes against the cold cement. Sarah
looked back at me with a confused sprawl of expression on
her young face. She heard it too.
“I’m sorry,” I told her.
She thrust face first into the wall as
I kicked her in the spine. When the door to the cage slammed
shut, it liberated me, sufficed the vengeance she forced me
to take upon her. Manchakuy was starved, hadn’t eaten in
weeks and it ascended her fallen body like a boa constrictor
wraps prey.
She yelled for help, whacked the
extending beast with her tiny hands. But Manchakuy grew, his
body elongated from the middle, as if this newest brand of
food would take time and power to kill. I turned the light
on to see Sarah’s mouth gawked open screaming and Manchakuy
shoving two black cuspids into the sides of her cheeks.
Brilliant blood bulleted from her
spilt face, slapped onto the floor of the basement. Her
screams waned and then fell to a low gurgle. The insect
scraped half of its body down her throat, his backside
sticking out her mouth like a bouquet.
When he pulled himself out, a slurping
sound emitted and Sarah convulsed viciously, as if under a
sporadic, brain rupturing seizure. Following was its
cheliped vice grips holding her heart. The deeply veined
apex muscle dribbled out love gore as the beast bit into it.
The smell of a dying girl and of bowels
careened in the cellar, but not for long. Manchakuy snaked
around on the other side of the cage, surrounded his entire
dinner with his black and incalculably leggy body. Its eyes
gestured that he was still hungry, still needing more. With
a yawning mouth as deep and wide to fit a watermelon, he
gripped the girl’s hair and pulled her into his vortex of
voracity. Sarah’s head swallowed effortlessly, but her torso
took a bit of crunching to squeeze in, the whipping crack of
shoulder blades was the finale, Sarah was gone.
<hr>
Even as I left the basement that day,
Manchakuy began to form his signature chorus of erratic
clacks. The same sounds that found their way up the walls
and into my bedroom, worming itself into my ear drum, making
me cower to him. I had to give in yet again. It was the only
way to shut it up.
I didn’t know that I had it in me, but
as I poured the last of the crushed rat poison into the
glass pitcher of tea that momma made every morning, I was
overcome with elation. When dinner was served that night, I
made sure that the tea was poured and watched my parents sip
their drink with questionable glances.
After a while, momma said she did not
feel good and wanted to rest on the couch. As she stood, her
gait already failing, she clasped her fingers to her chest
and fell on the floor. Sticky white froth erupted from her
mouth, spilled down the sides, as her body beat against the
wood, nails ripping into the wood floors. Pa’ ran to her
aide, and as I tripped him with my outstretched leg, he too
fell to the floor in a fashion of cardiac arrest.
I started off by dragging momma by her
apron and her ridiculously long, shit brown hair. She was
heavy, her hips as wide as a sedan as I could barely get her
though the doorway. I hauled her into hallway and down the
stairs. Her head hit every old jutting stair as we
descended. A pulpous grime of her life splattered as we kept
on.
I pulled momma into the dark basement,
dank with the heaves of Manchakuy. His eyes lit like black
fires and he drooled in sludgy rivulets. I opened the gate
and offered him my mother, to which he took selfishly,
snaked his way to her and began chomping into her neck like
a bear on salmon.
Momma was devoured instantaneously
as its jaws gaped and inhaled her body like a vacuum does to
dust.I made my way out of the pen, frightened, angry that I
ever thought this sideshow freak would make me money to help
Ivan, to keep my family happy.
I trudged my way back up to pa’ and
pulled him toward the door, hearing the clicks over and
over. Pa’ was light thankfully, twig thin. His body twisted
down the stairs like a rag doll. I shoved him into the cage,
and as momma’s foot was sucked into Manchakuy’s gullet, he
slithered around and snapped my pa’s neck with his up curved
claws, the split of bone and skin ricocheted against the
basement walls.
<hr>
After momma and pa’s demise, I cleaned
the stairwell of their mingled blood. I went into Ivan’s
room when I finished, watched the red orange sun crawl into
its bed of our hemisphere, enjoyed the dying rays through
the window and hoped that the clicking would stop. But even
the beeping of Ivan’s feeding tube did not hinder the sounds
stretching from the basement.
I ran outside like a tornado was
heading in my direction, did not stop even as I bumped into
a slew of people on the way back to Essex street. Night was
showing its lead violet face, and the people were all out,
huddling together to begin dinner and then sing until dawn.
I came to the old block where the old
Qari’s shop was. But it was gone. My mind fell down a spiral
of no return, like a funnel in the ocean that sucks up
boats. I could not help but to drown in the realization that
Manchakuy would be mine forever. The clicks and clacks, the
scratching claws like finger nails across a chalk board, the
sodden jaws. He’d be stuck with me for as long as I live.
“Whatever you buy from that shop never
leaves you,” the black hobo with said in between two dying
buildings.
“But...I...”
“But nothin’ boy,” he held his hand up,
“do you wanna know how I lost this?” He pointed to a patch
covering one of his eyes.
“I just want to get rid of it! It is
cursed.”
“Of course it is. That is why I tell
everyone not to go in there. That shop is the very reason my
eye is gone.”
“How?” I asked him, my curiosity
spanning.
The man came out of the shadows. The
patch on his eye was torn, hung on for dear life on a craggy
string. He took it off his head revealing the crusted socket
like the color of spoiled cheese. It oozed with infection
and looked nearly fresh as a white slimy tear slugged down
his cheek.
“I had seen a many youngen’s come and
go into that store, with some never makin’ it back out,
others vanished along with the damned thing. Like you not
seein it now right? But one thing is for certain, there
ain’t no real shit going on in there.”
I nodded, had no words to say.
“How could a store be there one day and
than not the next? You undastand?”
“Yes...” my head had begun the utmost
twist, ready to roll off my body.
“So then you know what I did sonny boy?
I went in there myself, talked to the big crazy Indian dude
and told him to get outta the neighborhood.”
“Okay...” I said, wondering where his
story was going.
“And you know what the motherfucker did
to me? He grabbed me by the neck, snatched out my eye with
his long finger nails and crushed it to mashed potatoes
right in front me.”
“I think I’m going to be sick.”
“This is why I try to stop all the kids
wantin’ to know what that place is all about. Now you have
one of his creatures and you are part of his circle of
madness.”
He gripped my shoulders and shook me
ferociously and then backed into the recesses of the
buildings and into the pit of shadows. I sped back home, the
ticks still an onslaught to my sanity. When I got in, the
insect’s bangs and clangs had already begun working its way
back into my head. I knew what had to be done.
<hr>
Even now I pray for the ticks to fade
away, to shut up, anything to alleviate the pressure that is
building inside me as each day passes. My days have been
tormenting, slaving to the symphony of Manchakuy’s begging.
That creature is my personal incubus, and now I must give
into it.
I still hear the light scratches, the
aggression in its walk, the gluttony. It is probably trying
to eat the very cage that I built for him, wanting to come
out and eat me. Oh god, the cage, no! He can’t eat the cage.
I must feed him! I must give him meat...I must give
him...Ivan!
My crippled brother looks calm now,
dreaming his endless dream, his legs a permanent pile of
useless sticks. Perhaps I could give Manchakuy just one,
only one? I don’t think Ivan would mind, after all he
doesn’t need them anyway.
But wait, haven’t I learned my lesson?
One leg would not last long; I must give him all of Ivan.
It’s the only way end those noises!
Turns out Ivan is not so heavy, his
limp body is like carrying a bag of bones. Here is Manchakuy
now, hungry as ever, his scaly body still shuddering at the
smell of food, his fangs a faint glimmer in this low
basement light, its eyes still a pair of hungry black holes.
Ivan is being sucked up now and does
not look happy. His eyes are open and they are glazed with
pain, but I do not care.
Oh it still begs! My meatless brother
did not suffice the endless appetite, the never ending
churning of his stomach juices. I kneel now before it,
imploring him to stop. But he is still clicking away his
terrible symphony, tapping against the metal wiring, grazing
along the walls with those claws like the sounds of a
million stilettos, whispering his needs in bug jargon. So
this is it, the final proffering.
I am opening the cage now and walking
in, Manchakuy is ugly as ever, the rarest creature I have
ever seen, my side show freak, the thing that was supposed
to bring me money, and now I am his dinner.
But at least it does not hurt. The
light is quickly fading, the clicks have finally ceased. I
can’t wait until I hear nothing, can’t wait to see nothing,
exist as nothing. Manchakuy and I will be together forever,
just like the old hobo said. |
