Deadra Acosta

July 4 20XX

Pit of Mine

LAZER SNAKE

You’d probably be pretty bored to hear me talk about cutting myself again, or how eating feels like eating shit, or my ugly extended family. You’re probably pretty bored watching me read Sylvia Plath quotes in the mirror, me.

I went back to the house and fetched his old Lazer Snake hoodie. It was hardened into the floor in the animal room. That’s where we kept the fish tank long after the family died, and it came to scum until the water molded solid and cancer-black in my best dreams. And the hamster cage quivered in disabled silence. I see the lizard’s terrarium quake like the disintegrated pile of scales, it left behind.

I took the memories from my head, lit them like incense, huffed the fumes like duster, so now only the burnt offerings I keep in mind. So now death is the key to fungal immortality, the image of expiration cemented squarely in the center as a lifelike, undying picture. Like the truth inside standing torture, as extended pain and monotony, the dead-alive things the brain will hoard out of lack of any discipline will not be avoided, just like the brutality in all four corners of the body—incapable of sleeping, sitting, fucking, regretting.

Whoring out my emotions, I’m thinning out in your oversized sweatshirt, Daddy, just like if I’d worn it when I was a little girl. Just like if you’d given it to me on a day where there was nothing but your self-sacrifice and my ineptitude, my animal weakness pissing on the floor. And now I’m lying on my back, walking my eyes from the wood paneling of my basement, upwards to the shredded ceiling tiles flaking away like old white women’s skin. And I hope I never have to live that long just so I can become that.

My sight inside, my peripheral cave gives me a context. It is the feeling of rocking shut as a seashell on this filthy sponge, rising the skin at my joints into roadkill, feral rash—fungal immortality before floral carpet. When and if I die, it’s a matter of if. If not, I’ll stay in this dirty, broken sweatshirt, worn by essential avoidance for all history, forever the product of unwashed stains and ineptitude. I used to live here, I tell the world, not sorry at all I’m lying, knowing that truth is whatever the fuck you tell.

Bronson matters even though he doesn’t, really. It felt nice to see him today, in all honesty, and he offered to take me somewhere after dinner, but I didn’t do anything. There is no reason, which is the truth I tell. Maybe it’s just easier that way. Then, when I stuck the house key in the door, when I even just got on the road and knew I was coming here by the feeling on my face, I knew it was gonna happen this way, even when I had no cause, not even a real desire.

I don’t wanna fuck you, somebody said once. I didn’t. Those were the last words in the sequence, and it never came up again. There, sometime, it was probably cleaner than this, and I didn’t mention all the lights were off. And I didn’t mention they cut the electricity last month, and my princess mirror no longer turns on when I stand up and go in that room, look at the brown stains left from the blood in my legs from over a month ago now.

I lived here then, but it isn’t even me. It isn’t mine, this thing, this tiara of dog teeth and fragments from the handrail on the stairs. It still wasn’t fixed six-fucking-years later! And the nail still sticks out on the same spot on the steps, the loudest fucking steps you’ll ever take, knowing up and down you can disappear into obsolescence in both directions. I am torn apart in both directions—past and present—into the shape of a daughter in a darkness not even hers.

I inherited nothing when he sagged into slug. All into the slime and wax of his dirty bed, I didn’t get the power and purity of watching paramedics rape him tight and subhuman into the ambulance, done gone and fucked off into no place. The body is too malleable: I looked into the open-casket, I told Aunt Betty it saddened when really I wanted to claw the fucking eyes out. I wanted to drag him home with me and drown him into the bog of cancer-black in the fish tank, serve his pig skin to the ash of this terrarium, make him quiver in disabled silence.