the bull in the heather

**cutthroat** · November 22nd, 2006, 02:33 AM

"Hay..mornin' Miz Voorhees.."

He had to navigate around the newest shipment of brown packages before he was even able to catch a shadowy glimpse of her propped up in bed, pointed towards the window and smoking an unfiltered Marlboro. Mothers were a complex mystery to Renton-- the only one he knew much about was only concerned with keeping an ocean between a confused junkie father and something so precious. So it was understandable that his heart would do panicked backflips in it's cage when she turned to him and opened her arms, oblivious to his bandages and bruising.

"Renton, darling! Get in here! Lookit you! We could be twins!"

"Oh, right." Renton tried to laugh, soothing a calloused palm over his own shorn scalp, the effect much less striking than Sissy's sexless swell of bald brain matter, lumped with knowledge, stripped by chemo and, for once, not draped in expensive wigs. But it was hard to sync a smile to the throbbing ache in his arms, train-track stitches covered by matching wrist wrappings. 'Very Lindsay Lohan,' Jeuls had purred in the sterile swelter of the hospital room.

"C'mon over here an' tell me what you been up to!" She flamboyantly waved withered arms, palms waving like two white flags preaching surrender. "It's been ages, darling!"

Sissy could see death in the swamp-eyed boy, and he made it more acceptable. The young bones of his face reminded her that her own structure was ancient and outdated and not equipt to hold on for much longer. She was built to drift and glide now, crafted into a fine grave-seeking machine by rot. She even stroked his unshaven cheek when he stumbled from the maze of boxes with a trembling, nicotine stained hand.

"It's so good to see you, boy."

He blushed.

As if he had blood to spare.

"Ay brought y'sim flawers." The young Scot taped the dozen red roses against his chest, trying to focus on the puppetry of keeping his smile straight instead of the way Sissy's eyes had sunk into her skull or the way her throat rattled and threatened to close when she tried to breath.

"Oh," She bashfully spread her hands over the arsenal of prescribed narcotics and holistic remedies that took up the entire bedside tabletop, puckered mouth crumbling shamefully.No room for such beauty here. "Just give them to Nash. She's in the studio, sweetheart, just go on back."

<blockquote>"Renton was not the same boy I had met in Georgia, but the foundation was still there. Solid green eyes, lots of sharp bone and a pulse so loud it nearly rattled the cigarette out of my goddamn mouth when he walked in the door."</blockquote>

"Shit! Look at you!" Nashville's mudbug brown eyes bloated in shock and she nearly dropped her Land camera, spinning away from an illuminated light table laid out with negatives. "Oh my god," Her body seized up, like she just couldn't take anymore!, elbows digging into her side and back teeth gritting. "Did you bring my mother flowers? Renton! Oh," She replaced her face with the bellowed eye of her Polaroid, cramming him into the frame with a couple of steps forward.

"You look like hell! Is this what the city does to people? Fuck, I'd rather have cancer." And she meant that, taking a vindictive suck off the ass end off her cigarette as she pounded on the shutter, embossing Renton's furrowed brow and flat gray mouth in slippery silver chemicals forever.

"Beautiful!" Ripping the embryonic image from the guts of the womb, she dropped onto a long black couch, throwing endless fudge colored curls over her shoulder. "Sit down. You really look terrible."

"Ay'm 'ight. Y'mum looks good. 'ow's sh' doin'?"

"Mmm.." Nashville rolled her big brown eyes, the ones Van Morrison would've sang about and fanned the polaroid across her nose. "You know, just dying." She tilted her head towards the door, to see if Sissy might be down the hall by some miracle, lifted from the ravages of terminal illness to catch her daughter talking shit.

She wasn't.

"We're all kind've just waiting, y'know? Aw, lookit you!" The smoke-eyed belle lifted a thousand lashes to the boy and pressed the photograph into his focus. The background was blurred into a grainy milkshake of silvers and grays, but Renton was juxtaposed in strict monochrome. Frowning, worried. Sickly, and fuzzy like a peach. "You look so vulnerable. So what happened? Did it all get burned out in a methlab explosion? That fucking sociopath finally flip her shit?"

"Ay cut it." He laid his palms in his lap, gauzed forearms turning brown, like he was some kind of dirt magnet. "All o'it."

"Oh." She buffered the silence with a slow kiss with her cigarette, breathing smoke when she spoke again. "Okay," The belle drawled carefully, gathering her legs underneath her and a nearby softbox in her fist.

She framed him in a canonizing halo of light and lifted an old 'blad from the window seat as he peeled away the bandages.

When her face disappeared and the camera winked seductively, they were both smiling.

"Show me."

[ November 21, 2006 10:59 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]

[ November 21, 2006 11:01 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]

**cutthroat** · December 10th, 2006, 11:21 PM

"No one'll cut m' loose. Ay'm sick, an all ay do is hurt, but they still hang on.."

The stitches up his arms were starting to heal, and his hair was growing back, but he sounded as confused as ever, staring down the swirling, stainless steel drain of one of the four sinks Nashville had installed in the barely-bigger-than-a-closet second bedroom, back to the wall of windows that had been blacked out by tar.

"They see the good, Rintin." And even Nashville, stroked by the fumes of developer and fixing fluid found herself struggling to see it, trying to peel back the silvering layers of emulsion, as if the complexities of a soul could be flattened into an easily readable map of emotions and reason (by the chemical magic of film) that could explain the fear lining a nervous lacework of detail around his eyes, the gaunt blackness that drew the shadows under his bone. "Somehow."

The pious southern bell had welcomed Renton back into her life and her darkroom, employing him with such manly tasks as re-stacking QVC boxes and opening pickle jars as Sissy and daughter squealed and clapped their mock-delight. He lurked around corners, sighing and avoiding windows, shooting dope in the bathroom and soaking up the endless stream of nostalgia that flowed from Sissy whenever he stopped long enough to listen. Nashville couldn't decide if he was a blessing (Sissy loved the glassy-eyed attention) or a curse (the dirty needles were starting to accumulate), and spent most of her time catching up in the darkroom, unable to kick him out but too tired of his sad stories to let him gain any distance.

But occasionally he'd trap her in the flat red glow of her darkroom, assaulting her with questions, excuses, panic.

"But ay can't take th' guilt, Nashville. Th' 'eroics. 's fucken killin' me faster'n th'smack, when they're all forgiveness an' fucken soft mouths makin' excuses for me.." Renton tangled his knuckles hopelessly, turning from the sink and talking fast to avoid going in circles, working comfortably with his disfigured junkie logic.

"But more'n fucken that, ay wont t'make it work. Ay wont t'be th'guy they all fucken insist ay am. Fuck, at least wif' Shiv', ay... fuck. S'like we're meant t'be, it doesnay' matter 'ow fucked one o' us is, 'cos the other'll surely overfuckencompensate, y'know? Sh'understands.."

"Then it's time to turn it on, boy."

"Wot?"

"Something about you makes these girls love you." Under the dim red glow of a scarlet cloaked light bulb, Nashville narrowed her eyes on the hallowed points of his face reflecting back in a glimmering wet wash of newborne chemical processes, the suture-bowed cross of his forearms fading out of focus in a sublimely lit blur. "You just gotta figure out what it is."

"But wot 'bout.."

"What? Your family? Your beautiful baby girl? They're halfway across the world, Rintin, they don't care about you. They don't have any use for you until you've found something for yourself. You think Ryni will hate you for falling in love?"

"S'jis.. ay can't--"

"Then don't. Don't, and keep fucking around and getting high and using people. But at least man up and stop fucking crying about it and wondering why everything in your life keeps hurting you. Jesus, Renton. Grow up."

**cutthroat** · December 10th, 2006, 11:22 PM

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**cutthroat** · January 17th, 2007, 08:15 PM

"Otis, it's Nash. Call me when you've got time to talk."

She only made this phonecalls when she was sure the drugs had successully pulled Sissy into the forgiving swamps of sleep, cloaking desperate pleas in daintily-spit snippets of polite conversation to a brother who had packed up and left his Southern traces behind for the dazzle-burning glow of a murder scene city long before their father hung himself from the barn's rafters, long before their mother's body turned against her and started breaking her down from the inside out. He had not grown older with the pressure and pain of chasing down elusive specialists, constant repeats of bad news playing like a mangled tape recording from the flat mouths of doctors, with the weight of a dying matriarch slouched on his shoulders, so she understood why her calls always rang straight to the machine. She wished she was on the other end of the telephone wire, where avoiding death would be as simple as pressing a button, not living in a house where it crept around every corner and cried out in the dark of the night for more painkillers, less noise, and sometimes just death when Sissy thought Nash was asleep. She left the same message every time, always hoping that he would call back before it was too late, because it was no good trying to reconsile a shattered past with a corpse.