brother R

[ <u>some renton-heavy posts are also here</u>. ]

<center>Come little daughter, I will carry the lanterns
We'll go out tonight, we'll go to the caverns
We'll go out tonight, we'll go to the caves
Kiss your mother goodnight and remember that God saves

A led her to a hole, a deep black well.
I said make a wish, make sure and not tell and
close you're eyes dear, and count to seven
You know your papa loves you, good children go to heaven
</center>
<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
Smoke rose from the gutters, sleepless and forever pinwheeling, weaving a dreary low grey morning mist for the maggot city.

On an occasional table flecked with tomato seeds, a red light blinked.

The late night had bled into early morning, moody oranges and yellows of sunrise seeping from the corners of the horizon and banding the shuddering slab of his chest through venetian blinds as he pressed a button, freeing the electronic songbird that twittered soullessly into his ear.

"You have one unheard message. . . First message, Sent today, at 4:31, AM."

"Who're you trying to kid, Renton?" Immediately, the words worked around him in a crackling, electronic beat as a crude blackened throat split in a moan. Too junked, too twisted, too far down the snakehole for a reprimand from halfway across the globe, where his heart rested without him in the pale white fist of his woman.

She would call in the early hours, to avoid his labored, liquor-thick breath clotting up the wires. It would always plummet straight through the airwaves and into her bloodstream, plucking goosepimples up and down the chainlink of her spine. Even with her eyes open, pointed out her window to the breezy Grecian villa below, she could see him hunched in a familiar dark, a sleazy corner with a cold bottle between his thighs and a cigarette between his lips, paranoia-gashed eyes blood-trimmed and barely open, laced over in wet eyelash bows. So instead, she called when she knew he'd be out, licking young necks and meathooking himself with obsession.

"Where do you think these girls will take you? Far away from this place that makes your veins itch and bones ache with memories? Far enough away that you could erase what you've done to me, to your daughter, with the grit from the road and a holy roll of blue sky above?" Was she drunk? His ear bent to the ninety proof bite (Would she be sipping vodka? Or gin? He tried to categorize the sloppiness of her tongue.) in her rhythm, admiring her poetic shrieks of indigence that frolicked up and down the maligned brick road of his spine.. "Could you even run that far, boy? Would your withered body even get you to Cincinnati?"

"You're the killer, Renton. You. Stop blaming those girls, like they're the ones that carved this ravine between us." Some were fleeting, painting him in cursory, razor-brushed strokes of mania. Emilia. Erin. Jinx. Others dug deep, into bone and brain, mangling sensibilities. Star. Jaq. Norma. He could tally these earth-movers without flinching, their names coming to his tongue like bile.

"You say you can't help it, that they pull you in with those soft, plying arms and your heart's too weary, too sad, too wounded! to push them away. But you're the one leaving their milky young bodies in your wake when their hair's not red enough, when they start to question those nights where you're just a lingering scent and tangle of linen in bed, when they start unraveling your history, asking about the baby pictures on your bedside table, you're just recklessly chucking hearts and two-stepping over emotion--you asshole! -- you don't even know what you need! You just want those girls around because your heart can't beat without their dewy, doe-eyed admiration. You need those fools to put you on your pedestal."

In a pause, he thought the machine whined to a stop, but he was interrupted by more words peeling off the tape, pinned in the kitchen doorway by the lull of her voice. If he squinted his eyes and sapped the last narcotic strains of shit from his blood, he could almost see her, silhouetted in caliginous halos of night and shadow and fire-kissed curls, matronly eyes weeping rosewater tears as her palms lay open at her chest.

"It doesn't matter how high they hold you, boy. It's useless. Dead. Don't even bother."

"End of messages."
</div>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ July 20, 2007 02:25 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>http://www.towerblock.co.uk/images/sidxmas.jpg



Tar-heel boy sings a song
'Bout a girl who ain't comin' home </center>

"Ok, yeah, you're my desert. Hot and ... " He was blushing frantically, trying to cram his erection down his leg, shrinking into the dirt between the snowbird's thighs.. "Barren. Andfullofcactus..."



<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 07, 2006 12:03 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
"So, Renton," Through delicate, rimless spectacles, the doctor recited his name mechanically from his files. "Tell me about your first wife."

"Ownly."

"Excuse me?"

"Me ownly wife. Sh's tha owlny one." He had already trained his head to the expensively draped window, heaving a sigh as a bloodless corpse color painted his cheeks and creases folded his brow.

This, this pouring out a soul as sour as whiskey shots to a complete stranger, it had seemed far more liberating a few nights ago when he decided that his miseries could be unraveled and healed by a trained professional, frenzied brain whipped into self-help hysteria by a few hits of meth and one of Jeuls' bucket-sized margaritas. Now, he felt pinned to the couch, the Doc's scalpel at his chest, ready to slice open his ribs and expose his funeral heart, supported only by the lies he couldn't stop telling.

Jeuls and Renton had staked out over a dozen therapists, searching for something cheap. Forget revolutionary tactics, high education and plush couches with white noise machines -- the tackier the waiting room reception, the louder Jeuls would squeal, gasping that "This could be the one!" as if they were interviewing potential lovers. When she spotted the lifelike statue of a sleeping bulldog tucked in the corner of an office decorated by paintings of suspiciously vaginal blooms, she clutched her brother's wrist with flutter-hearted abandon. She had signed him up for three months of treatment on the spot with a plastic silver AMEX she'd fucked out of the wallet of a aging CEO.

The Doctor resigned effortlessly. "Your only wife, then. When did you meet?"

He fidgeted, sighed and cleared his throat with a rattle, revving up a dialect that jetset from Scotland to New York, pit-stopping in the deep mountains of Georgia.

"Ay 'ad jis' come ovr from Glasgow. We were jis kids, like. Babies. Sh'..sh' was a fucken vision, man. Ays met 'er in front o'a jewelers on th' Avenue" Blood-clot green eyes softened dreamily as he felt himself erasing the years sprawled from then to now, stirring recollections of lust to the top of a wasted memory.

She didn't speak when he paused, and he skipped his eyes from her folded knee to her face. He'd become too familiar with all women leaping into his silences, uninvited and shrieking, spooked by her serene expression and open ears.

"Ay broke int' th'store an' stole 'er this necklace, likes. An' sh'was all mine. Wis like fate, er destiny, er some shite romantic movie. We's were meant ta' be, ays could tell th' first time sh' touched me. Tara wis one inna fucken million. Sharp, sophisticated, fucken witty, bird could fucken 'old 'er own." Once he started, he could not stop, like a steel-hearted freight.

"We wir fucken barry at th'start, likes, ril 'appy, in love. Honeymoonin'. Sh' dinnay mind th'smack, er m' fucken lunatic mates. We stole cars an' drank an' swam in th' fucken ocean! We nevur slept, w' jis ate up th'fucken day an' night like a pack o'fucken wild dogs." Hands made themselves into wistful fists in his lap, pointing his monologue at a dull brass Buddha instead of the doctor. He was starting to sweat, ultra-aware of the pinpricks of anxiety fringing his hairline.

"W'were ownly t'gether awhile, mebbe a year an'a 'alf, befer' th' babe came. M'fucken baby. Ays guess ay coulda been mohr .." Clumsy tongue cut from the crudest cloth fondled his throat for the right words. "Respectful o' 'er pregnancy, likes. Ay mean, whot kinda cunt dopes off ta Scotland ferra haircut an' whiskey 'en their wife's at eight months? An' ay guess it wouldnna' killed m'ta keep me fucken dick in m'jeans, right? Fi-del-ity," He spelled it out like he was still learning to wrap his crumbling mouth around the strange, uncomforting word. "An alla thats, y'nno, gittin' 'er pickles an' chocolate 'stead o' fucken 'er roommate."

"Bu' sh' made it so fucken 'ard when th' babe came!" He was starting to crack into erratic tones, betrayal cropping his tongue. "Like, I wis suddenly sapposed t' turn int' this soft spoken diaper-changer. I wis jis' a kid. We were fucken kids! Sh' didnay 'ave t'keep th'fucken thing!" Lips gashed into a wounded snarl, something strange and bitter that had never seen daylight masking his face, anger rising in a hot flood of resentment up the gully of his spine. "Sh' didnay 'ave t'turn inta mother o' th'whole fucken world, did she?! Whot wis ays sapposed ta' fucken do!? Buy us a 'ouse, cut m'air an' gitta nice bank job?!" He couldn't help but collapse back into the rough, pale salmon couch with a gravel-ground laugh, throwing his hands up between bony knees.

"Ays didnay know. Ays thought 'at's whot ay wanted, th' wife n' kid. Fucken 'omelife, somefin besides th'fucken streets an' drugs an' fucken haywire women. Bu' ay could'nt be a fucken father! 'Ave y'ever seen 'ow helpeless a bairn is? Can ya' fucken imagine?! Whot a fucken joke."</DIV>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 12, 2006 04:44 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>

It takes a whole lot of liquor to like her
That's why I drink all the time
It takes a whole lot of liquor to like her
But when I'm liquored up I like her just fine

Every time I get sober
she drives me out of my mind
It takes a whole lot of liquor to like her
But when I'm liquored up I like her just fine</center>
<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
If you ran into Renton on the streets, under a broad blue sky on a late summer afternoon and innocently asked about women, his eyes would bulge from their sockets, the blood would drain from his heart and he would immediately peg them all as selfish-hearted, intrusive cunts, working himself into a flush-faced frenzy over their conniving plans to make all men into mice. Bring them into the home and tame gypsy souls, hammer itchy feet to the hearth and crucify them, bathing the filth from their hearts, over humble mantelpieces. Crudely pasting them into an estrogen-soaked portrait of Americana.

He would pontificate peacockishly, with fists beating his chest and spit flying from a blistered mouth -- warning against their soft warm bodies, gentle smell and big wet eyes -- with his pockets turned inside out, throat crammed full of lies and redwet heart throbbing on his shoulders to illustrate the high cost of love. "They want to fix everything," he would crow, grabbing for shoulders in desperation. "They want to be the mothers of the world, they want to stitch up the tatters of your sad little heart and lick clean the dirt from your soul. Purify your blood, shield your eyes from the bright electric fishbelly glow of the late nights, turn you into fathers and money makers! Run, boys, run!"

But girls like Jeuls. He didn't have much to say about them, about the way they seemed to feel through in the shadows, waiting for weakness then lurching with gore-splashed mouths and wanting fists swollen temptation. Girls that would offer a scummy fleet of vehicles to a slow demise with badblood campaigning their sloppy smiles, Girls that would lovingly strum out a plump vein, Girls that were happy to have the company of a kindred wounded soul on their one hundred mile per hour joyride down a slippery, debauched highway to hell.


"Hey, finally." When he staggered from the dawn, fresh from the embankment of his own muddy river of booze, random, forgettable mouths and neon, she was ready for him. With four lukewarm stacks of pancakes and a few dozen strips of congealing bacon split between two paper plates and a silver-gilded pair of tweezers that she held out expectantly. "How'd it go?"

"Whot?" He didn't bother to shake the stained blazer from his shoulders as he waltzed across the sun-dappled front room, draped in the sleazy smell of smoke and liquor and the laundry detergent they used at the local Motel Six.

"How'd it go!" Like an aging transvestite, Jeuls clung to her extravagant wigs, bad lighting and veils of smoke, spilling ash and a little vodka from a plastic tumbler as she sat up. Carefully eschewing a wash of sunlight that pried through a crack between a nailed sheet and paint-chipped window frame. "The head shrinking!" She kept trying to cram the tweezers into his fist as he collapsed next to her, baby deer-like legs flung carelessly over his lap, ruffling the greasy pages of an aging wank mag she had been perusing in search of a perfect vulva or exceptional armpit. Recently, she'd crowed for days over the inverted nipples she'd found on page 16 of Renton's July issue of Lesbian Lust.

"Well? Was it glamorous?! Where have you been? Your appointment was like, two days ago!"

He did not flinch at questions flung like arrows, instead he sickled his spine over her calf and began plucking out fine black hairs. Jeuls had read about a long-dead Italian Princess hand-plucking the hairs from her legs in a glossy vintage starfucker magazine and had immediately crammed the act into her itinerary. Now that Renton was there to work her legs, she reclined into the clutch of the antique fainting couch she replaced the tomato-stained loveseat with ("Fifteen hundred dollars!!!" She'd shrieked at him, lambasting his La Tomatina celebration) and focused her attentions into a handmirror as she jabbed and yanked at her brows.

"She wis very quiet."

Her eyes swelled up jealously.

"I bet she was terrified."

Renton frowned and continued ripping hair out by the roots.</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 17, 2006 10:50 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>

Woke up hung like a ton of bricks
Don't know where the hell I am
Who's this naked next to me
What did I do, I gotta pee

Can't work or go to school today
Can't remember if I do that anyways
Got some money, got no clue
The world's a mess, what can I do

I hate my life, I hate my life

Crashed the car, lost the job
I'm dirty smelly total slob
Lot's of sex, little love
Stimulation no satisfaction

Life is hard, life is stress
Life is such a pain in the ass
Saturday nite, I'm not dressed
How can i go on?

I hate my life, I hate my life</center>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 13, 2006 01:55 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 22, 2006 01:39 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"Aw fuck, not again."

It was his rooster crow for these mornings, mornings when vodka still swam in his throat and his head throbbed like a spinning disco ball, when he would snap awake to the peculiar feeling of sun warming hollow cheeks (because that never happened in the blacked-out cave of his own bedroom), waking up genuinely unsettled with his fistfuls of skin and hair. Mornings when he had to groggily paw at the dainty, even stranger pair of hips flung over his waist and creep from scene undetected.

(An innocent little boy trapped inside a beartrap of bone and skin of a withered junkie pined for normality, a stable support to build a life around -- but the dopefiend continued to muscle his way through the dark, seedy nighttime in search of something to send the blood pulsing through his heart, struggling with call girls, fellow junkies and true blue lunatics. So, the boy was more than well-versed in cliche -- he lived it, with the tracks at his elbow and cocky swagger of his gait, leather jackets and chirping string of girls around his finger.)

Wailing "Shit, shit, shit!" into the new day's sun as he searched his skin for evidence -- bruises, new wounds, sores cracked open by struggle. Clots of lipstick tattooing bonework, or the deep sting of claws raked down his back. Early morning tumbling in a still-drunken ballet from one gritty corner to the next darkest and then back, eschewing the sunshine and turning his weary feet towards home. . .

</div>

<center>"of course, of course, of course,"</center>
<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
It was a whisper of bad faith that burnt up his mouth, turning tongue to ash and breathing cinders down her throat (the tired, dirty, methsour taste of his pleading devotion would curdle her tongue for weeks). Trying deserately to save his soul one last time, giving it one more chance under a sickle curve of a new white moon, surrendering it to the clutch of a steelboned trainyard goddess who could help him rebuild a body from the lovesick tremors of a withered funeral heart.
</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 17, 2006 10:50 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"Good afternoon, Renton. How are you?"

"Um," He pulled at tabs of skin peeling up from his fingernails, wiping blood on a pair of crisp grey slacks. The good suit. The one they'd worn to Sid Eli's funeral. He was convinced he could still smell the misery of a baby dying in it's crib on the lapels. "Okey, ay guess." I'm ruining another life, I should've told her to run instead of kissing her, I can't stop this cycle of infatuation. "I can'nt stey fer th'whole session t'day. 've gotta plane t'catch."

"Oh?"

"'s m' daughter's birthday. Sh' lives in Thes'aloniki. 's like a ten 'our flight."

The doc's face seemed like cheap pink plastic melted into a mask of concern. He was still unnerved by her silence. He wondered how many appointments it would take for him to get used to it, to feel comfortable yapping at this overeducated mannequin.

"Sh's ternin' six. Guess that's a big deal." He stood, eager to get out of that place, that suit, that city. "Anywey. I jis' came t'tell ya' ay might nawt be at m'next appointment, either. 'm nawt sure 'ow long ay'll be gone."

"Well, be sure to call when you get back."

"Aye." He was breaking for the door in slow-motion desperation, trying to keep his coupon casual.

"And you have my number, in case you need anything?"

"Yuh."

"Don't be afraid to call, Renton."
</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 17, 2006 10:50 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">Six in the morning with their plane taking off in two hours and she couldn't find the savage junkie king anywhere, screeching through the house in a hurricane of candy pink suitcases and the natural tangle of her coal black hair. She kicked open doors and even ravenged the closets, spare rooms and crawlspace, eyes starting to swell in hysterics.

But eventually, time steadily ticking down to take off, the phone rang.

"Hello?!"

"Jeuly." His voice was sober, quiet and crooning, making her shriek even louder.

"RENTON. We have to go now! Where are you?! We've got, like, two hours! The fuck!?"

"'m atta apartment on Jefferson. Ay think it's on twelf' street. Big fucken stucco buildin', ay'll fucken be wayten' outside. C'min git me. Th'keys're on th'kitchen table."

"What?!"

"An' bring us a change o' clathes!"

"What?!?"


Toughskinned flamboyantly colored suitcases clattered noisily in the rusted-out truckbed of his junked Ford Ranger (half primer gray, half oxidized orange) as she threw the tranny into gear and roared down streets still empty, most people still tucked in bed and unaware of the halfblind maniac steering the broad chromepitted nose of a smog belching truck through red lights and crosswalks. Cruising up and down Jefferson, it wasn't long before she was sticking her head out of the window and screaming his name like a sourbellied tomcat towards the sunless sky, midnight blues fading into less desperate purples and baby blues. But soon she was able to seal her throat, grunting a laugh at the sight of a shirtless Renton tumbling from the doorway of a rather nice looking building with a ill-fitting pair of plaid pajama highwaters flapping in the wind, along with his leather jacket, pants and shirt that spilled damply from his arms.

Of course, he hadn't just disappeared from under the crush of girl without a trace (his usual calling card--just a smear of grease and filth left behind on linen sheets), he had been cognizant enough in the dim grey morning hours to scribble a messy note, left on the stool in front of her easels.</div>


<center>
"Shy,
Thanks. I'll bring the pants back soon,
We'll work on the world
when I get back.
- Renton"
</center>


<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
"Oh, Renton!" She tried to sound scathing as he wrenched the stubborn truckdoor open and poured himself into the seat, but her lips were cut up by an overzealous grin that splashed clumsily across her face, nicked-up arms patterned in bruises and tattooing crossing the oversized steering wheel sloppily. "Poor rabbits! You just can't fucking stop, can you?!"

"Aye," His shoulders jumped in halfhearted remorse, pulling his skull through a mangled Guns and Roses tee balled up on the truck's bench seat. "Ev'ryday's a fucken struggle. Let's roll."

And with the sun lurching over the horizon in a toxic spill of familiar fire-fueled colors, she pointed the drooping snout of the truck towards the airport and gunned the wheezing engine with a triumphant shriek.</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 18, 2006 02:50 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...rty/showme.jpg


</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ October 25, 2006 07:16 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"This is television station TCN Channel Nine, owned and operated by Television Corporation Limited, 168 Castlereagh Street, Sydney, transmitting on 195 to 202 megacycles per second from Artarmon Road, Willoughby, with an effective radiated power of 100,000 watts vision and 20,000 watts sound!"

"Again!!!" The psychadelic-spun junkie priestess, mouth heavy and drooling her skewered pleads for redemption clutched at the carpet in a crackling wash of static, screamed and curved her spine into an impossible knot, clawing at his throat, trying to open up the noise, trying to make the dark even bigger, the noise even fatter because his lips stretched and breaking across his cheeks was just not enough.

"THIS is television station TCN Channel Nine!! Owned and operated by Television Corporation Limited!!"

"LOUDER. LOUDER. LOUDER."

He held her face, forced her eyes into his, the blood tasting just as much like the ocean, skin as gritty as the beaches and veins so bloated you could feel them pulsing with want in clenching dilemmas around the bone.

"Transmittin'! On 195 to 202 megacycles per second! From Artarmon Road!!!"

Thrashing, twisting, tearing with fingernails that snapped off, spitting blood from blistered lips nearly seared off her face, glassburnt and methsour. What excited him was the flatness of a windpipe beneath his palm that would still her manic convulsions for a second, making her eyes distend in panic as he spun in the control of her blood pumping.

"AN EFFECTIVE RADIATED POWER OF 100,000 WATTS VISION!!"

She was screaming louder and louder and louder and longer and higher until her throat cracked and the dam broke and the sobs came pouring from her chest like a great flood. They opened the night together with wide mouths lined with rotting yellow teeth and he did not know if he could ever leave this madness.

"20,000 WATTS, SOUND!!"</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 21, 2006 12:22 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"All right brother, here's what you do." His sister calmly suckled at the lipsticked end of a cigarette, snared in the occasional narcotic tremor as the psuedo-siblings draped themselves fashionably over her canopy bed, sliding and squeaking against dirty satin sheets. Decked out in expensive (white white white!) leathers and furs, skintight pants and exaggerated Grace Jones makeup, rolling onto their respective hips and elbows to hoover rails the size of poodle legs off a framed photo of James St. James (flies glued to his face in the exact constellation she kissed to sleep every night). "You ditch the drugs, (snort) get fuckin' coherent (sn-snooorrt) and start making yourself some alternative lives (heartwrenching, ribsnapping gasp)."

"Wh..whot?" Fingers slippery at the edge of lucidity, the cretin Christ could barely lift his head from the pillow, let alone swandive into her own perversions about his one life. His heart galloped when he thought about not even being able to fling that heavy slab of a chest upright and run from the room in case she started punching again. He was still too queasy to even touch the purple/red hamburgered bulge of flesh around his right eye, so he just turned his hips away from hers, swimming through satin.

"You don't know what to do about all these rabbits, right? You don't wanna give up any of them because it feels" Little sister wasn't fast enough, even in her cocaine beat, to soften her crooning, to keep it from curdling into a nasty hiss. "just so lovely with all of them? Well, you're a clever, industrious boy. You get your head straight and you could live at least six separate lives. And you only need what, four?" She turned her face towards him, like a crooked sunflower (bleached a jaundiced yellow) to the sun and dissolved into a wetlash batting smile. Like always, he could not tell if she was serious. He could not see anything in those halfblind eyes. "Five, if ya' count me. But I don't mind sharin'."

"Jis stop." Blood trickled from his lip. "Stop." Or was it his nose? He sorted a line through each nostril to make sure it wasn't his nose, and it tasted like he was swallowing down throatfuls of spare change, that coppery blood taste unavoidable. "We're gawn' t'that therapist so yew'll leave ays alone. Ay'll fucken figure somethin' oot."

"Figure something oooot?!" Like a Frankenstein monster pulsing with electric life shot from the sky, bed springs squealed as she bolted upright. "Fucking figure what oot, Renton? Here! I'll fucking tell you, we can save the doctor some time! You can either have all of one person or fucking nothing. You can't take one thing from that girl and this thing from another, just sticking around for the parts you like and ditching the others. You don't treat people like that." She had to pause, so weighed by her own irreverence with a delicious pain as Tyson and Caine bumped sightlessly over piles of clothes, rattled the occasional empty rolling vodka bottle and jammed cold gummy noses into to their mother's palm that hung over the edge of the bed. "Oh, and there is no way you can fuck that girl just because she has a clean apartment."

And the whitebellied thug, King Sadim bruising everything he touched, would've blushed, if all his blood hadn't been busy leaking from warwounds.

"Yah..no wey."</div>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"Ay jis dunnay wha' 'm supposed t'be dayen'."

Inside the doctor's sanitary soft pink office, his actions seemed far more degenerating than they did in the safe dark half of the streets. Every clench of wrought fists was epic, every rake of knuckles through his oilblack hair end of the world. And every week it was the same "cute" v-neck sweater in grey that he washed diligently now, hands always shaking too hard to part his hair straight, struggling for a pose of sound mind, if even for just an hour.

"Fuck, man, it's like ays nevir 'ad a family as a kid, ay thought that's whot ay wanted. Needed. Bu' who knows what ay need? Fuck, someone tell me, an' ay'll fucken pure git it."</div>

<font color="#757575" size="1">[ September 23, 2006 11:58 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>
keep movin'. stay. keep movin'. stay.

i never thought i'd meet somebody
who makes me feel the way you do
so someone tell me why
i find that i'm
terminally ambivalent
over you

don't ever mention commitment
'cos i could never say i do
but mention you're leaving
i'll be on my knees and pleading
i'm terminally ambivalent
over you

i never thought i'd meet somebody
who makes me feel the way you do
when cupid meets psyche
i get stupid, so don't mind me
i'm terminally ambivalent
over you</center>

Dear Brother,

My hands may be tied,
but yours are so dirty.

Good luck,
j.d

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">"So Renton, how have things been the past week?"

"Th'last message on m' answerin' machine wis fourty six sec'nds of someone cryin'."

"..Really."

"Wif' real loud country music 'n th' background."

"..."

On the long walk home (dressed in a filthy grey sweater and the bone-licking tremors of withdrawl), at least he could smile about the fact that all that time the doctor sat gaping at him in confused, panicked silence was still being charged (by the hour) onto one of his sister's credit cards.</div>

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ October 05, 2006 11:15 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">The Las Vegas police department called at 1:23am.

They found her there, in the city of sin. Three broken ribs (a wheezing punctured lung), a dislocated shoulder, shattered cheekbone, a fractured collarbone and thirty two assorted stitches mapping out a battered bruiseway of a body. They said she destroyed seven hundred dollars worth of equiptment when they came at her with the rape kit. He didn't know what to do, but thankfully his body moved faithfully in the motions of addiction and he reached through the dark for his poison, his veins cold, indifferent and mechicanical as they opened up eagerly.</div>

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ October 05, 2006 01:00 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<font color="#f7f7f7" size="1">[ October 05, 2006 01:29 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">Renton was a slanted stack of bones propped against the bathroom's door frame, arms crossed, eyes glazed, barely able to see through the thick curtains of smoke spinning themselves as atmosphere for the seedy hotel room. A degenerate ozone that fell around them in dusty curls, hardened in their throats. While the smoke swam in languid, constantly evolving masks in front of their faces, the twins, the filthy black junkie Gemini moved in the epochal clockwork of need and frustration, bumping against each other in the blind navigation of another strange mattress.

He didn't feel like talking, but he hated the way Jeuls sipped at her straight vodka and plowed through three or four tin folds of meth like he wasn't even there, glued to a four dollar porno sweating from the TV. Occasionally, she'd splash vodka over her bare chest as she leapt to her knees and screech him over to catch "this incredible money shot!"

"The police called me. They got our number somehow." This encouraged a curious, paranoid tilt of Jeuls' tattoo'd neck, who didn't bother turning away from the TV completely. "Did ay tell y' where 'ey found her?"

"Her? Who? Which her? That scummy redhead? Clean apartment girl? That overeducated cunt in the glasses?" She spat her jive into the television screen, both eyes lifeless and glimmering with smut. Veins like a spiderweb thrumming in a heart-stopping concert. "Oh! Norma?! I haven't seen her in weeks, do you think she's dead? Like, with her dog feasting on her pretty little Peruvian face just to survive?" Pausing into the erratic hiss of breath filtered through a cigarette, she turned her Slavic-sculpted jaw to her twin.

Rents held her in a granite stare. She batted her eyelashes apologetically, her one good eye rolling mindlessly back to the television while the useless yellow one continued to glare straight ahead.

"No, not those hers. And stop that, y' look fucken demented. Yer th' cunt who needs an eyepatch."

"Oh, Pais? Her? Christ. What the fuck was wrong with your parents?" Her mouth mangled into a strange smile as she sprawled across the dirty roach motel mattress (sheets shucked from the bed and thrown over a chair) and fished his pants from the floor. The distance of smooth tattooed skin between her shoulders shrank, blades (graced by knots scarring that came with repeatedly swinging from the ceiling on meathooks) practically kissing over her spine as she sat upright again.

"I mean, besides the inability to operate heavy machinery?" She made her throat bleat out a noise similar to a car careening off an ice-slick bridge as she jammed her tiny fists into his pockets, grunting happily at the wash of spare change spilling against her palm. She didn't even bother grabbing at the crumpled balls of twenties that floated onto her thighs.

"Vegas." His thumb found the crook of his elbow and stroked at the junkie gospel scripted in pinprick Braille. Purring in dirty black tones thoughtfully. "Fucken Vegas. That's th'last place ay woulda looked."

"If you'd been looking. Not so fucking busy chasing skirts." She pointed her cigarette at him accusingly, eyes bright and focused at the idea of pinning one more misery to Renton's suit of disorder that hung from him like a stolen kiss. "Was it another suicide attempt? Another hopeless swing at upstaging the grand melodrama that is her brother? Jesus." Thoughtfully rattling her fistful of quarters, she leaned into the television (her body a long white stretch of bone and skin, an elegant spine twisting) and punched the volume down a few notches, muting the flamboyant sideshow of porno glowing pink and slick. "Some people never learn."

As usual, she punctuated her sentences with leisurely gangs of smoke rings, half-lidded compliments underneath a new shock of white-blonde hair that reminded Renton of Kenny Kenny. "The trauma just looks so good on you." Her eyes cut across the room as she kicked her ankles over the lip of the mattress and pulled herself to the edge.

"We dunno yet. Sh's nawt talkin'. T' anyone." His body fell in a clumsy bone ballet from the doorway, palms cramming his eyes into the back of his skull as his fingertips knotted in an overgrown, greasy cowl of black hair. He had to shake off the feelings that tickled at the cracking grey chambers of his heart when he imagined the filth goddess's fists tangled there. Jeuls offered him a sleek, methslick fold of aluminum foil with her eyes round and piteous as she collected the bruised snarl of her knees underneath her.

"Maybe she's saving us all a little misery this time!" Sometimes the optimist.

"Ay dunno t'dew. D'ay fucken fly down there? I can't jis call, fuck, how fucken inconsiderate can y'fucken git? An' if ay do go, ay'll miss another fucken appointment." And he didn't know how long he could go before holding up another liquor store with his rat queen, but he only flinched instead of mentioning this. "An' fucken money?" His teeth grit involuntarily, body clenching in an unforgiving clutch. "Forgit it, fuck, fuck, fuck."

"Inconsiderate? Inconsiderate is expecting everyone to abandon their lives when you slit your fucking wrists, Renton. Let it go. Haven't I told you, you can't save everyone? I mean, shit, just look at you." And she did, leveling his moony curve of a speed-shivering chest and empty socket eyes with a disgusted once over. This bare-bulb lighting bathed him in corpse colors and his nose dripped into the absent swipe of a wrist's belly.

"It wissn't a fucken suicide attempt. Y'dunnae puncture yer own fucken lung. (snake's hiss of breath stolen through a glass tube) Dislocate yer own shoulder (and again, gasped with caution).. S' physically fucken impossible, someone fucken did this t'er, Jeuls. Someone fucken tried t'kill m'sister." Choked by loyalty, carried from the rolling green hills of Scotland, words leapt in suicide droves from his lips, replacing the empty space in his lungs with crisp white smoke.

"You're so paranoid." Jeuls fixed him with a shrewd frown, lips bloating into an insulted pout -- as if he had learned nothing a life with women like her. Like Ana. Ophelia. They would stop at nothing. He should know that. For a second, she wanted to lurch from the bed, smack the lighter ouf of his hands, splash molten amphetamines across his cheeks, splinter the tooter into his gums and scar him with a reminder that would disfigure, leave him a harelipped monstrosity, so he would never forget what a lovesick monster could do. Instead, she pinched a couple of quarters into the Magic Fingers, evoking violent mattress tremors while Renton chased thin white curls of smoke through a burnt glass tube.

"Y-y-you never kn-know. S-s-she could've r-r-ran out of razorblades. A-and pills. And D-dashboard Confessional r-r-records." Still stung from the sister crack, Jeuls was accustomed to being the only one.

She giggled throatily, throwing herself back on the bed with a bounce of barely there tits and scissor-kick of legs that mocked the fragility of a baby deer's first few steps as the bed seizured violently underneath her. She struggled in vain to keep her glass of liquor upright. "So, how're y-y-you gunna get down there?"

Renton watched her jiggle across the mattress under the influence of the Magic Fingers, rattling her 'huh-huh-huh!' giggling noise from a sooty chest as the straight vodka tumbler in her fist emptied onto her stomach and his head started to cloud. Heavy and black, fingers clotting into fists that sang for violence.

"Ay'll git th' money."

Two knees broke underneath him and he fell like a wolf between her thighs, foreheads cracking together as she flung her empty glass against the wall and noosed his neck with a broad, proud smile.

"You always do."</div>

<DIV style="text-align:justify;">without narcotics stringing him up and down the dirty streets, the harsh, weathered howl of his sick sister tearing up the night or the cold noses of a two-headed blind hound digging into his back, the battered junkie prince collapsed into sleep like an old decrepit building stuffed full of dynamite, into a thundering cloud of thick numb darkness that could cleanse his soul of it's miseries in a wash of broken glass and unforgiving steel. dust from the desert was still smeared over his cheeks (broken by brooks of tears that had stopped falling somewhere near kentucky), a bare chest angled over the fork of his denim-licked legs that flinched and ripped through the sheets in the first stuttering stages of sleep.

his dreams were a foggy graveyard of regrets, echoing with the mewling howls of aborted babies, tragic bastard sons dead in the arms of drug-addled mothers, rejected promises lurching for his throat with bloodhungry teeth. this was his dreamland, where he could kiss the bloated, rotting foreheads of long lost love forgotten and hold hands with his sister who's mutilated face smiled up at him from a beatific halo shine of fire, whispering promise gospel that she would be there all the time now, to make up for when he was never there for her.

sometimes he'd wake up and she'd be there, at his fingertips in a riot of bedsheets, the smell of smoke and liquor heavy on his bruised skin but sometimes shallow palms would roll over the valley her body left in her mattress before the blackness was back, gnawing at the edges of blurred vision, filling his limbs with lead. with or without the sewer princess, he welcomed it, prayed for the seductive choke of sleep before the fierce sadness returned with consciousness.

even when the sun peeled back the starry sky and started to pry at his soft, rheumy eyes, he dug his chin into lumpy pillows and knocked the neglected kitten clawing across his hips onto the floor. he would sleep through the sorrow, rise like a cretin jesus in three days time with the same exhausted circles under his eyes and stigmata of trackmarks and tattoos weeping the names of true life fairytale lovers that betrayed his heart.

his dream carnival of decay or the apartment of a girl who seemed to see through the sick suit of his complexes, who made a disastrous living trying to save the souls of boys who danced gleefully down the wormhole of the mortal coil, he could not decide which world was worse.</div>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ October 29, 2006 09:43 AM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...entonsmack.jpg

brainless, stagnant,
ain't it magic?</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ October 24, 2006 11:37 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>fuck the "what happened?", i got stuck
they can peel pieces of me off the grill of her truck
used to walk with luck, used to hold her hand
fell behind then played the role of a slower man

i want to stand on top of this mountain and yell
i want to wake up and break up this lake of hell
i feel like a bitch for letting the she twist me up
the last starfighter is wounded, time to give it up

on a pick it up mission, kept it bitter
gettin' in a million memories just to forget her
the difficulty in keepin' emotions controlled
cookies for the road, took me by the soul

hunger for the drama, hunger for the nurture
gonna take it further, the hurt feels like murder
interpret the eyes, read the lines on her face
the sunshine is fake, how much time did i waste?

fuck you lucy for leaving me
fuck you lucy for not needing me
i wanna say fuck you because i still love you
no, i'm not okay, and i don't know what to do

do i sound mad? well, i guess I'm a little pissed
every action has a point, five points make a fist
you close 'em, you swing 'em, it's hurts when it hits
and the truth can be a bitch, but if the boot fits


i got an idea: you should get a tattoo that says "warning"
that's all, just a warning,
so the potential victim can take a left and save breath,
and avoid you, sober and upset in the morning


i wanna scream, "fuck you lucy!"
but the problem is i love you lucy
so instead i'ma finish my drink and have another
while you think about how you used to be my lover


and everyone in his life would mistake it as love


- atmosphere</center>

<center>but i know she's been put through hell
i can feel it
and i know she's touched heaven as well
tryin' to steal it</center>


<DIV style="text-align:justify;">
"well, where do you think she'd like to go?"

shy's question didn't have far to go, their mouths close enough to deliver whispers to skin, clumsily stitched into each other's arms. and while her reassurances should've soothed the whitehot bundle of his nerves, her question only brought the truth into the hollow of his chest, like the steel-punch of a exploding bullet that shredded his guts, made his face warp in misery.

he knew exactly where pais would've wanted to go.

and he begged her to make it different, this stranger girl he couldn't escape, splashed in paint and jack daniels, endlessly seduced by her long, clean arms and her steady hand. he could see his life with her, long bright mornings under a canopy of her canvases, blanketed in the heavy wool sense of domesticity. and he made his heart skip beats, excited by the idea of living a life above the gutter.

early in the morning, his joints creaked and his body bucked in resistance as he tore from her tangle of limbs and stole from her apartment in his own clothes this time. scratching bowery between the ears and kissing her temple through a web of black hair before finding sunshine.

"tara, 's rents. ay want t'take pais back 'ome." and because he knew she was there, hanging over the answering machine like a fire-plumed vulture, his voice collapsed into desperate tones to tempt her into answering, staggering over the jagged cliff of his lips and dying in the cold air against the payphone's mouthpiece. "please pick up .."</div>

"She is human."

"Ay'm excited t'go. Wif' yew. Feels like it could really b'm'chance.."

"Your chance for what?"

"M' chance t' rilly make somethin' work this time. T'fucken make things right fer once."

"Tell m' stories baby, from b'fore.."

The women who filtered in and out of Renton's life usually only had two things in common: A beginning and an end. He preferred to keep their middling histories secret, using unfamiliarities to keep them at arm's length, refusing any emotional baggage that he might trip over one dark night when he finally decided to run (because he always did). And he shared the same courtesy, keeping his ex-family and sketchy past cloaked in a stubborn veneer of liquor and drugs.

But Scotland would strip him clean, to the fine white bone. And he wanted Shy there, to help pull him back up in case his lungs filled with water instead of redemption at the baptism.

Out of his city's skin and writhing on the clean sheets of an Scottish ocean-side motel, Renton crooned confused, tumbling deeper and plying Shy's gentle mouth for the stories that made her eyes so sad, fables from her childhood that would explain the way her mouth would bow into thoughtful frowns, reaching past the flutter of her heart for the ties that seemed to bind her so tightly to her privacy. As Shy's fingers found his spine and started strumming a comfort melody, he could've sworn he felt tears come to his eyes as they met at the impasse of their mouths, wideyawning and empty, telling nothing.

But when he woke up, her fingers knotted through the slick of his long black hair, he couldn't help but feel like it should've been his brutal gutter-gaunt princess tied in those sheets.

Renton didn't expect the welcome mat to be rolled out when he finally crawled up the un manicured walkway of the house the fall-apart twins shared, but the empty gaping windows (cloaked in black sheets from the inside) coaxed a shiver up the damaged whip of his spine and the silence draped over the house (like it's belt of bulletholes) made his feet scrape slower and slower up the crooked brickwork. He would've rather had Jeuls out on the stoop in nothing but rollers and her zebra coat and a pair of six inch fuck me heels, shrieking his name up in down the block in a magpie massacre's fury. The door was left unlocked, as always, and the doorknob spun dizzyingly against his palm as he opened the gateway to a deranged winter wonderland.

A coal colored bare-branched tree, scorched with branches mocking claws created the centerpiece, decorated with chicken feet and little animal bones painted gold and silver, a baby doll's head replacing the angel on top. Plastic shreddings of fake snow collected in drifts across the hardwood floor and glittered under the candy-colored wash of a million blinking Christmas lights spider webbing the ceiling, a lifelike plastic reindeer herd posed across the empty living room, across from the crowded nativity scene of amputated manniquens and huge slabs of raw beef. Maybe the smaller animal corpses were lamb. But the baby Jesus was a festering baby pig, curled in the arms of a headless torso, beautifully lit against a background of huge plastic blow up palm trees.. The maggots made Renton's stomach turn, but he had to appreciate the artistry.

And underneath the Christmas tree, he found a pile of glossy eight by tens, his sewerslick princess, strawberry haired and looking so calm exposed in a breathless moment of time over and over and over, tumbling between his palms and sticking in the synthetic snow drifts, his heart immediately leaping into his throat, but not useless, instead pumping harder than it ever had before.

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ December 13, 2006 01:52 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>this is the story of the boys who loved you
who love you now and loved you then
and some were sweet, some were cold and snuffed you
and some just laid around in bed.

some had crumbled you straight to your knees
did it cruel, did it tenderly
some had crawled their way into your heart
to rend your ventricles apart
this is the story of the boys who loved you </center>

the sun was just fondling the swollen curve of the earth after a night spent sprawled on a soot-slick rooftop as clumsy fists battered an unyeilding answering machine until it started puking up his messages in that flat synthetic voice.

"you have one unheard message. . . first message, sent yesterday, at 1:31, AM."

"hi renton, it's tara. i'm just.. just calling to thank you for the check."

sweating under the heat of a dozen sunlamps jeuls had arranged around the plastic pool that served as the front room's only furniture, the junkie prince leaned in as brows humped down his forehead and knit in knots of confusion over his hook nose. his demon sounded soft and grateful, and even through the wires it was like a punch in the gut.

"it.. it really means a lot that you're thinking of ryn. but it's too much, renton. what kind've trouble have you gotten yourself into?"

even before the tape had reeled into it's grave, the swamp eyed degenerate was gasping in disbelief, frayed nerves lighting up in panic.

"end of messages."

"w..wot .." and with a howl loud enough to make dorothy scratch and slip in a couple of frenzied laps around her pool, the rancid hearted junkie slapped the answering machine off it's rickety wooden perch and staggered for the stairway. "JEULS!!!"

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ July 24, 2007 11:04 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<center>
http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m.../18f834fb0.jpg
</center>

"'ey ju',..wot.."

with last night's whiskey (buckets and buckets of it still draining out the black hole of his heart) creeping through his veins and seeping into the slow pulse of his blood, stocking'd feet kicked up a fluttering pile of polaroids as he stepped into his pseudo-sister's room, torso bruised and bare, a fleecy pair of hello kitty sleep pants wrapped in a hangman's noose around the lowest bulge of his hipbones. he had to rub his eyes, icy knuckles grinding at sleep-crusted eyes before dropping back to his thighs, swampswirl greens trying to herd the leaking blowwhite edges of juels' figure into focus. they were matching skeletons of malnutrition, bruises forming easily under the crumbling veneer of skin, like words on a page in the diary of a lunatic.

"th'fuck're yew dewing.."

"getting ready."

"ah..wh.."

"i'm divvying up my material possessions. here." she turned and delivered a stack of of polariods into renton's limp hand. the top one was a flat shot of the benz, pre-frenzied car chase, with shiv's name scribbled on the white frame. the rest were easily ignorable snapshots of her mirrors, taxidermied animal collection, custom embroidered pillows and various pieces of antique furniture that she'd been pulling from desecrated hotels and abandoned buildings for years. but the benz is what focused renton's attentions, cramming the polaroid back in his sister's face.

"shiv gits.. !!"

"you have the truck!" jeuls frowned, thumbing through a pile of polaroids near her foot. "and besides, she gave me dorothy. like, you can't beat that." snapshots fanned across the sunbleached hardwood floor, fingertip skimming over the fresh-turned chemicals inside the starched white frames. "here, i haven't given away the bear suit yet, you want the bear suit? or the moose head. you can have the moose head!" juels grabbed up the polariod sun and pointed it at the guillotined head of a bull moose mounted on her wall, centered between two points of her four poster bed. the flash exploded and residual light bounced around inside the black pools of their eyes for a moment, distracting, but not enough to spin renton far enough from his original argument.

"ay dunnay want t'muuse 'ead."

"fine." juels snorted, flapping the polaroid in the hollowed ditch of her cheek.

his battered body swayed towards her bed, his feet kissing the warped hardwood farewell as he collapsed belly-up on her mattress, skull lulling over the lip of the edge, watching his sister turn back to her crowded closet, pulling out long-forgotten treasures and stringing them from the bed's footboard and all the way back. his exaggerated limbs broke at tragic angles, cloaking his eyes with a filthy palm. jay's leather jacket, a vase from rex's apartment, a shoebox full of photos of a pair of brothers--one who gave her life in bloody palms and one who tore at her heart with a six inch blade. these things, lost in drifts of knockoff gowns and amputated carousel horse parts and splintering wood statues of meth-born demons, made renton's skin crawl, reminders of men that had drove juels to the edge in luxurious vehicles of destruction.

"well, how many shoes do you think i can get away with taking?" she turned from the closet, two pairs of strappy heels hung from a curl of knuckles that mocked a claw, swinging them quizzically. "or do you think i can just buy new shoes? it is paris, after all. it's not like i'm going to need these cheap american shoes.."

renton had peered through splinters of space that appeared between his knuckles, the upside-down apparition of his sister swimming on the back of his eyelids, captured in mid-shoe-toss, frothy white curls obscuring her face and smoke spinning itself in a tornado around her body.

"ar' y'rilly eavin..?"

"of course. what do you mean? why? did you talk to devon?" the battle-scarred valkyrie's eyes flattened dangerously, matted under a roll of doomsday clouds as she turned to renton, searching his face for anything that she did not know. renton knew his half blind sister only trusted that mysterious street thug as much as he did her. not much.

"nah, ay jis..ah." his palm clenched, pressing his eyes back into his skull before his fist fell away, knuckles scraping the floor, teasing the dust bunnies at the edge of the bed. "ay'll miss yew."

"aww, i know." flattered, the thunderstorm cleared from her eyes, chased by a rickety smile that broke the flat red line of her mouth. "but we can be pen pals. and you know what they say."

renton grunted, shaking his head and turning his face towards the mirrored headboard of her bed. he stared into the empty gashes of his eyes, a blurred hurricane of skin and bone rising onto the bed beside him in an awkward ballet of affection, a rail-thin thigh tossed over his hips. obese snow-blown curls skated across the pronounced ridges of his ribcage, so that she could have one last listen to the pipe-dream gurgle of a faulty organ.

"distance makes the heart grow fonder."

three leaden knocks on the bathroom door was the first she'd heard from her brother since the feeble attempts had getting employed had started, and she escorted him inside with a singsong chirp from the depths of a green fuzzed tub.

"juels," a gang obese steam clouds managed to slip through the renton-sized crack in the door before it shut behind him, clearing the air and giving him a sharper view of the bathroom so electric green that it seemed to throb. he flipped the lid down on the toilet and cracked at his pin-thin middle, shoulders furrowed in familiar dejection with his mouth working out another misery that his pseudo-sister chopped short gracelessly.

"hi rinrin!" one leg, long and glimmering like a unicorn's horn splashed out of the murky bathwater and she wiggled her toes at him in greeting with her eyes still glued to the small television she'd strapped to the wall with a sloppy duct tape rig, a severe black bob wig skewered over the level plane of her eyebrow. "wanna hop in? the news is about to start." she extended her arm in a limited stretch, fruitlessly fanning her fingers towards a pack of pall malls just out of reach on the sink's edge. "wanna hand me those? wanna light it, too? my hands.." she offered soaked, well-pruned palms almost apologetically.

"lookit this, juels, wot th' fuck's this?!" in his hands was a pristine white envelope and a card scribbled in calligraphy, rattling between his knuckles, eyes wet and wounded.

"i don't know, honey. what the fuck is it?" juels gestured for the front of the card with dripping hands, squinting halfblind over the lip of the tub as renton crammed it in her face. "wow.. she's really got some balls! she said she was coming back to the states, but i didn't know why.. shit, wow!"

renton's eyes bloated at the understatement of the century, angrily slapping a silver-gilded invite down on the edge of the astro-turfed tub.

"fuck yah', i'd sey gittin' fucken remarried takes a fuckin pai--"

"no, no," the bewigged banshee frowned, picking up the invite and turning the heavy cardstock over in her soggy palms. "i mean inviting me to the wedding." juels paused, her own eyes clouding over in nostalgia as she tried to level with renton's swampswirl glare. "god, do you remember last time?"

how could he forget? between curt loosing consciousness a record number of times, ana's saran wrap bride's maid gown, juels' daughter insulting the clergy (when juels hadn't been trying to fuck him) and the gallons and gallons of alcohol that flowed, he had enough matrimonial nightmares to plague him for a lifetime. disappointed at juels' lack of indignation, he rushed to pick up the slack, slapping a crude sneer on his lips and letting the tender halfmoon of his spine curve even further, belly shrinking back into a cavern.

"whir doessit sey anythin' 'bout yew?"

"you can't go to a wedding without a date. especially not this one!" the slippery junkie's eyes flattened in menace, sopping fingertips slipping over the invite. "who the fuck else would you take?"

the staggering junkie prince didn't answer, the ridges of his backbone cramped against the tank of the toilet as he just shrugged and averted his eyes, because they were babbling at a million words a moment, speaking for a brokedown soul that couldn't move his mouth, but it was too late. the slightly sightless valkyrie was already gripping the edge of the tub, rising up in a tiny tidal wave of gritty gray water that splashed at her ribs and ran in rivers down her shoulders.

"oh, renton, no..."

"All of your friends wanted to have sex with me, Renton." Leave it to his sickle-souled half of a sister to warm a chilly expression, the rehearsal dinner's atmosphere a cheery, excitement laced haze broken only by a black cloud of discontent above the gemini junkie. He wore a somber black suit, and she wore her typical silver, white curls pumped full of Aquanet.

"Shut up." Renton flinched, watching a trio of bridesmaids hurricane by in a wash of frenetic giggling and aloof glances down the slopes of their noses. Juels watched them as well, with a predator's slouch, planning ahead for the battle of the bouquet. The blonde looked breakable. Meanwhile, switchblade winged butterflies swarmed in sickly circles around the hollows of Renton's belly, shreddin' hearts lungs and miles of intestine, keeping his eyes cut along the lip of the table while Juels reached over him for a fresh glass of wine sitting at an unoccupied chair.

"Curt wanted it."

"Julia." He desperately tried to shut her up with a little formality, hand dropping under the plane of the table to clutch at her bare, tattooed thigh. Like a lost babe clutching to the shreds of his security blanket.

"Curt could've got it, too. If he wasn't getting stabbed all the time. The question though," Pinkie flexed to the ceiling, she let the rim of the glass rest against the flat yellowing line of her teeth, tongue flopping out to splash in the shallow pool of merlot before continuing. Thigh flexing subtly under the callous of his palm. "The question is why.. I mean, I didn't even have the tits back then.. Mm."

Mismatched eyes caked in ebon silver shimmering powder lifted to catch the scarlett-haired bride laugh and clutch at the arm of a best man across the dance floor. "She must've wanted these pictures to match the old ones," She noted the shift in the Demon's hair color like Renton did not already notice, like he was not already agonizing over the image of those firefresh curls splashed across his empty chest. "Have you seen Milo, yet?"

A dented spine stiffened with a crunch, his eyes slitting granite as he slumped further in his seat, knuckles trying to catch a loose loop of the necktie noosed around his neck, skin crawling under the stolen suit. He'd spent most of the dinner avoiding the groom with his sparkling smile and suit that fit like a second skin; sweat prickling the junk king's upper lip as he resisted the urge to knock the black cowboy hat off his head everytime he saw him put a hand around the Demon's waist, or made her smile..

Juels, indifferent and getting drunker by the minute, she just laughed, watching the groom's parents lead Ryni to a table of punch and cookies. "Don't be bitter, honey. Enjoy yourself!" She hiked up a half drained piece of crystal with a limpwristed hand, giving Rents a snort of disbelief before she emptied the rest. "Open fucking bar!"

"sh' r'minds me o' ryni. 'er eyes."

renton's grimy finger traced the mercedes benz emblem embossed into the dashboard infront of him, elbows hanging between the knobby points of two jackknived knees, a cigarette bobbing from his lips and two glasshot eyes the only points of light on his face. the lovesick siblings had flown 'cross a ribbon of crumbling asphalt under a smear of starstudded sky, searching for a dead end where they could pull the car off the road and into a field where they could watch the city's pollution bleed out of the sky in strains of bloated purple clouds. a universe clawing through to peer back at them, just as curious.

"juels."

across the car, renton could hear plastic whisper between scar-crossed knuckles, and she managed to trap the occasional moonbeam in shock-white curls. providing her own halo where god failed so miserably. skin shifting in an uncomfortable itch that she scratched with fire, hot glass and slippery chemical drips. soon, they would be spitting cyphers of unbreakable speech on a radical plane with a savage tilt, reeling in and out of cohesive thought when a couple of words could've satisfied a conversation. juels was eager to get there.

"mmm."

"ar' y'listenen? ay sai--"

"yeah, you wanna fuck your daughter. i heard." the meth gave her voice an icepick edge, cracking behind a veil of smoke, spinner's fingers rolling a burnt glass dick against her lips. "it's disgusting." and she dropped her hand to the gearshift, pipe tucked between her knuckles. renton crossed his wrist over her's and plucked it from the cup of her palm, simultaneously pausing and fueling a slow-boil of frustration that roared behind his eyes, words billowing out with smoke that turned pink bubblegum lungs to glass.

"tha's nawt wot ay fucken sed, juels. th' fuck? did that asshole call yew a hoar 'er somethin' again? yer bein' a re'l bitch an' ay'm jis' tryin' t'fucken talk t'yew.."

"no, you're trying to get me to justify your sick pedo fantasies and christ, you know i'd usually be the first to encourage you to expand your goddamn horizons, but i'm not ju--"

"OH, c'mawn! pedo fucken fantasie--"

"YEAH! fucking sixteen, renton!"

renton recoiled, shoulder smudging the glass window behind him.

"wot kinda fucken monster do yew think ay am?!"

the question caught them both like fishhooks, eyes meeting through a swirl of meth-swirls before juels crumbled first.

"listen," she tried to sound tender, but her throat was raw and crude, and did not play dulcet tricks . "get this virgin outta your blood, baby. you'll kill that little girl."

"yah. 'er yew will."

"mm. . well spotted. but i'm serious. shiv's your kinda' girl, renton." juels tilted her head back against her headrest, casually wrenching the rearview mirror to reflect the illusion of her faux eyelashes and broad red lips, crushing them into a kissy pout. now that juels had the young virgin to villianize, she willing to seduce the idea that shiva was the piece with the shark-tooth edges that fit into the holes of his heart all the other woman had gouged before. and she would undoubtedly be an ally against this peach-skinned baby. "she'll stick around."

renton sat silent, pointing two hollow eyes out to the empty field that sprawled out around them, interrupted only by the seam of concrete they'd rolled in on.

"i said she'll sti--"

"ay 'eard wot y'sed. shiv deserves bett'r. someone who'll .."

"oh renton, someone who what?" with his tired, limping excuses grating on nerves exposed by a slice of an amphetiamine scalpel, juels scrutinized him in a slice of moonline, his trembling palm reaching for a chest that held prisoner a heart that ached when the gutter gaunt filth goddess that flashed in his mind's eye. their flaws flowed in similar veins, and he was terrified of the desert-skinned halfbreed becoming just another scrawl of forgotten ink on whiskeywhipped skin that was slowly scrubbed rawred by the grit of the city and ladylike claws. "someone who won't try an' fuck little girls?"

"jis.. ay know if ay rilly love 'er.. an' touch 'er.. " renton could already feel the sand slipping between his fingers, and that panic on switchblade wings fluttered through his guts, shredding tender swells of adoration that licked at his heart in the sand-sculpted princess, etching a grimace full of fine lines and regret onto hollow ivory cheeks. "we'd end up killin' each other."

and juels knew he wasn't talking about domestic murder. she could already see the love/dopesick duo driving a big black doomsday cadillac to a scummy honeymoon suite where they would coax each other to the slick edge of excess. with no one around to protect either of them, with their eternally gaping veins and empty bellies, they would be found blue and rigid with needle-stuck arms intertwined..

and they filled the silence with stars and foul-smelling smoke that clung to their hair and leaked from quivering nostrils, the occasional back country breeze cooling the slick filth sheen of sweat that served as a second, imperfectly fitting skin for the both of them.

"me and dev' almost fucked in that seat today."

"aaaaawwh!" shoestring limbs flailed in a burst of razor-winged disgust, knuckles clawing for the door's handle as his sickle-tongued sister tumbled backwards into a peel of near-hysteric laughter that flayed the stars from the sky hangin' above.

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m...kingrenton.jpg

i used to be
so carefree and jolly
but now it seems
always melancholy
something's wrong
'cos i'm always wasted
something's gone
an' i just gotta face it
i got to change
the the way that i'm livin'
give up the fags
fast food an' the women
cut down on the dope and the drinkin'
think even might up the thinkin'
'cos, well, i don't need much
to make me feel good
no, i don't
need anythin'
but love</center>

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ August 02, 2007 08:06 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

"you must be getting sloppy in your old age, renton. this is some typical acting the fuck out cry for attention bullshit. we all know you're worried about shiv, but c'mon..."

somewhere between a federal building bombing and a botched late-night liquor run, with a million miles of scorched earth and the fading trail of a desert-skinned insurgent in between, maybe the half dead boy had abandoned hope. maybe his half-hearted robbery was an attempt to recapture something he was sure he lost in a flashbang of fire and charred human remains.

the gruesome twosome's search across the country in a candy-apple red chariot of american steel had been fruitless, countless hotel-room nights burned away at the end of a glass dick while he shuddered and chased flimsy leads and anonymous tips down crackling telephone wires and filth-blistered backalleys. new mexico, ohio, the rolling hills of arkansas, they honed in on the places no one would ever look. juels struggled to keep the funds pouring in, hair tied up in knots and a kalishnakov mouth that sputtered discouraging words in his ear. she was sure that his crackhouse castle princess was further away than that vintage caddy could ever take them, and eventually they were rolling back into the city, renton defeated. mourning. jonsing for a danger fix, something to bleach out the memory of that fire-born madonna.


"we haven't been home for one day.." her little tattooed fist made a beat to shout to out on the steering wheel. "one fucking day! do you know what i had to do to make bail?!"

once the fire of youth started smoldering out in the pit of their bellies, most vandals realized that you could not survive on knocking over liquor stores and dope alone. and if you did, there'd better be an unbreakable method to your madness. because eventually, that long, crooked arm of the law would come shooting out of the shadows to snap you up by the collar, breaking your rebel yell spirit with one good shake. throwing you to the gaping maw of some snake-pit correctional facility that would inevitably sharpen criminal skills, or even worse, drug rehabilitation counseling to brainwash the filthy dopefiend masses.

he'd done it a million times before, with a million pretty young things at his side, but with his heart breaking up into static in his chest, with dope-glossed eyes, something went wrong. instead of grabbing the bottles and bolting for the door, actions all built into his bones bent to offend, confusion had pinched him up by the windpipe and made him wonder what the hell he was doing there, with that naive young stranger at his side and a hawk-eyed clerk breathing down his neck. he'd only made it halfway down the block, with a wave of broken-bottle tequila flooding behind him, before the cop's sirens were screaming, their searchlights stretching his shadow up and down the dark streets.

"you should've let the girl take the blame. she's was pretty enough to bat her lashes through it.."

red blue light splatter still caked the backsides of renton's eyelids, and the smell of a piss-stained jail cell hung in his nose even as juels turned the rumbling cadillac down an endless black-out road that curved gently towards the muck-pumping heart of the swamps. he had a bright yellow folder full of court papers in his lap, and a broken record reel spinning in his head. the court hereby orders you to a mandatory six months drug counseling and rehabilitation..

"this will be good for you, brother. just think how good at lying you'll get.."

sometime after juels fled the apartment in a hurricane of gasoline cans and rubber tubing with those baying shar peis in tow, the sun eventually climbed high enough to reach into his windows. impatient fingers jabbing a mellow wakeup call into the bruised smear of his face against the pillow. pawing a cordless phone away from his mouth with lips ripped up in a disgusted snarl, he bent his spine backwards and dug his palms inbetween the lumps of his mattress, sleep-swollen eyes blinking back the last smokey dregs of a dream crumbling at the corners of his eyes. a hangover melody throbbed to a four beat count at his temples, keeping time with the staggered way he rolled his hips against the smear of dirty bedsheets, pulling a desperate breath in through the raw-ragged pipes of his throat as his eyes searched the water-stained ceiling.

he kept his movements slow, through the ritual of a morning cigarette fished off the junkyard of the bedside table, through the whiskey-bleached recall of last night.

over the edge of his dirty mattress, he reached for a fresh spiral notebook, shucking off a tangled plastic bag, letting it fall open to a sterile white page over the his knee.

with his knuckles rigored in an unfamiliar clutch, his script was a juvenille scrawl bleeding from the tip of a pencil. licking an arctic glacierbaby aftertaste off his lip and bathed in a jaundiced mourning light, renton took the unsteady fourth step of his court-ordered recovery.

"i don't know what i ever did to deserve this."

<center>http://i107.photobucket.com/albums/m.../rentonmug.jpg

"sane's a relative term, baby..
you stick with renton, you'll be a goddamn
shining beacon of sucess and

rationality." </center>

the chipped formica table was almost completely obscured by envelopes, but none of them were addressed to hollywood. the mongrel prince flung opposite the table, working the deep creases out of a single letter floating atop the sea of stolen mail. his hands were still filth-fouled, but the hollows under his eyes, usually gray and defeated, were slowly being filled in. sobriety was packing the pounds on the ex-junkie, and the dark clouds that would occasionally roll over his eyes seemed to be moving out of habit alone. broke-down flesh machinery adjusting to a new type of fuel, still spitting and sputtering, trying to grind old habits between it's gears.

"what's that?" the re-blonde bombed whore bent herself over the paper and jabbed a crooked finger at the letter's signature. "that, what the hell is that supposed to be?"

"s'..s'liek--" he was tattooing that ugly little scribble on the back of his eyelids with a series of hard blinks. mostly to obscure the mental image of his gutter-gaunt meth-banger all skeeter-bit and sweltering alone in some dirty south squallor.

"it's like goddamn terrorist code, renton!"

"juels!"

"i'm just doing my part renton." gutting a pre-approved credit application addressed to a louis guerrero with the tattooed scythe of her finger, juels let her lips pucker into a self-important smooch. "as an american." and she shot him a look with her trust all spiked splinters under her eyelashes.

"fucken drop it, juels.." her paranoia, once a fantastic and heavy-handed inspiration, was becoming another creeping annoyance for the 30 days sober swamp eyed boy, and he was bending the letter in on itself before she had a chance to check it for scrawls of subliminal sleeper cell jabber. tucking it inside of a pale brown blazer that hung off him like it was stolen, into the pocket that pressed on his heart. he'd keep her there, until she got back. "y'gawt her own mail t'read.."

"mm." the witchbaby made a non-committal sound in her throat, disappearing behind a sheaf of terms and restrictions for visa's new platinum plus program. "hand me that bank statement, baby."

<font color="#ffffff" size="1">[ August 13, 2007 10:37 PM: Message edited by: black cats and cunnilingus ]</font>

<u>RESENTMENTS.</u>


worksheets littered the floor, and renton was crouched over them like a deranged crab. notebook balanced on the slant of his thigh, flipped open to a crisp new page while emeraldrot eyes skimmed the paper-scattered horizon, trying to avoid an unsteady pen hovering over the page.

Step Four is a fact-finding and fact-facing process. We are searching for causes and conditions.

he sighed, blowing out mostly smoke and bent his eyebrows in frustration.

"i am resentful at.."

"this thing says your sponsor's supposed to be here." she was hung in his doorframe suddenly out of nowhere, probably conjured out of a curl of cracksmoke and clatter of dice. kindergarten scrawl faltered. "who's your sponsor, renton?"

he was penning her name before he even looked up at her, before he could even think why.

"can it be me?" she threw her hair over her shoulder, dropped the silly blue book and oozed into the room, bare toes knuckled up on scratched hardwood. "you know what a great actress i am." in a fashion similar to her appearing act, a heavy ornamental cross had hung itself around her tattooed neck, sometime between his arrest and her new/old dyejob..she fondled it and jackyl-grinned at him suggestively.

"no, can't be yew."

"right." she sloshed a lime-spiked gin drink in his face, jagged rocks of ice banging on the side of a dirty tumbler, dropping next to him. "guess not. so who is it? did they assign you one, or did you get to pick? or did they put all you drunks in cages and let them pick?"

"why don'tcha come t'a meetin' an' git one y'self?" his hand had apparently amputated itself from his body that was tensed up and unflinching except for his weary breathing, scratching a gouge around juels' name.

"oh, fuck you, renton. don't try and brainwash me!" in a splash of gin and greasy blond curls, she was spitting down at him from a lock-kneed leer. "i don't want to join your silly little club!"

"y'think ay'm 'avin' th'time o'm'fucken life, juels?!" he smacked his notebook off his knee, in an obvious fucking gesture of just how wonderful it all was. lurching up at her, in a sudden move of violence that wiped out most of his vision in a tunnel of black. she was a milk-white light, unafraid.

"obviously!" he came out of that tunnel to her raw red mouth blaring in his face. in under five minutes, she'd turned twelve different shades, a rainbow of slurred emotion that seemed to swing in huge unstable arcs to compensate for the lack of shit in renton's veins. she had to make up for his new failure somehow.

"EAT SHIT, RENTON."