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Bhikku

**Preface - This story isn't precisely MJ-related, but I HAVE written the majority of it while I was baked out of my mind. This is the Advanced Fiction story that is due from me on Halloween. I was volunteered to do the Halloween workshop because a) my story is all voodoo-licious, and b) er, I was getting stoned when it was time to pick a workshop slot.

So this is going to be kind of like a serialized short story - I'll post in sections on the same thread, and if anyone has suggestions/ideas/encouragement, please let me know, and if you see any mistakes or incongruities, please let me know *that*, too. This is definitely still a work in progress, and probably will be until the 30th, lol...

PS: This story does contain violence, death, black magic, harsh language, sexual content, reference to drug use, and may include content about Hurricane Katrina, I haven't decided. So with that in mind, be forewarned if you are sensitive about those sorts of things. **


John didn’t know until her head rocked back on her neck that he meant to hit her, and by the time he realized it, it was too late to take back. He had always had a theory that drunkenness had a pace outside of ordinary time, but this was his first time to see his theory put into practice. The moments after he took a half-curled fist to Desdemona’s jaw seemed like a century.

The seconds were burned into his memory as her weight swung back into the corner of the countertop, throwing off her balance and causing her to flail out an arm to catch herself on the edge. Her hand pushed a bowl of over-ripened oranges onto the tile of the kitchen, shattered pottery shards and ruptured fruit littering the floor. His hand was still clenched in a fist.

“Baby, I’m s–” The words were almost out when she turned away from him with her hand up to her mouth. Her shoulders weren’t shaking, and when she spoke, neither was her voice.

“Save it.” She turned back towards him for a second, meeting his eyes, and that was long enough for him to be afraid of her. The fear cut through the intoxication. He thought he saw a half-light there in her green eyes, like the red reflection you caught off a coyote’s eyes on the highway. Her hair was down, falling around her face in dark waves. There was blood from her split lip smeared across her chin.

When she grabbed the bottle of tequila off the counter, blood from her fingers smudged the glass with a pink tint. She held it out to him.

“Take a drink. Isn’t that what you wanted?”

He shrank back from her. She advanced on him like a storm, her coffee colored skin transformed to pure shadow in the dimly lit kitchen.

“I didn’t mean it. Honest, Desdemona, it was a mistake.” He fell to his knees in front of her, the strength bleeding from his legs. He grabbed for her skirt and she drew back from him. The fabric swished between his fingertips.

“Sit down.” She set the bottle in the middle of the small kitchen table, sliding into the seat furthest from him. She nodded at the seat across from her. The soft tone of her voice hypnotized him, and he found himself doing what she said. The bottle sat between them on a no man’s land of crimson tablecloth.

“Go ahead. Drink up.” She smiled at him, and he could see blood on her teeth. Once he saw it, he could not unsee it.

“Desdemona, please–” But her only answer was to grab the bottle by the neck and rap it sharply on the table. Grimly, he took an overturned shotglass from the shelf over the table.

“Just one? Now that’s not good manners, Johnny.”

“I’m sorry, I’m so sorry...”

“Give me a shot, barkeep.”

He made the two shots, placing hers on the tablecloth in front of her. She never took her eyes off him as he poured his own shot.

Desdemona lifted the tequila in a toast. “To home correction!”

“Desdemona, Jesus.”

Suddenly she wasn’t mocking him anymore, wasn’t using her ferociously sharp wit to dig and tear at him. She was on the verge of tears, shaking on her side of the kitchen table with a busted lip and an empty shotglass. She was close to crying, but he did not feel compelled to comfort her. The look in her glittering eyes was not grief, but murder.

“Just go to bed, Johnny. You stink of Bourbon Street.”

“I love you.”

She just looked at him. Unblinking, until he finally could not bear the weight of that stare any longer and slunk towards his bedroom, staggering and stripping on the way, leaving his clothes scattered down the hallway. He could not see anything but the ruined oranges on the floor, blood from Desdemona’s lip in dime-sized drops on the tile. He knew that he should go back and try to make it better, or at least scrub the blood up from the floor so it wouldn’t stain. But he also knew that Desdemona would do this, and he was too drunk to try and change what happened.

John slipped between the sheets of the bed, looking over at the bright neon green of his alarm clock before his eyes slipped shut. 2:18 AM. Everything looked worse after one, he thought, and better after eleven. When he woke up for his noon class, he would make it up to her. Flowers, croissants au chocolat from Café du Monde, the works.

He fell into sleep with this dream of forgiveness in his mind.

__________________
"Being high is one of the most pleasant sensations available to mankind. Every day is Saturday. It is to be like a child; to perceive events with clarity; to look into the gates of paradise; to completely enjoy whatever you might be doing."

 

Bhikku

“Bastard.”

John woke up when the first swing of the bat caught him in the shoulder, sending a wave of bright pain jolting through his body. He instinctively tried to defend himself, but he was completely wrapped up in the bedsheets. Somehow he had ended up on the floor, but he had no recollection of how he had moved from the bed to the carpet. Standing above his head, Desdemona stood with the bat in her hands.

“What the fuck!?”

Another swing, this time to the forearm. John felt it crack under the weight of the wooden bat - sensed the vibrations of the fractured bone as it gave way - and finally realized that it was Desdemona who had wrapped him in the bedsheets and shoved him onto the floor. It was Desdemona who was beating him while he lay drunk and helpless in the sheets of their own bed. The bat connected with his hip with a solid bong sound, and the pain was incapacitating, swallowing the world. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the bat rolled from her fingers onto the floor, dropping perilously close to John’s face. As it was, he could do nothing but rock and moan in the shadows on the floor, whispering her name. He threw up on the hardwood, and there was nothing but yellowish bile and liquor that burned as hard on the way up as it had going down.

She gave him a kick in the ribs, but it was half-hearted. He saw her shoulders shuddering in the darkness and realized she was crying. She spoke between sobs, between clenched teeth.

“If you ever hit me again, I will kill you. Do you understand me? I will kill you.”

“Desdemona...I didn’t...”

She walked out of the bedroom on his words. John struggled with the sheets, every movement of his left arm an agony. He crawled after her, drunk and suffering. He did not even make it to the entrance of the bedroom when he heard the front door slam. He could see his own blood streaked on the floor in smears that looked black. The room swam and shimmered around him, and he felt a species of dim shock. This is what it feels like to pass out. I’m fainting.

Before he could contemplate the fact any further, gray waters folded over his eyes, and he sank into a darkness that was both cool and free of pain.

~ ~ ~

“Mr. Starrett?”

John opened his eyes. His own breath sounded like a rasping wind, in and out, in and out, and he raised one hand to his mouth, felt the cold reassurance of the plastic oxygen mask over his face, felt the warmth of a hand take his wrist and press it gently back along his side.

“Mr. Starrett? Can you hear me Mr. Starrett?”

John felt himself nod, the tendons in his neck like rusty barbed wire.

“Don’t move your head, Mr. Starrett. Just squeeze my hand. Once for yes, two for no.” He squeezed, not sure if he was even applying pressure.

They were lifting him, light-as-a-feather, stiff-as-a-board. He was being swept over the smashed fruit and broken bowl. He was cold; they had cut away the sheets and his bloodied gray tank top; the marks from the baseball bat stood out against his tanned skin in purple stripes across his chest and shoulders. His left arm was splinted. A vise held his head stationary, but the room still continued to spin.

“Desdemona...” His voice, not even a whisper. Just the rasp of his dry lips against lips.

“Just take it easy, John.” Faces hovering over his own, concerned angels in EMT uniforms. Suddenly he was outside, the restless August breeze hot even after three in the morning. The red and blue lights were blurry, everywhere. Neighbors whose faces he recognized but names he could never remember were standing along the sidewalk as he was carried towards the bay of an ambulance.

“Johnnie, Christ, what happened to ya?” He cut his eyes in the direction of the voice. Ronnie, his neighbor from across the hall. He closed his eyes against the lights, the screaming sirens, his neighbors’ alarmed faces.

“Make way!” The EMTs were carrying him, cutting the mob like the Red Sea. Hot winds from the roads of the city, the stink of wet garbage and the spicy riff of marijuana. The entire stretcher jolted when they lifted him into the ambulance, and he groaned.

Fingers waving in front of his face. The EMT’s voice sounded clearer, less across-the-reach. “Heyo, John, how many am I holding up?” John could vaguely see the glint of an earring in the top of the medical tech’s ear.

“...Three.”

“And now?”

“Five.”

“What’s your middle name, John?”

“Hendrix.”

“Ah, Mama was a Jimi fan, huh? Okay, who is the president?”

“That joker...I didn’t vote for.”

“Sounds like a winner. And what were you doing the last time you remember being conscious, John?” —

The voice was sounding foggy again. Someone had placed a bag over the mask on his face, squeezing it rhythmically. John closed his eyes.

“No way, Johnny-boy, stay with me. I can’t let you go to sleep just yet. Stick with me just a little longer and I promise I’ll get you enough Demerol to make you think you’re Hendrix.”

Just go to bed, Johnny. You stink of Bourbon Street.

He shoved at the oxygen mask. “Desdemona...”

“Desdemona Bijou? Your girlfriend? Are you talking about her?”

Fuzzy angels again. It was becoming hard to breathe. Something in his chest was broken, something torn loose. Everything was pain. He nodded. He wanted to squeeze the hand that had been given to him earlier, but it was gone. More than that, he wanted his parents. And somewhere deep beneath the pain and confusion, he wanted another shot.

“Stick with me, Johnny-boy. Don’t give up on me now.” But it was becoming more difficult to hear. The part of him that could still listen was fading fast. He was still stuck on the way she looked after he hit her. And then, that same look later, when she was standing over him. It was murder. It was old magic.

“Is Desdemona Bijou the one who did this to you?”

Someone was holding his hand again. He felt colder, shuddering even in the heat. He couldn’t speak anymore, but he could still move his right hand.

He squeezed twice.

Never.
Never.