skiptooth

I had just dropped a sliver of onion on my hardwood floor.

That’s what I can remember before the collapse. The onion had fallen from my styrofoam plate of Mongolian beef, bought impulsively and held tightly in my hand as though it was my last oxygen mask on a suffocating planet.

Many things seemed to slip out of my grip, out of my focus lately. I was meant to complete my college degree in two months, but the assignments weren’t getting done. Professors became impatient, and I joined them while we searched together for the culprit of my declining academic success.

Majority of Amerikans were dehydrated souls, so when I collapsed in my bedroom only to be found by my roommate nearly 12 hours later, it was no surprise to her. It could be no surprise to her. She had once been where I was, found in a wet spot half on my bed, half on the floor. I must have pissed myself at some point, or it was the beef gravy seeping into my sheets, thankfully not recently washed.

She had called for the Skiptooth to collect me.

There was a Skiptooth in every town, some old and some young, but they all knew what to do in order to prevent premature human waste. That’s when they delivered me back to my mother in a wicker basket. Clothing stripped and torn to reveal a sickly thing, veins protruding and on the hunt for moisture. A wicker basket too small for my body, my feet hung on over its edges, pricked by little thimbles of wood that I felt in my half-consciousness.
The Skiptooth sent along with my body a dust packet of freeze-dried amniotic fluid from my birth 22 years ago. I was a withered, tried thing, but I would be returned and revived only after soaking in my mother’s bathtub for some time.

breaking bread

“Don’t take the cheap shot,” I said. He knew when the bullet exploded the bone around the brain it left me to pick out the sharp skull shards. I didn’t like that. Exhausted, the blond woman held her hands up in surrender, then he shot her and he shot the man running along the line of the bushes, too. I could pick up the gun, and pick up people, place them in deep pockets as souvenirs, but I left the collecting to Jack.

Bodies do smell in ways, not just when it is rotting a few feet outside our cabin, but in the alien-like grooves of the belly button, in the crook behind the ear, and on the nape of the neck. The body does smell in ways, and those are the places I captured him. Jack would sweat down his back and the hair closest to his scalp became damp while he hunted, while he kept beggars away. The smell we created between us both when we shared the room for too long made him unwell. That’s when he’d leave to drag the bodies inside. I did not leave the cabin very often. I did not see other people very often. I did not see other people that Jack did not kill very often. We did not go hungry.

Before everything, I had liked looking at myself in the reflection of peoples’ car windows. Now, it was that time of day when I had to perceive myself for the second and last time, and I was always grateful it never had to be more than twice.

boy

The boy in the box picked up from the convenience store by my apartment was soon to spoil. I unboxed him from the cardboard and cellophane, he looked on at me and blinked.

A yellow slip around his neck, it told me that he had an expiration date. It was a game, a new rage that kept the bored entertained. I had to find his physical, discarded flesh tucked away somewhere close to Los Angeles where they bury dead people in a hill. That was the game. In that mound ,I had to find where they hid his body or else his soul would be trapped in sturdy plastic for eternity.

Trying to begin our hunt, I realized I was stuck. I was spent.

Nowhere to put all the feeling, the feeling I was possessed with before I went to the convenience store by my apartment and before I purchased the little boy doll. I wanted to be great, then I wanted to be nothing at all, I wanted to feel satisfied, then I wanted to feel nothing at all.

I sat on the couch waiting for the arrival of a pizza I had ordered years ago, or at least that’s what it felt like. The boy, in the body of a doll, stood waiting by the front door.

Still, in 15 years, I could imagine myself on this couch, permanently indented into cushions, my skin gone but my bones ever present against the fabric. The boy doll would never get his soul back into his physical body, he’d never pass on, but I’d have a friend.

It didn’t matter how many men and women I let crawl in and out of my bed, I was still hungry, still underfed, still blue. The boy doll made it better. I sometimes thought the pizza could fix that for me, but it never did.

And I’m waiting, waiting for the doorbell or the knock to summon me up on my hind legs. It should have been enough, the boy doll's eternal afterlife ticking away, to move me outside of these walls. I thought about a package I had ordered. A package I purchased from Malaysia on my little silver screen, and how it was going to travel back in time to arrive at home, at my local time. Maybe it would beat the pizza to the front step, maybe it would deliver me enough energy to save the boy doll's soul after all.

Syd Brewster is a writer and photographer from New York State. They are a recent graduate from Chapman University in Southern California.
You can find them on Instagram @sydbrews