Chapter 5: Dark dreams

Courtesy of Crystl.

An intermittent unfolding of a short story involving a woman, her luck and a randy cockroach. The earlier installments, in chronological order, are: The fall; The blame; Her very own hell; and What happened next.

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Their meetings in bed were violent encounters: foot shoved against thigh, elbow jabbed into rib, and he would fall out of bed.

Help me! she'd hiss.

Whaa? he'd say.

He fumbled in the darkness, trying to pull it off his body, but the night stuck to the sheets and in his ears like tufts of thundercloud, dark, soft, ominous.

I need help, you fucking idiot.

Her anger crackled like the static electricity in the blankets he was pushing back. His hands glided over lump and limb until he found a small wet face and silky hair. He lifted the bundle up and she cried with pain and alarm: Not that one, he's nursing! The other one! He'd start again with his hands, feeling, feeling. A tiny mouth latched hungrily onto his finger and he picked it up, triggering a new bout of crying.

Downstairs they'd walk from living room to kitchen to hallway and back to living room, a track so well tread he paced it with his eyes shut, arms jiggling the bundle of blankets. It was neither eyes nor ears, but hands that told him which son he held. There was a stubbornness, a stiffness, that came from one boy, a refusal to be cradled and rocked in his father's arms, so the two walked instead.

When the father needed to pee, he'd walk himself and his wailing son into the bathroom, where, with eyes shut, he'd jiggle his son with one arm, and with the other, loosen his pajamas and piss. There was that one night when he opened his eyes because he was splashing all over himself and found that he wasn't in the bathroom but was standing over a kitchen chair, urine running off the seat and spilling on his feet. But tonight was uneventful. Holding his son he tried to slip into bed quietly, but he was big and heavy and the bed bounced, the second baby cried, his wife let out a sleepy hiss and shoved a new crying son into his arms. Once again he was walking through the dark, eyes closed, arms telling him this was a smaller, lighter bundle whose cries would quiet to whimpers and finally ragged breaths. The father slept.

In the light, she woke, felt for her babies and found one.

Just one.

She kicked him, again. Hard.

Where is my baby?

Whaa?

Where's my baby!

He sat up in bed, the memories of the night unrecorded by his eyes that now opened, blinked, irises dilating, contracting.

I don't know.

The words floated above the bed with the dust dancing in the sunlight. He could hear her calls from the kitchen, then the living room, heard them replaced with coos and then the creak and whisper of her feet on the stairs. She climbed back into the bed that separated them, so big and crowded with young bodies.

You put him in the bassinet. He wasn't even crying.

In the darkness beneath the blankets, her cold feet sought his warm ones, touching them softly and gently, asking to be warmed.

Chapter four: What happened next

Photo of Mike Cockrill's art by C-Monster

When she woke the next morning, she looked around for the charred bed springs and singed carpet, but the only sign of the night's combustion of words was the soot beneath her eyes. Warm buttery sunlight melted on the bedroom floor. She breathed, and her relief caused the mobile of paper butterflies to dance and twirl above her head. The days that followed were flights on gossamer wings. She danced and sang and smiled as the sun shone, but at night she plunged into the flames like a moth on a suicide mission, only to rise again in the morning to dance with dark rings under her eyes.

"Something is terribly wrong," she told a friend over tea.

But the friend was blowing on the tea to cool it and didn't hear her.

"I've been cursed," she told her husband over the telephone.

But the babies were crying, and when her husband asked her to repeat herself, she threw the phone instead, shattering it against the door and leaving a hole that resembled a small, hungry mouth. Picking up the tiny voice from among the broken pieces, she fed it to the door, which swallowed it and began reciting long passages from "Moby Dick" until her daughter came along and silenced it by taping its mouth shut with Band-Aids.

Chapter three: Her very own hell

Photo courtesy of Smileykt

Because her luck died in the bedroom, it was here she felt the first lick of fire and sizzled skin. The bad luck curled through the room like smoke, choking and strangling her until she woke, smothered by the blankets and babies and man. (There were too many penises!) She clawed her way out of her claustrophobia and went in search of her daughter. The tiny girl was sleeping nearby on the floor, and, sighing in relief at the familiar shape and smell of the girl's small body, she lay down and slept again.

But under the dark cover of sleep, her breasts were discovered by her daughter, who nuzzled and greedily drank the milk, as sunny and sweet as ripe strawberries. Waking to the gulps and tugs, she slapped the girl away and ended up waking her cherubs too. First one and then the other sent up sharp cries of protest when they discovered their milk missing. The husband woke and cursed. The children wailed. She yelled. And the balls of words smoldered and exploded in flame.

Chapter two: The blame

Photo courtesy of ichangedmyname.

Wherever she went she was told how blessed she was, how lucky to have a beautiful little girl and twins (twins!). Women envied her, wished for sets of their own, their covetous fingers lingering too long on her cherubs' rosy cheeks and full tummies. But by then she knew her luck had turned, and she'd smile politely and mutter "idiot" under her breath.

When had life turned wretched? Why, after so many years, was she cursing and spitting like a wet cat? She played back the time leading up to the birth of her babies and gave herself a migraine trying to remember the hazy days that followed in the hospital. And though she knew luck had flown away with her cherubs' arrival, she dared not point a sharp, blaming finger at her babies.

In truth, blame (if any could be found) lay between her toes. It happened one night in the sooty darkness of sleep. A cockroach had spied her luck curled up in its soft nest of dust under her bed, fallen in love with it, and, weaving tales of an exotic nightlife, convinced the luck to run away. At that same instant that her luck was wrapping its thighs around the roach's hard brown shell, one of her cherubs woke her with a round, empty belly wail, and as she stumbled out of bed and went groping for the crib she squashed the cockroach and her luck.

Chapter one: The fall

Photo courtesy of fturmog

Her luck had turned sour and curdled even as the abundant supply of sweet, nourishing milk sprayed from her breasts and was gulped down by the two little cherubs in her arms. Really, it didn't surprise her, because for years her wishes bore fruit. She liked to believe her luck involved a bit of magic from the gnarled pomegranate tree that she and her husband had made love under one desert night. They fucked each other so hard the fruit fell from the tree and onto their heads, but they kept going, their sweaty bodies rolling over and squashing pomegranates, staining them red. And when they were done and lay staring up through the tree's branches at the ocean of stars, she licked the juice from her arms and nibbled on the jeweled seeds.

She liked to believe that for years afterward she carried her husband's seeds and the pomegranate seeds inside of her, and that this was why two times her belly grew round and full, skin taut and crisscrossed with pale red stretch marks. That it was the pomegranate tree that gave her three children, and two of them twins (twins!), when doctor after doctor said there would be none. But if, she figured, there was no magic, if luck were as predictable as the economy's rise and fall, then she knew her time to plummet had come. And so she fell, tumbling and crashing into the depths of her own hell, the fires burning so hot inside of her that it surprised her that her milk spray wasn't a hiss of steam that scalded her babies.

Prompted by [Fiction] Friday's challenge to sketch out a character with wildly bad luck. Make it a character you like, as we will use her again.