After the People Lights Have Gone Off by Stephen Graham Jones
Authors: Stephen Graham Jones
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watering whether I was telling them to or not.
I turned to the side to let him do what he was going to do and caught the sun, just starting to warm the very top of my gauzy ancient hand-me-down drapes.
“Hey,” I said about it.
He hissed, brought his mouth down to my neck, his teeth grazing my skin there, and said, “We finish it tonight,” tapping his naked eye, and then him and his black helmet and his perfumed stench were gone, stalking out the back, leaving my kitchen door open behind him, his bike tearing the morning open.
At first I just zoned out there after he was gone, staring at the pattern of the skirt tacked onto the bottom of my couch, pretending it was the curtain of a show I was waiting for. Pretending a tiny actor was about to prance out, ask how I’d liked the show, how I was liking this joke.
I made my way to the bedroom, rang my dad’s phone.
No answer.
I shut my eyes, threw the phone into the wall.
Gigi. Gretchen, really, but really Gigi, since she was little.
I’d always felt like I was out here throwing my life one way so she could go the other way. Like I was sacrificing myself so she wouldn’t have to. Like this was the only way to save her, the only way to be a decent big brother.
It’s stupid, I know. But I’m not smart.
My dad could have told you that.
Still, sometimes.
•
What I’ve done now, all day, it’s scrawl a rough X over each eye. And then over every free inch of space I’ve got left on my body, I’ve traced out scales, like I’m going to shade them in with color later. On my left side, kind of where I always imagined my heart to be, four of those scales have names on them. Like tombstones.
Mom, Dad, Gigi. Me.
This is the kind of art that would get me space at any parlor in town. The kind of imagery bleeding into meaning that makes real tattoo artists wince.
But that’s all over now, I guess.
It’s almost dark again.
Soon the chainsaw sound will be dying in the air, the helmet on my couch. A monster kicked back in my easy chair, his right hand between my legs, keeping me honest.
One last job, right?
But it’s also my first.
To prepare, and also because I can’t help it anymore, I feel my way down to the bathroom, lick what I can off the tile walls of the shower, scraping the rest in with my fingers. Pushing it deep inside.
What’s left of Dell’s ex is black and dried, but that taste underneath, it’s to die for. To kill for. Milk could never be like this, not in a thousand years. Cows got nothing on people.
I wore gloves when I was working on him, yeah, so I wouldn’t catch anything that was catching.
But then I used the same needle on myself, and I went deeper than I had to for just the ink to set.
His blood spiked up and down me. All through me, hungry.
For two hours, between one and three, the sun right above the house instead of slashing in through the window, I’m pretty sure I was clinically dead.
And I kind of still am.
Will he be able to smell it on me right away, through the flannel shirt I’ve put on to cover my new ink, to cover the bluebonnet on my chest that’s now my chest cracking open to reveal the real me, crawling out tooth and claw, or will we wait to do this thing until I’ve driven the needles through his naked eye into what the centuries have left of his brain?
It doesn’t matter.
Either way I win.
There always was a dragon curled up inside me, Dad.
Tonight it’s going to stand up.
to take their stupid little drama public (again), but that seemed to be part of what made them work the rest of the time, too, right? If the screamed accusations about last weekend’s unanswered voice mails and the apologies each of them promised never to give didn’t have an audience, then it would be like those promises weren’t even real, like the fight never happened.
Meanwhile, this is a camping trip.
Nevermind that they’re still forty miles from the park, and not in the same car anymore, and
I turned to the side to let him do what he was going to do and caught the sun, just starting to warm the very top of my gauzy ancient hand-me-down drapes.
“Hey,” I said about it.
He hissed, brought his mouth down to my neck, his teeth grazing my skin there, and said, “We finish it tonight,” tapping his naked eye, and then him and his black helmet and his perfumed stench were gone, stalking out the back, leaving my kitchen door open behind him, his bike tearing the morning open.
At first I just zoned out there after he was gone, staring at the pattern of the skirt tacked onto the bottom of my couch, pretending it was the curtain of a show I was waiting for. Pretending a tiny actor was about to prance out, ask how I’d liked the show, how I was liking this joke.
I made my way to the bedroom, rang my dad’s phone.
No answer.
I shut my eyes, threw the phone into the wall.
Gigi. Gretchen, really, but really Gigi, since she was little.
I’d always felt like I was out here throwing my life one way so she could go the other way. Like I was sacrificing myself so she wouldn’t have to. Like this was the only way to save her, the only way to be a decent big brother.
It’s stupid, I know. But I’m not smart.
My dad could have told you that.
Still, sometimes.
•
What I’ve done now, all day, it’s scrawl a rough X over each eye. And then over every free inch of space I’ve got left on my body, I’ve traced out scales, like I’m going to shade them in with color later. On my left side, kind of where I always imagined my heart to be, four of those scales have names on them. Like tombstones.
Mom, Dad, Gigi. Me.
This is the kind of art that would get me space at any parlor in town. The kind of imagery bleeding into meaning that makes real tattoo artists wince.
But that’s all over now, I guess.
It’s almost dark again.
Soon the chainsaw sound will be dying in the air, the helmet on my couch. A monster kicked back in my easy chair, his right hand between my legs, keeping me honest.
One last job, right?
But it’s also my first.
To prepare, and also because I can’t help it anymore, I feel my way down to the bathroom, lick what I can off the tile walls of the shower, scraping the rest in with my fingers. Pushing it deep inside.
What’s left of Dell’s ex is black and dried, but that taste underneath, it’s to die for. To kill for. Milk could never be like this, not in a thousand years. Cows got nothing on people.
I wore gloves when I was working on him, yeah, so I wouldn’t catch anything that was catching.
But then I used the same needle on myself, and I went deeper than I had to for just the ink to set.
His blood spiked up and down me. All through me, hungry.
For two hours, between one and three, the sun right above the house instead of slashing in through the window, I’m pretty sure I was clinically dead.
And I kind of still am.
Will he be able to smell it on me right away, through the flannel shirt I’ve put on to cover my new ink, to cover the bluebonnet on my chest that’s now my chest cracking open to reveal the real me, crawling out tooth and claw, or will we wait to do this thing until I’ve driven the needles through his naked eye into what the centuries have left of his brain?
It doesn’t matter.
Either way I win.
There always was a dragon curled up inside me, Dad.
Tonight it’s going to stand up.
to take their stupid little drama public (again), but that seemed to be part of what made them work the rest of the time, too, right? If the screamed accusations about last weekend’s unanswered voice mails and the apologies each of them promised never to give didn’t have an audience, then it would be like those promises weren’t even real, like the fight never happened.
Meanwhile, this is a camping trip.
Nevermind that they’re still forty miles from the park, and not in the same car anymore, and
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