Other 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐍𝐄𝐂𝐑𝐎𝐏𝐎𝐋𝐈𝐒 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ demonology's drabbles

[demonology]

demon
works

scroll

what is this?

demon's written works, usually ones that are solo projects

tumblr

the necropolis — currently a massive w.i.p but will later contain information not included here!

rating

18+ (dark themes)

𝙰𝙱𝙾𝚄𝚃 𝙼𝙴 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ
Hello ! Consider this a welcome to this silly lil thread. My name is JO, though most Internet fiends call me DEMON or DMONEY, so you're welcome to call me by all of the above.

As a roleplayer of many years, I always imagined my writing solely ammounting to hobby-levels. However, when the soul jolts in a particular direction, we are fools not to follow. Feel free to bully me for using such a ridiculous metaphor to describe my this thread. In fact, I encourage it.

If you find yourself at all enchanted by this silly introduction or what this thread has to offer, feel free to drop a line. Furthermore (shameless plug) feel free to check out my tumblr page, where I'm putting lots more information about my writing pursuits. Otherwise, I will be here, in the stratosphere.

— Jojo

---

𝙳𝙸𝚁𝙴𝙲𝚃𝙾𝚁𝚈 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ

1. A Folly of The Forsaken (title w.i.p); Story I in The Eventide Trapping — [x].
A short-story centering around a mysterious Crow, who fights a demonic creature whilst thinking of the steps on the path that brought her here.

2. A Letter to The DPS + Papillion Monster; a small nothing — [x]
A small something written about friends lost.

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.

 

[demonology]

folly of forsaken

scroll

synopsis

A short-story centering around a mysterious Crow, who fights a demonic creature whilst thinking of the steps on the path that brought her here.

greater project

this snippet is for a greater book called The Eventide Trapping.

rating

18+ (dark themes)

𝙵𝙾𝙻𝙻𝚈 𝙾𝙵 𝙵𝙾𝚁𝚂𝙰𝙺𝙴𝙽 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ

They beheld a miracle once.

Her head held stories, too many for a filing cabinet. If they were cataloged, ends would stick out and pages would be bent backwards. She held stories, too unbelievable to repeat. Not even the foreigners she creeped with beneath, in this realm called the Batting, could believe. She held stories, some of which were easier to keep, but she wished they would burn. Instead, she felt herself cradling them, rocking Rosemary’s Baby.

In this instance, she gave in to another story. A mantra. She held this one within the temple – her ribcage, and guarded it beneath Titane steel. They beheld a miracle once.

Her sword ground into a canine, and she dropped her skinnier blade to put both hands to the hilt. “Jackass,” she yelled before the edge sprung free.

With its tooth equally free, the thing groaned. An ache formed in its mouth, unfamiliar and unrelenting. It decided to follow a similar pursuit. Slimy hands walloped for her neck. Tree-trunk feet uprooted themselves and attempted to till her into the earth. Her broadsword clattered, running away as a small child afraid of the bed’s innards and underbelly.

She backed off too; an adult who realized her baby had been describing a rabid mouse who had made its home in the shadows under the bed, not just the shadows themselves. A gash leaked from her shoulder, and she realized her fate.

Unknowing of the cost.

It came in his voice, as it had been when they’d first read the poem aloud, ten years ago. Fate. His face became barren when she told him. Blanched, but it wasn’t until he shed a tear, that they were allowed to cry.

Crow took up a sword instead. It was not either of the swords she wielded now, and the realization stuck to her. She saw the tears of her friends as they spilled, as unsure even now of what she should’ve said then. They always asked her for answers when Fritz failed to provide, and a decade had not relented the potency of their deflated eyes as she turned from them.

Unknowing of the cost.

She held stories in her heart. Far too many to carry. This was one of them: calamity shown via dream. A red-eyed world with a tartar smile that stunk in her mouth. It gazed upon her, and she knew what failure was. Finding the End, where he was dead, where they were all dead, and she was left to bear witness. A disciple of Failure.

She scooped up the rapier, groaning. Her body formed a dance with its strokes, and she found the creature’s eye. Studying its blindness for a moment, her face was Stonehenge. Meaningless, meaningful, it was unsure what to make of its foe. Another mutt, Crow thought. It was the Taj Mahal, the only eighth wonder she remembered. Or was it seventh?

The It’s eye blinked rapidly, pooling with blood in a manner that showed how hollow the space between the lens and the iris was. It was an improper model of humanity, as though it had been created by someone who only saw humans in pictures or hazy souvenirs, from snowglobes to music boxes. Its bloated body formed gelatin, like excess cellulite on a thigh. Having eaten one, she knew it tasted like how she imagined human flesh to be: soft, flavorless, akin to the fatty excess she’d suck off a steak cutlet at T.Roma’s, sister Nikki eyeing her like a rabid dog. She saw her then, as she suckled the flesh. She sees her now, in the blood-clotted eye of the Feeder. Its hands, massive and weapons in their own right, with callouses that make them impervious and hairs so thick they could burrow into her and suckle Crow like steak.

This one, out of all the Feeders, looked like how Crow had once imagined an anatomically-correct Frankenstein, minus the cyclops vision. They always appeared in some new form, which she could never quite place but recognized as wrong, as fearful. FUBAR-ed, as Felix would say. His smile played in her taped memories, acting for her as the motion was too foreign to mimic.

Her own body became a mushroom left exposed in the fridge: shriveled, old, rotten. Recognisance dimmered. The brain became just a brain, and the arms became just arms. The wisdom of the Batting injected itself as heroin, enlightening her. Crow denied existence. She refused morality. Intelligence repulsed her. Stumbling back, afeared, she fell to the ground and allowed It to overtake her view of the sky and the planetary face curled into the distant mountain: Redwork.

They beheld a miracle once, she began again, hand gasping for the hilt.

The sword reared upright, absorbing the lighted god’s wisdom. It arrowed towards the beast’s head, set to cut free the threaded spine.

A sharp angel arched through the air.

She started to finish, And they never forgot–

A clubbed demon matched.

And then– the dark.

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.

 

[demonology]

a letter to DPS...

scroll

synopsis

A small bit written about friends lost and the pain of mourning them when, like most lost connections, all we had to do is talk and it could be fixed.

greater project

n/a

rating

18+ (dark themes)

𝙰 𝙻𝙴𝚃𝚃𝙴𝚁 𝚃𝙾 𝚃𝙷𝙴 𝙳𝙿𝚂 + 𝙿𝙰𝙿𝙸𝙻𝙻𝙸𝙾𝙽 𝙼𝙾𝙽𝚂𝚃𝙴𝚁 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ

Neil Perry's chest is laid barren in a hot-swill of blood, trickle-down - trickle-down. The gun safe unlocks itself with ease. I wonder if I will meet him, if he will find me as Christmas Future.

Instagram is haunting, as much as it feeds. I miss everyone dearly. An isolated leaf, flowing with the wind, who starts with loneliness as though the reprieve from it were just a dream. Was it?

Halloween is floundering near, blowing up like a sex-doll I don't have a particular urge to order off Amazon, much less fuck, but it offers old comfort, like I am innocent once more in an act so foreign to me. Irony. The real act, just like friendship, causes me pain, and both are alike in the amount of self-enthusiastic debauchery and clumsy greenery. The melancholy that warms my chloro-phallic underbelly. I miss you all dearly.

You all are dressed in costumes, drinking cheap beer and frying the egg-brain off synthetic wax pens at shows I would never attend unless asked. I miss you all dearly, but you will never inquire about me as I've burned the bridge you blocked off eons ago. You live in the Anthropocene, but I hum-drum along in the sepia-toned finality of aged film, frying myself on fiction. It is easier to find friends in actors and writers.

So Neil Perry is dying. Todd Anderson is crying. I am bed-ridden. And you are all still babies, still children, but so am I. I cry as Neil Perry dies, unsure who I am in this Fischer-Price play.

A chloric, rheumatic swill, metaphorical or real, consumes my lungs and my temperate. On Monday, Halloween, I will rise from my chambers, dress in a mildly inappropriate cloth for my big-girl job, choke down a cup of coffee, and face my 56-year-old coworker who hates me in place of her similarly-aged children and similarly-tempered husband. She knows that same weakness in me that my mother knew, that you supposedly saved from until you exploited it. Why did I stop you? Call me overdramatic, batty, build that cage again until the metal bites my cheeks and cellulite, and let us be friends again!

I am all alone on a Saturday night, having seen no one who makes me feel alive in months (besides the boyfriend, but does he count, when he is the life I have? It is like comparing the nomadic, infantile, and freezing breath when you walk out to heat up the car to the necessary inhale). Tick off the list, try to write, fuck around on the computer and talk to the Internet friends who live too far away, and open that god-forsaken app.

Instagram. An icon of colors that remind me of our friendships, back when they bloomed into technicolor tulip fields any Dutch painter would be twitterpated to capture. I gave up high school to you, yielded it all in favor of the love I though waited on the other side. No such Fate, and now I am scorned. By It or you, I cannot tell, but one of you is culpable for turning me Black with Death. In the coffin, I scroll through a kaleidoscope of your new life, but does that make me dead? Friends found in types of people you hated before, made fun of me for finding appealing. Are we really that different? So grown past our infancy that there is no use in trying to mend tears formed in adolescent mutiny?

That First Breath, screaming because you are now miserably breathing — I found it with you all. This app, it is the pillow drenched in chloroform. Would you attend my funeral if I offered it as a pyre, just for you to dance around, read from Kant and Whitman, and film Reels to? Protest me, protest me, but please, do not forget me. I miss you all dearly.

Running around Walmart, hollering in the car above the din of some hand-crushed cush in a song written by some wack-job nu metal worker one of you enjoy so much. Next to our ear’s Murder Scene — Gerard Way, still holding my heart in his palm, and yours too. I thought I had a hand on that too, had it in my mouth, pressed pert between my teeth, but it was you who feasted upon me. Rocky Horror fiction, Meatloaf all-cooked and coked up with your eyes, all eight of them, wild over the mahogany table. When I protested, when I asked you to stop, you feigned unfamiliarity with the poltergeists of Hamtramck. You laughed, even, and turned the radio up louder. You toked another bowl while I tried not to cry in the rat-dropping'ed corner of the party. I wanted you to love me, to let me in on your Chloe Sevingy debauchery, the casual-cool mean-girlness coupled with the twang of midwest Redditor to you all. I wanted to be among the baby-doll-burning, confirmation-bible-paper-joint-rolling, Kiwi-Farms-trolling, dirty-secrecy-found-only-in-Limp-Biskit-and-Kimya-Dawson, Gigi's-on-the-weekend-with-x's-on-the-hand-like-gay-Jesus club that you all formed.

Now it's all Harry-Styles, gender-queer, light-hearted cheer, and Monster High — things I enjoyed, too, but felt we would never share. You've boiled down what you were, perhaps grown a bit, I'd hope. Yet, none of you drop a line, invite me out. I shouldn't be surprised; I cut you all out first. I was on the cross, I had my hand on the gun-safe. You all left me behind, left me in the desert to die, and I wanted to. God! I wanted to! Yet, I ran along side the Honda Civic. 'Take me to the drug deal! Take me!' I begged, I begged, but it was soundless compared to what played in the car and your voices overtop. The Strokes, since when? Tumblr 2014, back in full swing, and I am that penchant, needy middle schooler all over again. I'm tugging at your sleeves, asking you to please be my friend. Tears streaming down my face, Virgin Mary, as you all liked to remind me. Too much of a kid for you.

"Lynz?" We were roommates, once, behind the Polish Film Theatre. Cigarette against the windowsill, and not even this I can find aesthetic in. The mice scurried about the kitchen, with the cat sleeping lazily on the weed-puffed couch. He stirred, tried to catch one of the butterflies on the cushion, before rolling over to show his belly. One of you giggled.

"Yeah?" I rose from my crypt (your mattress, your duvet), wishing you would ask me out, ask me round to whatever y’all are up to. I wished you would ask me why, all those months ago, I unfollowed you on Instagram, and you'd actually listen.

Months later, Halloweentown on the telly in a fabulously 50′s flat, tucked in bed like a constipated English woman. House coat, pink-plush. But instead, it's just a girl, mourning the marrow meal of Neil Perry, in a smelly pair sweatpants stolen from you and a haircut that reminds me of when one of you fried your hair off with bleach.

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.

 

[demonology]

losing sleep

scroll

synopsis

A short story I wrote for a workshop featuring Ronnie.

post

read here on tumblr.

greater project

n/a though thoughts do be happening.

rating

18+ (dark themes + drug use)

𝙻𝙾𝚂𝙸𝙽𝙶 𝚂𝙻𝙴𝙴𝙿 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ

He lets her down easy. “It’s not you, it’s me” and all that bullshit, so she lets him. There is no cries, no pleas for him not to leave, no asking what she did wrong because obviously there has to be something. He was good to her, she knows this, but he was a bore anyways, and probably a cheat, so what is there to lose? She knows he is not a boy to lose sleep over, with his khaki shirts and pre-bought jorts that skirt only just past the knee. Birdie and Pierce met him once when she brought him home, and fire-haired Bird didn’t even bother asking who was that? when he left the next morning. She knows he is not a boy to lose sleep over, but she has anyways. Up for almost eighteen hours at this point, she hasn’t been home since he broke up with her in the diner.

Before her therapy appointment, she’d met another guy, one she’d already fucked once for cheap coke, so when she comes to his door, he gives her just a price. She pays it, snorts it right there in his doorjam, and walks back out to the street. She knows he is not a boy to lose sleep over, but she sees his face everywhere – on billboards, in puddles, and on the white plains of window mannequin faces. Sandy brown hair that went too well with his khaki shirts harkened by the beige tartan jackets popular on the street this rainy week. The dimple on his ass posterized by a Calvin Klein underwear ad. In between, there are those moments of intimacy that she knows aren’t worth losing sleep over. Tucking her straw-wheat hair back in a way that made her think of herself as a girl with tendrils for hair instead of just strands. Booping her nose in a pettish way, but in a way that she didn’t mind being owned. Wharfing down her blinis at 3 a.m. after a show, telling her These are so good!, and slithering his snake arms around her from behind as she washed the dishes, telling her, you looked so sexy on stage. These were not moments worth losing sleep over. They made her cringe at every Calvin Klein ad, at every tartan rain coat, at every stupid dog that walked so pleasantly on their owner’s leash.
Somewhere around noon, she found herself in a bathroom and snorted some more. She found herself in the mirror: pupils as black holes, frizzy, damp hair from the rain, cockeyed bangs, unkempt brows and aquiline nose. She looked ravenous, she realized, but instead of stopping for food, she continued on. It was something else. He was not worth losing sleep over, and he was not worth going hungry over. She knew what Dr. Tuttle would tell her when she stopped in this afternoon. Well that’s great! I think we’re really getting somewhere. I’m proud of you, not causing an outburst and taking it like a real champ. She knows Dr. Tuttle would tell her he isn’t worth losing sleep over, but all she can think is why, why, why, why?!

What did I do wrong? Why don’t you love me? Wasn’t I a good enough fuck, a good enough lay? I let you do whatever you wanted to me; I let you live with when your Manhattan daddy kicked you out; I loved you; I love you; what is it about me that you didn’t like? You snort like its always your fucking birthday, you smoke like your daddy owns a tobacco plantation, and I’m what? I’m ‘not who you’re looking for’ because I can’t just roll over and fall asleep like you do?; I won’t scream this time, I promise, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry!; Maybe he’ll call me back, maybe he’s calling me right now, maybe I should go home and call him.; He’s not worth losing sleep over.; We spent whole days in bed, whole nights out on the street doing whatever the fuck he wanted, and he dumps me in the diner down the block from my apartment?; What was it about me that wasn’t enough? Because I gave you everything, you slimy fuckball, and I told you everything.; He’s not worth losing sleep over.; I’m not worth losing sleep over.; I’m not worth losing sleep over, that’s it. Isn’t it?

“Ronnie?” Dr. Tuttle snaps in front of her disjointed gaze.

“Huh? What? Sorry.” She doesn’t know how she got here, but she fluffs her hair back behind her shoulders and straightens her back. “I didn’t get much sleep.”

“That’s okay. What kept you up?”

She shrugs. “Nothing worth losing sleep over.”

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.

 

[demonology]

a hen's wager

scroll

synopsis

A snippet from the world of Egress, prior to the events of Pandora's Box. We follow Ramiel on an evening where their thoughts and memories choke them. In the morning, they will be expected to attend Church along with the rest of the Nobility, and in the sleepless night, they reflect upon past sermons, their outcomes, and how it all added up to create them, this malformation.

post

read here on tumblr. (coming soon)

greater project

Pandora's Box

rating

18+ (dark themes)

𝙰 𝙷𝙴𝙽'𝚂 𝚆𝙰𝙶𝙴𝚁 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ​

I will have been alive for twelve hours, up for sixteen, planning out my Sunday dress in flurrious knowledge that the Missus will expect me to dress nice or else. I’ll have to deal with her harmless jokes, the picking-off-the-lint-pills that don’t exist but that Verona, the grandfathered-in friend of the duo-now-trio, will say ‘See, look Twin,’ once she ‘hands’ them to him. His smile will be jeweled but off-center, built with a nonsensical geometry I’ve known since metaphorical infancy, but it will meet my own as we giggle over the after-service mimosas. Missus’s Husband, Mr. Trumblebottom will talk to Ova, as he has done all those years since I met his wife. After, Ova will walk past me, past the spiral iron-worked stair rails of our home, the ones wrought with faeries in metal prisons that I once ran my fingers over as I listened to her and Mama, and she will mumble, “That was a successful evening,” and the very implication that this is meant for me to hear will carry me through the troughs of the dreamful pseudo-crypt known as sleep.
I won’t be able to sit down after the service, as though now that I am alive, it hurts more to stop, to die. Where the hips meet the leg, the bones rub together, but I will be too drunk on mimosas and I will care more about V and M’s rudderless laughs ringing in my ear than my back pain. I will be alive, I know, but I will not be able to stop in fear of the same sea of thought that comes for me now. More so than usual, I know, and the indifference of the knowledge of what is to come is why I cannot sleep.

A sermon several slides back, I had similarly been alive for twelve hours. Up for sixteen, rising with the intruderous thoughts about what Mama’s death meant for me and my juvenile dynamic with the ‘Big Man Above.’ I was alive, sitting in those pews, pondering the external world, breathing painfully, but also aware of Missus, pious in the pews as Godiva, that same Big Man, would want both of us.
She’s always been more holy than me, sitting as a crumpled doll. After the service, her husband sat to the right, with his splotchy lion’s mane and popped collar. His hands were greasy as he shook mine, moving on to the more biblical creature (my mother), who smiled when she saw him come so close and shook business deals through the palms of their hands. The Missus, though – she still sat, something remiss, but with duty. Her warped-binding eyes ravaged the plump, sculpted-feathered wings of Apollonio’s pulpit body. They were tired and watery, but they bit at the iconography with a fervor; chomp, chomp, chomp. Consumed by hellfire, she fluffed up her pancake, mile-high curls, but with a glazed look like she had finished a late-night talk with a strange man, batting crimped lashes, and drunkenly hoping he might love her. Does Apollonio love you? I wanted to ask her, sitting six feet down and knobby knees going numb from the scratchy prayer pads under them. My hands were half-undone, because I was always bad at talking to Godiva, but by now I had let go of talking to Him when I stared at her. Rubber-gaze snapped, she looked back, an impatient owl, as though she’d been waiting for that little thing to stop praying. We haven’t stopped laughing since.
It is night now, and the Missus is a will-be-past-me. I am still embryonic, dirt-stuffed and filled with maggots. In an attempt to feign being alive, the mind is wandering. In an attempt to ignore the body (my body) and its back-gashes’s blood-knockings (they are here! Boom boom boom, with each thoracic beat), the mind is drowning in pre-birth swill.

You were born to be great. You were born despite a condom, despite birth-control — that means you are a mathematical improbability. You were adopted, meaning you have twice as many parents. You were adopted into a life you do not have a birthright to. Your life is filled with mathematical improbabilities, as Ova will remind you. You will rise, and she will look to you and remember Mama, but you are crumpled. So she will go, “Now, please, Twinny, just try the corset – it’ll make your spine straight as a rod. Oh! And give Mr. Trumblebottom a kiss on the cheek when you see him.” And she will whisper, “Kneel, kneel – Twin Sylvester, stop the waterworks, it doesn’t hurt that bad, and kneel.” And she’ll murmur tersely, “Thankfully, Mr. Trumblebottom didn’t comment on the service.” And at the end of the night, you will not have earned that compliment, and instead she will say, “Ulla made you food - it's in the fridge, and oh can you pass me the margarine? Why are you so mopey? We just had an amazing night!”
But there is the Missus to think about instead. That is the needle of this haystack, isn’t it?
“I know, I know, I can’t believe my mother made such a stink about Gwen,” I told her last week as we were sipping tiny and frequent sips, enrapt in discussion of the incident involving the removal of the local leper and homeless woman. “The Ministry is open to all, she’s a patron, and all she wanted was to meet with her social worker.”
“Why would you even bother her! She’s unwell, clearly – always tittering to herself and bothering passerbys about her ‘condition’. She doesn’t even want housing; none of them do! Not the infirm, not the mentally ill – none of them. If they wanted houses, they’d have them.”
I had made a neutral face, one that she quirked a brow at, and then Verona returned and saved the conversation.
This is the ghost that haunts this night, but it does not calm the mind. The mind is wandering with coked-up anxiety, and I am stuck in before-after death. I had thought each soiree, each prayer, each sardonic grin over champagne at something her husband or my mother had said – I had thought all of it were forged of some Otherness we both felt. She was a mathematical improbability, I had thought, but she is average. There is a new weight to tomorrow’s life, and the mind won’t forgive me for not feeling it sooner.
But it hurts to pay this attention, so tomorrow, you will smile and be happy to be alive. You will talk to Missus and be glad she forgot that awkward encounter, laughing with you over someone else’s faux paux. You are yellow-bellied, and you are a mathematical improbability. “Don’t be a writer,” Mother – Ova once told you, citing this fact, so you picked up a yellow legal pad instead, and you wrote down every number that you could think of — 0-9, over and over again. And in this act, you thought that a space between any number, even one as grand as the one between your mathematical improbabilities and their realities, made it different from those ten digits. And in this hope, you thought that life could continue, that even the Missus could bring you back to life, but you live only in these brief snippets in hope your mother will defy logic. You have been dead all your life, and Earth is just Godiva’s Heaven.
I roll over, released from the mind’s shackles through tears, and I sleep.

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.

 

[demonology]

smoke break

scroll

synopsis

While working a shift at McDonald's, Birdie and her manager, Jenna, head out for a smoke break, but she is quickly faced with something she was not anticipating.

post

read here on tumblr. (coming soon)

greater project

n/a

rating

18+ (dark themes + drug use)

𝚂𝙼𝙾𝙺𝙴 𝙱𝚁𝙴𝙰𝙺 𖤐 ࿐ྀུ​

The real reason she liked her job was because it was high school. Headset clipping her ears and sucking her brain, she moved through the motions of a McDonald’s day with a rhythm. Jenna pitched a fit about the egg whites being left out, tossed them in the trash, and then looked at her. Birdie smirked, pulling the headphones down to her neck and wore it in a Boleyn way. She nodded, tied in this jittery secret.

“Cover for me,” she told Rodney.

“Nicer girls would invite me,” he said.

“And do I look nice?” She gestured to her chalky uniform and spiked red hair.

“You look like you’d eat me for breakfast.”

“Damn straight. Now, be a good dog and man the drive-thru.”

“So giddy,” he teased, “like the quarterback just asked you to give him a BJ.”

She flipped him off as she ate the gap between her and Jenna, quick to wrap an arm around her waifish form. Her eyes plucked over the other girl’s edges, laying it bare. Jenna had pink streaks in her hair, an addition she didn’t make until Birdie had entered the scene, and she talked constantly about getting a nose piercing. Why she hadn’t committed to it yet, Birdie didn’t know, but she had her suspicions. Jenna was always on her daddy’s phone, talking when she should be managing, but Birdie knew there would be no recourse for this. Nor the extended bathroom breaks with the boys she had just got done murmuring to on the phone. Yeah, yeah, stop by. Now, yup. Okay, bye. Birdie presumed she didn’t know how much more of her cartilage she had left or if Daddy would take away her phone privileges if she got a piercing, so she didn’t.

They wheeled the garbage can out towards the dumpster, one hand on either side, and Birdie followed Jenna’s lead when she began to skip. A car honked at them as it rounded the corner for the drive-thru, and the girls were sent into a giggle fit. They quickly abandoned their baby, heading behind the dumpster with their tender backs pressed hard against the cold sheet-metal. Knees tucked close and knocking together against Birdie’s, Jenna fished around in her bra, reaching up and under the black, polyester-blend of the uniform. A peak of pink silk, but Birdie avoided looking. Instead, she focused on the sun, which trickled and scattered against the bleached, hedgehog tips of Jenna’s cropped-doo. Tenderly, Birdie brushed her hand against the gelled ends.

“Your hair’s starting to look like mine,” she joked.
With the joint tucked into the bed of her fingers’ webbing, Jenna brushed her hand across the spikier, stickier ends of Birdie’s fire engine hair. “Daddy wants me to tell you to cool it on the look,” she said absentmindedly.

“Yeah? Well, are you?”

“What do you think?”

“I think you know when your dad stops by to check on the store, and you should just not schedule me that day.”

“Hmm. That sounds naughty.” Jenna wrapped her lips around the joint, flicking the lighter once. Twice. Finally, she handed it over to Birdie.

“No, just coverin’ our asses. There’s a lot that he doesn’t see, so who cares if he misses me everytime he stops by?”
Jenna shrugged. Birdie struggled. Jenna reached over, cupping the flame with her chipped-pink nails. Birdie took a hit and blew the smoke in Jenna’s face, a lion cub at play.

“You’re a jerk.”

“What are you gonna do about it? Fire me?”

Jenna shook her head, beginning to choke on the smoke. “Hell no. Who’s gonna give me free weed? Or come in when Rodney calls off?”
She began to rub and pat at Jen’s back, until she awkwardly felt the clasp of her bra. Instead, Birdie took the joint back.

“Probably one of those guys that’s always comin’ by.” She mumbled it with her eyes back on the sun and Jenna’s streaky hair. “So when are you gonna get that nose piercing?”

“Have other people noticed him?” Her tone was mousy, as though Birdie had just turned the light on and disturbed Jenna’s kitchen-counter feast.

Whiplash. “Huh? Who?”

“The guy.”

“You mean there’s only one?”

“Yeah, duh.” Jen’s shoes played soccer with a rock, passing it back and forth. “How can you not tell?”

“Uh, I don’t know. Every drug dealer looks the same, I guess.”

“So do you think that other people have noticed?”

“I mean, I’ve talked to Rod about it, but I don’t know. Why?”

Jenna shrugged, ashing the joint. “Jus’ don’t want Daddy to find out.”

“That you’re snorting coke or that you’re meeting a boy?”

Flashbang: doe eyes to Birdie’s hazed ones. “How could you tell?”

“Dude, you and half of Manhattan snorts that shit.”

Jenna’s face disappeared into her thighs, tucked so tight as though she might regress back into the womb. “Shit, shit, shit,” she murmurs. “Shit!”
Birdie became painfully aware of her bra again, but she still wrapped her arms around her friend. “It’s alright, it’s all good. I doubt anyone’s gonna tell your dad. Why would they? You’re like their boss.”

Jenna didn’t listen. She tucked herself deeper into Birdie’s chest, moving to curl into the girl’s lap. Tears rain down her porcelain cheeks, but Birdie didn’t wipe them away. Instead, her hands hovered above Jenna’s warmth, stunned as the other girl’s spring-loaded emotions were a taser. They jolted into her heart, and Birdie could only gulp down her influx of milquetoast saliva. Her growling stomach was what forced Jenna’s head off Birdie’s bosom, something she hadn’t been aware of since high school. Rather, the last time she recalled she had boobs was when Bob, a geriatric manager, had first met her on the one shift they worked together. The other time, which arguably gave her worse heebee-jeebees, though for an entirely different reason, was when her buddy Pierce had laughed at her “I Heart Jesus” tee after she’d just stepped in from the cold street. So, with Jenna’s doll-face against her, Birdie could only think of Jacqueline, the last girl who’d willfully done such a thing, and her death, which happened not long after.

The circumstance began to make her skin crawl. Soft was Jenna’s hair as she petted it, and Jenna kept mumbling about something or other. He just doesn’t understand. Threatening me, holding the money over my head. Birdie’s throat was closing around a tumor of melancholy, and the weed made her forget how to breathe. He’s making me, you know? And with school, work, gah – Suddenly, Birdie stood up, snot stains dribbling down her front and a teary-eyed Jen baying at her shrine, on her knees with her mouth agape.

“Um. I have to get back.”

/* ------ credit -- do not remove ------ */

© weldherwings.