When they arrived at Mula’s apartment, a blow-up doll hung from the ceiling fan in her living room. The doll had a glued rumpled printout of her mother’s face. The air from the vent pushed it left and right like a conceited obscenity swinging on the gallows. A plastic rose jutted from the inside of her labial grotto, red and plump like a dead heart holding onto the last spill of life.
The apartment smelled like cigarettes and weed. Beer cans and discharge-stained panties lay scattered everywhere.
Mula tik-tacked on her high heels across the small foyer and into the room. She stood next to the doll, looked back at Mark, and said,
“There she is. Well, say something, don’t be rude. Isn’t she a wonder?”
Pointing at the muted apparition hanging on a silk thread. She untied the string from the fan and laid it on the couch.
Mula could smell the uncertainty in him about the whole thing. She walked across the room back into Mark’s arms. Doused in tube light, she smiled. Her lips, bruised petunias, opened up to his sun. She landed her palm on his chest. They kissed, eyes closed, without tongues and a raging lichery. Mula’s mother looked at Mark from the couch. Mula drew back and said playfully,
“C’mon, big boy, take your pants off, do your thing,” pointing at the doll on the couch.
Mark locked eyes with the doll from the foyer. The decoupaged cadaver sprawled on its back on the black couch. The thing tried to win him over with a gaze in a fine print. A series of Frankenstein scars showed on an overlapped paper on its face. It seemed like Mark was just a few steps away from barebacking its broken heart.
“Are you joining in?” he said and returned the kiss.
The room shifted. Mark could tell that Mula was pissed at his dithering. She said that she’d be sitting in the corner, watching. Mark backed up a little. He felt like an arm and a fist were moving from his stomach into his gullet.
“Mula, when I agreed to help you with ‘a thing’, and have a little bit of fun along the way, this is not what I had in mind.”
“ And what DID you have in mind?! ‘Sure thing, anything for you, beautiful.’ That was just the booze talk, right? Fucking men, so fickle!”
She took a deep breath, dipped her chin into her chest, and said,
“Look… please, I need this.” She couldn’t hide the shakes. “It’ll help me get better. I told you that. I promise, I’ll make it up to you.”
No right words came to Mark’s mind. He couldn’t believe he was falling for this crazy yet beautiful cat.
Mark Millwall and Mula Leahy met just a few hours before they went to her apartment. Mark sat at a seedy place, down the street called “Mr. Thaci’s Horseshoe.” The local folk says that Mr. Thaci died from a ruptured colon while engaging in fornication with one of his horses in a full standing back mount. Of course, Mr. Thaci was on the receiving end of it. The place looked like a farm stable and was an homage to Mr. Thaci’s paraphilia.
The whiskey they served there was shitty. But after a third glass, who could really tell the difference between good and bad booze? Just when Mark was about to lose the round count, Mula came out of a dark corner. She sat next to Mark and confidently downed what was left in his glass.
“You seem like a loser, drinking himself to success, alone.”
“How about just successfully getting drunk… alone?”
She put an empty glass back into his hand. They exchanged smirks, and Mark bought a round of drinks. They sat at one of the low wooden tables, ate peanuts from the shell, and drank the night away. The one-man band played his guitar gently, some Led Zeppelin deep riffs from hell.
Mula was a word piñata. If you hit her with the right question, she wouldn’t stop prattling. Her story rattled on a twelve-fretted black ibanze’s vibrating strings, as the neighing steeds crept in from the back of the house. In vino veritas, they say; in Mula’s case, it was in whiskey veritas.
First, she started talking about her dad, who passed two weeks after she turned eighteen. He’d been fixing a lawnmower when his saliva turned clumpy and his shirt became too tight on his chest. Struggling to breathe, he’d tried to rip the shirt off with his hands, but that only made it worse. By the time Mula’s mom got him to the hospital, he had already passed. The doctor said he died from a massive coronary hit, but Mula thinks it was a broken heart. She had heard her parents fight before. Her dad accused her mom of cheating on many occasions. Her mom would call him names and yell about how miserable she was, but she never tried to deny it. Her insults towards Mula’s dad were a series of petty justifications for fucking other men behind his back. A year after Mula’s dad had passed, her mom married one of his best friends. He was one of the guys who worked with him in a tractor factory on the assembly line. The guy turned out to be a filthy, hard-hitting drunkard. He beat her mom every day. The old lady took the hits with dignity, like the earth does with hail. Also, she never cried in front of him, but the weeps went through twilight to dawn. Mula felt sorry for her mom, but eventually, she learned how to cancel the noise, convinced that she was getting what she deserved.
The sun was weak. It looked like a round pocket mirror in a bony female hand reflecting white and blue light. Mula was in her room, rearranging pot plants on the windowsill. Her stepdad came home, blotto. He walked in with a baton and hit Mula’s mom on her face, splitting open her left temple. She fell on the floor, twitching in pain as the blood gushed out of the eye socket. He leaned over her and called her a whore.
“You fucked half of the guys at Remy’s, and now the whole dump is laughing at me!”
He screamed through his smoky throat.
He spat at her and told her to get up. Mula ran out of the room, jumped onto his back, and began hitting him with her stereophone fists. The man lost his balance for a moment, but as soon as he fell into equilibrium again, he backed forcefully into a wall. Mula fell off his back, struggling for breath. She crunched on the tile like a poisoned roach. He picked Mula up and threw her onto her bed. White pillows bounced, and the covers folded over them. Mula felt all the weight of his drunk, slumped body. His big, swollen, drunkard nose kept getting in the way as he was fighting to kiss her over and over again. Mula’s mom ran into the room, begging him to stop, but the man had gone deaf in anger. He ripped Mula’s dress off, and the sun became brighter, shining off her milky skin. Flower petals shook from the sill, and scented dust flew into the blades of light. Mula couldn’t hear her mother cry, but she knew she was there, watching, too weak to protect her from the flank-devil slittering and raging up in her gut.
Weeks of sickness followed. Mula’s mom drank herself into a rock-solid stupor every day. They all pretended that nothing had happened, so life just went on for them. But at night, Mula’s mind wandered off into the darkest spaces. Her thoughts settled inside the slits of her fresh wound. A new kind of pain ruled over her. The moon became just a polished grey cataract on the eye surface; disheveled, death covered in boils.
Her mom and her stepdad drank and fought. Fought and drank. In a flurry of insults, Mula’s dad’s name came up here and there. Mula hated when that happened. She wished they could keep him out of it. He was a martyr to her, like Prometheus, chained to the walls of this god damn house in his death. Slow pecks of treacherous ravens murdered him perpetually; they are the devil’s priests mantled in black.
Except for Mula’s room, their home looked like a flophouse. A blackout drape fluttered like an obituary linen on the living room window. The floor was littered with boxes and bottles. Bile odor permeated the house from the sink drain. A smoke cobweb lingered above the furniture that was unable to absorb more of it. Running away into the big world was consistently on Mula’s mind. This wasn’t her home anymore. It was a grave full of people.
Summer rain persisted for three days and three nights. On the fourth day, the clouds cleared up. Razor-sharp rays of light scraped puddle blots off the pavement. Squirrels fought in the tree shafts, and birds nervously flew around them, guarding carefully knitted nests. That afternoon, it somehow happened that Mula’s mom and her stepdad ran dry of booze. Panic attack bubbled the whole house. They ran like two rats looking for the car keys. It was her mom who found them under the pile of trash in the kitchen. They got in a yellow jalopy that Mula’s dad used to drive while he was alive. It was hard with jittery hands to get the keys into the ignition. The man in the passenger seat called her a stupid cunt, and commanded her to hurry up as he was beating the dashboard.
Mula was on her bed, lying between two purple stains, when the sharp sound of screeching tires punctured her chest. She jumped up and ran out onto the front porch. Her mom was making donuts with the jalopy on the street in front of their house. Mula’s stepdad grabbed the car handle. His eyes were bulging, and his lips took an “O” shape around brown, rotting teeth. His face was panicked as if he was being forced to suck off a line of prisoners. The jalopy spun in dazzling pirouettes and almost disappeared in a cloud of burning tires. Mula’s mom pulled out a black 9mm from her waist. The sound of two muffled gunshots stunned the vehicle still. The windshield and front windows were covered in a deep red sugary puree, slithering downwards; dripping over the control board and back inside their heads through gaping bullet holes. The squirrels stopped fighting, but the chirp of the worried birds persisted.
First, the police showed up, then the fire truck, and finally the ambulance. Mula just stood on the porch laughing. The whole neighborhood came out to sniffle at the iron spray in the air. The purple sundown reflected on the jalopy windshield. The colors driveled like melted crayons into one another, and then the entire composition pulled apart in a tear-broken prism.
Cops took Mula to the police station. Detectives tried to shake a word out of her, but quickly after, they gave up because Mula couldn’t stop her neurotic laughter. They sent her to a mental hospital. There she received warm injections filled with vitreous sleep.
Upon her release, she went to the closest bar, got shitface drunk, hopped on a bus, and went home.
She snuck into the house with light steps, trying not to wake up the ghosts. She sat on the couch, took off her shirt, and sank into the burnt cushions amid the trash. For some reason, the room felt bigger than before. Every crack reverberated. She pulled an empty beer can from between the cushions and stuck a burnt cigarette butt in her mouth. She scratched under her firm engorgement and called out her mother’s name. When there was no response, she yelled,
“You dirty fucking whore, bring that flappy ass over here, I ain’t in a mood to fuck around! Shit, after all, I’m a busy man,” she finished with a mutter.
That had her break into laughter again. The room rang like a metal pipe, and then she plunged into a dreamless sleep.
Mark and Mula were still standing under the ceiling fan. Tete a tete. Holding tight, not ready to go their separate ways just yet. Mark was into her. He didn’t want to play this stupid game of fucking a blow-up doll in front of Mula.
“All betrayed bastards meld in big cities. And the wider the limelight, the more darkness we need, you know. Equality in corresponding events is how most of us perceive justice, right? Eye for an eye type of thing. But my justice won’t hurt anyone. I’m asking you again, please help me with this.”
She extended her index finger as she spoke, pressing and moving the swollen vein on the back of Mark’s hand.
Mula found her spot on the chair in the corner, right above their heads. Her porcelain body prevailed over shadows. Mark removed the plastic rose and did everything Mula asked him to.
At one moment, he looked up. He was getting drowsy. The night nearly gave way to the new morning. She pulled her knees to her chin and rocked back and forth as the rubber squealed, watching intently.
