Joey Cloudy online

TRAMP:  

Death Makes Angels Of Us All  

-the Lizard King  

Mona didn’t speak, and Aaron didn’t need an explanation; he understood there was nothing left to say. After a while, she would begin to get a little anxious in a place with so many people and so much noise, the same way they meandered through the night, walking in the middle of the empty streets of the residential district. The cars were parked in the driveways, the houses all had lightless windows without curtains. Yards with giant old tree limbs hovered over them, invisible in the darkness. The streets illuminated only by the cones of light from the occasional old street lights.

“Do you have any pot?”

Aaron pulled out his pack of Newport’s lit a joint that he had stashed with his squares, passed the joint to Mona then lit a cig for himself. They continued to walk around the sound of the party faded in the distance behind them the party was over but nobody wanted to go home alone the it was a quit old East Dallas neighborhood they were drifting through each wanting to tell the other it was over and unable to as the finality of everything scrambled their brains with panicky firing of their synapse he had nothing to offer her, she wanted out of his world.

They thought their private thoughts warring within themselves, passing the joint in silence. The only sound was their booted footsteps, crickets, cicadas, and the occasional shriek of an owl as it devoured its prey. But the words would not come. They had never been honest with each other from the moment that they first met. Mona hadn’t had sex with Aaron since she had become a Sufi and converted to Islam. Aaron respected her enough to not force it with her while she was in this transitional phase of her life.  

Trevor had broken things off with her a few months ago, and she had moved out of Nat’s apartment and gotten a job as a receptionist for a lawyer they had met at the Zen Sufi reading at the cosmic café. Aaron was glad that Laurel had broken up with him, but he was sad that things had gotten so fucked up between him and Mona. When he first started up with her, they were just friends who fucked. Over time, the friendship dissolved, and they were just two people who fucked each other over without remorse. It seemed like they each did whatever was in their power to make sure the other’s life was as full of as much misery, hopelessness, and despair as inhumanely possible.

He didn’t understand why they still even hung around each other now, without the sex; it seemed pointless. He desired her, of that he was certain, even though he didn’t like her now, and he wondered if he ever did. Aaron knew that he could take and take from her whatever he wanted, and she would endure it in silence, protesting only with her eyes. But now he understood that he wouldn’t be fucking her, he would be fucking the ghost of the 13-year-old girl that was trapped inside of her head. The ghost that had been trapped inside of her every since her mothers boyfriend rammed 10 inches of cock into her 10 years ago. And after he was finished with her body, she would come back in a few days to hang out, help him edit his poems, and smoke weed, acting as if it had always been like this between them because it had. Aaron was bored with the white girls universal wasp Mandingo rape fantasy.

What was it that he imagined he saw in her? How had he deluded himself into believing he wanted her to want him? Why did he now wish for her to share the same senseless longing he felt for her? When had it stopped being nothing more than a fun little fuck between friends? He wasn’t sure if it ever had been. Now he was trapped by a desire for someone he had never wished to desire. When he first started to realize that he was getting too serious about her, he thought rationally enough that if he fucked someone else and spent his time doing other things with other women, this would pass, but his feelings had not subsided over time and, in fact, had only grown in power since they had stopped seeing each other.

Now, a hurricane of raw emotions swirled around in his chest in a heated storm of desire. Aaron was confused by his inability to free himself from her and disgusted by his own weakness. He realized that if he could not have her, he did not want to see her. Aaron harbored no jealous anger or desire to hurt Mona; it just hurt too much being around her, and he was not masochistic enough to endure her insanity and manipulations any longer. He was alone now, without the distraction of the suburban orgies or the warmth of a lover. At the moment, he was trapped in a cage within his own imagination. He hated himself for feeling like this; his rational had been overpowered by the basest of emotions, love.

He realized that not only did he hate himself for allowing himself to fall in love with this sullen petulant little girl but that he hated her too but he was too much of a coward to ever tell her this because he stupidly held on to the futile hope that someday she would want to be with him and he would abandon everyone and everything at that moment without ever experiencing a moments regret. But even as he held on to the imaginary happy ending for them, he knew that it would never happen.

Aaron knew that he was an evil near bastard and that she now knew that he was evil, and she had experienced enough of his darkness to know that she would never share her life or body with anyone as corrupt as he. Poverty was an evil she could never endure with a man. He was trapped in his head by all of the imaginary demons that fed on his ripening agonies. Her presence only heightened his illusory suffering, and he grieved for her. Whenever he was without her in close proximity, he wasn’t sure which felt worse: being around her or not being able to at least be near her.

“You wanna start heading back to the party.?”

“No. Can we go to your place?”

Aaron stared at Mona for a long moment; the surprised look in his eyes summoned a rare smile from her. She continued to smile at him as they walked to the seven eleven, and he picked up a soda and a dark chocolate for her, milk chocolate for himself. It was less than half a mile to his loft, and he was glad that she wanted to come over, hoping that she would give herself to him willingly this time.

Mona wanted Aaron, but she couldn’t give herself to him. She was dating Don now, and she was a Muslim, but if Aaron took what he wanted from her, then the sin was his, and her growing conscious would be clean. She hoped his newly taken vow of passivism wouldn’t prevent him from raping her tonight. She wondered how much longer it would be before he, like all of the others she had loved before, would grow weary of her and begin to treat her as if she did not exist.

They ate leftover vegetarian pizza and drank chocolate truffle Godiva Coffee sweetened with Godiva chocolate in his loft. Aaron put on the new Dead Can Dance CD and pressed the shuffle setting. Music drummed throughout the wide space of the giant single room. Mona had finished eating and sipped her coffee, listening to the music. Aaron was quiet all night. They had talked about the party, and they had both enjoyed it. She was looking forward to taking classes this time because she always did better in school when Aaron was around to keep her on track.

He was sitting on the pallet on the floor while she had pulled off her jeans and was wearing only her T-shirt. They smoked a little weed, and then he turned out the light, and they lay down to get some sleep. In the darkness, she realized that he would no longer be satisfied playing any of the games that they had played on each other over the last few years. He would never just accept her as a friend, and she would never want to be his woman. They were gripped in this ridiculous pretense of civility when each wanted to take revenge on the other for past wrongs, both real and imaginary. They could not go on like this much longer; one of them would have to find the courage to end it. Things could only get worse for the from-here-and-there relationship was already pretty horrible at this point.

Aaron was sitting at his computer, typing quietly on the other side of the room, shirtless, his long dreads hiding most of his profile from her view as he tapped out his poems in a Morse code that only he and the computer comprehended. In the light of the monitor, he looked demonic, she thought a man possessed by the demons of his childhood; he was just as trapped by his history as she was, and she watched in silence as he attempted to write his way out of this place of the skulls.

Mona hoped that he would escape, but she knew that she would not be around, whether he succeeded or failed. She believed that he deserved better, that life had not been fair. But she knew that in the future nothing would change, the world being an inherently horror-filled filled unjust place. He was an inherently honest and gentle man, no matter how much he tried to hide it.

It was true he was a scout at heart, one of the good guys, and no good deed ever goes unpunished. He was in for a world of hurt. In the light of the monitor, he looked demonic, a man possessed by the demons of his childhood. He was just as trapped by history as she. She wasted in silence as he attempted to write his way out of this place of the skulls. She hoped that he would escape, but whether he succeeded or failed, Mona knew that she would not be around.  

-About the author  

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.