Belladonna: A Faerie Tale
By Derek Mitchell
In the darkness of The Limelight she sipped her limoncello, dyed pink with red Skittles and rose hips, from a long-stemmed glass. With her tongue she teased the sword-pierced garnish—the cranberry bobbed above the surface and below, resurfacing and submerging on an interval just short of a moment and just long of a momentary lapse.
She was flanked on either side by a retinue of misfits, skinned in patent leather and latex and bubbles and stuff—each tin kepi and nylon kneehigh a cry for an eye, head to foot.
She cleared her throat—a murmur of disdain: “Ah-em.” The silken glove of her hand descended with an easy recoil from the crest of her lips, bloody with shoplifted Sanguine Fatale.
The heads about the narrow booth turned to fix upon the silicone faerie:
“Knights, tell me,” she hummed.
“Yes?” in unison.
She smirked. “Who’s the prettiest girl in school?”
They shrieked: “It’s you, Belladonna! It’s you!” She tilted her head back in a playful swoon, clutched her heart, and smiled, dissatisfied.
A dwarf in a velvet chesterfield appeared at the head of the table, the tail of his coat dragging in a train across the dusty floor.
“A guest for you waits at the Gate, Belladonna.”
She reeled with laughter, paused, and belched daintily into a cocktail napkin. The guests lining the booth rose from their seats, allowing her to exit. As she stood, the dwarf bowed deeply, bearing at the fingertips a bubbling champagne glass.
She reeled with laughter, paused, and belched daintily into a cocktail napkin. The guests lining the booth rose from their seats, allowing her to exit. As she stood, the dwarf bowed deeply, bearing at the fingertips a bubbling champagne glass.
“Thank you, dwarf,” she said, collecting the champagne and imbibing it in a gulp.
“For your journey, miss,” he continued, plunging his hand into the pocket of his coat. Withdrawing two sizable pills, each half white and half royal blue, he extended them to her bosom, nodding; she plucked them right up, swallowing each in a single gulp, too.
She exited through an emergency door labeled ‘THE GATE,’ and stepped lightly into a darkened alley, lit from above by a single halogen. Against the wall, opposite and to her right, lingered an eager and barely-kempt man in a trench coat. Slightly taller than she, his eyes were as black and deranged as his hair. “Hello,” he gurgled.
She paused, and shuffled her high-heeled seven-leagues. Her baby-blue eyes darted beneath their stark citrine lenses. “Hello, Sentinel.”
With a ravenous gait, the man in the trench coat drew nearer, until he clutched her either hip between his fingers and siphoned the sweat from her ear. She pushed him back, coolly, and he obliged, opening his mouth to speak: “I wonder if you know how many beans make five?”
“Two in each hand and one in your mouth,” said Belladonna, sharp as a needle.
“Right you are,” said Sentinel. Into his gaping maw she shot a lurid orange circle in a single, calculated flick. He swallowed, shivered, and grinned.
“Well, what’s the news, Sentinel? You can’t have asked me to The Gate for a simple exchange.” He grinned, and plucked a Virginia Slim from the breast pocket of his trench coat. Striking a match against the brick sidewall of the alley, he puffed the flame, exhaled, and sighed.
“Follow me Ma’am B.”
They stumbled onto the sidewalk from the narrow laneway connecting the alley to the street. Sentinel whistled garishly, and a taxi screeched to a halt just west of the shallow curb.
Dully unimpressed, Belladonna queried: “Where now?”
“Enter the taxicab, and I’ll confess.” He squealed, and leapt to the door of the vehicle.
[transcript]
DRIVER: Hello.
PIMP: Hello, baby.
[The nameplate of the driver reads OLGA ‘COOKIE’ DEJESUS)
DRIVER: Where to?
PIMP: 1822 Aureolin Road.
[pause]
DRIVER: You two been out tonight?
PIMP: No.
DRIVER: Hm. [Pause] Well what’yas been up to?
PIMP: [Picks teeth with a fingernail, extends arm about QUEEN] Visiting a client.
QUEEN: I don’t know where we’re going—he won’t tell me. [she giggles]
[pause]
DRIVER: You two together?
[He smiles; his teeth are yellow. She crosses her legs—not uncomfortable, but bored]
PIMP: Yes.
DRIVER: Ah. How long you two been together?
[He opens his mouth; she interrupts]
QUEEN: Driver?
DRIVER: Yes?
[The QUEEN strokes her temples]
QUEEN: Please stop talking.
[tape ends]
Belladonna watched through her window as the glow of billboard atop billboard thinned to a single marquee at the edge of a French ghetto. Such was the junction of city and hinterland that, save for the muted light of the yellow moon, as the taxicab hurtled west along the desolate avenue, they were soon plunged into an unrefined darkness.
Eventually, the cab came to a stop before a decrepit warehouse—for windows it bore mangy grey scraps of jute and from its depths eased a feeble sighing drone, as a breeze teased the windowpanes, and the frame of the structure threatened to fail. They leapt from the cab like rag dolls from a house fire.
“Twenty-five!” bellowed the cabby.
Sentinel’s knees buckled with laughter, and Belladonna vogued before battering the cabside with a deluge of Atomic Tangerine Crayolas. Cookie Dejesus shrieked, the tires squealed, and the cab departed.
“Shall we?” asked Sentinel, giddy for the ruckus and extending his arm to hers. She scowled, raising her knee, and kicked his hand with the tip of her heel. “Don’t fucking talk to me.” He winced, and she turned to kneel beside a puddle of grimy street-water.
Stroking her porcelain cheek with the back of her foremost fingers, she sang, “Looking-glass, looking-glass, on the wall, Who in this land is the fairest of all?” After a moment, a corpulent bullfrog, no less than a foot in stature, rose steadily from the puddle’s center. It first adjusted the crown atop its forehead with a tiny padded digit, then belched, bellowed, and inflated its gizzard. “Kiss me.”
“What can you do for me, you nasty frog?” Belladonna riposted.
The bullfrog quivered, and suddenly inundated her eyelashes with a torrent of grimy puddle-muck. Belladonna winced, eyes closed; the creature barked after a moment more: “Let Jesus fuck you, Linda Blair!” She swatted at the bullfrog, but, quicker, it leapt deftly down—down into the endless black depths.
Belladonna stood. “Let’s go, Sentinel,” she said, pointing to the gaping, doorless entry at the warehouse’s foot. Throwing handful after handful of lurid orange circles in her wake, she flounced hotly in its direction. The animals of the forest lingered as she passed, and devoured the abandoned morsels. After a moment, each possum and squirrel shivered and grinned—and red and white pinwheels ignited their eyes.
The two stopped at the shaft of a freight elevator.
“Hello?” barked Sentinel in a singsong bawl. Belladonna plunged her fist into the flesh of his torso, and he howled, whimpered, and hung his head low. She raised her knee, and brought the heel of her seven-league down with three sharp ‘clicks’.
A grinding filled the airspace above, and the industrial vent atop which they stood billowed forth a gust of stale, yellow heat. The golden ringlets of her mane bobbed like plastic, and she concealed her panties beneath the bleached white pleats of her billowing skirt. Flashing Sentinel a blood-toothed grin, she watched as the elevator thudded to a halt. They entered, and, as the doors rattled shut, the elevator clambered up with its freight.
To her delight, Belladonna quickly noticed the straggly, wind-blown street-person hunched raggedly in the elevator’s corner. She extended a Viscous Viridian fingernail in the woman’s direction, and asked anyone but Sentinel “Who is that?”
The woman looked up; from past her shaggy volumes of permed dirty blond, the dusty pewter of her quivering cataracts briefly penetrated Belladonna’s equanimity. The woman spoke, faintly: “My name is Alex.” She paused, and stroked the square jut of her jaw line and chin. Her teeth, narrow and crisscrossed, quivered as she whispered, “Can I boil your bunny?”
The elevator came to an abrupt halt, and its platform and walls quaked with rhythm; Belladonna squealed and Sentinel whimpered. Alex stood slowly, and collected the litter of QuickMart! bags strewn casually about her feet. She shuffled past the two, and disappeared into the darkness of a musty corridor. The doors clattered shut, and they ascended. Then the clang of a hidden bell pierced the cabin, and the doors slid open without a sound.
The hallway was carpeted in an opulent pentagonal array of crimson on black, and was lit from above by dim and easy bulbs in ivory fixtures. The tenebrous hum of air through amplifier swallowed their eardrums, and Belladonna clicked her jaw once or twice, attempting to equalize the pressure. She turned, exasperated: “Let’s go, mutt!”
Sentinel didn’t hear her. A frothy spume collected at the corners of his mouth as he snarled and bore his teeth in a writhing agony. He squalled and clawed at the wall, running circles about himself—chasing his essence and bleating from the ears.
Belladonna looked on pallidly, removed her seven-league, and held its metallic stiletto to the humming warmth of an overhead fixture. After a moment, she removed it, and, pulling a Slim from her ringlets, lit the cigarette.
Sentinel glanced fleetingly in her direction; she dismissed him with a flick of the wrist—“Shoo!”
There was a window—paned with glass and heavily curtained—to her left. In one moment, Sentinel stood before her; in the next, he’d leapt, arc culminating with a fragmented blast and a forlorn cry.
The pressure of the corridor was suddenly equalized, and Belladonna traipsed to the windowsill to survey the wreckage. Leagues below, the motionless Sentinel lay crumpled in a heap of jutting limbs and bile-swilled bloodstains. His kidney lay a foot from his outstretched palm.
She opened the door at the end of the corridor to find a clubscene, barren of life by her immediate estimation, pitched in a muted shade of gray. With a final drag, as she waded delicately through the sea of black-clothed tables, each garnished at its center with a crimson globe and a flickering ivory candle, she extinguished her cigarette on a tablecloth, and flicked its butt somewhere in the darkness beside her.
A dozen yards ahead, past two or three rows, a spotlight suddenly illuminated a stagespace with the thunderous echo of a thrown switch and the surge of chemical sunlight. At stage left, two fandango easy chairs complemented a stylized desk—it was bumptiously picturesque, even without Rosie or Merv.
Dust flitted and flamencoed in the Moorish beam of the spotlight, and a speck or two settled, daintily, atop the man sprawled across the desk in a half-moon, one knee bent and the other extended. Between his thumb and forefinger he dangled a swan-shaped mass of aluminum-foil by the neck, and drew its backside to his nostrils, interior exposed. He grazed the underside of the bird with a long-stemmed match, and gingerly tilted its neck, as if manipulating some toy labyrinth within the orifice. A whirling vapor rose like a vision, and the man eagerly inhaled as it wafted and waned. Trapping the vapor tightly within, his eyes reeled, slightly, and his tongue slacked like a bull moose. In a moment more, his eyes would register the light, he’d smile, and exhale through a tightly rolled tube of foil. He crooned, quietly: “You’ve come, finally—and with not a moment to spare! Come,” he said, beckoning her with the foul bird, “we’ve been waiting.”
Belladonna came to the foot of the stage, and stepped gracefully up, to stand in the sightline of the curious man.
“Come,” he purred, “and drink with me.” Repulsed though she was by his unadulterated pomp, she obliged. He struck another match along the rough, well-kempt stubble of his five o’clock jaw, and with it brought the ill-conceived zigzag of the poor swan’s solar plexus to a steady boil. From the tar burst the writhing opiate’s hireling, like a dragon heaving from tail-tip to stem. He drew closer to the cavity of her powdered neck, and the castor of his breath swallowed her ear as he said “Chase it, baby, chase it.”
She sat in the easy chair. She beamed. She was rocking back and forth, back and forth, and ran the nail of her thumb across her lips. He burst with laughter. He eyed her with appetite.
“Your beautiful form, your graceful walk, and your expressive eyes; surely with these you can enchain a man’s heart!”
Belladonna bit her lip. Seductively. She wriggled in the cushion of her chair, and opened her legs wide to hint at the groin. There was uproarious applause. She blushed.
He continued: “Well, have you lost your courage?”
She shook her head, to whoops and cheers. The neon marquee indicated ‘applause’.
He stood, and tore his belt from its buckle. He didn’t fumble with the button of his pants. Nor their zipper. They fell, and he was utterly nude.
Belladonna’s eyes widened. The corners of her mouth turned down. He laughed, hips gyrating. The audience screamed, euphorically, and whistled.
“Put out your little tongue…” he said.
Belladonna shook her head. He laughed once more. She grimaced. Writhed. Was penetrated.
The studio laughs sustained for two to eight hours. Then they were gone.
A janitor swept the rubbish between the empty seats. The man zipped his pants.
Belladonna asked to leave.
His frown waxed, and he said, after a pause, “Will you return.”
Her fingers shook, and she acquiesced.
He said: “Remember your promise and come back… you won’t need any chariot to bring you.”
Then she was on the subway. It was empty. Atop the seat across the train was perched an outdated television set. Belladonna tilted her head slightly. The set flickered to life. Across the screen, a woman with eyelashes of abhorrent beauty danced with a puppet. She sang, sweetly. Across the bottom flashed, chartreuse, ‘Psalm 45:11.’ She sang again. “The King is enthralled by your beauty.”
Belladonna extended her legs, and lay across three seats of the subway train. It rattled as it hurtled along—a stately and majestic coffin of engineered beauty. And she lay a long, long time, in the coffin, and she did not change, but looked as if she were asleep.
Wearing: A little girl’s tutu tulled in a light sapphire with a kitschy Sailor Moon bodice; knee high patent leather platform boots, white, and torn black fish-net stockings; a camel-hair boa dyed pink; a veil of black lace, concealing the eye shadow and the steep decline of her eyebrows, pointing to her lips—painted white. Rouge on the cheeks, and shimmering false eyelashes.
Alex wasn’t in the elevator, but it was daytime. Splinters of light burst through the loamy boards rotting fast against the windows of the elevator shaft.
Approaching the warehouse’s mouth, she passed Sentinel’s corpse. As though it had sunk a small measure into the pavement, his already meager girth had tightened, and a carrion beetle had borne a stringy hole in the flesh of his cheek. His eyes were missing, too.
The theme music began to play:
ANYTHING YOU WANT, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING YOU NEED, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING AT ALL, YOU GOT IT.
Belladonna smiled behind the lace and waved, eagerly pivoting her wrist clockwise, counterclockwise, repeating.
The man was overtly handsome, almost conventionally so. Dark hair smoothly parted in a line extending from his temple. His eyebrows were expressive, not bushy. His smile was debonair, and was framed by a sharp jaw and its stubble. His eyes, catlike and affixed, were nonetheless amicable, and his teeth were white and well aligned. Shoulders broad and musculature well toned, his stature surely surpassed six feet. The definition of his pectorals was manifest in his tailored sport coat, and that, too, of his thighs, in his black pressed trousers.
She was slumped in an easy chair. A syringe clung to a throbbing vein.
She was slack-jawed and smiling.
He overcame her with his form, so that she could only submit. She only bleated as his tongue gyrated, his lips locking about her cheek, ear, and chin.
ANYTHING YOU WANT, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING YOU NEED, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING AT ALL, YOU GOT IT.
“Perhaps I should dip in, again?”
He smiled, in the tent of the lace.
He injected her.
The audience clamored with roars and applause.
“I’m Diana. What’s your name?” asked the woman in the easy chair beside her. She had short taupish hair, and a pointed nose capped a brimming, easy smile.
Atop her lap sat a small fair-haired boy in a sailor suit, clutching a pinwheel. He smiled, and his baby-blue eyes twinkled too.
Diana rocked her head from side to side, singing to the boy:
Paper roses, paper roses
Oh, how real those roses seemed to be
But they're only imitation
Like your imitation love for me
The boy giggled, and Diana pecked his silken forehead with a pursed smile. A dirty teardrop, stained black with Great Lash, slowly traversed her cheek.
Belladonna asked to leave.
His frown waxed, and he said, after a pause, “Will you return.”
Her fingers shook, and she acquiesced.
He said: “Remember your promise and come back… you won’t need any chariot to bring you.”
The subway coffin rattled, again. She lay, slightly contorted. She grasped her abdomen. Beads of drool dried the skin of her chin and cheeks.
On the TV set: Kathie Lee Gifford strokes Tammy Faye’s tear-stained cheek.
“There, there.”
Kathie Lee is handed a tray of small, circular, robin’s egg pills.
“So this is the Valium?” Kathie Lee asks. Tammy Faye nods with a quivering lip.
“They’re so small!” Kathie Lee laughs heartily, and Tammy Faye heaves a tormented sob. She drives a scooped palm into the sedatives, piled high. She shovels them into her mouth, and continues to cry.
And so, in that way, Belladonna would visit the man. She’d stay awhile. Then she’d depart. On the subway. Then she’d return. Again, and again. For months. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.
Wearing: Horizontally striped black and white stockings. Glittering slippers, red like candy apples. A petticoat—lacy, umber. A translucent latex camisole, of sorts; her nipples were each concealed with an ‘X’ of black electrical tape. She wore no eye- makeup, and from each eyelid had burnt any semblance of lashes with a polypropylene Bic. She wore her yellow lenses, and strokes of Venetian Whore eclipsed the boundaries of her lips.
Sentinel’s clothes were his surviving essence. A bone or two lay strewn, haphazardly, beside a sewer grate. A squirrel gnawed with gumption on the stirrup of his inner ear.
ANYTHING YOU WANT, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING YOU NEED, YOU GOT IT. ANYTHING AT ALL, YOU GOT IT.
She submitted as he fucked her.
“Are you done?” She phased past consciousness for a moment, and then was drawn back in by the miasma of his musky perfume.
He tore away the fraying seams of her petticoat, and plunged the needle of a thick, crystalline syringe into her bulging vena cava. She acquiesced.
In the twilight of her consciousness, he smiled, and seated himself behind his desk, as he had, however long ago.
From behind it, he drew a cage containing a chirping canary. It fluttered, feverishly, about the confines of its prison. “Watch,” he whispered.
He opened the cage’s door. Out flew the canary.
“I call her Princess Zizi. Now she is free.”
The canary flew headlong into the globe of an overhead spotlight. Its neck crunched and it fell, dead, to the stage below.
She awoke on the barren clubfloor.
Post-haste detritus of the night prior littered various panels of the rough-hewn hardwood. It was painted black, and cloudy patterns of dust suggested some prolonged vacancy of furniture or fauna. Belladonna righted herself, pulling her head and disorderly bubble-gum ringlets from the floor—legs spanned like a child’s, a look of dumb incognizance proliferated her runny nose and sagging jowls. She managed a reedy cough, and rubbed the crusted jonquil from the corners of her eyes.
She pulled a Virginia Slim lightly from a knotted ringlet, but, pausing to search for a match, found no source of flame. She stood, and surveyed the expansive ballroom. Clicking her tongue in ennui, she turned and started for the door. The windows, no longer smothered by dusky velvet, welcomed a steady, semi-stale breeze as she passed, which licked the flapping shrouds of jute, and coaxed the debris into an ethereal gavotte.
Her slippers sparkled wanly as they clattered across the pavement. As she’d reach an odd, jutting square of sidewalk, her cautionary sidestep would send one heel colliding into the other with a ‘click’.
She passed a matchbook, and stooped to collect it from beside a chute of crabgrass sparring with the sidewalk’s crack. ‘Perrault’s Bar & Grille.’ One match remained, and she struck it, lighting her Slim.
She passed a fruit vendor, and stopped to buy a Florida Orange.
“How much?”
“Twenty-five cents,” chirped the vendor. Belladonna rooted about the velvety walls of her sidebag. A single quarter was all that remained. She handed it to the vendor.
“My, my,” the vendor warbled, “you are far from home.”
“Oh?” cooed Belladonna, skeptical and disinterested.
“Subway’s that way, Princess.”
Belladonna skinned her orange.
The seven o’clock subway train danced more smoothly atop its rails than did the night’s. Belladonna reclined slightly in her seat, and, tired, dreamed of a candy mountain.
The television set flickered to life.
LARRY KING: And you firmly believe that you’re going to heaven?
MESSNER: I know—for sure, for positive.
She was emaciated, and her head, beneath the piles of stringy auburn hair, looked like a little dried bean—the kind kindergarteners use for counting. She didn’t cry—the mascara had sealed her tear-ducts. But she was human enough to Belladonna. Ravaged, though human. And, when she toppled from her chair, dead, Belladonna couldn’t help but shutter a tear.
The subway’s intercom was flooded, then, with “Song to the Siren”—Cocteau Twins. Belladonna’s heals clicked quietly, once more.
She exited, through the ‘outbound’ terminal, and pattered lightly onto a platform, this one well kempt and paved in a diagonal herringbone.
There were no taxis in the suburb—of white pickets and crimson tulips and sun tea and sailor suits.
She walked.
She came to a whitewashed bungalow, and unlatched the gate. She traipsed along the narrow path lined with African violets, and came to the front door, a creamy ivory.
She entered.
A woman emerged from somewhere inside, and beamed at the sight of the ragged Belladonna.
“Oh good,” she cooed, “you’re home!” She approached Belladonna, and locked her in a motherly embrace. “Let’s clean you up.” She lifted Belladonna easily from the floor, tore from her the latex and glittering slippers, and placed her in the sink—a warm, soapy pool.
Belladonna covered her eyes, their favorite game.
“Where’s my little Whitcomb?”
Belladonna tore away her hands with a smile.
“There he is!”
She scrubbed the Venetian Whore from his lips, and washed away the layers of Elizabethan powder caked atop his cheeks. She lifted him from the sink, and dried him.
He put on his favorite navy sailor suit—trimmed with silly white bric-a-brac, pinwheel in the pocket. His palm outstretched, she smiled, and reached into the pouch of her apron. She handed him several notes, each of some denomination past ten. He grinned, and said: “Now I’ll be the prettiest boy in school!”
Whereas Whitcomb had been persecuted and despised for his ugliness, now he heard them say he was the most beautiful of all the birds. He was the child of the White Valley.
He would return to the clubfloor the following night, crisp folded bills pocketed—costumed, and luminescent. They would turn, and they would revere him. He would sit beside Burt and Ernie; Alig; and Kurt. He’d be no longer relegated to a booth of mirthful buffoons. No longer—forever and ever—as he had been, once upon a time.
No comments:
Post a Comment