Fiction

Death Dance

by Tawny Pike

04/23/18

Orlon Washable DuPont, you are the richest man in town. Orlon Washable DuPont, you live in the biggest plushest classiest house in town. Orlon Washable DuPont, you are the last of the high and mighty Jacksonino County DuPonts and because you are a spineless, childless smack addict, your line will end with you. And it will end right fucking here and pretty much right fucking now, because we need that armored Hummer that you’ve got parked in the six-car garage that sits out back of this plush-lined sewer of a mansion that your grandfather built where you spend all day dreaming of nothing but the way your dick used to be able to get hard and listening to that fucking slack-key ukulele music you fucking love, and because we need the fancy guns that you’ve got squirreled away in your panic room upstairs, and because you cannot be trusted to stay quiet about what we’ve taken.

But because you have been a good customer through the years, Orlon Washable DuPont, here is what I will do for you. Hush and don’t struggle or I’ll have the retard pull your shoulders out of their sockets. And don’t cry, or you’ll get me crying, because this is the end of a long friendship for me too, and I have loved you in my way. Here’s what I’ll do: instead of shooting the beautiful hot load of 911 that we’ve brought along with us into the withered, broken veins of your arms or legs or crotch or into the ruined flesh of your pale pale ass – Jesus, look at you, even your goddamn carotid’s all fucked up – I’m going to put the spike right into the meaty part at the corner of your eye, where the tears are coming out, where they’re squirting out right now, and I told you not to fucking cry.

Don’t squirm, baby, here it comes. If you squirm and I happen to catch your eyeball in the process, you’ve fucked your eye up. Listen to me, Orlon Washable DuPont: shooting smack into the inner corner of your eye is basically shooting smack into your sinuses which will hit your brain fast fast fast. It’s going to be the best spike you ever felt. It’s going to make you take off like a rocket. It’s the spike you’ve been waiting for your whole pathetic, wasted life. You’ll go out on the best high you’ve ever felt. You know what, you pathetic junkie fucker? You should be fucking thanking me.

~ fin ~

Tawny Pike is a 2016 graduate of the MFA program in fiction at Southern Illinois University, Carbondale. She was accepted to the Calliope Workshop for Fiction Writing at UCLA and subsequently the recipient of the Taliesin Nexus scholarship. Her short story “The Quillman Girl”, which was originally published in THE SURREAL SOUTH ’13, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She has read at the St. Louis Noir at the Bar and led a creative writing course at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Marion, IL. She currently resides in Missouri with her two sons.

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