Afterlife

The radio busts through the static like a silverback gorilla. *Domestic abuse. White male still violent. Requesting backup. *

Squad car wailing, I don't look both ways at the red light.

Buckled upside down. Kick through window. Kerrigan splashed in blood.

My fault. My grievous faults.

Nancy waits for the next blow, toughening her porcupine spikes. When it falls, she feels her needles pierce his palms, his wrists. She's winning, she knows it. He leaves off, shouts more. Swig of a bottle. Too cliché to be real. The phone shattered behind her. Are those footsteps on the stairs. I hope they have their spikes out. Maybe they are dinosaurs. Maybe they have claws. They're gonna need claws.

I don't want to hit her. I want to hit her. I don't want to hit her. Petals of a dandelion. She loves me not. My mother said to pick the very best one and you are not it. The police are coming. I don't care. I am not human anymore. I am a spirit enflamed. My smoke climbs out the ventilation and into the night air. It hears, distant, the crashing of a plate, the smack of a bottle.

They don't see the troll who guards the alley. His toll is hardly worth mentioning. His lips are too cracked to beg. He watches them couple by the dumpster, listens to shouts from above.

Like pigeons, all of them.

A bag of smack falls from her shin-gathered panties. He thinks about taking it, trying to sell. The clacking of a spray paint can nearby. He turns. Two boys high on the night. He watches the paint land on the brick. The shape of a gorilla smoking a cigarette. Impact changes everything.

The ambulance is double-booked. Lauren looks back and forth between the battered cop and the battered wife. Their faces are remarkably similar, symmetrical in abrasions from glass. Their skins sheared, momentarily, by life too violent. Too sudden.

She alternates her attention between them, humming an old tune she can't say where she learned. It floats up and down the scale, painting the walls of the improvised hospital.

A pothole and she loses her balance, has to choose which patient to fall upon.

Kerrigan dreams of the biggest gorilla in the world. It has teeth like a snake. Tiny, disproportionate fangs that drive into his arm like an IV. It pumps its poison inside him, unrelenting. He wishes he could swat the gorilla away, but it is too large, too greasy, too hairy.

The gorilla sucks his blood. He can only watch and learn from it. He studies the contours of its fur, wonders what drove it to this. He pities the monkey. He wishes he could tell it that it was going to be okay. That it didn't have to be a vampire.

"Can you slap me?" he asks her. She is not surprised. She judged him by his stride when he walked up, paid letting her see all his cash.

She winds an arm back without a word. As it moves through the air, she tries to follow it with her mind, to relish the impact against his jaw.

He moans, finger marks already appearing on the side of the his face. Her hand is a monkey hand. Her tail is a monkey tail.

The dog picks scraps out of the dumpster. It smells humans in heat. And chicken. Mostly chicken.

It rips the chicken with its calloused teeth. The chicken doesn't stand a chance against the hunter dog.

It has fallen too far in the dumpster to get back out. It barks, because it doesn't know what else to do.

A man who smells like death peers in. The dog bites the hand that comes down to rescue it. But that's just for show.

The storm refuses to break. The clouds clench up, hold onto rain. The tension brings mosquitoes, lovers of the humidity. They float on droplets of air. They are vampires. They are leeches. Their proboscises snoop into flesh like heroin needles. They gorge themselves on blood everlasting, amen. They gorge themselves on the idea of flesh.

“It’s not like that,” Doozy says. “I don’t know what it’s like, but it’s not like that.”

I sigh. “I’m just saying it feels like we’re getting too old for this shit.”

“You don’t age out.” A gunshot sounds nearby. Sirens ping off the walls. We duck low.

He laughs, shakes another can of tag, lets it clatter into the now-empty night. I shine my light on the near-finished job: doozy lives for