Mercy

“You were wrong ‘bout Vixen. It ain’t a compliment.”

Though I was aware of the words being carefully constructed to appease my delicate state of mind, they exited my auditory perceptions as nothing more than disregarded fragments of speech. I was far too preoccupied with my dream and a hard-on gone limp I had ineffectively been attempting to hide from the man I previously assumed to be sleeping beside me. His mention of a bath reignited a memory suppressed by what I could only speculate as an odd form of dissociative amnesia. Having been educated on such subjects to fulfill my graduation requirements for college, I recognized how rare legitimate cases of the disorder were. In some instances, the trauma experienced by the individual suffering from their supposed memory loss is so great that the mere retelling of their ordeal would earn them a one way ticket to a room with marshmallow walls, no questions asked, do not pass Go, and do not collect your two-hundred dollars. In such a case, silence is simpler and less damaging than a gory, nightmarish narration for both parties involved. In others, they refuse to admit to any harrowing skeletons in the closet of their past because all recollections specific to said skeletons and demons have been wiped clean from their hard drives by the marred success of a semi-decent hacker. It’s as if their minds were reprogrammed to protect their cracked emotional states by inadequately deleting the trauma, but, funny thing about hard drives – they can be restored. Just take a person geekier than the one who’d wiped it in the first place, and presto. Horrors returned in the scattered, unpredictable forms of flashbacks, reminiscent dreams, or conscious lapses into the past. The latter of the three are much like daydreams, yet they can generally be more alarming than the former two. The afflicted will relive their repressed past right before your eyes, and there’s not a damn thing you can do to console them because a hard drive is rarely restored without a few damaged files here and there.

Then again, I’d never really been much of a computer whiz. Perhaps the dream was merely a manifestation of what Elliot and Darcy had done to me, and my hatred for the two intermingled to create one giant Super Skeleton. Le Squelette Super. Of course, there was always the obvious explanation which was far simpler to accept than all others in that my nightmare was just a nightmare. Nothing more, nothing else, and certainly no mainframe restoration was necessary or required.

“You hearin’ me, Fairy?” Billie persisted and further displayed his aversion towards being ignored by inflicting a harmless enough poke in the ribs to one whose flesh had been ripped open by the malicious branches of trees during a midnight scamper through the woods. His playful poke invoked pain’s fiery wrath upon my abdomen and continued to burn well after the wounded skin had been disturbed. I hissed at the reawakened ache, causing the old bastard to roll over and stare, eyebrow cocked, at why I had reacted so negatively when his touch had managed to arouse me in more ways than I would have liked to admit mere hours previous. His gaze lingered on my scowl of discomfort before locating the gashes, and his eyes widened immediately.

“For a psychic, you have really shitty aim,” I grunted, taking a stab at a weak smile to show him no true harm had been done in his minor lapse in judgment, but the muscles in my face persisted in their exasperated glowering.

“Ain’t true. Maybe I was aimin’ for that little flesh wound ‘cause it sure as hell did a damn good job o’ getting’ your attention,” he chuckled, eyes glued to the impaired skin covering my ribs. Other irregularities surrounded it, such as bruises and scars courtesy of the brutish half of my Squelette Super, and naturally, the eerie white glow of the gauze wrapped around my neck and fingers haunted his field of vision. In that moment, I wanted to disappear. I wanted him to see me as something other than the broken-winged Fairy crumpled next to him. I wanted him to see Mike and maybe, just maybe, whisper my name in the dark once more…but with the sunlight bleeding through the drapes and spilling into the room, I couldn’t hide from who he needed to see. Maybe Mike didn’t even exist, and his Fairy-creature was who I truly had been this whole time.

I was just too dumb to see it.

“You ready for listenin’ now, Fairy?” he whispered, gaze never leaving my body. It was unnerving, and it gave him a certain tentative air like he feared whatever he had to say would slip beyond his grasp if he all but looked into my eyes. There was something concealed within them that he couldn’t see while ogling my broken body, and that alone compelled a battalion of furious goose bumps to wreak havoc on my exposed torso as I realized my eyes were more excruciating for him to stare into than the evidence of the abuse I endured and the truth I’d uncovered in that forest.

“Yes,” I croaked, averting my own stare to potentially make it less painful for him to look at me. My shame only made it worse.

“I want you to know you were right in thinkin’ that Momma Cass cretin was too damn big for her britches, but that word…vixen…it’s a lady fox. I know it somehow got all glorified ‘n’ fancy, like a fuckin’ compliment or some bullshit like that, but it ain’t,” he rambled, and I failed to find the significance in his explanation. I didn’t even notice that he’d yet again plucked something directly from my mind with accuracy enough to select a specific word that seemed to have plagued my five-year-old mind.

And that was only assuming it wasn’t a dream.

“I know what a vixen is. It’s a bitch of the fox world, so what?” I asked, coming off more irritated than I intended. Our avoided gazes made it impossible to discern whether or not it had bothered him.

“I don’t think you do know. A vixen ain’t just a pretty face. She’s a vamp, a grade-A ballbuster, who will do anything and hurt anyone to get what she wants. A vixen ain’t no cupcake, sugar, she’s the razor hidden inside the cupcake. Get it?”

I chanced a peek at the old man and noted that a scarlet hue was blossoming upon his cheeks, growing red with rage he felt for a woman he’d never even had the pleasure of meeting. Still, he didn’t look me in the eyes. For a fleeting moment, I wondered whether he feared I would read his mind if he did so.

I also couldn’t remove his echoing enunciation of sugar from my mind. The way it trickled from his lips held a specific elegance in its southern twang, and I found it to be utterly alluring. Sugah. I wanted him to say it once more, but I somehow managed to ask something else that mattered. Billie’s enlightenments were few and far between, and despite how his vixen tangent didn’t shed light upon what I assumed to be important, I knew it was noteworthy. Why, however, was a different story entirely. Forgive me if the significance of female foxes didn’t exactly click within my mind.

…at first.

“No. Why’re you going on about this woman? She’s not…real and certainly not worth getting worked up over,” I told him, but he would hear nothing of it.

“Oh, she’s real alright, ‘n’ I know exactly who she is. I just need you to know too. She’s a fuckin’ shrew, ‘n’ what kills me mos’ is that it ain’t politically correct to tame the likes of her these days even after all the unspeakable things she did to you ‘n’…fuck!” he wailed. Tears had begun to make the scarlet glow in his cheeks shimmer in the brightening sunlight, and I still was none the wiser as to why the old man had commenced with taking refuge in the crook of my neck, weeping into the gauze that covered a particularly nasty burn.

“Shhh, calm down. You’ll suffocate yourself if you keep crying like this…but who is she? How the fuck do you know her if you’ve been locked in this house for the past thirty years?” I interrogated, attempting to console him by wrapping an arm around his shoulder and pulling him closer to me.

“You honestly don’t recognize her? Think long ‘n’ hard, Fairy. You seen her more recently’n you think,” he blubbered, making a futile effort in keeping his sobs under control. In the way he carried on, one would suppose that he was the battered abuse victim and I, his knightly savior, but I wasn’t. I was a Fairy.

And I would have sworn to the death that I’d never seen that Momma Cass shrew in my entire adult life.

Billie Joe knew this and shied away from me, shimmying his body just enough to roll right on out of bed and tiptoe around the shattered guitar fragments upon the floor. Though he didn’t glance over his shoulder and beckon for me to follow him, I did so at once, catching him by a tattooed arm the instant he began to lose his balance in the doorway. His physical fragility was heartbreaking to witness, and I may have relished in being his makeshift cane as he led me into the kitchen, but the leering face of a woman whose likeness had been captured in a photo strip annihilated all feelings of importance. As I gawked at the ink on Billie’s arm, I grew wary of a familiarity in her face I initially failed to recognize, yet I hadn’t a clue pertaining to where I’d seen her before.

The old bastard stopped at the first counter, glaring down at a prematurely emptied pill bottle while his free hand darted forward to grab it. At once, the bottle was being thrust into my face.

“Read it. The prescriber’s name,” he commanded, the hand holding the bottle trembling with such force that I worried I wouldn’t be able to do so. I squinted against the letters quivering in front of me, and after some vigilant concentration, I read the name aloud.

“Dr. Lorraine Jenko, what…?”

I was in the midst of demanding just what the hell the Mistress of Mindfuck had to do with the pills she’d subscribed to me when an image of her sitting so damn far off the edge of her seat that her knees nearly brushed the edge of the hospital bed I’d been restrained within invaded my mind. She had been just a bit too interested in my case, in my relationship with Billie Joe, and I’d simply waved it off as a hazard of her job. If a patient’s case were to present itself as tragically as mine had, who wouldn’t act peculiarly towards me? Towards Billie? As her face grew clearer still, a specific likeness burst forth that it compelled my stomach to lurch violently enough for me to dry heave in disgust. How hadn’t I seen it? How could I have been so fucking ignorant?

“Now picture her with lipstick,” Billie coached.

I did.

I was staring into the spiteful countenance of the Vibrant Vixen herself.