Doll Heads by Cheryl Anne Gardner

“That was a really fucked up thing to say,” she said while flicking her cigarette ash on my shirtsleeve. “I know it looks like syphilitic testicles in dick cheese sauce, but no one said you had to eat it.”

I was talking to Mollie, of course. Morbid Mollie I liked to call her when there wasn’t anything sharp nearby. It was Tuesday, black and still and pouring rain. We were at some depression era bar on the north side. Chinatown. She’d picked the place because she knew I hated the way it smelled when it rained — burnt pistachios, wasabi, and raw sewage. She was sitting at the bar, stabbing something nasty with a pair of chopsticks. Sleazy was her middle name. I hated the way she dressed in those Halloween Nun outfits; Nuns who’d obviously had enough fucking the cross in their spare time and were chewing the pews for a good old-fashioned cock in their mouths. You know the type: toxic with a capital infectious fucking “T.” I hated her. Hated her warm meat. “How many you got?” I asked about the suspicious burlap sack lying there, seeping a russet yellow liquid at her feet. I hated looking at her fucking feet too. Her toes looked like a deadly mutant outbreak of knuckles and flesh and hair, all jacked up and crammed into a pair of steel stilettos. I was starting to sweat. Good thing the bartender came by and asked me if I needed something stronger. I did, but even then, I could still taste the vomit and match light residue in the back of my throat. I was hungry. I needed to eat. Fresh or Frozen, I didn’t care. Mollie had what I needed . . . in the bag at her feet. My plan was to be direct. Cool. Calm. Direct.

“Whatcha got in the bag, Mollie?” I asked again, but she still didn’t answer, not yet. Her cigarette smoke danced around my words, and I just stared at the veins in her sagging breasts. I wouldn’t have enough money. I knew that, she knew that, but I was hungry. Snap off the head and suck out the juice. That warm delicious juice. They only taste that good when their young, fresh, but I’d settle. These were probably old and stale — rotted biohazard — from the free clinic down the block. I didn’t even have enough to pay for that even, but we always came to an arrangement. I’d pay for her dinner, and then I’d have to eat her out. She never said a word. She just smiled at me, stood up, grabbed the bloody bag, and headed for the alley.

© 2011 by Cheryl Anne Gardner. Previously appeared at The Carnage Conservatory June 2011.

When she isn’t writing, Cheryl Anne Gardner likes to chase marbles on a glass floor, eat lint, play with sharp objects, and make taxidermy dioramas with dead flies. She writes art-house novellas and abstract flash fiction, some published, some not.

Comments are closed.