Custody Battle *expletive deleted*

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Kylie heard there were people who actually had the luxury of choosing whether or not to be a f**king @$$hole. She, unfortunately, was not one of those lucky $#itheads. Her great grandfather was an old-fashioned @$$hole who begat an even bigger @$$hole, who begat the king of all @$$holes, who married the high exhalted queen b**ch @$$wipe, better known as the person she called Mommy W**rest. All this to illustrate why Kylie felt she wasn’t totally responsible for the way she was. Not so f**king easy to be a g***ammed pillar of the community when the gene pool you’re pulled from was a $#itty septic tank.

The other genetic trait she inherited was the uncanny ability to choose the absolute d**chiest mate. Enter: Simon. Ever much the p**ck match to her @$$holosity, only he wasn’t merely a p**ck to her, sometimes he was a c**t, too. They were made for one another, the most fearsome twosome since the Kray brothers. And as long as they had a mutual target to focus their hatred on, they maintained wedded bliss. When no target presented itself, they turned on one another like rabid @$$ dogs.

There was only person on the entire face of the planet who was spared their abusive wrath, Ms. Brittany Anne, their daughter. The only thing they gave two $#its about because she was the only thing the pair of created that remained unsullied by the $#itstorm of their separate and combined f**ked up worlds. And as the only thing they had ever gotten g***ammed right, Brittany Anne was only thing they would have abso-f**king-lutely died for, no hesitation, no questions asked.

So, when their marriage $#it the bed for the final time, Kylie told Simon he could keep the house, the car, everything in the joint account, the whole ball of wax, just as long as she got Brittany.

Of course, Simon was having none of that and they wound up in court, which to Kylie was the stupidest move he could have made. He ate his b**ls in the courtroom. He was a living off the grid, import/export, bootlegging sonuvab**ch who looked like dog$#it warmed over on paper. Hadn’t taken the judge long to award her full custody, but she knew in her heart of b**tard hearts that the motherf**king court order wasn’t anything but a piece of paper to wipe her @$$ with.

It took Simon less than four hours to enlist the aid of his brothers, who Kylie knew to be a bunch of fake f**king tough guys who swore they had King Kong sized b**ls simply because they watched Scarface and Goodfellas on continuous DVD loop. And when Kylie was in the kitchen microwaving dinner, those $#itbirds kidnapped her daughter.

Being that there wasn’t an Einstein among them and together their collective IQ couldn’t reach room temperature, Kylie knew exactly where they were holding Brittany. The hot house. It was where Simon operated his numerous non-corporate businesses, a tiny hovel where his inbred f**ktard brothers shacked up when their w**re mother threw their shiftless @$$es out. It was also a $#itty crack den that sat in the otherwise decent residential neighborhood like an infected, bloody hemorrhoid. One that was definitely getting lanced tonight.

After Kylie cased the house and picked the best spot for her approach, she drew her piece, the assault rifle pushing its way from under her denim duster. Simon always accused her of having p**is envy, and if that was the case then this b**ch of a rifle was her g***ammed hard on!

Lep stepped out of the front door, planted his feet on the porch and turned his gat Kylie’s way. The gun was a piece of $#it .44 he bought out of a Kmart shopping cart from some dude with a serious boner for Clint Eastwood.

The youngest of all the brothers, Lep’s real name was Earl but his brothers gave him the moniker due to his height and bizarre resemblance to a leprechaun. Four foot if he was an inch and at least two feet of that was head. Combined with his high pitch laugh, he had a nickname that stuck for life.

Even thirty feet away and caught off guard, Kylie had more than enough time to clean this @$$hat’s clock. She whirled around and squeezed her trigger. His oversized head came apart like a pumpkin in a microwave. To his credit, he managed to take a few steps forward and pulled his trigger before he collapsed, but the shot went wild, missing Kylie by a mile.

Lep was the rare brother who had never really done anything to Kylie and for the briefest of instances she kind of felt sorry for him. But he did try to shoot her, so fuck him, dancing under rainbows, gold hoarding, headless motherf**ker!

The sound of the rifle shot was bound to bring out the rest of the boys so Kylie put a little pep in her step as she walked toward the house.

Slick Sid, the middle brother with the oily, bad skin, was next out of the house and his face went went slack the moment his eyes fell on Lep’s body. He started screaming. Screaming like the little b**ch he was. Kylie though. Mouth going off like a little p**sy siren.

When Sid saw Kylie coming at him, rifle leveled, his hand shot down to the pistol in his waistband, even while he continued to scream. She could have shot his dumb @$$, but chose not to. Maybe hadn’t even needed to.

By the time Sid’s gun cleared his waistband, Kylie was on top of him. Rifle butt to the family jewels doubled him over, then an elbow to the jaw knocked him down to the hardwood porch deck. Sid’s hand twitched on the pistol grip which made Kylie stomp down on his jaw with a horrible crunch.

“Where is she?” Kylie’s voice was controlled rage. Sid made a noise that Kylie took to be “Who?” Maybe smashing his jaw wasn’t the best idea.

“My daughter, b**ch! Where’s my child?” Kylie knelt down and pried the pistol from Sid’s hand. She placed the muzzle on his temple and cocked the piece.

Call it self-preservation or simply blind luck but Sid’s hand shot up and clutched the gun in a manner so that the meat of his hand between thumb and forefinger blocked the hammer from firing.

Kylie was caught off guard as Sid twisted the gun out of her grip, spun the barrel in the opposite direction and squeezed the trigger.

This mutherf**ker! she thought as she took a gun shot to the stomach. Kylie grunted as she brought the shotgun up to his neck. Sid’s throat bloated with automatic rifle ammunition and burst, spitting a dark crimson stain on the bare hardwood.

Kylie pressed her back against the house near the front door, the worst possible place she could have been but the wound in her gut wasn’t letting her go anywhere.

“I know you heard the commotion, so you know I’m out here.” she yelled into the darkened doorway, putting pressure on her stomach to try to stop the bleeding. She prayed they couldn’t detect the pain in her voice. “Si, can you hear me? Two of yours are dead. Didn’t need to be that way. Just give my daughter back unharmed and we’ll call it quits. How’s that sound to you?”

Kylie thought she heard someone running inside the house but couldn’t be sure over the sound of her own heart in her ears as blood continued to ooze from her belly. Unbeknownst to her, Gabby Otis, the mute brother, crept around the side of the house and would have had her dead to rights if he hadn’t stepped on a loose floorboard.

The creak snapped Kylie to attention. She brought the shotgun around and blew the bottom part of Otis’ right leg clean off his body. The man dropped face first off the porch… but never let go of the gun.

Otis’ gun came up over the lip of the porch deck, shakily trying to target Kylie. She put the man in her sights and pulled the trigger. Jammed.

Kylie cursed and squeezed her bullet-pierced stomach as she grabbed the rifle by the barrel and swung it at Otis’ hand. Not a direct hit but the butt connected with enough force to send the gun flying off into the unkempt lawn grass.

Kylie angled the rifle butt at Otis’ head, connected and did it once more for good measure. Otis’ eyes fluttered close as he lost consciousness. His head still in striking distance, she aimed the rifle butt again, catching him full on this time. The left side of Otis’s head caved in and blood squirted from his right ear.

Without warning, Kylie cried out in agony as she was blown forward by the impact of a bullet in her back. She tumbled over the porch railing and landed face first in the grass. Though every movement was pure agony, Kylie twisted her head and struggled to understand what she was looking at.

Brittany Anne, the young girl with clear traces of her mother in her face, a face that was now a mask of fury covered with a sheen of tears, held a pistol in her tiny trembling hands.

Kylie tried to ask her daughter, “Why?” but only managed to cough blood as her mouth formed the word. A shadow fell over Kylie.

“No one took her, you dumb c**t.” the familiar voice said. “She came to me on her own. She wants to live with her daddy right now. Isn’t that right, pumpkin?”

Kylie lifted her head up from the grass, trailing threads of pink saliva and blood, in time to see her little girl nod her head.

“But, if you want to stay,” Simon said, “… there’s one thing I’m going to need you to do. Remember what it was?”

Brittany Anne nodded a second time and answered, “Kill Mommy.”

“What? No!” Kylie said as the pistol in Brittany Anne’s hand went off a second time.

To be continued…

Sally forth and be handling your domestic disputes professionalingly writeful.

©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Creative Commons License

Songs As Stories: My Mind Is Not My Own Today

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*Inspired by the song “Once In A Lifetime” by The Talking Heads

My mind is not my own today. Neither of my minds.

That reality continues to plague me as I make my way through both my workaday lives, and I mingle with people both strange and familiar. My minds are not my own today. I have to keep telling myself not to put too much stock in my conflicting thoughts as none of them truly belong to me.

But it wasn’t always this way. Once I had a singular life. A life I can no longer recall because I am not in control of my memories. Not since this morning, when I woke up living two separate lives simultaneously and asking myself, “How did I get here?”

In my left eye, I see the existence where I live in squalor in some poverty stricken part of the world, and although I have many friends and am surrounded by people who care about me, I am alone and lonely. There is no one here for me. No one to share my life. But somehow I manage to remain happy. Or at least I am not unhappy. Which is more than most can claim.

In my right eye, I live the other side of the coin. My house is unbelievably vast and luxurious. My wife is statuesque and blindingly beautiful, and my car, my car is large enough for a small family to live in.

One would think as my wealth has no limit, it would be a freeing thing, correct? But I find that I can’t manage it properly, for this fortune comes with no instruction manual. Can you tell me how a beautiful wife, a gorgeous specimen of a woman that was supposedly tailored to suit my needs actually works? What of a house and car that I feel absolutely microbic in? It is all somehow wrong as if I am a three dimensional being living in a three and one-quarter dimension reality.

Then my doubts become corporeal and wrap their bony fingers around my ankle in a death grip and pull me under the rushing tide of all the moral debts I have incurred throughout my lifetime.

The tide is a repo service that removes all the things that I possess. The push-to-start conveyance is no longer my large automobile, the mansion is no longer my beautiful house and the amazon is no longer my beautiful wife,  Unable to hold my breath for long, I gasp for air, each mouthful leaking my fortune along with my air.

The repossession waters dissolve my belongings, removing them from my existence, remnants of luxury items sink to the bottom of the ocean as waves push me away from opulence and wash me onto a fork in the road of a highway, the signposts of which points left for “Right” and right for “Wrong”. What do these signs mean? Which should I take? What have I done? What have I become? Ami I right, or am I wrong?

And when I question my realities, a voice keeps repeating, a voice inside my head, a voice that is not my own, one phrase that is meant to calm me, to reassure me that everything is as it’s meant to be…

Same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was.

Same as it ever was.

Sally forth and be letting the days go byingly writeful.

©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Creative Commons License

Songs As Stories: The King of Wretches

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*Inspired by the song “Search and Destroy” by Sanders Bohlke

I don’t have a favorite season, per se, but whenever summer rolls around, my head swims with near endless possibilities of how I can alter not only my reality but the reality of existence so that I can finally live a life in which my head falls on the pillow with no worries and I awaken the same way.

But at this moment, any life other than mine would be an improvement. When you live in the gutter, climbing up onto the pavement can feel like reaching the first heaven, but there’s not much chance of climbing that high. My wings, or what’s left of them, haven’t been able to bear my weight for quite some time now.

And I’m not alone. I lay here amongst the other bodies that convulse on a human Richter scale that makes it impossible to pray and have those prayers heard. My lips, dry and cracked haven’t kissed another in a century of lifetimes, though I have been kissed by cruel fate, who calls my name and announces my presence, the King of Wretches Among Wretches, this fate who comes down from on high, feigns love for me, lifts my head slightly and kisses me deeply and passionately and leaves without uttering a word.

And here I lay wide awake trying to mask my terror because I was instructed to know no fear but I feel my reserve crack and my secret fears are beginning to seep through. Left for dead but not truly dead, I sometimes raise myself to my full height and threaten to leave, but those who know realize this is an empty threat. My soul is anchored here and even though I can beg the wind to carry this all too fleshy carapace, what would I be without that which makes me unique? What sort of life would that be?

Besides, I’m far too proud to beg, even for mercy. Accepting charity never seemed quite right to me. So, I stay in anger, and at the dawn of each new day I let the carrion pick away at the bits of me that have gone necrotic from non-use. I curse the fact that when they take to the sky, they never steal away the bits that made me the monster that led me to be in this predicament in the first place. It’s as if the universe believes its very own balance is better with me assuming this role.

The sad truth is that not all dead are buried in the field with the flowers. Some lie rotting away to nothing, slowly dying from wounds that never heal. The minor injuries you suffer repeatedly every single day that rip the scabs off to bleed you anew. It’s the slowest death imaginable. Where you die a little more on each anniversary.

And in time these injuries celebrate anniversaries, birthdays, and even holidays. And you cry outwardly until the tears no longer come, then you cry inwardly and when people cannot see you weep, they assume that you’ve moved on and think it’s okay to pretend the bad thing never happened and things can return to normal, without realizing that there is no longer a normal to return to.

The parent of a dead hopes and dreams never stop being a parent in their hearts. And you spend the rest of your life gathering the leftover pieces and remnants of a future life well past its sell-by date, and inhume it in the backyard of years gone by in a specially constructed box of disappointment.

Sally forth and be sowing your dreams and reaping better realitiesingly writeful.

©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

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Unwritten Stories That Will Never See The Light of Day (maybe)

Prodigy. Genius. Talented. Gifted. Blessed. While it’s true these words describe me to a T, there are times when greatness does not come easily (no, really, it’s true) and some of the ideas that spill forth from my gray matter fall far from the greatness for which I am known.

Most of these hideas (hideous ideas) are forgotten as quickly as they appear, but there are a handful, a select few, that hang around and claim squatter’s rights on mental real estate better suited to my magnum opus(es).

This post shall serve as an eviction notice, with the hope that given some minor attention, the ideas will pack their belongings and fuck off back to obscurity.

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Venusian Gender Non-Specific Martians From The Moon

The year is 1938 and the United States launches a rocketship with the secret mission of sending settlers to stake claim to Earth’s moon for America. Upon their arrival, the lunar settlers stumble upon the satellite’s indigenous lifeform, Venusian Martians who do not identify by gender. The settlers also learn of a Venusian Gender Non-Specific Martian plot to invade Earth and mine the planet for the most precious energy source in the galaxy… human tonsils!

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Trouser Snakes On A Dame

Samantha Jackson, an asexual parking enforcement officer, is trapped in a subway train full of horny business men during rush hour traffic and is force to take on car after car of deadly, one-eyed snakes, deliberately unzipped to deflower any virgin who dares stand in their way.

“I am sick and tired of these masturfapping trouser snakes on this mother loving dame!”

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Pocket Rocket To The Stars

It’s 1937 and America is looking for alternative fuel and power sources. Enter female rocket scientist, Hedda DiClasse, who builds a rocketship powered by the ever elusive and once thought to be mythical female orgasm. Problems arise when Captain Manuel “All Man” Hardbody is brought aboard to pilot the vessel despite the fact he possesses too much testosterone. Can he and Dr. DiClasse put aside their differences and come together to ride that rocket into the Milky Way?

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I Was A Teenage Neanderthal Bride

Ooba wan’t going to be told whom she would marry, especially with all the potential Cro Magnon suitors running around, with their promises of a newer, better way of life. But even as she discovers the prefect homo erectus, she finds herself torn between pursuing her wondrous new life or saving her old life and her family from extinction.

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If Books Could Kill

A single mother gives her daughter a popular children’s book, only to discover that it is possessed with the soul of her recently murdered serial killer husband who’s out for revenge.

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Firstborn

A viral outbreak renders the human race infertile and in order to cheat death, the top scientists and surgeons turn to the works of Victor Frankenstein until generations later, the world is nothing but frankenpeople, but when a frankenwoman gets pregnant and gives birth, the planet will stop at nothing to dissect the newborn.

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Gym Rat Blue

Five unbelievably attractive rookie cops who look as though they spend every waking moment at the gym, have just graduated from the police academy in a nondescript city that could be New York but is probably somewhere in Canada. Now that training’s over and the rough and tumble life of a beat cop begins, they must learn not only to deal with their duties as police officers, but also deal with the problems and expectation of their severely dysfunctional families and friends, while maintaining their unnatural good looks, even after being shot. Pose, pout, protect and serve is the name of the game at the One-Oh-Sex Precinct.

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Let Go Of My Ears, I Know What I’m Doing

We never need talk about this story or its title ever again. Move along, nothing to see here.

Sally forth and be repurposing your less than stellar story ideasingly writeful.

©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Creative Commons License

Things Kept Precious

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My mother warned me to guard the things I held precious by keeping them hidden inside me. The only thing I held precious was her and I found it impossible to place her inside my body. I was too young to understand she was talking about love. Too young to save the best parts of my mother’s love in my heart. Too consumed by the hate caused by her leaving me on my own. Too young to accept that death comes to us all.

It was hard to hold onto her love. Hard because I watched her body decay and rot away to nothingness. I watched to see the precious things she kept inside her and where she managed to hide them so I could do the same. I never found them. I watched as I picked vermin from her flesh and fought away carrion from her decaying form, until the day she was unrecognizable to me.

In particular, I watched her heart. Who knew what was inside there but I knew it was fragile because my mother spoke many times about how it had been broken. She said, “Sometimes you have to break a heart to find out how strong it really is.”

But when her heart became visible, I couldn’t see any cracks. I watched it as it bruised like an apple and disintegrated away. Nothing inside it but emptiness. I was hoping to see love—even though I had no idea what love looked like—or at least be privy to some secret that would explain the world to me. I found none of those things.

Her heart was a chamber for maggots. That was what my mother kept precious. Little disgusting creatures that fed off her body. They were everywhere. Stripping my mother of her beauty.

It grew harder to remember her face. I tried to recall the last time I saw her eyes or her smile but that memory was too distant in the past, lost in the forest of forgetfulness.

Occasionally I dreamt of my mother, standing in a room somewhere I had never been but yet felt so familiar to me, her face was a storm. Clouds roiled where features should have been. When she spoke, her voice was a swarm of black bees the drained the life of anything it touched. The bees blotted out the room and ate a pet dog I only had in dreams and never in real life, before coming for me.

I would run from the house and through the trees, down a dirt path that led to a black pond of brackish water. The water called to me and I was torn for the water was frightening, but so too were the bees who devoured trees on their way to eat me.

No real choice at all, I dove into the pond and discovered the water was actually tar and I was being pulled in, just as other creatures foolish enough to make the same mistake, the same fear-based choice as I had.

My nose and mouth filled with hot thick liquid, bitter molasses that scorched my insides, and melted me like butter on the griddle.

I woke alone in the dark, choking for air, my chest weighted with the heaviness of fear. My breathing was a thick, wet noise like someone sloshing through mud — or tar! — and I no longer felt safe in this world, so I did the only thing I could think to do.

I crawled inside the remains of my mother’s body and wrapped her tight around me so that I could be the thing she kept precious.

Sally forth and be keeping things preciousingly writeful.

©2014 Rhyan Scorpio-Rhys

Creative Commons License