Make_____

“He travels all over to teach others,” he continued. “I met him when he came here. We fell in love. I thought I’d never find love. Especially in a place where I knew no one, and wanted no one to know me. When he came home this morning we began our day like we usually do. He took my glass sculpture pussy candy and began to use it on my hole and he—”

“You can stop—”

“He started laughing at my hole. Laughing! And I got so mad, I turned around and broke that piece of pussy candy off in his fucking eye!”

“I don’t—”

“Then I took another one and shoved that through his face and his neck-”

“STOP!”

“Oh, sorry, I got carried away didn’t I?”

I answered with my eyes, which felt very wide and were probably filled with unfathomable terror.

“I want my ring. And I want to leave. Okay?”

Tag stood there staring at me for what felt like an hour but was only about a minute.

“Sure thing, baby. You got it. But you gotta help me clean up this mess first, then you can have momma’s ring-”

“My mother’s ring-”

“Whatever, there are trash bags under the sink. Knives in the drawer.”

Tag walked back over to the couch, fell into it like a sheet packed full of soured pumpkins, and lit another cigarette. He blew the smoke out and looked down at the mess on the floor.

“Who’s laughin’ now, fucker,” he muttered.

Sweat ran down my back. I had to make a decision, which was either to help this disturbed mess of a person I now understood I had never known, ever, and leave, or call the cops and try to explain myself and hopefully not end up on the news where my boss might see me and fire me later. I took a deep breath. I closed my eyes.

“Any day now,” said Tag. “Are you hungry? I got a Banquet dinner in the freezer. It’s a chicken pot pie.”

I did not respond. A tiny fart from Tag addressed the silence following his question.

I turned and retrieved the trash bags from under the sink, and all I found were just emptied bags from Wal-Mart. Then I located the largest butcher knife I could find. I put two of the bags over my hands, grabbed the knife and walked over to Tag.

“You never answered me when I asked you how you found me?”

“On People of Wal-Mart. It’s a website. You were wearing a cape.”

I aimed the knife directly above him on the couch.

“Oh yeah,” said Tag. “I remember that cape. What are you doing pointing that at me?”

“I want my mother’s ring.”

Tag blew out smoke, lips curling under a pre-pubescent mustache.

“Do you, now?”

I said nothing, only waited. My arms shook, the handle of the knife greasy under the plastic sack.

“Well, then you’ll have to come eat it off Momma,” said Tag.

Laughing, horrible and throaty, he lifted his stained shirt over the island of his stomach, then with both hands lifted his stomach to reveal an engorged pink stem hanging awkwardly from a nest of wiry black pubes. The pink stem looked stretched and shiny as if it were the body of a snail. Hooked through the end of it was a piece of shining gold crowned with a diamond surrounded in blue gemstones. My mother’s wedding ring.

“You pierced your . . . your dick with my mother’s wedding ring?”

“Yeah,” said Tag, smoke curling from between his greasy lips.

My hand squeezed the knife handle until it was numb.

“If you want it, baby, you gonna have to eat if off me.”

The laugh from Tag began small and grew like a storm. It grew and grew the way a disciple’s laugh would grow, the way his teacher probably taught him to laugh. His laugh consumed the room, devoured all other sounds, flew up the walls, resonated through all of the plastic and glass and metal around us. It seemed uncontrollable as if it would devour us both. It seemed to wipe out all thought from my mind, all desire, all need. It rose and rose and washed over me until I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Fractured sparkles of light danced across Tag’s meaty thighs from my mother’s ring. The light was sharp and broke directly through my line of vision. I looked at Tag’s unrecognizable face and in one swift movement brought the knife down directly between his legs. I drove the point right into the gap between my mother’s ring and the head of his dick. I put all of my weight into it, and with a flick of my wrist, tore the ring free. It came off in a splatter of red and a thick tearing sound, like a raw tendon ripped from a bone. I grabbed the ring from the point of the knife with my plastic wrapped hand and held it up to the light. I could feel a smile grow on my face.

Tag’s laughter turned quickly to a guttural cry from somewhere deeper. He toppled over onto the floor attempting to grab the place that bled under the island of fat above it.

I tossed the knife to the floor and said, “The only rule is you can’t stop laughing.”

I left Tag where he was and ran out of his apartment. I decided to walk to my hotel. As I walked the air washed me of a lingering stink and dried the sweat on my back. I held the ring in my fist and thought of what I’d lost and how far I had to come to get it back, of what it cost me; the expense of people on other people, how we will try and suck each other down into our own private crimes, our messy lives, or how we will try to find laughter where none should ever exist, and hope in places devoid of it, like this wasteland in the middle of the country.

When I arrived home in New York, I curled up in my bed after a long shower. The sounds of the city were a comfort. The unsolved would always remain just that because there was always more of it and it was us and all the things we’re capable of. Things are lost or disappear and sometimes they are found again. The same goes with people. But there wasn’t anything anyone could do about it. Before I closed my eyes and drifted off to a long, heavy sleep, I made a strong mental note I didn’t want to forget:

Buy more waxed floss. And nutmeg.