Pasadena Mascara
Written by lzhoudidion and
FleshMaddAvalon
This is our entry to the ComboCon contest, incorporating the themes 'heat' and 'hideaway'. TWs: fight scene with depictions of violence as well as references to narcotics.
This is how you fight with a switchblade.
Stoop. Bend your knees. Test the flexibility of your legs. Stretch. Extend your joints. Feel your tendons, your shins—shift and burn the skin, turning from something vaguely pliable into a hardened paste, brown and dark and oozing dead platelets and pus for days afterwards. This is no ample occasion for sunblock—that aerosol of zinc oxide that smothered your pores, pricked your eyes and gummed fingers, depriving sensory friction. For ample shade. The Pasadena sun tears through everything: the pavement, the chain link, the television antennas, the Venetian blinds like bare gills: powdered blades dangling crooked, loose around dreadlocked cord.
It sits at the tail of a lanyard in your breast pocket. Heft the length, feeling the turtle-shell handle press long and cool into your palm. Diecast rivets and a spring-loaded safety lever sandwiched between a glob of mechanical fat, an cartouche silkscreened in off-brand gold.
Chun Hwa & Son M.F.G Cutlery. Kowloon.
For utility purposes only.
Your opponent tries to talk, mouthing syllables. “You…aggrandizer.” There’s nectarine juice crusting like paint chips under her lip. Hair damp, steaming with chlorine almost like vacuum-formed plastic. Shuffles again, sandals crushing past browned roses. Potted succulents, subsisting on the last of liquid fertilizer. Barbs. Dried cells and linseed sap come in tow. Do not stand up straight. By God, never stand straight.
You glance, left, right. Vinyl siding and batten boards and a dumpster, stone alleyway walls strung and bonded together with twine. This backyard, pushed up just behind a strip mall, the San Gabriel mountains—khaki and swimming pools set like teardrops into the hillsides, is a moth thrashing in paint thinner. Swap the knife between hands. The stainless steel springs open midair, bare face reflecting the stalk of a razor palm. Silver and indigo and insoluble green. Which hand serves best? The right. So let the blade sit. Injection molded guard finding equilibrium. God, please, find equilibrium. She cocks her head. Stops. Pinkie, curled tight. Ring and middle finger, pricked up, finger pads digging into the divot of the handle. Thumb and forefinger, extended, clasping.
The elbow is the forcemaker. The pile driver. No stabbing. The blade point isn't fine enough. The long edge, shimmering taut, straight—will be the first to sizzle, ship through the air. Remember never to mimic the blade. You must maintain polarity. For now you are no samurai—your tool is straight, your back curved. Barely return their smirk. Maintain tight formation. Stance. Legs spread, arms pinned—swept back—into a short radius. Palms out at waist level, flush with a belt that seemed a hole too tight. A single, slow breath. You approach, heel-toe, fade-sole patent leather boots scuffing.
They respond. Sweat drips down your forehead. Far away, an eternal distance, less than three yards, a collie saunters out of dull-green underbrush. You both halt. You stare at the dog. It glances at you both. Maw open. Panting.
A moment.
Your heartbeat quickens. Industrial autohammer strength, your ribs feel like putty holding down the errant muscle. Your abdominal aorta pulsates. What is next? How do you approach? The blade sits against your thumb, ready to slice through skin and cloth. To let crimson fluid spray like the rust-corrupted rain water dripping from the dessicated hulking mass of a fifties sedan, brand name escaping, that guards one end of a driveway. Blood-brown and dull, you fear your innards turning that color.
Grease fires burn across your system, hips and waist twisting with tension and lactic acid. It needs to be released lest your mind break. You can barely take it, the third-rail-shock in the Grand Central of your body. You simmer, vicious and more unbridled than any of the wildfires that scorched the brush neighboring your home.
The two of you, pinstripe suit prisoners of the streets, finally come within range. Your arm tenses. Steel infests your tendons. You are strong. You are powerful. The prey before you shall not overthrow your life. Shall not sideswipe, end the existence you cling to so hungrily. You are the hunter. The grandmaster. The alpha-being, the ender of all who would attempt to-
The neighbors. One peeks through the window. They see the party in their connected state, a hazy crimson thread of potentiality connecting your two figures. Let them watch. That is what this is. It is a show, a facade, a series of mocking messages sent from person to person to symbolize hatred, threats, violence. You can’t help but feel a sickening irony float through your mind. Just last night, you were embraced by the warm flesh of neon and bass, as you lapsed through a cloud of makeup and vape smoke. A motorized mirror splitting light, in those surroundings, just with different desires, different feelings.
You can smell their flesh, their sweat, harsh and pungent. It stings your nose and activates a scent memory, the xenon-bright highway of your neural connections sprinting to life. Remember when you held her tight, and flew through the night? Remember how her sweat smelled, mixed with leaded aviation fuel and cheap lilac perfume, after you sold a full kilo in one swift blow?
A splitscreen flashback in high resolution. Two scenes of equal measure. You and your partner, coiled together, embracing in the rainbow gel lights of the dense brickwork club innards, feeling a freight train of edible marijuana passing down your insides, the high starting at your chest and spreading like the world’s best illness, loosening, relaxing, unlocking. In that moment, magnetized to your love, to the sheer inertia—twisting about, heels and loafers scuffing into the gilded linoleum, you could do anything. Feel everything. Touch the salt-rimmed shot glass and down just one more pull of the good stuff. Flush the acidity with a ten-cent Coke and rum. Bubbles and fructose coursing—down, down as the stereo system warbles, synthesizers and subwoofers thumping in time to the gasps of drunks fumbling about as another film of smoke descends from the glass catwalks and observation galleries high above. Someone laughs. Almost collides with your backside. You ignore them, glancing back at your partner. Let yourself ride the rails.
That is who is most present in your mind. Her auburn hair, Chantilly Dye #6. Her deep brown eyes, endless pools that you could lose your entirety within. Her hands, delicate, manicured, threading into yours. Overrunning your scars. Gliding through your hair. Hugging you tightly as the stack in your pocket bulges. Feeling you, in that moment, in your ecstasy, drifting across fumes, acetone and menthol—trying to crest, unfurl, yet another trail to nirvana.
You must win.
With a quick thrust from the shoulder and torso, the blade shudders. Loses rigidity. Snaps back into position, wobbling.
But you don’t tuck. Turn. These streets are still an open face mausoleum, asphalt shingles and the ridges painted sunset. Somewhere a lone klaxon flatlines. Her eyes are glazed over, still reeling back, legs buckling, skin stretching from a dark pink to a pallid white flecked with crimson. Lucky that it is only superficial. After all, a wound is far, far easier to slash open than to seam and zigzag and bar shut with a dab of rubbing alcohol, a needle cauterized under a broken incandescent lightbulb: magnesium, tungsten and escaping argon forming an vacuum of flame and carbon and stink over tapered nickel.
Someday you’ll use sunblock, the mist backhanding your face, hands, chest. Stinging your eyes and trapping in the sweat whole. Making it slick. Purging all traction. Someday you’ll break cadence. Someday you’ll stand straight. God, how you’ll stand straight. Bracing your shoulders, sun-spotted and off-kilter, against the backside of a diner booth, two tone aluminum fluting and laminated formica and a birdcage flash hider fastened to a Kalashnikov muzzle swimming, jabbing towards your stomach in place of spring-loaded, forward-locking steel. In place of Chun Hwa & Son. Lunging, head scrunching in a small space behind the buttstock, a counterfeit Rolex and upturned arms, ready to windmill. Someday you’ll learn to stop bluffing. Someday you’ll land a consistent, sure slash. Someday you’ll walk, slink, away, wits and sobriety and pride unscathed. Sidestepping figures paddling—fists clenched, chins bared face down with the suckers of fruit flies on the tarmac, a satchel full of lysergic coloring books beating gently over your back. Someday you’ll cross the border. Rapping your knuckles against the shifter column as the engine knocked—bucked—tore through a tollbooth and a ridge of concertina wire, a lukewarm bottle of Pabst sloshing around in between the tuck-and-roll seats. Someday, holed up in an dollar bedroom in Sonora, the shag carpet punctured, burned to the masonite baseboards by yesteryear’s matchstick phosphorus and black tar—you’ll run the backside of your hand along an liquid crystal thermometer, an ailing AC unit’s grille, feeling the freon-laced air, the pillow, turning from an bruised peach in the light shafting through the diamondback curtains into something far more silted, far more hemorrhaged, and then wonder how it came to chance that no ibuprofen, no amount of Nyquil or fuzzy reruns: Columbo and Strangelove’s brooding jaws twisted, smeared in the stuff of Chesterfields and static and Medellín snow—will shield, repulse you from the encroaching dark.