Spin Cycle

PROLOGUE

• NULLA - PROLOGUE •

NOVEMBER 2003

       IT NEVER RAINS in Grinrod, but on this particular afternoon, it storms. Addison watches on her tiptoes from five stories up, through a windowpane soiled with charcoal pencils and decaying potted plants. Hailstones splatter across the pavement below - God playing pinball with pedestrians. The sky is gunmetal and indigo, streaked across like wilting verbena flower petals atop a tombstone. It reminds Addison of burying her mother - the open casket, the bubblegum manicured nails, the lapel resting against her rigor mortis breastbone.

       That was Addison's mother for you - always wanting to be desired. Still wishing to be fuckable on her deathbed, like the allure didn't end when her heart seized up and her guts started rotting.

       Addison tugs at the uneven seams of her dress. The resultant movement digs the zipper into her hipbone, latching to her flesh like a carnivorous preying mantis - metallic teeth grinning. Her nostrils still itch with the stench of decaying flesh and Chanel N°5 Eau from earlier, when her cousin Bobby made her look inside the casket.

       She closes her eyes. In this fresh darkness, her mother's face stares back at her, etched into her sockets like a crude hieroglyphic - the mascara lashes, the curtains of anemic skin hanging down from her cheekbones, the bloodlessness of it all. As though her casket was a last ditch attempt to stop the outside world from seeing the ugliness that existed behind it all: one last pathetic plea to persuade otherwise.

       Always persuading.

       "Kiddo," Dad calls, across the room, "come say goodbye to Lisa."

       Lisa. Her name thwacks, like chomping on stale bubblegum. Addison had caught the two of them, him and Lisa, four months ago in the stairway between her floor and theirs. It was the height of summertime. Their mouths and hands and bodies were all over each other, magnetized by their opposing force fields, both ring-less, as if that made it less immoral.

       She never told anyone about it, as if the action of witnessing it was a shame that she too had to carry. It wouldn't have mattered much anyway - the act of telling or not telling.

       People always said that men didn't cheat on women like Addison's mother.

       The recollection of this makes her palms damp. She wipes them against the creases of black cotton bunching at her thighs. It's too warm in their apartment, she thinks, like the kind of tepid heat the keeps flies buzzing around masticated carcasses in desert wastelands long after the predator has retired. That's what these people are to Addison - these strangers offering their quiet prayers in the adjacent room. They're vultures in feeding time, narcissistic, preying on fresh grief and death and that stench - knowing that they'll leave before sundown and Addison will remain, stuck here, suffocated by all this goddamn loneliness.

       She blinks away the image, of vultures and decay, and drifts into the living room. She's not supposed to think like that, Dad says, but she can't stop it.

       The thoughts appear without consent.

       Halfway to the door Addison catches sight of her Aunt by the refreshments station. She's buckled over like a cheap lawn chair, head pressed in her hands, weeping. The tears come out in waves, ripping up through her spindly frame before spilling over, then repeating. Again, and again, and again, tearing at some invisible seawall. And then the palpable breaking point comes, the splintering of her heart into millions of intangible shards - the irreparable tissue damage. Mutilation like that you can't sew back together.

       Addison looks away.

       It's the saddest fucking thing, she thinks, that she's ever seen.

• • •

       Dad makes Shepard's pie for dinner, her mother's favourite, after the final collection of visitors have left. They eat in dazed silence, like timid dancers in an intimate waltz; pirouetting around the other as though the length of hardwood table between them is an active minefield. There's a bowl of pie at the setting Addison's mother used to occupy, untouched, tendrils of steam curling from it. It will be cold soon.

       "I got a test back Monday. An A in social studies, " Addison says, eventually, peeling a layer of mashed potatoes off the side of her bowl.

       Dad just looks up at her from beneath his thickly furrowed brow with those eyes - those murky eyes. He doesn't reply. His butchered hand's sprawled out on the table next to him, festering through the bandage. It's that dead stench again, of rotting skin and faithlessness. That nostril itch.

        The landline rings. He answers it, pressing the receiver to his unshaven cheek. Across the living room, Addison can just decipher the hushed voice on the other end - a woman's.

        "You don't think she knew..." muffled...

       "No-"

        "-about us?"

        "No."

        "What if she found out?"

        "She couldn't have."

         "How can you know?"

        "I would've - she was my wife."

        Static. "...and it was your morphine..."

        Addison withdraws to the bathroom, lifts the toilet seat, and violently vomits.

• • •

        The blood comes later that night, in the ceramic bathtub, seeping out from between her legs for the first time. It unfurls itself like a curtain call, the final act in this horror movie, streaking the foamy water in butcher's red. When it happens, she's as helpless as a newborn calf, knock-kneed and motionless, stunned into submission. The bathroom transforms into a slaughterhouse. Addison watches this self-created nightmare - this bloodshot sea, reaching towards the neoprene duck at her feet. It's cartoon eyes stare up at her. Addison imagines them shifting in horror, those neon rubber eyes, looking as though she's the devil, as though this is some violent end, a loss of all left that is innocent.

         There is nothing to be done now, so Addison doesn't try to stop it, powerless against her own body's biddings. There's no motherly comfort waiting at the other side of the doorway - it's too late for that, stolen away by fickle illusions and morphine and loss.

        So much loss. 

        She curls her knees into her naked, blooming chest - arms wrapped around boney shins - and rocks to the off-kilter cadence of her heart in her ribcage. Back and forth and back and forth and back and forth, like a malfunctioning children's toy.

         This is what it means to be a woman, she thinks.

        I'm a woman now.

       Addison cries.

• • •

AUTHORS NOTE: so as many of you probably already know, spin cycle (an adaptation of a short story i posted a couple weeks ago) is the novel i've chosen to write for nanowrimo this year, and i'm stoked to be doing it. i'd like to think of this story as every theme and every thing i've ever shied away from writing splattered out in one big amalgamation of pent up creativity.