Milk-Blood (13 page)

*
FINAL NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR - This story doesn’t seem over just yet. I don’t know what it needs, but something is left hanging. Some time on Brentwood is what I need for one last feel of the setting to close this story out proper.

I drive down
Eight Mile Road past grocery stores, McDonalds, and storage units, and slowly the scenery changes to party shops, Baptist churches, and bus stops full of waiting people

My presence beco
mes more conspicuous with each mile I get closer, like an invading agent into a foreign body. Just seeing the street sign, “Brentwood” makes me smirk.

I remember
the place from my visit as a social worker years ago, and it had changed only in that whatever was there 12 years before, was the same but now only more so.

I crept at ten
miles per hour down the street, eyes casing the houses to spur my memory. The abandoned house that inspired the beginning of this story was indeed boarded up. Fresh planks were drilled over each window, and trash was sprayed around the outside like pinecones around an evergreen. It now seemed safe to walk by, but somber. The headstone of a man with a troubled life.

Across the street
was where I imagined Lilly’s house to be. And just as I had written, the house was recently on fire. Freshly burnt blackness from the flames inside had coated the siding.

I parked on the street next to a rusty blue escort, and when I slammed my car door, two girls who were playing turned their heads, knowing there was a stranger to this street visiting. Their mother was on the porch eyeing me as well. I don’t think I looked like a cop, but perhaps like Protective Services come to visit.

I eyed the house from the curb.
There wasn’t a single glass pane left. All of them had been busted out. I’ve been in a house fire before, and I know that’s what happens. Firemen with axes smash in every bit of glass, douse the house with water fast as they can, and leave the remains.

Standing on the sidewalk, I
peered through the gaping holes looking for any movement, but saw nothing but darkness inside. I walked onto the porch, turned my head each way as if waiting to be invited inside, but then stepped through the front doorway.

I was greeted by
thick, burnt air. It filled my lungs and searched each part of me, like a guard dog, smelling the visitor.

A man was in the front room. He
didn’t even notice me, didn’t flinch at my arrival, but was pacing, three steps and a turn, three steps and a turn. His skin was an alien color, not exactly the Red-Man like I had thought, but perhaps crimson. His mouth mumbled words too softly and rapidly to hear, but they certainly had him in a trance.

At his side, his hand
grasped a long steak knife.

He
kept pacing, back and forth, and then raised the knife as if to strike. I crouched ready to flee, but before I needed to decide my next move, he put the knife to his own neck, and slid the blade along his jugular.

Nothing happened.
No blood, nothing, just a groove in his colored skin that seemed deep as if it had been cut and sawed at more than once. Tendons of his neck were exposed, and his head had started to lean towards the damaged side.

On closer look, I noticed a
liquid stain that ran from his neck down the side of his body, like he had spilled a shake. Blood had already been drained.

He took
three steps, turned, took three more steps, turned, mumbled, and then slid the knife over the groove again. His head tilted, just a bit more. The cut was getting deeper and soon his head would topple off.

Walls of black, glass shards, displaced furniture, kitchen
appliances broken or melted, all were littered about the house. I stepped through the wreckage and my footsteps made tiny echoes in the silence. I was at the doorway of the bathroom when I saw her. It was Lilly.

Her eyes looked up at me, brilliant bright white in contrast to the dark skin of armor that her flesh had become
. Not flesh-colored black, but like the outside of a well done steak, leathery. It really was armor now, but she was more malnourished than I had ever imagined despite all my descriptions. I could have picked her up with one hand, and her legs and arms stuck to the side like twigs of a tree.

She knelt in front of the bathtub, as if genuflecting, waiting, but the
tub was empty, it was just her, and the New Balance box of syringes at her side.

“
Is the man still cutting himself?” she asked.

“That he is
.”

“He thought I would be his girl, but instead I am killing my father.”

“He deserves it.”

“
You aren’t protective service are you?”

“
No,” I answered. I wasn’t even sure if my lips were moving, or if I was writing her words for her, or thinking them in my head. Either way, we were in full communion.

“
But you are here for me, my momma told me so.”

To that I had no answer
.

“
You are, I know it. You were here on this street before, and Momma used you. Got in your head and made you come to get me.”

She said this and
stared into the bath, which had a small, muddy pond inside. The liquid had turned black with ash and soot, but the bath was now empty of bodies. Still, she stared as if she could see someone.

I looked closer at her skin, which
was full of tiny holes, most of them up her arms. As terrible a life as I had described, this was worse. I should not have resisted urges to hold back as I wrote. A lesson learned. I may have failed you.

Her hands started to rummage in the shoe box, and she held a syringe in her fist.
Like a Hara-Kiri suicide, she pounded the needle into her heart, right through her sternum. It hit with a thud. If she gasped or if I gasped for her I could not tell, but I watched as she pulled the chamber on the syringe and sucked out parts of her own insides into the needle.

“
You are here for me, my momma told me so, I’ll be inside you. Take me away.”

She had all the tenderness of a nurse when she grabbed my arm and turned it to its underside. Her fingers were still warm on mine, when I
had expected cold, from this girl who I was pretty sure was dead or in some similar state.

When the needle went into my
own vein, I thought of all the ways I had described this sensation, and wondered if I got it right. The pain of the needle itself was a sensual shock. It was a direct current to my spine, and quickly spread warmth to my whole body, starting in my back, shooting through my nerves, and finally into the tiniest capillaries of my brain. Tiny synapses soaked them in.

“Go.”

I took a snapshot image in my head of this deadless girl, living in the ashes of this house, ashes of her family, ashes of this city. Her face was a mix of contentment and somber resignation.

I
walked past the Red-Man who was pacing in the front room and slicing his neck with the steak knife every few steps. I realized I was leaving the tomb of both of them, and this house would have their presence here forever. I got into my car just a regular suburban drug addict, visiting the inner city and then driving home with the high of the drug inside of me, leaving the city dwellers behind.

I drove aw
ay with a hand on the wheel and an eye on the blue vein that extended from my wrist to my elbow. The vein was no longer blue but had become the shade of Lilly’s black armor skin. My body burned with the buzz of her life and all that was in it. I indeed felt the rage and power of her dad, felt the sage of the grandmother, and the hopes and dreams of Lilly that could never be realized on this street.

And the love of her
mother, Latrice. I felt that too.

But the feeling of
Latrice was nothing new, and I understood what Lilly had been trying to tell me. The spirit of Latrice had been inside me for years. Ever since the day I visited the street for the in-home therapy session twelve years ago. Latrice had been nearby, buried in the ground, and she came into me at that moment when I had opened myself up to be spoken to. If only I had known what that burning inside of me was, the feeling I had confused for social worker empathy, that went from caring for the people on this street and turned into the urge to write this story.

Latrice was the puppet master who got inside heads, and I was the puppet
.

And now I had
Lilly inside me, Lilly’s point of view, all of it burning through my veins, pumping through my heart, and part of me forever. I was taking her away from here, which is what Latrice wanted all along. I was the giant peach, and I needed to write about it, to catalogue it all best I could with meager skills but an eager heart. Obsessed I became at times to get this story down. Latrice commanded it so, and Lilly let me see through her eyes. To write her in the first person point of view.

So I did.
We did. All of us. And that is the story that you have just finished reading. And now that it is done, there is this urge inside me to do the things that Lilly could not. An urge that comes from Lilly herself.

Joey from next door.
I would watch over him as I could. I would do that, to be the peach that rescued him. As long as I believed in this kind of magic, I was sure to find it.

But not just that, there’s more
. I feel driven, obsessed even, to go to the house across the street. Lilly wants to me to visit the house were Oscar lived, the place he died in the smoke from her own dad's fire. She says she knows how to save him. She says she can bring him back.

I drive there on a Tuesday night and park my car on the street, which has now become familiar. With the claw of a hammer I pull back on the boards at 617 Brentwood. The wood plank resists at first, but soon starts to give, and the scent of the smoky air is released. I'm back inside…

Acknowledgments

I’ve had this story in my veins and spent many hours letting it bleed out. Being the spouse of one who has such an obsession is not always pleasant
, so I owe a huge thanks to my wife and family. Thanks to Kealan Patrick Burke for making the cover shine and Richard Thomas for making the insides glisten. Both were a joy to work with.  So many authors have given me support along the way, to name a few; John F.D. Taff, Julie Hutchins, Joe Hart, Peter Rosch, Shana Festa, Michele Miller, and Jan Kozlowski. Thanks to the beta-readers who helped shape this story including Author Gary Cecelia and Charlene, Deborah, and Chris from Goodreads. Thanks to the millions who had a hand in my own sobriety, most who are unaware of how they helped. I will continue to drink in their milk-blood, and offer my own in time of need.

About the Author

Mark Matthews has worked in addiction and mental health treatment for nearly 20 years, and writing for just as long. His books are all based on true settings, including the horror novel,
On the Lips of Children
which he wrote after
a predawn run on a dark San Diego trail. Like MILK-BLOOD, his novels STRAY and The Jade Rabbit are also set in Detroit. He is an avid runner, and has completed over a dozen marathons. He is a graduate of the University of Michigan, a licensed professional counselor, and lives near Detroit with his wife and 2 daughters. Reach him at
[email protected]

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ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

ON THE LIPS OF CHILDREN

“One of the scariest novels I’ve read all year.” ~
The Horror News Network

"Top Horror Read of 2013"
~A Readers Review Blog

"A dark, bloody book, at its bleak heart about the love a mother has for her children and the lengths she will go to for them to survive. You'll never look at jogging, the homeless, or even vampires the same way again. And, no, this book isn't about and doesn't feature vampires at all. What's featured here is infinitely worse."
~John F.D. Taff, author of Little Deaths and The Bell Witch

STRAY

"I loved this book! It was very believable & wonderfully written. Be ready for an intense read that will change your views on addiction."
  ~
Kandes Starlin, Book Reviews by Kandes
"Stray is about addiction, yes. But mostly it is about relationships and the bonds that keep us all from going astray. Whether it's your wife or a hardscrabble mutt on the side of the highway, it's the connections to other creatures in the world that give us our forever homes. The writing here is clean, vivid, and wildly empathic to all the beasties who take shelter in communal spaces. Stray sings."
~Sacha Scoblic, author of  Unwasted: My Lush Sobriety
"The characters are colorful and believable, and I was especially impressed by the author's realistic balance between the tragic despair and the very real hope of recovery that come with addiction.  I recommend this book for anyone interested in an honest, unvarnished peek into addiction and recovery."
~Ron S., The Spirit of Recovery