Spin Cycle

ONE

• I - ABSOLUTION •

12 YEARS LATER

       ADDISON HAS SEX every Sunday morning, like ritual. Her God exists somewhere beneath linen bed sheets. The only faith she has ever come close enough to touch to believe in occurs in this primal exchange, this distorted symbiosis; she governs the sermon like a wolf stalking at dusk. In the months since she moved into this new apartment her box spring mattress has transformed into a twisted holy ground, the ever-changing prey that lie upon it sacrificial - she recites prayer to them in muted tongues before she slits their throats.

        Today is no different.

        There's a nameless boy with his head between her thighs and just like that, the rapture reroutes, boomeranging back around again. Addison arches up and lets the tide crest over for the second time this morning, a little less urgent now than before. It comes and goes like a fighter jet through the sound barrier. Whoosh. She slumps down, heart walloping. Her eyes are greener, fleetingly, piercing through the suspended A.M. dim. She reckons they'll decrescendo back to hazel soon.

       Illusions don't last long around here.

       "We should get breakfast."

       "Can't."

       "Why's that?"

       Addison looks across the room. At the foot of her bed, Moxie bats at an empty vial of marijuana, crushing it with his paw as though he's slaughtering a rodent, severing the spine in two. It's a primal expression, the instinct to kill, deprograming years of domestication for a moment of true authenticity. It reminds her of humanity and pleasure - the innate desire to do, to touch, to feel, stifled by societal expectations and God and whore being belted across your back in the cafeteria line at school.

       Out of body, looking down at her crumpled figure in the bed sheets, Addison fleetingly feels the filth of it all.

       An ungodly abomination, my daughter. MY daughter.

       She twists away from the boy beside her, skin peeling from skin, divergent edges of double-sided duct tape. The sun is higher in the sky now, post dawn, reflecting shades of honey crisp and blood orange into the studio space. Addison fumbles with her underwear, tugging it up her legs.

       "I have a thing," she says. "I'm supposed to be there in ten minutes."

       "What thing?"

       She arranges her hair in a messy up-do, thick tendrils of ink black.

       "Can't you miss it?"

        "No."

        "Please?"

        Addison retrieves a striped tie from the floor at tosses it onto the bed. She hears her father in her eardrum, detached at the dinner table, chewing ribeye - stupid choking hazard. In the corner, the motion of whipping limbs and slicing claws sends a pile of old newspapers careening over, inky pages askew on the hardwood.

        Fucking wizardly cat.

       "It's important," she says.

       The boy slumps back onto the pillow and groans, loud. It echoes across the exposed brickwork, that ugly sound, that fawn-like whimper, as though she's ripped out his guts and displayed them on the mattress as abstract art for passerby's to worship upon. It makes her skin itch. Addison hates grovelers - desperation isn't an attractive quality.