Sinners Circle Read online

  Sinners Circle

  Karina Sims

  2014

  Dark Hall Press

  A Division of New Street Communications, LLC

  Wickford, RI

  Copyright 2014 Karina Sims

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Except for brief quotations for review purposes, no part of this work may be reproduced in any form without the permission of Dark Hall Press, a division of New Street Communications, LLC.

  Published 2014

  Dark Hall Press

  darkhallpress.com

  A Division of New Street Communications, LLC

  Wickford, RI

  This book is dedicated to my mother, Vanita Sims.

  I love you deeply, but you drive me crazy.

  I

  I was born in the summertime, inside a house inside a storm. The winds and quakes were so bad mom said they had to loop rope through the handles on the cabinets to keep the dishes from spilling onto the floor. My Aunt Marcy wrapped duct tape on all the black plated chandeliers, said they looked like shiny wasp nests swinging this way and that. They locked all the windows, pushed bookcases over the tall ones in case the glass broke and shot across the room like sparkling shrapnel.

  My mother told me she and Marcy were in the living room drinking hot chocolate and keeping their candles low in case anyone passing through the long stretches of wheat fields came close enough to notice the house they were holed up in. They were playing cribbage and it doesn’t matter who was winning because somewhere in either the middle or the end my mother’s water broke. At first the two of them just stared at the puddle under the chair, the wet spreading in my mother’s jeans until she bucked forward. Her mouth gaping, eyes closed, she knocked the cribbage board onto the floor, fingers clawed out towards Marcy.

  And then the storm started. Between contractions my mother was shuffling through the house pushing forgotten furniture that wasn’t hers across dusty rooms that belonged to no one.

  Even with all the windows blocked and exits sealed my aunt was still nervous. In between telling my fifteen year old mother to push, she would get up from between her shaking, pencil-thin legs and peek through tiny holes in the furniture piled in front of the windows. “What if someone’s coming?”

  My mother said she couldn’t remember much of that night. She kept blacking out, waking up soaked in sweat, her head in Marcy’s lap. At some point, just before I came out, she said she came to for a moment. Marcy was across the room, back against the front door, hugging her knees and crying beneath that polished wasp nest that swung slow and steady as a pendulum. After that, she said all she could remember was me in her arms and how it took half an hour for Marcy to work up the nerve to cut the umbilical cord. She kept crying and picking up and putting down the kitchen knife saying things like, “What if I kill her? What if I hurt her? What if she dies and it’s my fault?”

  I wasn’t a big baby. My mom being so young at the time and on the run with her little sister, without a doctor to tell her, it was several years later that she discovered I was three weeks premature.

  When I was six, every night she ended the story with, “But I knew when I looked at your tiny face, and you opened those big blue eyes, you were my little girl.” My mother would squeeze me inside my bed, flick the lights off and blow me a kiss. “I love you, sweetheart.” When she shut the skinny four panel door, I’d crawl out of bed and look through the honeycomb shades, my eyes sweeping the rest of the trailers in the park, looking through windows into other people’s lives. I’d watch the teenagers kiss and feel each other up on the baseball field I could only see half of from my window. I’d listen to the sounds of radios and arguments and car engines turning over, and the constant, shrill cry of crickets. I’d do this until I heard the TV in the living room turn off, my mom phoning somebody, leaving a message, hanging up. I’d wait fifteen minutes after I heard her pull out the cot and stop shifting around on the springs, and then I’d open my door, tip toe down the hallway and crawl in beside her. Even when she was drunk, mom kissed my hair and sang to me. Twinkling stars, mockingbirds, black sheep. I’d fall asleep with the smell of gin and stale cigarette smoke in my nostrils, but ‘you are my sunshine, my only sunshine’ in my ears and my hands pressed against my mother’s heart.

  II

  Carl, he’s waving a picture of Marilyn Monroe in my face. His labored breathing and the crunching sound of paper barely muffles the sound of somebody moaning in the next room as they pinch off a heavy shit in the toilet. “According to Maria, this is the devil.”

  Marilyn’s paper face folding and unfolding as she flaps between Carl’s fingers, it’s like she’s blowing air under my eyelids.

  “Maria said Marilyn would whisper stuff to her while she was sleeping. Like, she would make Maria get up and do shit. She wound up in this place...” His finger circles the ceiling. “…after she walked through a sliding glass door at 3am. Neighbors found her covered in blood, passed out on their lawn.”

  He leans in close, his lips barely on my cheek, his eyes aimed straight up, “Marilyn Monroe made Maria eat her own dog.”

  He slaps the photo down onto the wood desk he’s leaning against. Its surface is carved up with so many little swastikas and massive ‘FUCK YOU’s I’m surprised it doesn’t cave in like balsa-wood when Carl raps his knuckles all over the ‘SATAN’ and ‘PUSSY’ gashes.

  He pulls a dusty Sony Watchman off the shelf, one of those portable TV sets you don’t see anymore, and wags it in my face. “Steven thought Jesus was talking to him through this thing. He thought God was televising His messages. See this?” He slides a finger over the ‘Watchman’ logo. “He thought it, literally, meant ‘watch man’. With this hunk of junk, Steve thought he was a Shepherd of men.”

  Carl slams it on the table, hard, and reaches for a hamster wheel. “This made Greg think he could punish his enemies. He would buy hamsters, take them home and watch them run on it. After a few hours, he’d burn the little beasts so the cops couldn’t find any evidence in case the person he was trying to kill, did actually die.”

  I take the wheel from Carl, slip my fingers in and out of the little spaces between the wires. “How’d he get in here?”

  “Pet shop owner called the ASPCA after his eleventh hamster. When someone came poking around, they found crushed snakes nailed all around his door frame. He wound up attacking the poor ASPCA gal with a garden rake. Really fucked up one of her arms, I guess.”

  The toilet flushes in the other room so I don’t quite hear Carl when he says something about Greg having raccoon fur glued to his armpits when he got here.

  “I’m gonna take this stuff home with me when they get discharged, add it to the collection.”

  He takes the hamster wheel away from me, plugs his finger through the middle and spins it a little. I try cracking my neck, but nothing happens.

  He leans against the tin shelves that are sagging under the weight of all the piled junk. Carl tosses the hamster wheel onto the table and tents his fingers, “I gotta go do rounds in a few minutes. You can wait in the common room for me if you want, but I’ll be an hour, maybe less.”

  I nod, follow him out the little storage room and past the men’s bathroom. We go down this real shabby looking hallway, the carpet is so worn down you can see the cement flooring coming through in some places. At the end of the hallway we go through this steel door with a grated window, which takes us through the residence quarters. Each little room has its own metal door, clipboards dangling from yarn tied through the wire windows. It’s eerie because on one side almost everybody is weeping, on the other side, you can hear patients screaming and their jaws grinding. That awful sound of tooth on tooth echoing loud as their socked feet slam
the bolted bed frames, the noise following you in tiny booms down the corridor.

  Carl takes me into the main lobby and says he’ll be back in a bit. He says if I need anything, just talk to the nurse at the office and “…make sure you show her your visitor’s pass.”

  I sit down on this huge floral couch and reach for a magazine as Carl disappears around a corner.

  I’m leafing through issues of Anchor, SZ, Black And White, Cosmopolitan, Mental Health Today when this fat guy comes shuffling up to me and says, “They keep Archies in the library.”

  “Library?”

  He points a sausage finger at a table, the steel legs wrapped in electrical tape. There’s three Granny Smith Apple boxes half full of assorted reading material, and when I dig through them, they consist mainly of motel Bibles and Jughead Double Digests. I grab one where Jughead is dressed like a mummy on the front cover, telling a cute pirate girl that his favorite type of music is ‘wrap.’ I walk back to the couch but the fat guy is sitting in my spot, staring into space, a look of total despair spreading almost instantly across his face.

  I sit at the very end of the couch, scratch my crotch and wonder if Carl will be back sooner than he said. Ethel is wrapping her arms around Jughead who is clearly unpleased when the fat guy at the other end of the couch starts crying. I look at the clock and know that if he keeps crying, within five minutes a nurse will come. I know that within eight minutes she’ll go back into her little office and within ten minutes she’ll be feeding him Ativan. Within twelve minutes I can be in the coma ward and within thirteen minutes I can be inside a patient’s room with the door locked behind me.

  But only if the fat man keeps crying. If he stops, the nurse won’t come. If he isn’t crying I won’t be able to get into the coma ward. Funny thing about this hospital is, there are only two ways to enter the coma ward. One is by elevator, which requires special authorization codes. That and there are video surveillance cameras above the button panel. Sure, I could keep my head down, but eventually I would be caught. Not to mention, I imagine the code is subject to change as well, and clearly I am not hospital personnel.

  The only other method of entry would be right through that door beside the nurses’ station. The coma ward functions in accordance with the psychiatric ward, which I am inside right now. This is a special psych ward though, in the sense that this ward specializes almost exclusively in psychotics. When one of the patients here undergoes some kind of massive mental breakdown, they dope them up and wheel them into the coma ward for a couple a days. What it boils down to is, Carl is rubbing elbows with the hardcore psychotics and inner city lunatics who wind up getting shipped to this very special floor. He’s checking beds every fifteen minutes to make sure no one has swallowed their tongue or caved their skull in against the wall, he’s checking to see that they haven’t sliced their wrists on the wall vents or punctured an artery while digging imaginary microchips out of their arms or thighs. He is fishing clothing out of the toilets, tightening arm restraints, and assuring anxious patients that nobody is following them, that nobody is listening in. He is scrubbing piss off the walls and taking home their memorabilia.

  I’ve known Carl for a good eight years now, and he’s worked here for seven of those. When we first met, we were both at a lesbian bar. We were laughing at the same drag queen and he wound up taking home the girl I was going to murder that night. I guess he started dating this waitress Alison who works at a coffee shop a few stores down from the porn store I’m working at. The two of them came in one night looking for a blow-up sheep for a friend’s birthday party. He weaseled his way into my life like that and it was painfully embarrassing to be friends with a guy. I’d considered slitting his throat when he invited me on a hike, but when I saw Alison get in the car I knew it wouldn’t happen. When I discovered he worked here, I thought it would be good fun to come poke at the psychotics; that is until I discovered the coma ward. Then I started returning Carl’s phone calls. I started inviting him over for beers and I started laughing at his stupid jokes. The other night he clapped me on the back and said, “Amanda, you’re the closest friend I’ve ever had.” We were doing shots and flicking quarters at strippers, I was heating mine with a lighter. “You’re not ‘core like me, but you understand that maybe I’m just a lot different than the rest of the world. Thanks.”

  I flipped a quarter down the poster funnel a stripper was holding over her landing strip. She yelped and looked around, whistled the bouncer over and pointed at the two guys in front of me. I looked at Carl as the bouncer hauled the two dudes away and smiled as we took their seats, but I wasn’t smiling because of him. He grinned back and ran a hand through his faggy emo hair.

  Back on the couch, the fat man puts his head down to his knees, rocking himself a little. From out the nurse’s station, the biggest but-her-face comes skipping over with a meds cup. She’s soothing the big dummy as I slip through the coma ward door, wave my visitors pass in a passing orderly’s direction and walk up and down the hallways, peering in at the sleeping patients.

  Depending on what you want to do, it’s best to find a patient who’s already covered in cuts and burns. It’s best to find a woman whose already bruised up, so new handprints won’t seem so unusual, though I’m sure for research purposes this really fucks up the healing statistics.

  I stop outside the room of a girl whose face is covered in bandages, strands of blonde hair poking through the top. I laugh, thinking about the Jug Head Digest, all wrapped up like a mummy, talking to the sexy pirate. I look up and down the hallway, it’s totally clear, so I slip inside, lock the door and roll the little curtain down over the window. I stand there for a few seconds, take off my jacket and pick up the clipboard swinging at the foot of the bed. Marianne Pollanski DOB: May 7, 1993, injured in a car accident, multiple bone fractures, lacerations to the stomach and pelvis from dashboard, second-degree burns on the face, thighs and calves from explosion of vehicle gas tank. Highlighted at the bottom are the words: Condition: critical/unstable.

  I put the clipboard down and sit on the edge of her bed.

  Up on the window ledge are flowers, decorated helium balloons proclaiming ‘Happy birthday,’ ‘Get well soon’ cards and pictures of teenagers jumping on a trampoline, a little blonde girl smiling so big her eyes are closed. I roll the covers down to get a look at her legs. They look like two yellow banana peppers cooked over a campfire. Unopened birthday presents stacked on the floor, a rugby jersey and field hockey stick laid carefully out on a chair beside a breathing machine. I look from the pictures, down to the girl wrapped up in this bed, barely alive. Poor little Marianne.

  I breathe heavy, put her little hand in mine. I stroke the puffy skin and give her fingers a gentle squeeze. I get up, pick some lint off her tiny jersey and turn her field hockey stick over in my hands. I trace my fingers over the smooth wood and turn to Marianne, laughing a little, “You any good?”

  I smile when she doesn’t answer. “So modest. You’re so modest, Marianne.” I try balancing the stick on my palm and walk over to the window. I look at a picture of a smiling boy, Marianne piggy backing on top of him.

  “You think he’ll still go down on you?” I point the stick at her legs and chuckle.

  I try cracking my neck again and when nothing happens I check my watch. If this hospital’s employees aren’t on smoke breaks, I have eight minutes. I flex my grip on the stick with both hands and yank off her covers.

  III

  “Don’t bother alphabetizing any of the DVDs. Most of these newer titles start with A’s anyway.” My boss Harry, he fans a couple films in his big gorilla palms. “Ass-stimulation, Asian Anal Amateur, Annie Chokely, All American Amateur parts six and seven... so you just put them up according to date, see?” He pushes a stack of movies into my arms and says, “I’ll be in my office.”

  This means he’ll be in the janitor’s closet. The one he tore the sink out of and put a desk and table lamp in. The safety shower is still there, but it’s stuffe
d full of mangled dildos and punctured bottles of flavored lubricant. He’s got skin rags with torn covers stacked five feet high in there.

  I nod, trying not to drop any DVDs. “Sure.”

  When he leaves, I look at the hundreds of movies spilling out of the towers of boxes all around me. I’m literally surrounded by enough porn to keep the TV on for a decade. Funny thing is though, when you spend hours upon hours handling pornography, you start to think about things like grocery lists. You wonder if you’re brushing your teeth enough, you consider whether or not to get a pet and weigh heavy the pros and cons of having said animal. Your hands on top of Jesse Jane’s tits your thinking, “Am I getting enough absorbency from my current brand of toilet paper?” Staring down the holes of topless teenage lesbians you wonder if you are getting enough fiber from your breakfast cereal. There’s a certain desensitization that takes place when you spend all day with dicks and tits in your face. Though every once in a while, and I mean rarely, you come across something that either cracks you up or gets those greasy wheels of sex grinding and gyrating around in your mind.

  For instance, I’m almost done shelving all these movies, I’m sliding a copy of Pushing the Pink onto the rack and I notice the two girls on the cover. By industry standards they are two normal blonde babes, tits in hand, arching their backs in an attempt to look skinnier, but the thing that catches my eye are the two humungous dicks strapped over their slits. This isn’t anything new, for Christ’s sake we sell strap-ons here and even move a couple each week. But these girls, these two twits gripping their tits on the cover of this DVD, they’ve got that look like they’ve been rode hard and put away wet, but the life in their eyes now, when they’ve got these big plastic penises belted around their pussies, it’s staggering.

  According to Freud, the penis wasn’t just the man’s erotic zone; it was the sole erotic zone. Period. Freud assumed the characterization of women was only noting their differences from men. He coined the phrase, “Women are castrated.” See, according to Freud women must sense some kind of inferiority to men because nature dictates females as incomplete beings. This is where the masculinity complex comes into play because once a woman is made aware of the wound to her narcissism, she develops a scar on her ego. So, she starts to share the contempt felt by men for a sex which is of less importance and thus, insists on being just like the average run of the mill asshole guy on the street. Because, clearly, it’s not enough to be fucked, but to be the one fucking that gives you the power. There have been thousands of women in the Adult Film Industry who try and defy this role assigned to their gender. These girls, they insist on being the stud and rearranging the order of ‘dominance.’ But in the end, it never pans out and they just wind up being real paid whores who make a couple bucks whilst setting the feminist movement back again and again with this awful defiance of logic. Never the less, this whole super sexed thing on camera is bound to take its emotional toll on the lesser successful starlets, such as these two girls on the cover of Pushing the Pink. This is a total bummer because strictly speaking from a dermatological aspect, stress is a real skin killer and looking at these two girls, they got stress coming out the wazoo. Late rent buried deep in their eyelids. Bounced checks burrowed into their foreheads. They’ve got high school dropout stamped into their laugh lines. But their eyes, their eyes have that same look people on TV have when they win the lottery. They’ve got the same look as a fat kid given unlimited access to the Hershey’s factory. Now, right now with their cunts hidden, huge rubber cocks strapped over top, they look happier than ever. They’re beaming like pregnant Mormon newlyweds.