The Lady

I woke up in haze and I found myself laying in the backseat of a car. The lady was driving. She drove hastily through the pitch-black night on a winding two-lane road. The sound of the tires running on the road made my eardrums wretch in pain. My stomach turned violently while trying to digest the thick scent of cheap perfume that permeated the car. Up was hard to discern from down. Double vision played tricks on my brain. I was in bad shape and I felt that I could die at any second.

When I was finally able to gather strength to sit up, I noticed that my head was pulsating. It could have been from all the coke I snorted. It could have been from the red sand opium I smoked. It could have been from the lady’s incessant rambling. Who knows?

I knew the lady’s type. It depressed me that she was less classy than white trash. The skin that covered her bones was disgustingly over tanned. Sun blotches and stretch marks displayed themselves in abundance. I could just picture the lady in her younger days going to tanning salons, making daily attempts to burn away her insecurities. The lady had always dreamed of marrying a rich man that would take her way from all of her problems; someone that would display her worth to the world through useless possessions and silicon injections. Instead, she turned fifty and remained single. The lady’s hair has thinned grotesquely from the countless years of cheap bleach jobs. It was frayed and brittle. Her desperate attempts to maintain her youth made her increasingly bitter. The lady spoke in a condescending, matter-of-factly way that made the hair stand up on the back of my neck. The lady’s little brain was only able to communicate things such as, “The cigarettes at 7-11 are cheaper than at Wal-Mart,” or, “Look! There is a cow with horns,” or, “Southern Comfort has more alcohol in it than Keystone Light”. I am talking about some extremely intelligent shit here.

As I sat in the back seat, sweaty, dizzy and uncoordinated, I caught a glimpse of the lady’s tired eyes in the rear view mirror. “The lady is a waste of space,” I remember thinking to myself. Fantasies played out somewhere in my brain. If I had a gun, I would shoot her directly in the back of the skull. If I only had an axe, I could chop away at her neck, splintering her spine. I was useless though. I had no obvious means of exterminating her. The thought of being inadequately equipped infuriated me.

She mumbled something like, “There is a white truck,” and I decided immediately to do something about all this. Although my body was numb and my hands were hard to move, I was able to pull my pack of cigarettes out of my front pocket and remove the last one from the box. I somehow managed to throw the empty pack at the back of the lady’s head. She condescendingly stated either, “You are a prick,” or, “I want dick,” I could not be certain. I found a lighter already in my right hand and lit it. I brought the lighter to the end of my cigarette, puffed, and exhaled slowly. Somebody in the backseat of the car with me (or it could have been in my head) said, “You need to kill the bitch.” Whoever it was, I was confident that I had listened to them before. So, I pulled the lit cigarette from my lips and held it in my right hand. The lady said something like, “Its colder in Antarctica than here,” and I sat up straight in the backseat and leaned in closer behind the lady. Quietly, I brought my hand with the burning cigarette in it, right next to her right ear. With a sudden burst of power, I forcefully jammed the burning cigarette as deep into the lady’s ear canal as I could. As the inside of her head began to snap, crackle and pop, the lady let out a high-pitched, wailing, scream. With my left hand, I grabbed the lady by her hair so she couldn’t move and lit my lighter. The flame spread over the lady’s entire head with ease and soon burned her dry and frizzled hair into nothing but a fleshy, black mess that looked just like charred, melted plastic. The smell of cheap perfume in my nostrils was quickly overcome by the familiar smell of burning hair and flesh. The lady no longer screamed. She just moaned like a beast and gurgled like a baby and frothy foam started coming from the ends of her mouth. That was my sign to re-light my now extinguished cigarette and gently begin to push it into the lady’s right eyeball. She barely put up a fight. She might have been in shock or she might have just liked it. I pressed harder and harder until the moisture of the lady’s eyeball extinguished my cigarette. Through the rear - view mirror, I could see that the eyeball had transformed into something resembling a scorched hard-boiled egg with a runny yolk.

At that time, I noticed that the car that the lady had been driving was now stopped in a ditch on the side of the road. The engine was still running and the smell of exhaust brought me out of my stupor. I was able to open the car door and let myself out and into the brisk, dark evening. I looked at the wreckage and realized the car was completely totaled.

After taking a piss on the lady’s twisted and mangled face, I turned around and walked away triumphantly, into the night, with the desert at my feet, having felt that I had done my good deed for the day.