Blissed
General Summary
The little angel on my shoulder with said I’ve got to try to lay off the drugs. The little devil on the other was already prepping the needle.
And, for the record, yes- I do imagine that the angel is a little brain with mechanical spider legs and a halo, and that the little devil is a devilish gorilla with a big needle as a pitchfork. Honestly, fuck Magilla- big-ass, bastard gorilla doctor… Where’d he get that doctorate from anyways- a zoo?
“It’s just a few bullet wounds,” I had said to him, giggling at that oafish concern written across his wrinkles as he picked the shells out with a pair of callipers. “It’s fine, really. Just give me a few band-aids and some boo boo kisses and it will be all better in a month or two, I bet.”
But that big dumb fucker had to wag his big dumb fucker finger around at me. “No no no,” he bitched. “You’re gravely injured. We need to speed up your recovery as quickly as possible. Some surgical procedures and some drugs to dampen the pain will allow-”
Now, I’m going to be completely honest with you, ladies and gentlemen: the moment this baboon said “drugs,” I stopped listening. Look- I’m not going to claim that Jaquelyn Todd is some teensy weensy princess who is precious and pure and has never done a thing wrong in her life. No no no, Jaquelyn Todd is the most exhilarating woman that’s ever existed in the whole wide apocalypse, the baddest bitch of them all. Jaquelyn Todd doesn’t twirl her hair and wait for a prince to come to her tower on a white stallion- no no no- she whips it back and forth in the wind and rides that prince all the way across the apocalypse and back like a chopper drenched in motor oil, popping a wheel on him every quarter of a mile or so.
Sex and booze are some of my closest lovers by this time in my life, one just as sweet yet bitter as the other, but drugs and I have been in an on and off relationship for years now. CJ was always trying to get me off of the freaky shit I put into my body- dope and smack as my go-tos, with the occasional dose of codeine. Too bad he’s dead now, just like my impulse control.
“What kinds of drugs?” I asked my gorilla provider, trying to sound as shocked as I possibly could with a little bit of a fake gasp.
Magilla picked up an clipboard inventory list, inspecting it with a heavy finger sliding on paper. “Well, the fort has run out of its supply of morphine, but there are some vials of ketamine that could easily help relieve your-”
OH, FUCK ME SIDEWAYS, I thought. Autopilot turned on immediately. I stopped caring about the rest of the words he was saying to me. I just started pretending that everything hurt, trying to roll around the operating table to really sell it, bumping my knee on a metal corner to really help sell it with how much it hurt. Magilla rushed to get the medicine for me.
Dear Body: I. Am. So. Fucking. Sorry.
You know, just a few days ago, I was sitting in a big old chair with my feet up on the desk of one Gypsy Fucking Harper- the very bitch who shot me and all of my friends- killed them all deader than dead on the shores of North Webb. Sure, I tried to blow up her stupid bridge, but who gives a damn, anyhow? Well, look who’s laughing now Gypsy: that same foxy devil you threw in a jail cell to rot- Jaquelyn Fucking Todd. I see her standing before me and I ask her to do a little Irish jig for me, but my brainer amigo isn’t having any of it.
I’m not going to bore you with the details of how my good buddy Peek dissected her brain and hijacked her body with his psychic cyborg brain because I don’t have a doctorate like all of these other jerks. Honestly, I didn’t want to try to figure out what his little spider brain could cut open somebody’s head like that and rent out their brain cavity like that- how it crawled around with clickity-clackity little robo-legs like some killer windup toy.
So instead of trying to figure it out, I just decided to sit back and relax, holding the brain of my good friend Gypsy in my lap like a Persian, stroking it’s gooey membrane with the tips of my fingers, plotting and scheming like an evil mastermind by the fireplace. It didn’t take me long to decide that I could cram my favorite backpocket grenade into her brain’s backpocket- to keep it cozy, you know.
Here, my three right-hand men around my new desk- my monkey, my muscle, and my maniac brainwave- all standing at attention. I reveal to them my genius- tease them with the strokes of my brilliance. “Come now, ladies, brains, and gentlemonkeys- we have an entire fortress two-hundred strong! So what if we blew the southeast tower to smithereens? We’ve still got an army- we’ve still got guns- we’ve still got some humvees! We can accomplish anything if we set our minds to it, lads! We can conquer North Webb one settlement at a time; we can actually blow up the Lock now; we can blow Irene and her freakshow at C-Breeze sky high if we wanted!” They all try to calm down my ambitions, but nothing can stop me once I get revved up.
Fast forward thirty minutes to Magilla’s moaning and whining about me needing an operation, fast forward another thirty to when he breaks out the ketamine, and you can see me sitting there thumping my foot like a rabbit, waiting for him to stick my ass with that needle already. He comes in lumbering, fee-fi-fo-fum, like his usual self, saying something about something, trying to tell me some stupid joke from before the apocalypse that nobody cares about, and all I can focus on is that little glass bottle in his hand, the little needle he’s ready to poke in it. I didn’t just disassociate; I astral projected the fuck out of there.
A few seconds later of not paying attention to his rambling, I realize that Magilla had already injected it into me.
Hoooooooo boy.
The rest was a dream- a myriad of swirling words and squiggly bodies, funny faces zipping past my eyes like bullets. The ceiling moved when I didn’t want it to, and the floor wouldn’t when I did. I thought I was on a water slide, but I was still in my bed, but the bed had the squeakiest goddamn wheels, but also a deafening jet engine that roared at the back, but it also had wings like an angel! It had everything I ever wanted- a nightlight, a little tin whistle I could toot whenever I wanted, buttons and dials with all sorts of mysterious beeps and boops like a spaceship control panel, a little bowl I could puke in to my heart’s delight, a pillow to hide my favorite knife inside of and my favorite revolver beneath. Magilla made it go as fast as I wanted to- faster, Magilla, faster! Something tells me that this shit was laced with a bit something special, but I didn’t care. It was a rollercoaster I never wanted to get off of.
Everyday that Magilla comes to my room to redress my bandages, toting with him more ketamine for his favorite little battlebabe, it’s another new thrill for me. Monday I opened a two star Italian restaurant. Tuesday I was a fish with a machete called Jaquelyn Cod. Wednesday we all opened a strip club together and Kim was our pimp- our Kimp, if you will. Thursday our car broke down in the middle of the ocean. Friday I shot Gypsy in the face over and over again until only a puddle of strawberry pudding remained.
Come the weekend and Magilla and Kim are wheeling me out of my room rather than giving me my ketamine, still a bit blissed out from the earlier dose. “Where we goin’ buddies? The fair?” I slur to them, trying to suck on Kim’s fingers like sausages.
“We have to get out of here, Jaquelyn Todd,” Magilla hushes to me, trying to pull my face away from Kim before she pulverizes me.
“Wha? But I like it here, man! We got a big old fort and a big old army and drugs and-” Kim smacks me asleep again.
Wake up thirty minutes later and we’re all in the garage- I’ve somehow managed to get on my feet and stumble around licking side view mirrors, sprawling myself across rugged humvee hoods to see if I can touch one end with my toes and the other with my nose. I see Magilla try to jimmy the lock to the driver side door- I honestly don’t know why he doesn’t ask me to do it for him since I’m great at it and all.
“WOOOooooOOoooo! Roadtrippp! I call shotgunn!” I yell to him, just before Kim slaps a hand on my mouth again to shut me up. Fine by me really- I like it when a big strong woman shuts me up. What I ain’t fine with is four big guys with shotguns walking up to us acting all suspicious, trying to interrupt us stealing this car or whatever. Who do they think they are? Why do they get shotguns and I don’t?!
“Hey, what are you fucks doing?” one of them calls, pumping his. Magilla spouts some bullshit about needing to inspect humvees like we’re some sort of mechanic trio. I slide off the hood and jump over to the passenger door, yanking on the handle and leaning backward to try to get it open. “It’s not openingggg!” I whine, craving to throw my feet up on the dashboard and wag my legs in Kim’s face.
The asshole moves up to me with the shotgun. “Listen here, bitch-”
I throw my finger in his face, my head sags to one side and the other. “No YOU listen here, bitch-” I don’t remember what happened after he smacked me in the back of the head with the butt of his stock.
Wake up thirty minutes later and we’re apparently being carried back down to the prison cells AGAIN by this same asshole that gun whipped me, him toteing me over his shoulder like some sort of kidnapped bride. My ears still ring from the impact, a trickle of blood in my hair. I wriggle for a second and see if I can break free- I get impatient and decide to sink my knife right past his collarbone. He stumbles and dies beneath me instantly, the both of us fall and collapse to the ground one on top of the other, two heads with a resounding simultaneous smack, the most painful, ketamine-slash-blunt-force-trauma-induced headache of my life about to begin. But I suppose it will be the wake-up slap I need to get out of this alive.
At long last, my bliss has ended. Guess it’s time to finally shoot our way out of this shithole.
The Good Stuff: The frame of reference this vignette comes from (the character of JT) seeps into the wording and even the structure of the piece. The propensity for swearing is just the start. JT's desire to turn every other thing about herself into a joke (“Too bad [CJ]'s dead now, just like my impulse control.”) shows the blasé attitude she takes to her troubles when everything is looking up. JT's intense focus and detailed description of her joyful drug trip captures the feelings she wants to get back at every turn. The metaphor JT uses to describe how she's not a princess is intentionally confusing but proposes cool imagery, making it clear that she doesn't sweat the details. I also appreciate how much Magilla's perception from JT's point of view is immediately changed when he gives her drugs. He goes from being a, “big dumb fucker,” to a caregiver paying extra attention to JT. It's another small detail that just shows how selfish JT really is. The Bad Stuff: The line about how Peek is JT's angel and how Magilla is her devil comes off as confusing and verbose. It's not a bad metaphor, but the key information the sentence is trying to convey (who JT's companions are) is explained later on in much clearer detail. I'd ditch the inclusion of describing JT's companions and just focus on the drug metaphor. Also, when talking about how Peek hijacked Gypsy Harper's body, JT says, “I'm not going to explain [how that happened],” right before she immediately explains how that happened. The explanation doesn't seem to be played for laughs, so I'd remove it entirely. Finally, the timeline of events is a little confusing. We start the vignette with Magilla leaving to get the ketamine, and then are thrust into a condensed explanation of what happened. If the reader isn't attentive enough to catch the similarities in the situations (see; me), then it appears that the story just cut away from itself to tell a similar story taking place somewhere else. It would be nice if there were a few reminders of when what scenes take place in.