Country No Longer My Home – Anna-Marie

I could hear the sound of cars passing by, speeding like the wind. And various sirens from them blaring like the sound of trumpets.

Above was liquid, green colored slime. I thought that I would die the day my body died. Now here I am spending time, with nothing better to do inside of this tank. I’ve heard many dead girls end up here, who committed various murders, their life force preserved into eternity, guillotined for crimes of passion. Cut throat world, a world of blood bleeding from the wound, to the guillotine blade in the neck. People say being beheaded by guillotine is instantaneous. But they’re wrong, but not dead wrong. In the hallway of the lab, I saw other girls whose severed heads were kept inside of healing tanks.

Even if my body was gone, it still felt as if my body was there, like a sadistic game of phantom body. My body was a phantom of apparent deserving, according to the mores of the new Napoleon in chief. Floating, eternity falling. The suspension of gravity, a neck in constant free fall inside of a liquid tank. When your a severed head, it gets lonely. Sometimes doctors check in on you, to see if you’re alive. But the loneliness always stank. The doctor’s pants looked like they were suppressing a giant ass wank job. One looked terribly dank, the other was simply a yank. That’s in both the Northern Fractured United States sense, and the other sense of yanking one’s penis. For my murders, to myself, that is whom I have to thank.

And it was with this, I remember why it was I came to trust Hemato-Tomato, the vampire huntress whom showed me, that not all people were evil, and would give a murderess, they poisoned most of her male family members, a chance. I remember the time that led up to our moment of immersion therapy scissoring. It had been years since Hemato Tomato had seen me die a lonely death, at least to her I was dead. But for my I was simply a head of the curve.

A head of the game called life.

Nobody what people tell you about neighbors, there was something different about knowing one who kept talking and talking, and never seemed to stop. Beverly was the type of woman to visit the offices of each scientist in order to tell them how to do their job, and never seemed to stop talking until it got to lunch break. There was something hidden drive in this woman, it was always a pain to listen to, while my severed head floated in green liquid coolant. But knew ways to dig right down into your soul, and inquire deeply, something that, while mom was able to do, always had certain objectives in mind rather than simply paragraphs of audio speech, rather than hemming and hawing all the day long day, blurting out like rail road cross-bars.

Beverly had wanted to lose weight rapidly, never ascribing to politically correct ideology, but had been overweight for many years. All those years at the swimming pool, all those years of my neighbor’s childhood spent by bringing friends over, and only just now was this spent cutting down on the birthday cake. Every day was a break, though it was never absolutely clear what she did for work during the week. My guess was that she worked at a blue collar job, like most in my and Hemato’s neighborhood. Yet the hours seemed to go by faster than usual, when Napoleon’s forces invaded the gated community of Chattanooga. A community now that barely resembled the old one our childhood, and not even a French city.

Most people were idiots.

They hummed to Convier Twisty. Flowing like apparent old music notes, but singing about things most Western singers would be embarrassed by. Part of it was that Chattanooga had not originally been considered part of the west, rather western culture largely came out here, during the global warming expansion.

And now we live after the flood.

The zealots sang to Jesus.

Although this was an issue with Tennessee in general, during the eighties the state became an urban trash burn and burial pit, this explains why all the home-grown tomatoes, seemed to taste like shit. The same tomatoes used to make Tuna casseroles, as suggested by the same delightful neighbor, that tends to my severed head. I suppose our relationship had always been tangy, but nothing like the weird tango Hemato had with her daughter. I suppose it wouldn’t have been better to grow a tree with mangos, whose theme of life is another tango, another opera loses its star performer during its midnight opening scene.

Sometime in life you’ll meet people that make you want to rip out your spleen, but they never seem to compare to the very familial horror that was your family, that never seemed to ever give you a break. Whether it’s being almost ran over by a truck, being told that your best friend was a necrophiliac, and them turning out to be the best person you’ll ever meet, none of them seem to compare to the very intimate horror that was the very familial sexual abuse your father and two brothers seemed to perform on you.

I suppose for that reason, I’m not entirely sorry. What I do regret is the amount of emotional hell I put Hemato-Tomato through. People justified the guillotine in the 1800s as mercy, and yet they never seemed to include all the tortures on prisons they seem to always include as part of the punishment no matter the crime. Although in my case, during that particular century, it flowed slightly differently. I didn’t get those tortures until the end of two thousand sixteen. The nineteenth century was decidedly genial by comparison. Whatever laws they had on the books against torture, never seemed to matter all that much.

But the worst torture was different.

It was painless, and subtle. It was being merely a floating head, in green cooling fluid, with simply nothing to stare into, but empty space.

One of the security guards, who had known me for a while, would occasionally interact with me. Do the obvious fact of my severance from my vocal chords, I am unable to vocalize words to him. But knows that I am alive, and I am aware of everything that I see around me. A few months go, he used to talk about times he went out to eat with his ex. But how interacting with them was never quite the same as talking with me. After a point, it seemed to become something of a crutch for him, as he simply had nobody else to talk to. Because of his knowledge, he would read me different bed time stories, ones that were taught to him during childhood.

His personal favorite book was See Spot Run, though I knew that he liked reading more complicated material. There was nobody that really wanted to break into the lab, so we developed somewhat of a relationship.

Now here I am, resting on a wall in the streets of Chattanooga, wearing wooden clogs, with my head attached to my newly grown body from a vat. For once I could feel what it was like to have a body again, after my head had been struck up with a Guillotine Gun, as punishment for murdering my family. It wasn’t so much that they had deemed me fit for release. They wanted to empty the tag for another lady whose head was taken off. And they didn’t like the idea of the security guard crushing on me.

Yet in the streets, people stare at me. I can’t vocalize my assurances, that I am not a killer. That I’m not a bad girl at heart. I simply want to live my life, in my long flowing tattered dress, wandering the streets of obscurity, trying to find some way to leave the state, so I can be with my beloved. Yet the electric carts were not always on schedule, and I had no money to pay for a taxi.

I supposed it was another cross-country.

In this country no longer my home.

I had the thoughts for words, yet I couldn’t speak. Decapitated on a guillotine, and newly grown body, I had to relearn everything in English and French. But there was one word I promised myself I’d never use, because I hated my father.

“Hemato, there is somebody here to see you.” Lisa-Marie said, she was holding her luggage to go off to college, while I stayed at home to tend the house.

“Who is it? Who could possible want to see me?” I asked, giggling a little bit from the ridiculousness of my self-pity. When you get to the point where I’m at, you no longer want to focus on the past. Only the future.

“It’s a surprise!” Lisa-Marie said.

She opens the door, and it’s Anna-Marie. Her head was stitched back onto her body, and she shuffled in my direction. She wore a similar dress to the one when she died, or I assumed that she died. Instead those eyes indicate a new kind of life, a new life of life form like a zombie but not quite. While she had a hard time keeping her head straight, it being stitched on, she didn’t seem to understand why she wanted to see me. She was not rotted at all.

On some level I felt sad that she was still alive. If she had any memory of the indecent from before her head was taken off, it was probably scattered in all directions fading out by the second. “I know you don’t remember me, but I remember you. I never got to tell you how sorry I felt for you.”

There was a slight smile. And then she came in for the kiss.

We exchanged glances and soft gestures, the moonlight hour being when Lisa-Marie arrived to see her new family being reborn again.

We could be a family again. I thought I heard words from Anna-Marie.

“Hemato. Hemato. Hemato.” she said. Apparently the doctor that rebuilt her was an experienced surgeon. He repaired the vocal chords, but it was relatively new technology. She was kept in a tank for months.

“That’s right, Hemato is my name.”

We all group hugged.

“Famille!” Anna-Marie said.