When the eyes cry, they glimmer. When their ducts gush, the mucus water films over them and spreads with their blinks, and then the eyes glimmer. But not only.
When pupils focus, when their camera lenses zoom onto someone, like me, and dim the sink behind that person's head and collide the kitchen into a narrow aperture of just them, then those pupils expand to fill their irises, and the kitchen lights shimmer off the black-hole galaxies inside them. And then the eyes glimmer. So not only.
“Spyder! What?!” My T's imitate D's without a sharp tongue.
The Colt Custom digs into my bridge, he'll break my nose, and my neck bends back. As the vein above his brow throbs visible, sinks into his skin, throbs visible, then invisible, Spyder rakes his bottom lip with his teeth. His mouth opens as if to emit sound, but clamps shut again as he drills the nozzle into my sinuses. My ducts swell.
“Spyder!?”
“WHY DIDN'T YOU WASTE CARTHAGE? I TOLD YOU TO GHOST HIM!”
His mother wasn't one of us.
“I tried! Spyder, I tried. I had him. I took him to the middle of nowhere and had him kneeling!” He's stiff-arming me with his Colt, coercing my neck back, folding my backbone, until the gun yanks away and his other fist bowls into my cheek. Strike.
I cringe to the floor and drool tongue-pulp. But I rise. “Spyder! I had him kneeling. Was ready to blow his forehead through his thoughts. I HAD HIM.”
Swing, and my cheek bone aches and my temple pumps pain into my brain and my cheek pools with purple. Feels frozen. Salivate more tongue-marrow. How much did I bite off?
I waiver up. “SPYDER. I had him. Then he groveled. He swore to leave. HE PROMISED. Then he mentioned Thebe! THEBE, Spyder. Thebe goes to school with Izzy. How could I do that? What if Izzy found out? I couldn't do it.”
Another right hook, FACK. But I tremble up. I'm a fighting co*k. “Spyder,” my hands up, “he swore to leave. He had snot over his fat-a** lip. He begged. He sniveled. THEBE, Spyder. Thebe goes to school with Izzy. I couldn't.”
Spyder spins toward the screen door and wipes at his buzz cut. Yes, yes. He's getting it.
I urge on, “He promised to leave. HE PROMISED.” I study Spyder's pace. “I had him in the middle of nowhere and he swore on Thebe's life to leave Charlotte. HE SWORE ON HIS BROTHER'S LIFE. I had to believe him. If the point was to make him go away, and he promised to leave, why do I have to k** him?”
Spyder canines to me and hacks my left temple with the bu*t of his Colt, crumpling me to the floor. With my cheek smooshed against the plastic tile, I struggle my eyes open. Where is everything? I make sure they're open. f**. I blink and shake my head. FACK. A bleak nothingness. You're slipping.
From above, Spyder's voice says, “Because he k**ed Roach! n******gs don't just leave. And now he's going to send everything at us and we're going to lose bodies. BECAUSE YOU LET HIM GO.” His jeans ruffle but I only see an emptiness that flashes hues of blue, purple, red. He sounds louder from being closer. “I SHOULD DO TO YOU WHAT HE DID TO ROACH.”
My vision flicks on to capture his hand cloak my nose, so I thrash my head side to side to rip him off but he's a leech and I can't breathe, so I gasp through my mouth and his Colt bones into it. My eyelids peel back and I scream. Remember what he had to do?
“HE HAD HIM CASTRATED. He was fourteen!” screams Spyder. The barrel is an icicle, and it travels down my throat until the trigger guard rams against my bottom lip. “How do you think I felt when his moms blamed me? I promised him he'd be safe from those n******gs.”
I'm gagging between the nozzle and the floor, so I push his forearm but his hand won't budge. Clamped around his sleeve, my fingers feel his mutilated muscles. I'm gagging. His mother wasn't us and Abuela hated that. GAG. Even though his father was high, Abuela forced her son to initiate César. Not to welcome him like other family, but to initiate him. I'm choking.
He's still clinched onto my nose and my bridge feels as if it'll snap, and I'm yanking at his deformed forearm to dislodge the Colt. I'm choking.
She sicced her fighting dog onto César. GAG. Remember? César strolled into the backyard and the beast chomped onto his forearms and nearly stripped them clean into wishbones. I'm choking. And his father and Abuela observed from inside this house, and once she felt enough n******g had been skinned from him, she nodded to her son and César's father pitched that Colt out the screen door.
“WE'RE OVER, KAYDA. YOU'RE GHOST!”
I'm deep-throating.