Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

Author:Poppy Z. Brite [Brite, Poppy Z.]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi, pdf
Published: 2011-12-13T08:30:12+00:00

It was too much to think on now, right after doing a show He crawled out of the hole in the page, hauling himself on bony knees and bruised elbows. He dragged his fevered brain out last. It was nearly nightfall. He'd been writing all day hadn't slept in thirty-six hours. Sometimes he thought heroin was the only thing that had ever let him sleep.

Outside, Airline Highway was cracking one bleary eye and shaking off last night's hangover. Luke could hear souped-up engines going by, the subliminal hum of neon, the occasional dull pop of gunfire. He sensed a hive of activity in the rooms around him, comings and goings on the veranda. Cheap sex and business deals of all kinds. There was junk out there, pure and merciful.

He couldn't stay in the room any longer. He slung his jacket over his shoulders, pulled his boots on, went out and sat in his car with the windows rolled up and the tape deck blasting Bauhaus' last album, Burning from the Inside. Peter Murphy only sang half the songs on the album, officially because he'd been in hospital recovering from double pneumonia. Rumor had it that his pneumonia symptoms bore a remarkable resemblance to heroin withdrawal. The emaciated, androgynous singer had once bragged about a psychic's prediction that he would die of AIDS in Paris; now he had a kid.

As far as Luke was concerned, Murphy should be here begging to trade places with him. Sure, breeder, he'd say, unzipping his pants, suck my dick, then go buy yourself a ticket to Paris.

He huddled in the bucket seat and wrapped his arms around himself. His leather jacket creaked softly, familiar as the sound of a lover's breathing. The bulk of it reminded him what it felt like to be strong.

I stood staring at the filthy brown surface of the Mississippi River. The water had a slick look, iridescent with a thin film of crude oil. It humped and heaved and rolled as if in peristalsis, a long brown string of viscera endlessly churning. I was near its sphincter, which accounted for the smell.

A line of barges moved slowly upstream in the night, silhouetted against the opposite bank, heaped with some glittering black substance. I imagined them ploughing into the gaudily lit bridge that carried traffic across the river, the long silver girders bending and shearing, the roadway crumbling into the water, spilling cars and tiny half-crushed bodies. Unfortunately, I held no sway over barges.

This river was nothing like the Thames, the cold grey vein that snaked through my cold grey city, upon whose banks I had spent most of my life, into which I had flushed through my toilet any number of carefully wrapped, slightly stained parcels. The Thames seemed sterile beside this roiling brown stream.

I wondered what it would do to a corpse. Perhaps I could float one out tied to an empty plastic bottle, then row out to retrieve it in a fortnight. From all the similar bottles sailing

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