Excerpt: 'Yeezus In Furs' by Shane Jesse Christmass
Rotten Breath:
Cult Leader drops what cocaine she can into a metal bucket. Laugh track gets louder. Cult Leader glances to one side. She whispers, repeating numerical permutations. Barges in the Hudson River transport bodies and barrels of nano-brain. Cult Leader with a cloth patch over both eyes. Dried lactose encrusts the left eye. Cult Leader is on edge. NYC is out of control. Fire fighters fighting cops. Cops fighting cab drivers. Cult Leader spits at them. Solvent in Cult Leader’s plastic bag. Long letters in postal bags dripping with tree sap. Coffee cups stacked like piles of abandoned car tyres. Moneyback guarantees given for every purchase at every convenience store. Guide rails removed from Penn Station. Cult Leader’s hair past her shoulders. A hole in the plasterboard. Central Park seen through the hole. Amtrak services have no gods, or leaders, or worthy humans. Cult Leader reaches over and turns the radio off. Her stomach ripples. Sick motion starts and the midtown area of Manhattan crashes into the earth. Cult Leader kneels on a doormat. She inhales paint fumes. Ropes holding up the Empire StateBuilding come undone. Sweats. Armpits. Criminal offences detailed in the Daily News left on abandoned bus seat. Cult Leader listens to the power lines in Koreatown. Mug shot of a guy with a comb-over sentenced for tax avoidance. Bus crash outside Macy’s department store. Jam jars of blood all over the sidewalk. Neat Brooks Brothers suit, entirely fashionable. Cult Leader smirks, she takes her coat off. She hangs it in her hospital locker. Delivery drivers stand in phone booths. Apartment doors open up. Gabardine shredding in photocopiers. Movie posters in cab windows. Quiet gravestones on Seventh Avenue. Choking noises from inside Madison SquareGarden. Strange guttural and starving. News reports from the Third World. Displaced people dead-pressed by torrential winds. News headlines scroll across the TV screen. Patterned and strobe shapes disrupt traffic around 31st and 34th Streets. Soldiers dressed in pyjamas and dressing gown wade around the entrance to the North River Tunnel. Cult Leader extracts herself from her body. She looks. Pokes around. Her mouth and lips. Sunrise. Cult Leader talks in strange technical jargon. She swallows, and then flicks a ball of saliva onto her leg. A strongbox of donuts falls from the cinema screen. Cigarette burns on the sofa. Doctors then patients. Farm animals sniff piles of discarded clothing out near Tottenville Station. Staten Island drowns into the Atlantic. Cult Leader brushes her hair down with her palm. She licks her palm beforehand. Cult Leader tightens her belt. Buildings tumble into the Hudson River. Commuters flee North down
14th Street. Cult Leader coughs. Her bones creak. Military nanoswarm weapons fire up. Plastic bags move in time with unfathomable shiftiness. Knowbots scan the New York Power Authority for imminent blackouts. Cult Leader lifts her shirt collar up. A watering can in her right hand. Cult Leader snaps out of her blackout. She’s outside Gramercy Park. Cult Leader walks down from the intersection. A noose drapes from the electricity pole. Shards of windscreen in a building site project the image of midday 1985. Cult Leader wears black slippers. Music fumbles from these black slippers. Cult Leader inspects the inside of her black slippers. Coal lumps at a bus stop. Cult Leader’s throat has tension and then none. Choking and limbs. Cult Leader feels around the Lower East Side. Cult Leader with sunglasses over eyeballs. Long coat over her body. Weeks of shoe polish washes in from Little Italy. Thin woman pushes through fog. Graffiti over the courthouses in
Foley Square. Sadness. Cult Leader looks inside her hospital locker. Her fingers dangle like key chains. Her hands up against the mirror. Slowly and repeatedly. Steam on mirror, steam in bathroom. Cab drivers ride people over to the mall. Tourists tell fibs. Hair pushed back from forehead. Jeans in a tight-style. Cool morning air pumps in from
Worth Street. Men without testicles lope around
Bayard Street. People dance on gasoline. Disease in the air and tone tongue orchestras play near
South Street, the entrance to Brooklyn Bridge. Cult Leader’s lips. A mound of clay underneath Brooklyn Bridge. No one knows who placed it there. Garrottes draw blood from the broken window. Cult Leader trails her fingers along the wall. Cum in her hand. She smears it all over the wall. The sound is vast. Financial organisations collapse around
Ann Street. Moustaches and women with waxed shins. Fungal spores feel good in the stomach. Cult Leader smokes a Camel. Turns, walks off, pulls down her cap. Snowballs melting in Park Row. Desert sands winding around the SouthbridgeTowers. Little bones of the long minutes. Homicidal enthusiasts robed in rubbish wrappers and newspaper. Cult Leader swings left to right across
Spruce Street. She chokes at the back of the bus. Cult Leader studies the subway timetable. She gets on at Grand Street Station. Cracked lips and cooling towers in Tribeca. NYC’s nature. Delays in getting out to
14th Street. Camel cigarettes smoking in
Brookfield Place. A country will in war pull rank and leave you just with the lowly ranks. Cult Leader sets the world at chance, in possibilities, and after a dose of stimulants, immunity. Orchestral sounds varying in pitch come from the Winter Garden Atrium. The music of ordinary meat. Cult Leader’s jaw line. Cult Leader gags. Grimy smudges of name-calling. Police in darkness seize their prey. Despotic rats with no other form of unity. They need to stake a claim in commerce. Over-hated. Hauled in. Indifferent to everything. The doormat. Cult Leader’s legs. Her grazed knees. Cult Leader strangles herself. Arabian producers of oil throw themselves from the window of the New York Mercantile Exchange. Pitchforks on cemetery road. Camera moves across NYC’s inhabitants. Pretzel sellers inside the Irish Hunger Memorial. NYC morning silhouetted against fly-blown City Pier A. Spiders track Cult Leader’s eyes, her forehead. Metal spikes in the electricity pole outside the FlatironBuilding. Cult Leader’s insides do all the talking. A sweating sheet consumes Cult Leader. Ankles exposed on the
23rd StreetStation platform. Insect bites all over the walls of Baruch College. Cult Leader throws her shoulders, her back to the street. The enamel on the glass, the windows of the Sohmer PianoBuilding, the gold dome. Rusted washing machines, refrigerators, car tyres, Cult Leader in sleeping bag, sleeping at Dead HorseBay. Doll’s heads, alcohol bottles from 19th century, flour bags, mill parts, horse bones, glue pots, leather offcuts, driftwood, flotsam, napalm, oxidised bicycle frames, odd metal cabinets, kitchen sinks, human pelvis, prophylactics, spark plugs, battery acid, sodden shoes, vases, cracked mirror, hair brushes, belt buckles, rotary telephones, hessian sacks of fertilizer, rubber gloves, sea corridors, dolphin bones, coast guard flare guns, white puffs of jetsam rainclouds, visible solutions of Celebrex, saline in IV drips, perforated medical waste. Cult Leader draws her eyes over to Gerritson Creek. Leading folds of seawater means Cult Leader anticipates something living there. Cult Leader stumbles around 14th Street. A wheelchair’s wheel turning on the linoleum floor. The wheel creaks. Feet push the wheelchair. The morose figure of yourself in the wheelchair. Cult Leader pushes her. Your face details immense pain and sadness. Her black hair. Black skin. Louisiana Creole. Slender features. Carnal. Slightly older than Cult Leader. She’s wanton. Appealing. Intensely. Her long black hair past her shoulders. Her eternal sadness. Her dispossession. She’s beautiful. A glimpse that she may have been broken previously and has spent a lot of energy trying to stay afloat. She’s exceptionally beautiful. Her sadness is appealing. CUT TO: INT. – PSYCHIATRIC WARD – MOMENTS LATER anyway. Transplants and antibodies set off in cargo holds for Northern Africa. Cult Leader looks over her shoulder. Nothing behind her. She has a spare key. She guesses she can still stay at the Gramercy. Cult Leader looks at the sculpture. The nose is missing. She attaches the nose. Cult Leader hurries to the elevators. She looks across the station, a homeless person on a bus. A packet of sugar on the dresser. Parcels of meat wrapped in butcher’s paper going mouldy. Cult Leader hunches over, snatches the fan mail, and runs. A middle-aged woman looks at me. She ices her voice. Look at her! She’s up. Running. Peeling off into tide. Into her room. The woman looks old. Metallic typefaces on subway entrances. Woman forward running. Outlandish motion. Fidgeting. Twitching. Get me out of here. A bread roll spins on the hotel stairs. Drawstrings undone on Cult Leader’s pyjamas. Cult Leader picks her pyjamas up off the floor. An ambulance crashes out on the Trans-Manhattan Expressway. Replacement hips. Tobacco, one extract. Cocaine again in the bathroom. Cult Leader’s future. Cubicle closed by shower door. Soap in the shape of opals. Soap taste inside mouth. Dogs patting sex dolls. Hair locks. Cult Leader hikes up the hill. Soldiers annoying her with deck chairs. Index fingers snapped in two.
APARTMENT IN ALABAMA. For as long as I care to remember, I have always wanted to kill myself. Alabama. Months back. Small rooms in the outer suburbs. Wood floors. You’re drinking from a carton of milk. Hot sun. Nothing to do here. You want to be moving on. Costume jewellery in a paper bag. Wine bottle in a recycling bin. Red wine. You’re naked in a colour photograph. Fashion magazines. Flesh beneath satin clothes. Fucking. Small filing cabinet full of pornography. Repetition of highway noises. Antennae on your head. Radio sounds from your mouth. Petrol engulfing desert grass. Patrol car submerged in the Perdido River. Death scenes under the Barrineau ParkBridge. Interchangeable sexes. Tongues. Eye chart on sawdust floor. Lawn furniture outside a gas station. Grey-green radars. Yellow eyes in the twilight. Street lamp. Your long eyelashes. Soft warm scratches against my skin. UFO / space craft under observation. Dispassionate sleep. Razor over soap-lathered face. Young woman in a station wagon. Gas tank empty after long drive. Your nightgown in the bachelor apartment. White light over the pre-dawn sky. Small plane on the tarmac. A gas station in Pennsylvania. Coveralls on a stack of tyres. Your gold cap tooth. The house cleaners scratching the walls with their vacuum cleaners. Stenographer rubbing messages into marble. Square jaw under your eyeglasses. An empty room. Different body sizes and animal parts. Office buildings full of industrialists. Manservants in the drawing room. Glory through data collection. Blueprints for military devices. You’re not interested in social positions. Foreign agents involved in financial fraud. Horseshoes constructed in stone. Blue handkerchief on naked breast. Secret police in Panama hats. Burglary then murder. Small cyanide capsules. Secret rooms. Deep moonlight. Dark shadow. False microfilm. Mood rings exhibiting subnormal emotions. Reading a McDonalds employment contract. Buying airline tickets to Capri. Smoking cigarettes in Rome. Watching drugged America. Incompetent WI-FI. Dreary background of palm tree. Musty underwear and hot dogs. Washing your ballsack in syrupy detergent. Falling into the liquor cabinet at the convenience store. Suicide bomber uninvited to the supper party. Bullet hole in the motel room door. You were dating petite women before the bomb blast. Now you have no legs. Drinking beer in the water fountain. You wear red rubber to the job interview. You leather lash the middle management. You ask the pharmacist questions in your birthday suit. Animal reincarnations on the bus seat. Burnt bone hooks in the back room. Tiresome groups talking about literary movements. Heated spatula placed on inner thigh. Ghetto buildings. Medical rooms. You clean the toilet bowl inside the toilet cubicle. Prescription drugs (barbiturates) on sale at the pharmacy counter. Technical jargon required to destroy your childhood home. M&Ms in the medicine cabinet. Drinking Pepsi-Cola inside a trolley car. Discussing retail electronics while sipping instant coffee. Smoking marijuana in likely sandals. Car keys lost in the hot tub. White towels from a porn movie. You laze around in riots, bed sheets and skin care. You wear a polyester shirt, no underwear. Bare feet of the factory workers. An unconventional laugh full of warm brandy. Bath towels cover filthy corpses. A piss-smeared midget offering afternoon injections. Air-conditioned sleep for useless animals. Hair in the medicine cabinet. Bus driver asleep at the wheel. Telephone rings. Champagne corks crack. Your thin waist at the cash register. Twenty dollar lap dances at train stations. You’re behind the shower door. Grenades and mustard gas under your reading glasses. Traffic accidents beside the ticket booth. Anatomical tests on hotel guests. I’m not interested in living. Your aftershave in the shower stall. Working out in the new gymnasium lounge at the local K-Mart. Your eyes dilate and your bones are hollow. Cranberry juice spilt over your business shirts. Playing a drum kit alongside the medical steward. Psychological tests included with birthday cards. A pop-up tent full of lifeless smoke. You notice the patterns in the newspaper print. Time travel allowed on train station platforms. Broomstick in the ass. Smoking menthol cigarettes in the bathroom. Mint aftershave in the basin. Room service calls the abattoir for fresh steaks. Kabul refuges huffing solvent. Number plates made from horse hair. You’re inserted into thick blue denim. Your rear end is ghastly. My rib cage in jean jacket. Protuberance of red lipstick on your face. New diets so prices soar. Rope tricks upon ochre dirt. Vegetable matter from Mars. Your hand scrapes across surgical instruments. Abscesses inside the bonfire. Hot Dogs dripping in Stetson grease. Never-ending space research programs. Mysterious police forces with indefinable jurisdictions. Black patent shoes and seven inch heels. Straight slicked pony tail. Leopard-print mini. The world involves interaction. I’d like to die.
Excerpted from Yeezus in Furs, by Shane Jesse Christmass, published in 2018 by Dostoyevsky Wannabe, republished with permission of the author. Photograph by Orobi.
About the Author:
Shane Jesse Christmass is the author of the novels, Yeezus In Furs (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2018), Napalm Recipe: Volume One (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2017), Police Force As A Corrupt Breeze (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2016) and Acid Shottas (The Ledatape Organisation, 2014). He was a member of the band Mattress Grave, and is currently a member in Snake Milker. An archive of his writing/artwork/music can be found at www.shanejessechristmass.tumblr.com.
