Damn the Chinese Stick

Damn the Chinese Stick
@aladreth antoinette brown

you were the nurse
who knew better

***

you always came to me
every Wednesday
for your fortune

you'd pull from the
ghost cup a red tip,
do a dance wishing
with your eyes
like a little girl,

and if you didn't like
the fortune I would read
in rhyming voice
you would put it back
and beg me to let you
pick again.

Today when I was told
you were going to die -
(one of our doctors said
you had every known
illegal drug
in your system
when you were found
unresponsive on the floor)

I pulled your stick for you,
hoping number 45
would be something good,
something that would tell me
something different,
something positive

I read it quietly and alone,
it didn't say anything about
your liver and kidneys shutting down,
your mother apologizing for your
bad behaviour,
or massive heart attacks
and brain swelling,

No ...
It talked about a dark lover
being jealous of you,
The stick talked about working
in metal,
mining and trade industries.

It talked about taking a day of rest
and not overworking yourself mentally ...

And then it said, and
I'm so sorry, dear,

"Getting your wish is doubtful."

This Ovum Never So Red

Disclaimer: "OMD! It's a story!" - said by ? 
Oh, just said by everyone in the entire world who wants to read it!!!
"YAY! A story!!!" - said by ME ...and you.
P.S. This story is not about anyone you know.  Including me.  Only the stars
tell the truth.

This Ovum Never So Red
copyright @aladreth antoinette brown April 02, 2007 to current


"And let us consider how we may spur one another on toward love and good deeds."  - Hebrews 10:24, The Holy Bible, NIV Version

"If things on earth may be to heaven resembled,
It must be love, pure, constant, undissembled." ~~Aphra Behn 
(1640–1689) from "And Forgive Us Our Trespasses"


My name is Justice.

My parents had a weird sense of humour.

All of us girls were given names like Charity, Faith, Love, and Hope.

Do I get a nice, positive name?  No, I get Justice.

I guess with justice comes truth so I have to be truthful with y'all and admit these weren't my real parents.

These were foster parents.  So, when I got to be of legal age I decided to try to find my real parents.

They lived in Sierra Vista, Arizona and that's what brought me here to the fricken desert.  No one comes to the desert unless they are lost.  Or, looking for something. My real parents had seven children - not counting me who they had given up for some reason or another.  They had a farm and an old fashioned horse and buggy.  My mother looked a lot like the mother who played on "Little House on the Prairie."  Seriously.  No one believes me when I tell them this stuff, but it's true.

Me?  Well, I grew up in the foster care program in Cerritos in the Los Angeles Basin and I became a writer and an artist.

If that's what you want to call it.

I'm nothing, if not truthful, in regards to my ability to con.

Someone told me once they had googled my name.  I asked, "Oh, yeah?  What popped up?"  They told me, "Wreckage."  Of course, they were in a 12 step group and that's the sort of words they use.

Wreckage, family of origin, family of choice, one day at a time, the BB, and all sorts of other stuff that sounds like a cult, if you ask me.

I just sighed and said, "Oy."

I remember a Mensa contest where the winning prize went to the person who wrote a newly created word and definition: "Foreploy: Any misrepresentation about yourself for the purpose of getting laid."

And boy, did I do some foreploy on you.

My mouth was bigger than my trousers, and my trousers were really big.

Over the years, I've made a lot of inappropriate comments to musicians.  It's like I can't resist telling them I did S & M to their music.  Most of them just look at me like I grew another head.  Maybe I have along the way, maybe I have.

***

Back to this foreploy.

Yes, you and I ended up in a play, alright.  At least it seemed like it was.  Right, straight in an Pre Broadway Play.  That's what they call it.  It's not "Off Broadway," no, it will be going to Broadway, but not for a couple of years.

When I look back on things, it just seems like a dream.  Maybe when I was happiest was when I was lost.

I remember seeing a kitty who had jumped on a pit bull one time.  It was a bloody awful mess.  So much for saying those dogs are harmful.  The cat had done that poor thing in.

Someone jumped on me once too.  All that grinding was fine.  Hell, it was real fine.   Until the lights came up.  Then I ended up kicking him right in the groin with my boots on.

The light brings a lot of things out.  Light, truth and justice, they say.

I don't know.  I'm not sure I've ever really been given justice myself.  I am always getting the raw end of the deal with things and people are constantly telling me to just be grateful and look at all the stuff I have and to stop whining.

You promised me so much, but you could never deliver. I heard how badly you spoke of other girls, or how goodly, if it be the case.  If it suited you and your foolish purposes, you could talk a good right streak about anyone.

But, I invited you anyway to a convention I had to attend for work.

My suite was the largest and I was to be staying alone.  At least that is what everyone believed.

Next door was my "office enemy."  Well, they kept telling me she was trying to take my job.  I would have let her have it, so it didn't bother me.  She had to share her suite with four or five other girls so I'm thinking she wasn't too happy with the arrangements and how it must have seemed I was getting special treatment with my lone self in a nice suite.

No one knew you had met me there.  We were quiet.  That's what gags are for.  No one knew I had you wrapped up in plastic next to the bed.  No one knew how we fucked long and hard, just like we had never done it before, just like we had never touched another person's skin,  just like we had never even seen someone of the opposite gender before.

God, you smelled good.  And your voice whispering to me in the early morning hours was superbly convincing.  Your voice could coax a coat off of an Eskimo or get an Arizona girl like me to buy condos in the suburbs of Hell.  I would buy or sell anything you asked for in that voice.  I knew heat.  You had it.

Then there was the morning when you kept interrogating me why the caths full of orange juice were there, not cafes, but literally, someone had been drinking, injecting, main stream lining, veining all sorts of disease under our sofa.

You said there were so many secrets and hidden bags under the duvet.  That's what you called it because you were English and that's what they call a comforter. It's fancier to call it a duvet.  It's more posh.  And one thing about the English; I know it far better than any other American woman, (other than Madonna, maybe) ...is that their men are quite polite.

It doesn't mean they love you, though.

But, those orange juice caths, someone else had put them there.

I was showing you so well how to fasten the glue, tie the corset, keep things bricked in, you know, put up walls.  That's the way I like things.  Let them come at me with a sledgehammer if they want in me.  And my soul?  You may think you are eating at it, but you aren't.

Oh, sure, this one blond girlchick in California keeps popping in to my head now and then.  I think she offered to suck my soul out with a straw once; but, no... I pretty much try to keep people out of my brain.  This addiction I have.  Yes, guarded and protected; vulnerable and fragile.  That's me.

Once I read of a man who said all writers were either physically or mentally inadequate.  That is why we write, he said.  He may have been right.  I can accept my shortcomings on both levels.  Can anyone else?  I hate to find out.

A potter told me stoneware is not strong.  You would assume it was, but, no, it's the most delicate!  The fragile bone china is the strongest. The fragile bone china everyone is so worried about breaking, that's the strongest of all.  It may chip occasionally, but survives most traumas for generations, unless it is struck on just the right point, and then it shatters.

Stoneware *feels* safer, but can break in two just with the weight of all the other dishes around it.

I wonder if we are lot like bone china, much stronger and durable than we may appear, worthy of special treatment, but easily shattered when hit at our vulnerable fault line.

These things I wonder about when I tell stories about you.

One day you said all my stories were about you.  Yes, you were right.  They are. You are the reason for my very fabric of existence.  I wait to be rid of you, even watching the news for serious accidents in your neighborhood, but, no, I know in my heart, I will die the day you die.

The same day.  We are that connected.  You can ignore me.  You can talk to me.  You can touch every part of me.  No matter what you do, you will always be the one who controls my living and my death.

But, now.  Why wax nostalgic?  For, it seems I'm already dead sometimes.  Let us get back to this trip.

The door to the other room unlocked and all sorts of bodily fluid was on the little sticky mat they put in the tubs in some seedy motels.  Oh, but this was a high class, up town hotel and I was so accused, excused, fired up and down.

So fired.

Yes, I lost my job over you.  Over the orange juice in those IV or enema looking bags, I lost my job.  Or come on, let's get serious.  Maybe no one from your work cares who you screw and that's not the real reason I lost my job.

Who knows why I lost my job.  It could be because I'm hard to get along with.  It could be because I smell.  It could be because they are jealous of me.  Yes, that's what I'll say.  They are just jealous!  Those bitches!

And, there's Bernice, walking straight through our hotel room suite, she's got to be 92 now.  Or a ghost.  Didn't she die years ago?  I introduce you as my husband, while pinching your behind.

You glared at me over your shoulder and when she is finally gone you pull out the clay heart necklace from under your soft shirt and ask, "What does this say?"

You don't wait for an answer.

You answer yourself.

Hell, I know what it says.

I gave it to you.  Bought it in a little upstairs shoppe in the village of Sedona.  Way back when it was called a village.

"It says friend."

Gotham was never so high.  This Ovum never so red.