As promised, a short extraction of my WIP for #AStoryAMonth , this one geared specifically to honour Women in Horror Month.

The music is pumping. Thundering. Stomping through my body and amplifying the trembling beating of my heart. Each step vibrates through my bones, undulating, reverberating out from the inside. Shockwaves pounding out to rock hard nipples and flushed genitalia. Every soft spot on my body feels full and raw, every inch of me is wet. I can feel my brain floating in it, untethered and dizzy from the relentless sway and bounce, a ship tossed in a raging tsunami of spinal sauce and ten-ton beats. I don’t know it anymore, but my feet are moving. My legs. My hips. I don’t feel them, but there they go, bobbing and weaving like a goddamn champ, moving to the endless rise of the music. Bigger, higher, faster, stronger. Where else can it go? The roof is holding it in against all perceived laws of physics. It should be tearing at the seams, spinning off into the night as the tornado of sound and rythm and pure fucking sonic fury whips us all up into the stars. The purple is hitting me hard now.

I see familiar faces through the strobe light fog. They wave and shout and smile and nod. YEAH! they say, you fucking GO!. Screaming what I’m feeling in my knees.

DJ Rothstein at the decks. He gives me the high sign as I ping-pong through the crowd, live-wire red and lightning fast, a pinball machine on light-speed. I know I’m headed into the inevitable. I know I’m almost there, but it seems like a lifetime and a split-second, a flash of eternity on a dirty mirror.

Then it’s over. Cardiac Arrest. Rothstein drops the needle flat. Straight cut. Rothstein with his spiky hair and his green muppet parka. He drops a slow-jam for the drunk office girls and lipstick lesbians. My heart is skipping beats like a mambo. Purple shines off of every surface.

I fail to notice that I’ve reached my checkpoint. Mission achieved. Level unlocked. I’m smiling goon-like into the ocean of sweat and flesh. Arturo’s voice growls in my ear as he pulls me down into his booth. The residual spirit sweats of the last song are running warm down my thighs. I hope that’s what it is. I see the Senator’s blood. I hear his voice when Arturo groans Hey Girl, like a low-rent over-flamboyant Ryan Gosling. Ever the charmer-out-of-time, six months to eighteen years late on every joke, lost on every reference. Doesnt stop him from being The Man. I had a problem. Arturo would have an answer. I needed Arturo to have an answer.

He packed me into the booth, already preloaded with high-rent call girls and horny upscale dudes in Armani and Brooks Brothers. He waved a hand and  the waitress appeared like a ghost, phasing into existence through the wastelands of my periphery.

© Axel Howerton 2014

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