other kinds of dread

seven entry wounds

guest post and photo by Evelyn Hollow

Men will learn everything there is to know about the Roman Empire before going to therapy. The bread and knives. The roads and the hierarchy. The lions and Caligula and the lambs not entertained. The sport of blood. Will Christopher was thinking about pluto and the girl with gold eyes he loved in the american eleventh grade all the while devising seven clever ways to murder himself. To disappear himself into the black that becomes yellow.

The women crouch on cold tile with coat hanger teeth begging the night ends gentle.

Cormac McCarthy’s wife bathed in cold water and ate beans for two months because he wouldn’t speak at a university for two hours for two thousand dollars.

A man I loved once went to work thinking about Nero whilst I thought about setting the oven to 350 degrees and making a medium rare head Sylvia Plath style of my soft skull barely lucid from an hour of stolen sleep between the panic attacks of shifting weight in a bed that pretends not to be the inertia of a lover masturbating to photos of his ex girlfriend’s best friend who he desired more than me because I was a hundred pounds too light to be considered attractive to him whilst everyone else considered me to be too big even for the radio.

Zelda threw herself in the river whilst F Scott stole lines from her loveletters for Gatsby and Daisy called us beautiful little fools long after she burned to death in that asylum.

I was thinking about the time I arranged every knife in the drawer into a circle in a cocaine frenzy at 4am. I was thinking about my uncle telling me about how he lost his virginity in an Indian summer unusual to Scottish climate underneath my mother’s orange blossoms. I was thinking about buying a second bottle of vodka for the freezer. The bottom drawer of a freezer should only ever be for that. Emergency vodka nothing else. Break glass in case of wellness. I thought of boys returned from war with bodies like doors slammed shut. The desire to bite any hand that touches my face. The wraithlike former meth addict crying on Cowgate again at 4am as I held her and forced her to scream her own name with the conviction of a tornado siren to stop the dissatisfaction of being.

The time I drank so much absinthe I vomited all over a taxi and quoted the opening lines of kiss me, Judas in a bathtub whilst a film director hosed me down. I thought of the time my sister put her head through the glass door of the livingroom, right to her neck, and my father gently knocked the shards out around her with a hammer so she wouldn’t bleed to death if she moved a quarter inch. My grandmother’s ashes emptied like a hoover bag in a rose garden behind a house I rented many years later so that I could learn to talk to her ghost.

The time I won £300 on blackjack picking cards using second sight after four bottles of Chardonnay on a Tuesday night and the man I won it for said he’d take his girlfriend on a nice holiday and then tried to follow me home. The green lava lamp in my childhood best friend’s bedroom that illuminated the first monster I ever knew to be real. The ever increasing cost of cigarettes compared to wages. Verdi’s operas and Capote’s lost papers for Answered Prayers. The Dead Sea scrolls and the church changing the bible to make the first sin a woman tempting a man when the first sin was really Adam trying to rape Lilith, mother of monsters.

I haven’t read a book in six months since the last one was shook out of my hands by a boyfriend fucking himself whilst messaging a chatbot in bed next to me on his phone because he’d ceased to see me as a living person and replaced me with a serial killer grade obsession with 400 pound plus artificial woman he fantasized about fucking all day every day, even when he lay inches away from me. I think of making enough money one day to get a mortgage as the world burns so that I don’t have to move for the seventh time in six years. I think of the girl who bit my face outside a nightclub. I think of the three times I’ve slept in a bath tub this week to escape the ptsd convulsions. I think my neck will never stop hurting. I think of the IT teacher I had at 15 who smoked L&B under the staircase and sang Candi Statton in the corridors.

I think of the girl recently raped by a stranger, then led into the woods and raped by her brother, who then strangled her. And then the man walking his dog who found her body raped her corpse and how all of these animals should be skinned inverted done inside out but nothing will ever matter because that girl is me and I am her and hell must be real because there is no other celestial space to commit these men to. I think the fact that Murakami has a Pulitzer tells us all that the human race is fucking doomed.

I think of John Fox, Holly Humberstone, Robert Plant, Brian Fallon, and Kate Bush. I think being on gogglebox three times is not a career success but an indictment of me being unable to say no to paying the bills by making TV shows because my bones are too brittle to go back to eighty-hour work weeks in hospitality.

I think of Goya, Waterhouse, Grimshaw, Turner.

I think of the emotionally unavailable boy I dated in my 20’s whose lovely older brother was murdered recently and I still don’t know what to say, if I should say anything at all. I think of how I am always thinking of my own death when someone is inside of me. I think of the sky shredding itself. I think of the dead bodies I used to clean at 7am in a private type B Jacobean mansion in Edinburgh as my first ‘serious’ job and how that will definitely fuck you up a bit.

I realise I’ve not taken my coat off in the forty-five minutes since I sat down to think and write and that today is a 24th cigarette sort of day.

fade.

*Evelyn Hollow is a Scottish poet and paranormal spelunker based in trainspotting country who read Kiss Me, Judas at a tender age and kept reading the poe books like eurydice chasing her literary Orpheus through the underworld of his own making until she tracked me down on the net in late 2017. Not long after the near death episode at a memphis ER during the ragged descent into my own yellow void. She appeared like a bullet out of blue. She told me to come back. To wake the fuck up. To write and publish again. To rescue godspeed from my shattered laptop. To stop with the abyss staring back shit. Never met her in the real but trust her like my own hand. Funny that yeah. We hate the cloud and curse it on a loop but the net too has a way of pushing people into our path who save us change us forever alter our trajectory. It happens every week lately. The 401 family is exponential. Anyway say hello to Evelyn Hollow. Give her some love. She is one of the reasons I’m still here with you guys still telling stories out of school.

find her on instagram and elsewhere in the cloud @evelynhollow.