On that night, with that ritual begins the countdown to Doomsday.
And once again the automobile’s mirrored window fills its frame. And at this instant, the storm, the rain and darkness, these swallow the car. As the Lincoln departs the curb, bearing the young maiden away, the winds herd her castoff thing-baby. That knotted bladder. That graven image. The wind and rains shepherd their bountiful harvest of slaughtered vermin and plastic trash and dried chewing gum, tumbling and driving it all in the direction of gravity.
Gentle Tweeter,
It’s worth noting up front that I have always conceived of my mind as a digestive organ. A stomach for processing knowledge, if you will. As a looping, wrinkled mass, a human brain unmistakably looks like gray intestines, and it’s within these thinking bowels that my experiences are broken down, consumed to become my life story. My thoughts occur as flavorful burps or acrid barf. The indigestible gristle and bone of my memories are expelled as these words.
Writing an honest blog is how you unlive your life. It’s like uneating an entire peanut butter cheesecake, and just as messy.
The convoluted, creased, and folded gray entrails of my mind exist as a kind of tummy of the intellect. Tragedies ulcerate. Comedies nourish. In the end, rest assured, your memories will long outlast your flesh—witness me. My name is Madison Desert Flower Rosa Parks Coyote Trickster Spencer, and I’m a ghost. Meaning: Boo! I’m thirteen years old, and I’m somewhat overweight. Meaning: I’m dead and fat. Meaning: I’m a piggy-pig-pig, oink-oink, real porker.
Just ask my mom.
I’m thirteen and fat—and I will stay this way forever.
And, yes, I know the word ulcerate. I’m dead, not illiterate. You’ve heard the term midlife crisis? Simply put, I’m currently suffering a “mid-death crisis.” After some eight months lodged in the fiery underworld of Hell I now find myself stranded as a spirit in the living-alive physical world, a condition more commonly known as Purgatory. This feels exactly like flying at Mach 1 aboard my dad’s Saab Draken from Brasilia to Riyadh, only to be trapped circling the airport in a holding pattern, waiting for permission to land. Plainly and simply put, Purgatory is where you unwrite the book of your life story.
Regarding Hell, you mustn’t feel sorry for me. We all keep secrets from God, and it’s exhausting. If anyone deserves to burn in the unquenchable lake of eternal flames, it’s me. I am pure evil. No punishment is too severe.
For me, my flesh is my curriculum vitae. My fat is my memory bank. The moments of my past life are archived and carried in every obese cell of my ghost blubber, and to lose weight would be for Madison Spencer to disappear. Bad memories are better than none. And rest assured, whether it’s your fat or your bank account or your beloved family, someday you’ll struggle with this reluctance to abandon the living-alive world.
When you die, trust me, the most difficult person to leave behind is yourself. Yes, Gentle Tweeter, I’m thirteen and a girl and I know the term curriculum vitae. What’s more, I know that not even the dead want to fully disappear.
Gentle Tweeter,
I would not be stuck here on the stony Galápagos that is Earth, drinking the warm tortoise urine that is human companionship, were it not for the Halloween caper cutting of a certain three Miss Slutty O’Slutnicks. On the Halloween in question I’d been strangled to death with my blood flushed out for only eight months, tops. I’d been damned, yes, for committing a horrible murder that will be revealed here soon enough. One of the chief torments of Hell is that we all know, secretly, why we deserve to be there. How I came to escape is, as per custom, on All Hallow’s Eve the entire population of Hades returns to Earth to forage for salted nut clusters and Raisinettes from dusk until midnight. I was thus gainfully occupied, scavenging suburban neighborhoods for Twixes and Almond Joys to enrich the treasury of Hell, when a breeze carried my name out of the nighttime distance. A chorus of girlish voices, these wheedling, piping tweenaged voices were chanting my name: “… Madison Spencer… Maddy Spencer, come to us. We command you to come do our bidding.”
To you predead people, like it or not, postalive people are not your bitches. The dead have better things to do than respond to your dumb-ass Ouija board queries concerning lottery numbers and who’s going to marry you. You and your séance games, your table-tipping, ghost-baiting shenanigans. I had, at best, four hours of darkness to gather Kit Kat bars, and here I was getting summoned by a giggling cadre of Miss Coozey Coozenheimers. They sat on my former bed, in the room of my former boarding school in Locarno, Switzerland, and bade in unison, “Appear to us, Madison Spencer. Let’s see if your big ass looks any skinnier dead.” And they laughed into their slender hands.
Shushing each other, the crew of Whorey Vander-whores chanted, “Show us your secret ghost diet.” This playground taunt reduced them to giggles, toppling them sideways, their shoulders bumping one another. They were sitting cross-legged, soiling my bed linens with their shoes, an occasional foot kicking my former headboard, eating popcorn around some candles burning on a plate. “We’ve got potato chips,” they taunted, and shook a bag of the same. Barbecue flavored. “We’ve got onion dip.” One voice intoned, “Here, Madison… Here, piggy, piggy, piggy…” All the voices combined to sing, “Soooooeeeee…!” Loudly were they hog calling into the frigid Halloween night. “Here, piggy, pig, pig, pig, pig…”
They snorted. They grunted. They called out, “Oink, oink, oink.” Chewing noisily, their mouths crammed with high-calorie snacks, they shrieked with laughter.
No, Gentle Tweeter, I did not slaughter them in my rage. At this writing, they continue to be very much alive, albeit humbled. Suffice to say I arrived in a black Lincoln Town Car and answered their hillbilly yodeling. On the Halloween in question I prompted the infamous enemy trio of Miss Skeezy Skeezenheimers to void the meager contents of their anorexic bowels. So shame, shame on me. In my favor, I was a mite anxious and distracted by my impending curfew.
To linger even one clock tick past midnight meant my banishment to tedious Earth, so I remained hypervigilant as the big hand of my wristwatch ascended minute by minute toward the twelve. Once the three Miss Sleazy O’Sleazenicks were well laminated in pelts of their own fragrant upchuck and gummy doo-doo, I hightailed it for my waiting Town Car.
My trusty getaway vehicle remained where I had left it: parked at the frosty curb beside the snowy lawns of the school residence hall. The keys dangled from the ignition. The dashboard clock read eleven thirty-five, a reasonable allowance of time for my return trip to Hell. I climbed behind the steering wheel and fastened my seat belt. Ah, Earth, I thought somewhat indulgently, even nostalgically as I glanced at the old edifice where once I’d crept, nibbling on Fig Newtons and reading The Parasites. Tonight, every window blazed with light, and many were thrown wide-open to the wintery Swiss clime, their drapes flapping in the frigid wind which blew down from the glacial slopes of the tedious Alps. Of those wide-flung windows all now framed the heads of wealthy schoolgirls who leaned out and puked long banners of foody yuck down the building’s redbrick facade. The sight was vastly too pleasing to abandon, but now the dashboard clock gave the time as eleven forty-five.
Bidding it all a fond adieu, I twisted the key in the car’s ignition.
I twisted the key again.