I Followed Carrie

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Victoria Mnemosyne
Posts: 305
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 5:57 pm
Gender: Female
Location: long island, NY

I Followed Carrie

Post by Victoria Mnemosyne »

Chapter 1: Willy P.

I was fourteen years old and following a girl named Carrie.
“This guy’s always buggin’, like, on some other planet.” She laughed the way a dog barks. “But he’s cool. He’ll smoke us up.”
Her voice was full of cigarettes and razor blades, but I liked the way her body moved. I couldn’t stop watching her breasts in her black wife-beater, her ass in tight acid wash jeans. I followed that ass up a narrow flight of stairs, through a door that looked as if it had been painted over dozens of times; the white paint was thick and sloughed on like putty.
I sidled in after Carrie, trying to look nonchalant, and waited for my eyes to adjust to the gloom. A collection of uncertain lawn chairs, a bunk bed and an X-Box were the only furniture. I noticed that someone had covered the windows with sheets of aluminum foil, so that no light showed through. An anemic blond girl was sitting Indian style on the dirty rug, and a tall angular boy like a scarecrow was pacing back and forth, muttering to himself, and trying to shake invisible insects from his coiled orange hair. I wondered what he signals he was blocking with the foil. I wanted to peel open his brain like an orange, and become immersed in the horrors that lived there.
The girl on the floor looked at me meanly through black rimmed eyes, wiped a finger across a rabbity red nostril. “Who’s the kid?”
She was looking at Carrie. The air stood static between us. I watched the carpet closely, hoping for her to say something… anything, a reason to hope some more.
Carrie shrugged. “She’s just some kid.”
My heart took a swan dive. Fleetingly, achingly, I wished she would drop dead on the filthy carpet. Maybe it would’ve been better for us all, in the end, if she had.
But she didn’t. Instead, she moved to one of the chairs and plopped down. I set course for the other chair, but I was too slow: the scarecrow had finished with the insects, and he perched moodily on the edge of the second seat. I stood uncertainly, leaning against the wall. My arms felt like a mannequins. I pushed my cuticles back one by one until they bled.
The blond girl took a strawberry Dutch Master’s cigar out of her pocket and began to unroll it. After some fine engineering on her part, we held in our tobacco-stained fingers a fat sticky blunt, smelling of strawberries and skunk. I toked too hard, coughed asthmatically, and pushed my lighter toward Carrie through rapidly watering eyes.
“Woahh.” The scarecrow offered.
We looked at him expectantly.
“White lighters are bad luck, man. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, man… that other guy. Come on, you know.”
No one seemed to know.
“What did they all have in common? They were all found with white lighters on them when they died. It’s a curse.”
They all turned to me, accusation on their faces. I tried to show by my expression that I was in no way responsible for the death of rock legends.
“Use this, man,” He rummaged in his pocket. “Banana lighter!”
They collectively insisted that my lighter be thrown out the window, where it sank into the snow. I handed Carrie the yellow lighter and the blunt.
Sometime later, we stumbled red eyed out the door and down the stairs. The world had tilted into the sudden hilarity of a carnival. I was no longer sure my feet were still connected to my legs. Walking like a drunk man on water, I reached the bottom of the stairwell first, and froze.
The blond girl was right behind me.
“The doors keep changing”, I explained. “They’re not sure where they lead.”
She rolled her eyes and laughed, “Here. Try this one.”
She opened the door in front of her, and we took a few steps before realizing we were in someone else’s apartment, and managed a confused retreat back into the hallway. As soon as the door was closed we burst out in laughter.
“Try- try- another door!” I gasped out, doubled over.
She maneuvered past me and opened the door on the left this time. Squinting against the low fuchsia sun, we trod outside into the snow. Only I seemed embarrassed by the scene we were making, the dirty looks thrown from frumpy town mothers and harassed shop owners as we walked through town.
The sun had gone and the snow was flushed with indigo and amethyst. Somehow I ended up in front. I knew, without knowing, where we were going.
By the time we reached the old cemetery, the sky was black and void of stars.
We were all skittish, made paranoid by the pot and superstitious despite our better judgment. I kept repeating to myself a mantra that was really just a Rod Serling quote from an old Twilight Zone episode: “There’s nothing there in the dark that wasn’t there when the lights were on”.
Leanne- (I had discerned the blond girl’s name during the course of our travels)- froze at the cemetery gate and pointed dramatically.
“There’s a man standing there.”
“Where?” We asked together.
“There.”
We peered unproductively into the gloom for a while.
“I see him!” Carrie suddenly put in, sounding pleased with her discovery, “Looks like he’s wearing tan. And a hat.”
Leanne nodded triumphantly. “He’s watching us. And I think it’s a fedora.”
“Oh no, that’s not it.” Carrie said decisively, “it’s a headstone.”
And so it was.
We walked over to it; it was quite a tall headstone, with a flat rectangular top. William P. Halk, 1824. I shimmied up onto it, yanking at the top of my jeans, and lit a camel.
“Maybe the guy died of lung cancer.” Carrie said lightly.
“Poor Willy.” The scarecrow shook his head mournfully at Willy’s misfortune.
“Well, then he misses cigarettes,” I countered reasonably. I leaned down and aimed a puff of smoke at the grass below, where I imagined his body to be, six feet under, a-mould’ring in his pine box.
With silent consensus the group moved on, and I slid ungracefully off of my perch to follow, struggling through the snow in my now damp socks.
By the time I caught up to my new friends at a break in the hedges, they had fallen into a moody silence. We had reached what looked like the edge of the cemetery only to come upon a long field of graves, endless tombs, stretching out until they faded into the night, an endless field of bodies marked with cold rocks, skewed like a derelict’s teeth.
All four of us linked hands and stood there for a long, long while, gazing into the darkness.
Ginger Faith!
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Re: I Followed Carrie

Post by Ginger Faith! »

I really really liked this. I surely do hope you continue.
Victoria Mnemosyne
Posts: 305
Joined: Wed Jul 28, 2010 5:57 pm
Gender: Female
Location: long island, NY

Re: I Followed Carrie

Post by Victoria Mnemosyne »

Thank you darling :)
I'm hoping to one day turn it into a collection of short stories, if not a novel
Bougainvillea
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Re: I Followed Carrie

Post by Bougainvillea »

Really interesting! And the details are amazing.
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