The Scar- Ghost Town by Shiny Toy Guns
The Fitch Family- Du Hast by Ramstein/Raamstein
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The evening sky was smoothly and slowly turning from that normal radiant blue to shades of pink and deep purple, signifying that dark was quickly approaching, despite the lazy way the sun took its time to set. Heavy metal music flowed softly through the playground, muted by distance but still managing to leak through the park's only patron, tickling her ear drums as she swayed slightly with only the effort of the wind pushing her. The plastic grocery bag hanging from her limp fingers lightly brushed the gravel on the park ground. She sat, staring into nothing, on theonly swing untouched by vandals' hands. Her eyes closed as she listened to the music that swirled around her. She could almost lose herself in the chaotic serenity of the park while deep down wishing she was someone else, anyone else. The air was warm, the August breeze carrying the thick smoke from the girl's cigarette into far off fields and the uncut front lawns of her disgusting city. Cotton ball clouds were slowly disappearing into the horizon, only to be replaced by the blanket of night, speckled here and there with random stars. The first ambulance siren of the evening blared to life, welcoming the oncoming night with its electronic echoing screams. She dug her heel into the dirt, smiling around the filter of her cigarette, before she kicked her leg up into the air, sending up a cloud of dusk with the toe of her boot to join ominously with the smoke. She watched the cloud rise into the night air, poisoning even further the pretty perfect picture of the world.
Morgan crushed her cigarette out in the gravel beneath her swing and flicked it over to the usual spot by the park fence. Due to the growing pile of discarded filters, it could be eerily obvious to any passer-by that someone routinely used the park as a retreat. Someone was setting off firecrackers, a few blocks away, left over from Fourth of July and a few stars struggled for life against the not quite dark sky. It wouldn't get much darker than that; all the city lights drowned out what little illumination the stars released. Somewhere in the city of downtown Maxville someone was being raped, robbed… murdered. Druggies somewhere were getting high; delinquentswere breaking into something, spray painting billboards and bridges.
Setting things on fire.
Same old insect ridden, rodent infested, hell hole of a city. The only thing constant in the city was the crime. Screams, sirens, and shoot outs serenaded most nights with their grim grisly melody of fright.
She smiled slightly standing up from the swing. It was incredibly ironic how much she needed the city but hated it in the same breath. It was very much like the way she felt about her self. She hated who she was, what she was and what she looked like. In short she hated her body, but she needed it to live. She pushed her hair behind her ear as she realized just how many similarities there were between her body and the world. She snorted in realization.
The world was like a giant body.
Every city was an organ, needed to create the larger body. The roads were veins, scattering across the maps like spider webs. The Earth drank the oceans, breathed the winds, and devoured the wicked.
Purely alive.
But just like the world, and physical bodies every city has a bad side. A downtown, a no man's land. That place that parents tell their children to stay away from; especially after dark. Nothing good comes out of after hours indown town Maxville, but it was the most fun.
About half way home she stopped to fish another cigarette out of her bra. She firmly believed that was the reason push-up bras were created. What else were they good for other than creating a pocket? She laughed at her own wit, and quickly lit the cigarette. She took a deep breath letting the smoke resonate in her chest before letting it stream out of her nose. Her city was really just a town, a smaller part of the actual city labeled on the map. It was a town but it felt wrong calling it so. When you think "town" you think of small quaint suburban houses, with perfectly cut lawns and town squares. That kind of place was nine miles away.
Suburbia.
Regardless of how wrong it felt calling it so, it was a town. Still with Suburbia just a good spit away it was a dump. So reasonably everyone called it the Scar, the flaw that marred the perfect reputation of Suburbia Maxville. That horrible hideous flaw that was nothing better than a growth; an unsightly tumor growing and festering hiding under the appearance of a Scar.
"People like me are just the cancer cells." She said in a puff of smoke, blinking into the night with a grim frown.
It was nine houses down from her house when she first began to hear the music. A loud, rhythmic, metal mess of music pounded down the street. Nine. Fucking. Houses. That meant that her family was really cranking it up. Her fucking idiot brothers were going to get them evicted. Again. She knew it was coming from her house because, really, where else would it be coming from?
Their close neighbors to the north were deaf mutes, thankfully. But that didn't mean that the other neighbors were. They lived in a fairly crappy neighborhood. Mostly low income families, and trouble makers lived on her street. The trouble makers, though, were mostly in prison, leaving their hundreds of children to get in people's way. So that only left her asshole brother's to be the ones disturbing the little bit of peace that settled over their street at night. She and her brothers weren't very well liked on their street because of their obnoxious loudness. She rolled her eyes. It wasn't her loudness. She knew better. She had been thrown out of too many apartments and one bedroom houses due to her brother's constant need to annoy. She couldn't keep them quiet. After all she was the baby of the family, and due to her parents' stupidity, the only female at that. She couldn't blame her neighbors for hating them. But she really didn't care. She and all her brothers knew they were hated and accepted it. They even made a consciouseffort to crank up the volume on Mondays around three am just to piss their neighbors off.
She took a drag on her cigarette and sent the smoke to the heavens.
Her brothers were fun at times, at other times they were annoying as hell. The neighbors were constantly calling the police on them. She had several times had run-ins with the older people on her block becauseof her skimpy dressing and her underage smoking. Really, though, it was the noise that kept the neighbors on edge. Even as she drew closer to her home, she still couldn'tmake out the words of the song blaring from her house. The volume and bass were up too damn high. As if to reinforce this thought one of her neighbors, an older pudgy women, peered throughthe busted blinds of one of her windows and sneered at her as she walked by. Like it was her fault their music was so damn loud. Well the old hag could kiss her ass for all she cared. In a pure act of defiance, she blew out a puff of smoke towards the window. Clearly aggravated, the woman huffed, blowing herself uplike a puffer fish, and released the blind in a frustrated stomp.
She took another drag from her cigarette.
Her street, Gleanley Street, was damp from a recent rain. Wet and soggy newspaper and cardboard clogged the drains and littered yards. A dog was barking at her from one of the neighbors fenced in back yards. Really you couldn't call it a fence. Most of the metal was torn up away from the ground. If the dog wasn't tethered to a chain he could get out of that fence in a heart beat. She took another drag of her cigarette and sighed. Another symphony of sirens lit up the background, creating that nauseously calming white noise.
She reached her front porch, after taking her own sweet time. The stairs were crooked and probably could stand to be replaced; the paint was peeling back revealing several layers- the earliest which was probably heavy with lead; the corners were softened and rounded by time. The shutters on the windows were gone leaving stark naked windows with only old torn sheets for curtains. They had used them to keep a summer bonfire burning one year. She had no idea why they needed a bonfire, or why they even wanted one. But they did, and they couldn't find anything better to burn. The spot where the shutters had been was the only semi-dirt free and sun bleached part of the house. Grime danced in every crack, and mold seemed to sprout proudly from the crevices. The plants were all dead. That happens, though, when no one bothers to tend to them. Why should they care about the stupid plants when they hardly cared for themselves? A busted lawn chair sat forgotten on the front porch, left over from one of the hotte summer days when the one air conditioner of the house was on the fritz. The boys weren't the kind to share anything; so naturally they fought over and ultimately wrecked the chair. Fuzzy lyrics about self destruction and not caring about what authority thought about it were leaking through every crack and water filled cranny of the house.
But it was home. She couldn't ask for more, because honestly she couldn't afford it.
She flicked her finished cigarette into one of the dead rose bushes and walked across the porch to the front door. She dreaded stepping in there because she knew that as soon as she opened the door the music would get louder, practically knocking her over. With a deep breath she opened the door, and braced herself against the torrents of sound. The music was so loud that she couldn't even hear the door as she slammed it behind her. All seven of her brothers were sitting, comatose, sprawled over the couch and love seats in the living room. The pot haze was so thick in the air that she immediately began to feel lightheaded and she knew if she didn't get some ventilation in the house she would get contact high in a heartbeat. While she did enjoy the occasional high, she didn't plan on loosing her head tonight. Not from second hand smoke. She watched them for a moment as they did nothing. They just sat there, eyelids half closed and their arms draped over the backs of their respective seats, staring at a television of static. They didn't turn their heads, didn't so much as twitch, no indication that they had even noticed that someone had walked through the front door. She turned and pushed open the window by the door. It usually made a horrible noise when it was opened, but due to the overbearing music, it was lost. She looked back over to them. Their chests were rising as they drew in their breath, the only signal that they were still in fact alive. They didn't notice her. They didn't notice anything.
Smooth move to do in the Scar. Fucking idiots.
"Everybody on the floor! This is a robbery!" She didn't know what possessed her to say it, but it came spilling from her mouth anyway. She narrowed her eyes and waited, watching for their reactions.
They all turned their heads towards her, not even making an attempt toget up. The twins Skyler and Ryler opened their mouths in unison to say something, but seemed to think of what they were about to say. It had better be an apology. She went all the way to the store to get groceries becauseeveryone else was too 'busy', fought with the old man at the check out aboutthe price of milk, had a stupid person in a truck try to run her over and shehad to come home to-
"Heh. Robbery."
"RUBBERY!"
She wasn't actually expecting an apology. Apologies weren't something that happened very often in her family. She sighed, not able to contain it, and walked around the couch to the stereo above the TV. She had to press the off button so hard with her thumb that the nail-bed turned white. Some of the buttons stuck. Most buttons in the house did. That's what happens when all the stuff in the house is old and mostly stolen.
Karma's a bitch.
"It wouldn't do to have someone call the cops because of the noise, and have them see all the smoke. Besides, you're all half baked." She said wistfuly, tossed the groceries on the small open space on the couch between the twins.
Matt, the oldest, lazily opened his mouth and said in a half mumble, "I am no...".
He had fallen asleep.
Morgan went around the couch to the stairs and stomped her way up to the second landing and inthe direction of her room, opening up another window on her way there. She had to lift up on thedoor when she turned the handle, and likewise closing it, and she had to pick her way through pile after pile of choking thrift shop and pay day clothes but she finally made it to her bed and unceremoniously flopped backwards onto her bed.
She sat there, for a good fifteen minutes, on her back with her arms spread out on either side of her and her legs dangling off the end of her bed. Just staring unblinkingly at the spray paint on her ceiling.
It was her mural. Her work of art. Her weekend activity when she had nothing better to do.
In the corner of the ceiling was a black heart, a minuscule halo of light behind it and the rotting brown and gray planet earth in the center; large smoke stacks billowing dark gray ash colored smoke and smog sitting on top of it. From the halo, vine like black and dark yellow swirls erupted from it like newly grown vegetation from a baron waste land, reaching forward and infecting small white and light pink colored stars scattered around it, turning them black and brown and various shades of gray.
If the Scar was a tumor, then her house was the core. The rotten malignant puss that drains out when exposed.
He shook his head as he walked in the door. Work was hard. It wasn't that the work itself was hard. No, just having twenty customers walk in two minutes to closing really irritated him. He tossed his back pack on the bed and walked over, pulling his shirt off over his head. With a flare of his fingers he litthe candles on his nightstand and collapsed onto his bed. Saturday's were their busiest days, so he knew what to expect. Perhaps that was why he was so restless. Everything was expected. Even the unexpected. He snorted and rolled over onto his stomach. That part of being a hero in training sucked. Nothing ever took him by surprise. At least that's what he always thought.