The voices spoke.
Is he going to die?
Is he really a real hedgehog? Or is he artificial like the rest of society?
Is he alive?
Or is he dead?
Look at him pandering to the Man of society, see him walk and talk like the rest of the phonies…
Shit eater!
You're so worthless!
You should jump out of the car! Jump, jump!
Mommy, is he going to be okay?
Ring ring!
Telephone!
Telephone for our lucky maiden, Annabelle!
Hear her talk about her dead baby that curled up and rotted inside this boy.
I'm dying, dying!
Go kill yourself, you piece of shit!
His eyes contained the still images of red lights, stopping in the middle of the dark, bloody, and infinitesimal night that seemed to reach on for many years, thousands, millions. He was in the middle of the galaxy, as his mother bandaged a cigarette to her mouth, her breasts flat and androgynous, her quills dull and never glaring in the green light. That meant go.
Her lips appeared bloody, containing meat she ate just this morning. The sky was bleeding a rough pink against the sky, a silhouette of a finger. The mother's nails, they were wooden, iridescent against the gold lights that told her to slow down, turning to the burning red that caused her to growl and stop.
Sonic's bed was full of beer bottles, from many different brands. Budweiser, Corona, Rolling Rock, Miller Light…always had the wide selection of taste, she did. The mother who was a monster. Her fur so hairy, quilly legs so skinny and small like the cigarettes that clung to her like the bandages on her breasts, she was a sick mother, a mother who wanted to love, but couldn't, and Sonic never learned how to scream. His mother took away his voice years ago. She stored it in a little brown box with a golden key. Never allowed to speak to the mother. Never allowed to speak to the children either. Or his father, who was away on business trips.
The voices were his voice, that was inside his brain, their lips sinking deeper, deeper, into his gray matter…
Stupid little bitch! They screamed.
Her glasses always seemed to fall off the bridge of her nose. Her lip always bloodies it. Dangling off her mouth, the glistening white teeth, she asks questions, Sonic never answers.
The drive took hours. Sonic wanted to go to sleep and never hear his mother talk again.
She encouraged him to believe in the supernatural. That voices are charms inside a man's poultice soul, that fingers are parts of tree branches God made to build humans with sticks and stones, the flesh was kissed by witches, the sex organs are the aftereffect of Adam and Eve. Religious, religious! She was very! Sonic's lids began to drop as he heard her speak about how men don't seem to appreciate her enough, and the bloodlips, they were becoming more odious the more Sonic gazed at them. He imagined roses growing from them, while her eyelashes were petals.
The voices wanted to kill her, but he could never let them. She was an oracle.
They lived in their father's SUV while he was gone. Because they couldn't stand being in the house alone at night.
She traveled to many states while his mother had insomnia.
Tennessee? Been there.
Oregon? Been there.
California? Yes.
Mexico? Maybe. He couldn't remember.
Or was that Texas…
Oklahoma? What a shitty state!
Ohio? The only color Ohio is is gray and white!
Florida? A hurricane happened there and they somehow survived.
Massachusetts? Maybe his only favorite state.
They could've been everywhere except Hawaii and Alaska.
His mother wished her car was a boat too, to travel to Europe, to Asia, Australia, anywhere but the US.
He wished he could travel anywhere but here, but he remained locked in the van, by her mother's long thin fingernails that hid the keys in their individual lock on her painted beauties, as red as her lips. How bloody they were! Full of poppies in her lips, full of disdain!
Sonic continued to whisper, the words insurmountable in their volume, touching his fingers, wondering if they had locks. His green eyes, and his mother's, glittered like the pavement in the street, gold and jade, the colors that would take him to Oz. Or was it the Yellow Brick Road? He sighed as the raindrops littered his screen, and he watched his mother smoke cigarette after cigarette in the cold night with the white spiked moon that continued to shine ever so brighter with his mother's melancholy, her lows ambivalent in her gaze, her hair that was dry and crusted and flaked, her arms lavendered with cuts and scars, her alcohol level twice the legal limit, but she still drove like any sane man would. God bless her, God bless my mother, he said.
You shall never speak an inch of me.
You shall never say my name.
You shall never drink mommy's drink.
You shall never eat mommy's flesh (my dinner. You get food yourself.)
You shall never speak of daddy when he's gone.
You shall never ask questions when mommy's out making money so she can eat and drink.
You entertain yourself. You stay quiet at the back of the car. Let me earn a few dollars for gas money.
He watched them have sex in the car, a man he never known, her mother naked with offensive breasts that protruded out of her bandages and her vagina even worse (he imagined it was so dirty that flowers began to rise from her dirt and filth, in a way to disguise her heinousness), and he felt he couldn't see either. He backed away as the seats jumped, bounced, their gyrating bodies hovering over him, their sweat and semen and juices dripping on his quiet head, his mouth that could never speak any words to the incident that his mother was selling her body just to buy gas and beer and cigarettes, once in a while food. His mother often ate very little except fried food in gas stations and little trinkets of sacks of Cheeto's and Dorito's and pork rinds. Sonic just ate whatever was left, which meant he often went without food for days.
To this day, as he remembered his mother, having sex with mysterious men, driving away from their lonely home that his father paid for, living in the van and sleeping with yellowed cushions as his only friend, his back sprained from the effort of trying to find a comfortable position next to all the moon-lighted beer bottles.
Drank dirty water to stay hydrated. Or several of what was left of her beer's. Sometimes she left some gin ready to be drank with thirsty throats and eager vivacity. He soon grew to love alcohol. It kept him away from the reality of the men. Pointing their fingers at the little child that watched them fuck senselessly, that the man would joke and pay her extra if he could fuck his mouth.
Please don't, mother please don't mother please don't please don't…
He shut his eyes, winced tightly, but nothing came about. His mother told the man to get out of the van and he couldn't fuck her an inch more of his dick. Told him to take his money and shove it up his ass. His mother, the colorful linguist, yet he still wanted to remain blind for the rest of his life. It took away all the scary things, all the men with cat dicks, all the men who wished to have sex with him too.
"Fucking pedophiles! Sick!" She took another swig of whiskey as she dressed up and put the key in the ignition. They were on the road again, and she laughed it off. Sonic wouldn't care if anyone fucked him or not, she said.
Wasn't about him, he repeated. It was status. She didn't want pedophiles taking her blood mixed in with their life. She didn't want them to even stain her and scar her like so many of these other men did. The pedophiles were at the very lowest of her rank, next to rapists.
She was raped a few times. He remembered. He feared he was next, as he lied in the back of the van, holding onto a vodka bottle, drinking whatever he could to forget about the incident entirely.
Nights grew darker. The rain became more celestial, showing more glitters of the street. Green meant go. Yellow meant slow down. Red meant stop. The cigarette was like a fingernail that was oxidized and rusted brown in her mouth, the red beginning to burn away the remnants they had that was once redeemable. Her ashy mouth sucked all of the cigarette until, like a snake, she swallowed her cigarette whole.
A hallucination, he felt. Unless his mother didn't have the money to eat and she was hungry to eat her relics she kept dangling in her car like tourmalines and diamonds, the cases of beer and whiskey and gin lined up, glittering like stars in the night sky, while Sonic had his voice taken from him in a glass jar, his mother inserting holes, the firefly ready to come out. Flames, flames! The fireflies were truly dragons ready to burn down their lives!
Did she have the lock to the box? Or the jar that contained his voice?
He knew she didn't even have it. He kept it away from himself. For his own safety.
The lady, stick-thin, a caricature, her lips like poppies with their black holes, her bitchlids always propped open. The breasts were veined like a nice delicate white cheddar cheese, the blue wine flowing through it.
Sonic's only survival was to drink. Drink away from the pain of the bitch.
He could catch the darkness in his hands. How black, how bloody they seemed to be! His eyes caught onto the stars, the signs made by the streets, and he wished to sleep, as more men came in, waking him with their pendulums swinging against their bodies, their pubics as hairy as his mother. Wanted to take that away, and he caught a dangling cigarette as the voices told him to smoke it, and become part of the majority, like mommy, like her selfless breasts that poked through her shirt when she was ready to prostitute herself, when she believed the bandages didn't make her pure, ready for any man to take her away to Eden.
He triggered the lighter to spark a small flame, and he burnt the cigarette. And he coughed and hacked without a sound, and he let it burn in the back seat.
Burn…
Burn…
Burn…
The voices cried in unison! They saw the mother with her glasses looking at the flames that licked her belongings, carried and tarried her beer bottles that melted with an eerie orange glow. The browns and whites and greens began to blend with their molten tongues, dehydrating the van of all its liquid goods, about to explode, erupt, the gasoline having his mother's van bloodied with the flames, pop! Pop! His mother drove the sleeping babe out, and had blamed him for the fire, as if she knew, as the van exploded and called the police out of their slumbering eyes in a quiet town in Alabama, and he said nothing. There was nothing more he could say anymore in his life. The van, their only home, was gone. They were thousands of miles away from home. They could've died in the fire and have his suffering end. He wished he fell asleep when the flames surrounded him. Die burning and dreaming, wild dreams, curled black dreams as his mind was reduced to ashes. A Jew in a Nazi oven.
It was hours before a single customer arrived. Sonic still wore the dress that Shadow claimed would make him look "presentable". Espressos made his heart race after drinking his third one (to replace the alcohol in his system). The customer wore glasses without frames and was dark, tall, and a shirt that had Link from the Legend of Zelda rescue F. Scott Fitzgerald's wife rather than the princess in the game, along with Link's alcoholism and his mercurial moods. Literary humor combined with videogame humor. He loved it.
Sonic hid in the back of the cafe, hoping the man wouldn't see him. His cheeks burned, as if fire was under his skin, his heart blazing over his sudden embarrassment. The other workers never minded him, as they kept discussing over the summer blockbusters they watched while the man continued to watch them with listless disinterest.
His shoes reminded him of the ones they had in the cartoon version of Alice in Wonderland. The dress was made of lavished silk, the frills feeling light and soft on his touch. He couldn't deny he wanted to work, no matter if his father once said he was always lazy and never did anything around the house except sang and played his instruments. His guitar he had for over ten years still remained with him, and his mother once threatened to break it if he didn't help her out with the baby.
Oh God, the baby.
The man discussed videogames that were released over the years. He claimed he played nothing but Kirby all year, maybe some Mario, and Stone said he needed to play some Call of Duty. A game that was for real men.
His hands shook underneath the pallid cloak of his gloves. Delirium caused his body to experience sickness, the quaking, shaking, the sickness that held him! He haven't had a beer in so long, any alcohol since he answered the ad.
"Sonic?"
It was Mr. Shadow again, his voice sounding like sharp glass in his ears. He knew he was angry, that he wasn't doing his job and cleaning the tables. The sounds of the other workers laughing over the sad nerdy kid's defeat over not knowing the "true videogames" worth playing this year reverberated through the air, and Shadow sighed. "Jesus," he said.
"Jesus…wh-what?"
The world spun around him. It twirled like a ballerina inside a music box, the tinkling of the laughter and the sadness, the Conor Oberst music playing in the speakers, the images of the baseball players and Marilyn Monroe and Manson dancing alongside with him, a dance that wasn't in celebration or joy, but a sorrowful dance as Shadow continued to gaze at him with the bloody eyes and say, "Jesus."
He stood up, the laughter ceasing. He held the vomit in his stomach long enough to go to the tables, with his sea-green rag and clean them of all the coffee and crumbs he could wash away. Shadow's voice continued to reach his ears, the sound of a disgruntled 50-year-old hedgehog who only took the business because his father left him with it and he had no other choice but to take it: "I now see what you are. You got a drinking problem?"
The cafe went silent.
The sad kid took his mocha cappuccino without a thank you or any utterance of a robotic response. He could hear the birds chirping outside in that garish sun, look how happy the little bastards were. The gray bunny that might as well have been the white rabbit chuckled, the giraffe held her mouth delicately as if it would fall to her bosom, and Sonic could only shyly gaze up at him, his body feeling sore already from the rapid washing he did to try to ignore him, but the lack of drinks had weakened him, his mind was feeble and dusty, and he said, "Yes. I…guess you can say I have a bit of a drinking problem. I'll admit it."
He said nothing. He expected the almighty Mr. Shadow to fire him already, but his eyes had the edge of, yes! Yes! Disgust, but Shadow stood without a sense of power, with a sense of compassion for him, he thought maybe Shadow was one of those people who thought they could fix him.
The sad kid walked out of the Mocha Lounge without paying, and none of the workers noticed. It seemed automatic for anyone to dispense coffee for free after someone admitted the truth. Stone once claimed he had a felony for seeing another movie after finishing one, the Man claiming he was stealing. Some have thought the whole concept was ludicrous that they never paid for their lattes and coffees. Even poets stopped in mid-sentence. Brenda said she had an experience in college where she kissed another woman, and they also weren't paid for their soy espressos and their muffins. Some people expected to get something out of the store without having to pay. And Shadow knew this, but those customers never came again, and he knew that was why they were losing business.
Yet, there was no declamation that Sonic was fired. Even when he came to work in a maid outfit, even when he was experiencing delirium, and Shadow told him that "even hobos gotta have jobs. I'm a fucking Salvation Army here," and he could keep working ("but you better work," he said, "cause alcoholic or not, I don't want to hire lazy asses.")
He was both an alcoholic and a lazy ass, so Shadow won the lottery.
It was the afternoon, and no customers had come. Shadow continued to sit in his chair, watching the time go by. The brown walls welcomed him to his lair of shit, as he gazed out into the sunshine, the birds warbling and the sunstenched grass untouched by roads and buildings, the only light he had inside his office that stroked the face of his father. He often turned the picture over, just to ignore his face, his alcoholic, coffee-drinking face. He knew alcoholics when he saw them. And Sonic reminded him too much of his father. It was why he could never get rid of him.
Even if he never seemed to care for him.
The cafe continued to seep of silence into the late evening. He stretched his immaculate dress. No one came through its doors, still.
His breath smelled like whiskey. Even when he hadn't drunk any in a long time.
Stone made more catcalls to him, Brenda laughed and said he needed some stockings to complete the act, but Sonic continued to never mind them. He washed everything he could, even the pictures of the baseball players that grew some dust and had the frames yellowed over the years, and he sat in one of the leather seats as he waited for more potential customers as the afternoon grew into stark and dark night, and he could tell Shadow was beginning to rustle his keys in his pocket of his coat, signifying the end of the day.
A day where everyone learned he was only more of a burden than he really was.
Finally, a customer came.
She smiled like a pearl.
A preteen girl, no more than 13, came to order a hot chocolate, as she thought this place possibly had the best hot chocolates.
Shadow didn't smile back, though it was as infectious as herpes. He said, "So says so many people who came in here and tried them. We wouldn't be called a Mocha Lounge without it."
He was lying through his teeth. In his opinion, the hot chocolate tasted like hot piss from a diabetic with high sugar. But he couldn't bear to tell the truth at this sweet little girl, with her hair as brown as chocolate, her eyes like azurites, her dress pink as early morning with unicorns and rainbows. A sugary sweet girl. A little Lolita worth writing a book about.
Sonic assumed he could brush all the dirt and food particles off the floor and he could be done for the day, his broom taller than he was, seeming to blow away the fragments that the Mocha Lounge used to be, as the little girl pointed to the innocuous hedgehog in a maid dress and asked for his name.
"Hey! What's your name? I can't leave here without your name, cutie!"
Why was she interested in me? He asked. And why did she seem much more childish than a thirteen-year-old ordinarily would act?
He blushed a bright pink, the heat in his cheeks beginning to burn inside him. He smiled too. The girl's grin as she walked over to him and tugged at his arm and ribbons, it was…something he barely experienced in his life.
Immediately, he had fallen to an insurmountable tundra of affection from this little girl. She kissed his nose with lips as light as a butterfly's, she pet him like a house cat on her lap, and she whispered to him secrets. Secrets that he thought he would never know without that little girl loving him, her kisses giving his heart a flare, the toying with his ribbons and frills making him anxious, but her hands felt warm, full of kind intent, curious and childish.
The child may have regressed. Maybe, he thought. Could she bear to face the reality that she had to be put in middle school, had to deal with the growing changes in her body, and soon only cared about other boy's kisses? She didn't want to grow up, he could tell, a child who never had much of a childhood.
He wondered if he had ever done the same thing too, when he was 13.
Even when her hot chocolate was ready, she tiptoed towards Sonic, barely wanting to face her. He was supposed to be a miserable alcoholic trying to get a minimum wage job, he couldn't make any other child happy except for Tails, who was sick right now…who was possibly going to die. He had the touch of death. Necrotic fingers! She continued to dote on him, love him, wonder where he came from, hoping she could make him loved. This nymph from the lakes of Greece, walking with her finny toes and fingers, she caressed his head softly, Shadow watching, the other workers getting ready to leave for the night, as if the girl wasn't of any importance to them. Just another customer. Just another droid to leech off, their own Ma and Pop corporation.
Her hand was tender, small, as she placed it underneath his own, the girl laughing as she twirled his ribbons, kissed him, and pet him. Shadow watched the entire event as he was ready to go out in the cool summer air ready to drive away and leave the shop for another day. It was closing time, but yet he remained watching the girl, with his eyes appearing interested, his full attention on Sonic.
She brushed his rough fur with her hand, yet she mentioned how soft he was. He chuckled, purring slowly, his cheeks glowing brighter the more she sipped her hot cocoa and massaged his head, showering his face with kisses that smelled of chocolate.
He wasn't sure why she grew to like him. Was it the dress? Did it somehow have magical powers to achieve popularity among little girls?
It was 11 PM, as the other workers walked away and were met with the kiss of windy humid nights, but Shadow remained. Sonic remained. And the preteen remained. Shadow never told her it was time for the lounge to close.
"What's your name? I asked you that before, but you never answered."
His cheeks were so bright, he might as well have been Rudolph guiding Santa's sleigh.
"Sonic. My name is Sonic. It's just that…Sonic."
He laughed nervously as Shadow watched from a distance, his gaze seemingly to melt the more the girl had played with him. He had experience in raising Tails after his previous parents died, but he never considered himself good with children. But the more the hours droned by, he felt himself becoming more fatherly, more of a guardian to this girl, as she gave him kisses on his cheeks, petted his head as he desired more by brushing himself on her hand, and she scratched his belly, the hedgehog purring louder. Despite being so embarrassed about his condition and his place in the Mocha Lounge, he liked the attention, and he liked having someone tell him that he was worth it after all, as a girl would always love him, the "cutie patootie" he was.
Midnight soon masked the moon into darkness, and Shadow clutched his keys tightly in his fist as he watched the girl and his employee sleep away in the Mocha Lounge, her close to him, their bodies feeling so relaxed and dreaming, for once in Sonic's life, of wonderful, wistful things, as the skies were colored like a pointillism painting, the golden lights of the city blooming along with the red roses of the stoplights, and the white oleanders of the cars grew to touch the other cars and the pavements, shining so prettily to be eaten by the sun in the morning…
Shadow opened the door and locked away the cafe for the night. He watched the girl and Sonic continue to snooze as the stars danced alongside the building, protecting them from all harm. The lovely little girl, Shadow thought. I swear I've seen her several times in this cafe before…
He ignited his truck, while listening to his Harold Budd CD play "The White Arcades" as he drove down to his lone apartment in New York. He tried to count how many raindrops collected on his windshield, but he stopped at about forty-five. Forty-five was a number he felt satisfied with.
