Woom

by Duncan Ralston

Some places hold the pain in their walls, in the carpet snags, in the cracks of the ceiling and chinks in the baseboards.

"Hello, Mom," he said to the empty room. "It's been a long time."

Wut

This room was where it all started, he thought. Fitting that it should end here, too.

His sticky mouth tasted like a dog's asshole.

?????

He examined her body with clinical detachment: a gynecologist's gaze. He was neither aroused, nor repulsed. She was merely a vessel. A thing to be filled and then discarded.

"My mother died in this room," Angel told her,

"Do you think... places... absorb bad things?"

I think they hold on to bad things, the way people hold on to memories. Grief. Pain. Disease. Addiction.

"When something... carries... something else, for a long period of time, do you think it remembers it? Do you think it's possible it absorbs a part of it, on an atomic level?"

Your girl here, she look like kaka—no offense."

Lol

there were twenty-seven bags in the sink waiting to be cleaned and swallowed again.

Wash, rinse, repeat. Wash, rinse, repeat. That was his mantra now.

He fell back on his ass, and the squishy, purplish thing plopped down wetly on the carpet.

Is that even possible??????

His wife, who fell into a deep depression, changed its name to the Lonely Motel before hanging herself in Room 6 in the fall of 1980.

"Do the closets have clothes hangers?" she asked him.

I'm not hurting him, I'll be saving him,

Once her two hours were up, the desk clerk came into the woom—room," Angel corrected

This was my pussy whisperer.

Lol

He suddenly realized the similarity between the words womb and tomb wasn't a coincidence.

"That was you, wasn't it? The man in the story?"

The more I talked about it, the less power it had over me."

"That doesn't invalidate it," Angel said. "There's no statute of limitations on pain."

"I need to feel whole. For the part of me they took away."

All of this made me the perfect man for Beth Chastain, but I didn't know it then.

when I visited her in prison.

Lol wat

"I love you, my angel," she said, and the music faded away, and then I was out.

Bruh

I'd spoiled her half-baked plan to turn me into a mannequin, to make me smooth all over the way he was,

I'd been mutilated.

"To me, Shyla. I'm going to squeeze my head into your vagina, and you're going to birth me."

He would emerge from her an Angel.

He'd raped her. Raped her with his head.