zed
[dormitory fiction: Actress Murdered]
When I was twelve or thirteen I thought turning off my brain was a way to evoke spells. I would wait until Mom was sleeping and let a trance carry me into the backyard. This moon-world caressed my phosphorescent skin-clothes shed and bundled near the fence. Playing the part of an ancient king I laid face down and rubbed against the planet. She turned under me humming faint water sounds.
A grave is a hole made by a life’s worth of fuck.
I dropped the actress, My Mother, into the pit and went to work. I am twenty-seven now.
As the news would have it: An upcoming actress met a tragic end in her house in the hills. A note purportedly written by her stated that disturbances in their personal lives drove her and her lover Carl to suicide, but police believe he stabbed Mom to death. Then he ate one canned peach, mixed a drink, and checked his email before ending his own life.
Things were handled with tweezers and put in plastic zip lock bags: a bloodstained dagger, some cyanide powder packed in paper and the suicide note written on the return envelope for the electric bill.
That’s about all it took because cops, journalists, and the readers of the paper are all people. People are 99% idiots lazy enough to come to the first and most obvious conclusions. Newspapers are thin and blow down this street until they come to a chain link fence where they make a temporary skin.
A couple of knife wounds were pretty deep, one near here left shoulder and another on the left side of abdomen. The other five were not more than scratch marks, as if halfway through the killer’s attention was distracted by something on television. The room was not in disarray to indicate a struggle, but the mattress was soaked with blood.
…As was the blanket, and her dress, and the carpet, and the earth too, when the house, so heavy with blood, cracked open and swallowed them.
The actress had returned home after the funeral of her husband, a real estate salesman who hung himself from a crossbeam in the garage. The phone beside her bed rang on occasion, but her dead hands never lifted the receiver because her dead ears could only hear the hullabaloo and shuffle of other newly dead and clueless spirits fragile as moths.
Officer Harvey Reynolds used to bowl with Mom back before she pursued acting. He said, “With no one responding, we forced open the door and found, uh well, the two corpses.”
Then who or what did I bury? They were each as long and heavy as a dead person wrapped in a bloody blanket. Whose blood is that all over the backseat of Mom’s Hyundai?
The car is parked inside an abandoned sawmill in Calaveras County. I removed the battery and license plates, and washed the seat with gasoline. I would have set it on fire, but that would have gathered attention. I’m hoping the vehicle gets picked clean by teenagers who go in there out of drunken boredom. If this were a movie it would drive back to my front door and honk it’s horn like a lazy visitor. I would be married to it with handcuffs and a priest blessing me with the rights of silence.
Since it’s no movie the car just rusts, until the color of old blood erases it in a landscape of rust and dust and what the papers like to call “lost dreams.”
Clad in a dress made of a patchwork of jeans the actress was lying on her back. Carl lay beside her with his head resting on her lap and his left hand on her kneecap, the nails tinged a grayish blue, his rum and coke spilt on the floor. There are no mentions of a third party and by now, what with the confusion over the bodies and all, I’m wondering if I was really there.
Maybe I killed another couple, a woman who was just a lady in the hills that no one at all would care about and no one would call to see if she was alright, except maybe that man who was there with her, and now he’s dead too, so their house will remain as still as an old saw mill. Or maybe that’s what a lost dream is: a poison cocktail spilt on a low-pile powder-blue carpet.
If the police did find this other woman, would they care? Their hands are full of the important deaths of actors and actresses, and the relatives of actresses.
The mother and brother of an Oscar-winning actress were found murdered at their home in Chicago only yesterday.
Police confirmed two people had been shot dead but did not identify them. The neighbors however had all the 411 and spoke, almost compulsively, to anyone who would ask.
The actress was not hurt, her bodyguard said. It is unclear whether she was even in the house. One neighbor said the actress was never in the house, because the actress never really existed. These people were only posing as her relatives to give the story of her life credibility. She was nothing more than CG and the occasional tabloid gossip. The “mother” and “brother” were killed because they knew too much about (this is where the story dissolves into supposition and conspiracy theories) …a fire at Paramount warehouses that destroyed a vast amount of film stock and props used in many beloved classics... (and so forth).
A model and actress who appeared in music videos was found murdered near her west Tennessee home yesterday. Originally from the city of Bartlett, she was last seen Sunday, March 8, buying toiletries at Walgreen’s. Her body was discovered late Tuesday afternoon in a field in Lakeland, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis. Detectives went to the home of her lover Carlos and had not even gotten as far as the front door when they heard the pop of an automatic. Carlos had shot himself in the head. A note he had written in her blood was now also splattered with his own.
The note asked, “When I am sleeping, does the earth’s rotation play into my dreams? When I lay my head in her lap, do those dreams crackle with Holiday Inn neon and CG effects? When she is buried, is she still a wonderful actress?” The note was unsigned and presumed to be unfinished. Police had to pry it from the dead man’s grip. A voice down the hall faded and was nothing.
Police suspect her live-in partner, who committed suicide. Both bodies were found in a single-room flat. Both bodies are missing.
The missing body stabbed her to death and then committed suicide by driving into a poison, I mean frozen, lake. The police found a suicide note, purportedly written by the missing body’s mother in her own blood, which said: "We have decided to commit suicide since people are fucking assholes who will never recognize the love between an actress and a being who is not wholly human but also not without human feeling, emotion and desires."
It went on, “also I started neglecting him after my successful debut film. I was probably fucking that gap-toothed Mexican director. I always came home late and I think they weren’t even shooting anymore, you know? Like, my sister told me films are usually shot in two or three weeks and it’s been two months already!!!”
Her parents deny that she ever existed. Though one neighbor claims that they had acknowledged her existence up until she became an anchor in a television channel. Her parents say that girl was another daughter, one who since has moved to the hills.
We were watching Holiday Inn when I heard the first shot and went to the window to see what happened. I saw a woman running out toward the empty field beyond the parking lot and would only later learn that she was an aspiring actress and model who, like so many others before her, had moved from Arizona to southern California in pursuit of the Hollywood dream.
Friends grew worried in March when they couldn't reach her for a few days. They called her mother in Tucson. Her mother called the Santa Monica police. Police found her dead inside her apartment in a field.
We turned the television off and went downstairs. We ducked behind the cars and once at the edge of the field crawled on our bellies through the tall weeds toward the sound of her muffled screams.
Why didn’t we just phone the police? Neighbors will tell you we have something to hide: nothing related to the murder of that poor woman, but stuff we don’t want police poking their noses into. It’s not true. My lover is a nice guy. He’s never even lied on tax reports. Frankly, our lives are pretty dull. Even the sex is nothing special, not like all the perverse stuff you find out there these days, and anyway we’re not even having sex anymore except on very, very rare occasions, usually sparked by heavy drinking. No law against that, is there?
Police also would not disclose whether Mom’s apartment, I mean the actress’ apartment, had been broken into, which would give clues as to if she knew her assailant and opened the door for him …or her. They also refused to say whether she had been sexually assaulted.
"We have made no arrests in this case nor do we have any suspects or persons of interest at this time."
According to neighbors, Mom has been dating a guy from Costco for two years and they had broken up about six months before her slaying, but remained friends. It is unclear whether she had a new boyfriend.
There was blood in the parking lot as well as on the wall outside our apartment. Police asked routine questions. We told them we were watching a DVD of Holiday Inn and that, what with all the musical numbers, we hadn’t heard a thing. I looked at the place where you can see her hand print in blood on the stucco wall about six feet to the left of our front door. I shivered and said, “I used to see her buying milk and cigarettes at the corner store now and then, and I knew she was an actress but I never let on that I knew. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it, you know, since she was a neighbor and all. It’s just awful.”
The police never came back so I guess that answer satisfied them.
Do I feel guilty for withholding information? I do. I feel even more ashamed however over all the messy business that would have been aired in public had I come clean-in that sense the neighbors are right. My lover and I aren't hiding anything, just me. He doesn’t have clue one. No one but her and I knew we were mother and son for example, and now she’s dead.
Found hanging from a shower rod last Wednesday, the 5-foot-2 actress, who was my mother, had been sedated, then dragged to the downtown apartment she used as an office, and positioned in the shower to make her death look like a suicide. The killer did an alright job with the body I guess because so far the medical examiner's office has not yet ruled whether the death was a homicide or a suicide. But he screwed up in some other areas and police are remaining hesitant to label the case a suicide because A. no note was found and B. sneaker prints that didn't match Mom's shoes there in the bathtub.
Her fake son, a guy my age who is also an actor (aspiring actor), found the body. He came by her office to use her Internet because his computer was down. She was in the bathroom, all grey and dangling. I heard he puked
He released a statement to the media on Monday night:
"Mom's senseless death is devastating to me and our friends. We are incredibly grateful to the New York City Police Department for their dedication, professionalism and tenacity in following up on every lead in this case. We appreciate the outpouring of support we've received. Her fans and the film community knew Mom as an award-winning actor, screenwriter and director, but her most enduring legacy is as a caring and wonderful mother. To those closest to her, she was the best mother and friend anyone could ask for."
After reading that I was the one who felt like puking.
When anyone asked me if I remembered my mom, I had to shake my head. “Oh no,” I would lie, “I was so young when she died, too young.” They had found me there, only four-years-old, with my head in the lap of the dead woman. Clever paperwork had been forged to make her appear to be my mother.
My real mother, the actress, puts out her cigarette in the freshly turned soil, picks up a shovel, and either helps me bury a total stranger, or helps me bury her suicide lover, or helps me bury her lover that maybe she but more likely I murdered, or smashes my skull with a firm down swing.
If the later, I can’t say what followed.
When I was twelve or thirteen I thought turning off my brain was a way to evoke spells. I would wait until Mom was sleeping and let a trance carry me into the backyard. This moon-world caressed my phosphorescent skin-clothes shed and bundled near the fence. Playing the part of an ancient king I laid face down and rubbed against the planet. She turned under me humming faint water sounds.
A grave is a hole made by a life’s worth of fuck.
I dropped the actress, My Mother, into the pit and went to work. I am twenty-seven now.
As the news would have it: An upcoming actress met a tragic end in her house in the hills. A note purportedly written by her stated that disturbances in their personal lives drove her and her lover Carl to suicide, but police believe he stabbed Mom to death. Then he ate one canned peach, mixed a drink, and checked his email before ending his own life.
Things were handled with tweezers and put in plastic zip lock bags: a bloodstained dagger, some cyanide powder packed in paper and the suicide note written on the return envelope for the electric bill.
That’s about all it took because cops, journalists, and the readers of the paper are all people. People are 99% idiots lazy enough to come to the first and most obvious conclusions. Newspapers are thin and blow down this street until they come to a chain link fence where they make a temporary skin.
A couple of knife wounds were pretty deep, one near here left shoulder and another on the left side of abdomen. The other five were not more than scratch marks, as if halfway through the killer’s attention was distracted by something on television. The room was not in disarray to indicate a struggle, but the mattress was soaked with blood.
…As was the blanket, and her dress, and the carpet, and the earth too, when the house, so heavy with blood, cracked open and swallowed them.
The actress had returned home after the funeral of her husband, a real estate salesman who hung himself from a crossbeam in the garage. The phone beside her bed rang on occasion, but her dead hands never lifted the receiver because her dead ears could only hear the hullabaloo and shuffle of other newly dead and clueless spirits fragile as moths.
Officer Harvey Reynolds used to bowl with Mom back before she pursued acting. He said, “With no one responding, we forced open the door and found, uh well, the two corpses.”
Then who or what did I bury? They were each as long and heavy as a dead person wrapped in a bloody blanket. Whose blood is that all over the backseat of Mom’s Hyundai?
The car is parked inside an abandoned sawmill in Calaveras County. I removed the battery and license plates, and washed the seat with gasoline. I would have set it on fire, but that would have gathered attention. I’m hoping the vehicle gets picked clean by teenagers who go in there out of drunken boredom. If this were a movie it would drive back to my front door and honk it’s horn like a lazy visitor. I would be married to it with handcuffs and a priest blessing me with the rights of silence.
Since it’s no movie the car just rusts, until the color of old blood erases it in a landscape of rust and dust and what the papers like to call “lost dreams.”
Clad in a dress made of a patchwork of jeans the actress was lying on her back. Carl lay beside her with his head resting on her lap and his left hand on her kneecap, the nails tinged a grayish blue, his rum and coke spilt on the floor. There are no mentions of a third party and by now, what with the confusion over the bodies and all, I’m wondering if I was really there.
Maybe I killed another couple, a woman who was just a lady in the hills that no one at all would care about and no one would call to see if she was alright, except maybe that man who was there with her, and now he’s dead too, so their house will remain as still as an old saw mill. Or maybe that’s what a lost dream is: a poison cocktail spilt on a low-pile powder-blue carpet.
If the police did find this other woman, would they care? Their hands are full of the important deaths of actors and actresses, and the relatives of actresses.
The mother and brother of an Oscar-winning actress were found murdered at their home in Chicago only yesterday.
Police confirmed two people had been shot dead but did not identify them. The neighbors however had all the 411 and spoke, almost compulsively, to anyone who would ask.
The actress was not hurt, her bodyguard said. It is unclear whether she was even in the house. One neighbor said the actress was never in the house, because the actress never really existed. These people were only posing as her relatives to give the story of her life credibility. She was nothing more than CG and the occasional tabloid gossip. The “mother” and “brother” were killed because they knew too much about (this is where the story dissolves into supposition and conspiracy theories) …a fire at Paramount warehouses that destroyed a vast amount of film stock and props used in many beloved classics... (and so forth).
A model and actress who appeared in music videos was found murdered near her west Tennessee home yesterday. Originally from the city of Bartlett, she was last seen Sunday, March 8, buying toiletries at Walgreen’s. Her body was discovered late Tuesday afternoon in a field in Lakeland, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis. Detectives went to the home of her lover Carlos and had not even gotten as far as the front door when they heard the pop of an automatic. Carlos had shot himself in the head. A note he had written in her blood was now also splattered with his own.
The note asked, “When I am sleeping, does the earth’s rotation play into my dreams? When I lay my head in her lap, do those dreams crackle with Holiday Inn neon and CG effects? When she is buried, is she still a wonderful actress?” The note was unsigned and presumed to be unfinished. Police had to pry it from the dead man’s grip. A voice down the hall faded and was nothing.
Police suspect her live-in partner, who committed suicide. Both bodies were found in a single-room flat. Both bodies are missing.
The missing body stabbed her to death and then committed suicide by driving into a poison, I mean frozen, lake. The police found a suicide note, purportedly written by the missing body’s mother in her own blood, which said: "We have decided to commit suicide since people are fucking assholes who will never recognize the love between an actress and a being who is not wholly human but also not without human feeling, emotion and desires."
It went on, “also I started neglecting him after my successful debut film. I was probably fucking that gap-toothed Mexican director. I always came home late and I think they weren’t even shooting anymore, you know? Like, my sister told me films are usually shot in two or three weeks and it’s been two months already!!!”
Her parents deny that she ever existed. Though one neighbor claims that they had acknowledged her existence up until she became an anchor in a television channel. Her parents say that girl was another daughter, one who since has moved to the hills.
We were watching Holiday Inn when I heard the first shot and went to the window to see what happened. I saw a woman running out toward the empty field beyond the parking lot and would only later learn that she was an aspiring actress and model who, like so many others before her, had moved from Arizona to southern California in pursuit of the Hollywood dream.
Friends grew worried in March when they couldn't reach her for a few days. They called her mother in Tucson. Her mother called the Santa Monica police. Police found her dead inside her apartment in a field.
We turned the television off and went downstairs. We ducked behind the cars and once at the edge of the field crawled on our bellies through the tall weeds toward the sound of her muffled screams.
Why didn’t we just phone the police? Neighbors will tell you we have something to hide: nothing related to the murder of that poor woman, but stuff we don’t want police poking their noses into. It’s not true. My lover is a nice guy. He’s never even lied on tax reports. Frankly, our lives are pretty dull. Even the sex is nothing special, not like all the perverse stuff you find out there these days, and anyway we’re not even having sex anymore except on very, very rare occasions, usually sparked by heavy drinking. No law against that, is there?
Police also would not disclose whether Mom’s apartment, I mean the actress’ apartment, had been broken into, which would give clues as to if she knew her assailant and opened the door for him …or her. They also refused to say whether she had been sexually assaulted.
"We have made no arrests in this case nor do we have any suspects or persons of interest at this time."
According to neighbors, Mom has been dating a guy from Costco for two years and they had broken up about six months before her slaying, but remained friends. It is unclear whether she had a new boyfriend.
There was blood in the parking lot as well as on the wall outside our apartment. Police asked routine questions. We told them we were watching a DVD of Holiday Inn and that, what with all the musical numbers, we hadn’t heard a thing. I looked at the place where you can see her hand print in blood on the stucco wall about six feet to the left of our front door. I shivered and said, “I used to see her buying milk and cigarettes at the corner store now and then, and I knew she was an actress but I never let on that I knew. I didn’t want to make a big deal about it, you know, since she was a neighbor and all. It’s just awful.”
The police never came back so I guess that answer satisfied them.
Do I feel guilty for withholding information? I do. I feel even more ashamed however over all the messy business that would have been aired in public had I come clean-in that sense the neighbors are right. My lover and I aren't hiding anything, just me. He doesn’t have clue one. No one but her and I knew we were mother and son for example, and now she’s dead.
Found hanging from a shower rod last Wednesday, the 5-foot-2 actress, who was my mother, had been sedated, then dragged to the downtown apartment she used as an office, and positioned in the shower to make her death look like a suicide. The killer did an alright job with the body I guess because so far the medical examiner's office has not yet ruled whether the death was a homicide or a suicide. But he screwed up in some other areas and police are remaining hesitant to label the case a suicide because A. no note was found and B. sneaker prints that didn't match Mom's shoes there in the bathtub.
Her fake son, a guy my age who is also an actor (aspiring actor), found the body. He came by her office to use her Internet because his computer was down. She was in the bathroom, all grey and dangling. I heard he puked
He released a statement to the media on Monday night:
"Mom's senseless death is devastating to me and our friends. We are incredibly grateful to the New York City Police Department for their dedication, professionalism and tenacity in following up on every lead in this case. We appreciate the outpouring of support we've received. Her fans and the film community knew Mom as an award-winning actor, screenwriter and director, but her most enduring legacy is as a caring and wonderful mother. To those closest to her, she was the best mother and friend anyone could ask for."
After reading that I was the one who felt like puking.
When anyone asked me if I remembered my mom, I had to shake my head. “Oh no,” I would lie, “I was so young when she died, too young.” They had found me there, only four-years-old, with my head in the lap of the dead woman. Clever paperwork had been forged to make her appear to be my mother.
My real mother, the actress, puts out her cigarette in the freshly turned soil, picks up a shovel, and either helps me bury a total stranger, or helps me bury her suicide lover, or helps me bury her lover that maybe she but more likely I murdered, or smashes my skull with a firm down swing.
If the later, I can’t say what followed.