Videotape

(Yes, I stole Charles' muse and made a weak version of something in his vein)(PS sorry this chews up so much space)

You tell yourself that you’re not crazy, and most days you believe yourself. Your days aren’t really that interesting, or at least you don’t think they are: you wake up, toast a bagel while your coffee dripdripdrips into your mug, and then you’re off to work--an agency that files away reports about UFOs. Most of the people there really are crazy, and compared to them, you feel pretty good about yourself. The only thing that bothers you is that you’ve never been sure whether you were hired by the government or Ernie, the nutjob who runs the office. He hired you, of course, but a lot of the things you signed were all official looking, and maybe you’re really looking for the government and don’t know it yet. Or that’s the lie that you tell yourself to make your job seem more interesting. Usually you eat lunch with Albert and Jane at the Sushi Mart across the parking lot from the little mousetrap office that you work in. Actually, you think of your office as an ant motel because it looks like the ant motel traps, but Albert calls it a mousetrap and you don’t think that arguing with him is worth your time because he’s rather stupid.
Anyway, that’s the boring part of your day. After you get done answering calls from crazy people and writing down stupid reports about the things that they saw in the sky--usually airplanes, you imagine, but never tell anyone this--and pretending to care about the crazy things that you hear about with the crazy people that you work with, after all that you drive home across the desert past the roll-polly balls of weeds and dead animal stuff and work on making your videotape. It’s your pride and joy, though you like to think of it as your magnum opus, because if you’re going to be cliché, you may as well be fancy about it.
You close all your doors and lock them, but you leave your blinds open because the neighbors might wonder what you’re up to if you button up the house every day as soon as you get home from work. Then you turn on the TV in your bedroom and leave it blaring nonsense while you go down into your basement and through the little trapdoor hidden underneath a chest that you cut the bottom out of. Under that is your wine cellar, or it was a wine cellar when you used to live in the house with your mother, when you were a little girl. Now it’s your laboratory, and you make sure to pronounce all the syllables because you think that pretentious-sounding words are amusing.
After you killed your mother, you stuck her body in a barrel that you filled up with liquid nitrogen and insulated with styrofoam that you duct-taped together to keep the cold in. More importantly, you started remodeling the wine cellar and turned it into your laboratory. First you got rid of all the wine, threw out all of the Australian crap that your mother liked and replaced it with more palatable French reds. Then you tiled the walls, floor, and ceiling with little, square, white tiles that you got at the Home Depot before the owner got caught running a kiddie porno ring and had to shut the store down and sell the land to pay off all the neighborhood parents; you thought he was a nice guy, but you only ever got candy from him on Halloween and never talked to him other than that.
Now the laboratory has white fluorescent lights hanging from the ceiling, the barrel with mother’s body in it is set into the floor and covered with a plate of tiles that looks just like the rest of the floor. Then there’s your metal table where you do most of your work, making your video tape. It used to be messy, and you weren’t making much progress until you realized that the cutting worked much better if you kept mother rock hard. The cutting took more time, but if you were patient you found that you could make precise, film-thin slices that would have impressed even Tyler Florence. You still think that he’s cute, but he’s been eating too much of his own food, probably.
Getting the right edging stuff for your videotape was a lot trickier than you thought it might be, especially because of how large your frames needed to be. But you’re bright, you figured it out--you bought a lot of cans of thrown-out film and cut out the pictures--mostly porn, nothing you’re interested in; you could probably sell it by the slide to the neighborhood boys and make a fortune, or you would if it weren’t for the internet--and then mounted your frames in between the edges after you backed each with a thin sheet of plastic and glue to keep everything in place.
It’s hard to tell how much time you’ve spent working in your laboratory on your magnum opus, but it must have been a long time. Every day you spend hours with a ceramic knife, cutting mother into the thinnest of sheets to make into your videotape. You started with mother’s left arm, a few years ago, and finished the whole thing last May, now you’re working on her left leg, to mix things up and keep yourself from getting bored. Her whole body is as solid as a block of granite, so you had to get a power saw to chop her leg off, and now you keep pouring liquid nitrogen on it as you work to keep everything solid and make it easier to cut thinly and cleanly. It’s a good thing that mother lost so much weight when she had cancer, or her thighs would be too thick to fit in your frames; they’re already too big for a normal videotape, but you’ve figured you can break the rules a little. Most videotapes aren’t deep tissue explorations of murdered mothers kept on ice in a retrofitted wine cellar, either.
Your first videotape, the one of mother’s left arm, turned out nicely, you think; you rigged up an old movie projector and watched it, and the picture quality was a bit fuzzy, and you could tell where you didn’t cut through her wrist bones very cleanly, but you got the idea across, at least. It starts at the tips of her fingers, and then the cross sections whiz by and you gradually progress all the way up her arms, watching where her bones and veins and skin shift and dance around as the film rolls. You think that she’s the most animated dead person you’ve ever met, as a joke to yourself. You thought it was clever once, at least.
This morning you woke up and wondered whether you saw the same colors as everyone else. Perhaps what you thought was yellow looked red to Albert or purple to Jane, but you all called it “yellow” for convenience. Perhaps your boss, Ernie, sees green fire. He’s probably crazy enough. You wonder what color your mother thought your hair was; you call it “auburn”, but maybe that doesn’t mean anything beyond pure semantics. Thinking of your mother makes you angry, but only for a little while. You remind yourself of the video tape that you’re making, and you start to feel better. She may have ruined your childhood, but you can’t let that worry you; after you stirred up her brains with a power drill, you don’t worry too much about what mother used to do to you.
Instead of coffee, you drink orange juice today, and feel better than normal. Like you got an extra few hours of sleep, or passed the night without any odd dreams of aliens and videotapes to keep you from truly recouping energy you lost on your magnum opus. So you’re feeling rejuvenated, and you go to work with the idea planted in your cerebellum that maybe you’ll do something interesting, perhaps some whack in Nevada will call you and say that they saw an alien disembowel their dog. And you’ll ask them whether they actually saw the dog being disemboweled, and no, no they didn’t actually see it, but what else could have done that? A chupacabra? No, that would be stupid--everyone knew those didn’t exist. So you’d ask if they had kids, or if there were any kids nearby in the neighborhood, and of course there would be, and you would chuckle and inform them that they might want to have a stern conversation with little Jimmy about how to treat animals.
That happened once, and Ernie had almost fired you, but had to admit that it was pretty funny and you got to keep working the in office. Jane never liked you much after that; she was convinced that it had been an alien, but Ernie hadn’t let her file a report about it. He trusted your judgment, and Jane resented you for that. Nothing interesting happened today, at least not with the crazy people who called the office; all of those calls were rather pedestrian--someone saw a weird light in the sky and you explained that it was probably an airplane, or maybe a shooting star. A boy had heard something tapping at his window for the last week and his parents wouldn’t believe that he was seeing girl or maybe even another boy, but you were pretty sure that’s what was going on.
There was a new guy working in the office; he was a replacement for Bill, who had died at seventy-eight a month ago. He was cute and his name was Mark and you talked to him a little and kept all your weight on your right leg because you were nervous at forgot that it made your knee hurt to put all your weight on one leg for a long time. You made him laugh a little and he asked if he could eat with you and Jane and Albert tomorrow and of course you told him that he could.
So that night you tried to work on your videotape, but you couldn’t focus because you kept thinking about Mark, and then your mother, and you had such a hard time keeping the two of them separate that you mixed up all of your thoughts and got confused and angry and sad all at the same time. You ended up remembering too much about mother and that just made you more angry. It felt like she was standing over your shoulder, reminding you that you were ugly and stupid and worthless and if you kept hanging out with Ernie you’d end up being a stupid, pregnant, good-for-nothing waste and she’d be damned if she let her daughter turn out like that. She had been standing over your shoulder just like that when you had to call Ernie and tell him that you couldn’t hang out with him any more, and it almost hurt worse that he didn’t really care, and that he had better, prettier girls to be around, and he thought you were a stupid bitch. Mother heard all of that and agreed with you, so you tried to punch her and she had caught your wrist like her hand was a bear-trap, and then she slapped you and she might as well have taken a bunch of needles and ripped open your cheek.
And that made you think that maybe Mark would be like Ernie, and maybe you shouldn’t even try to be nice around him. But that would be doing just what mother said--that you were useless, a coward. No, you’d go to lunch with him tomorrow and try to forget that you had mixed up what you thought about him with what you thought about your mother. You spent a long time trying to sort that out, but something about him reminded you of mother, or what mother used to be like, before she became a bitch. It was strange, and you couldn’t quite figure it out, so you went to sleep.
The next morning you spent an extra ten minute in front a mirror in your bathroom, admiring your figure and trying to judge what clothes made you look the best. Your hips were nice, you thought, but your boobs were a little small, though it wasn’t like you were flat. You had a nice face, which was the most important, you decided, and so you added a little makeup to make your eyes look nicer. You wore a blouse instead of a sweatshirt, but you decided to stick with the jeans that you usually wore, in case somebody wondered why you were all dressed up.
Lunch with Mark was nice, and you talked to him the whole time and made Jane and Albert feel a little out of place, though they did the same thing to you a year ago when they went out for a few weeks. And when lunch was done you felt lighter than you had since before mother had started to yell at you all the time, and you walked next to mark and kept talking to him and admired the way that the sun crawled up his hair and out over his eyes.
“Have you ever wondered whether we all see the same things,” you asked him as you walked, and he looked at you a little nonplused, so you elaborated for him, “You know, like maybe I see a car I I say ‘That car is blue’, but you see the same car and it looks to you what the color ‘green’ looks like to me, but you’ve been taught that color was called ‘blue’, even thought I would call it ‘green’...” You bit your lip because you knew that you were rambling and not making any sense and now he probably thought you were weird and you’d gone and ruined everything.
But Mark just laughed and nodded and said that Yes, he’d thought about the same thing a lot, especially when he was younger, but he hadn’t really had a hole lot of time to think about things like that lately, but it certainly was interesting.
You exploded into a smile and skipped a few paces as you walked back to work and thought for a minute that you might be in love. But then you thought of your mother and got angry again and wondered briefly what it would be like to stick a drill into Mark’s skull. You felt bad, thinking like that; it wasn’t nice, but you were still curious, in an angry sort of way.
A few days later you asked Mark to come and watch a movie at your house and he said Oh, that would be fun, when should I come over? And you floundered for a bit because you hadn’t expected him to accept the offer, but you got your words back under you and managed to say that seven o’clock ought to be a good time, and that you would make pizza if he wanted, or he could eat before he came over, it didn’t really matter.
So you went home from work and were so nervous that you could hardly hold the brush to paint your nails and had to give up because you were just going to get polish all over your fingers and then they would look bloody and Mark wouldn’t like that. And you kept looking at the knives and thinking about them and what you were doing down in your laboratory, working on your videotape, and you wondered whether you would ever be able to show your videotape to Mark, but of course you wouldn’t, not even if you got married, because people go to jail for things like that. So you tried to think about the knives instead, but then you started taking them out and holding them, just feeling their weight in your hand and you got scared that you might use them, so you put them away. It was already past five and you were terrified that you would be a nervous wreck, and all the time your nerves were building up and up and up on one another in a feedback cycle that you had to break before you had a breakdown, so you went down to your laboratory.
You were almost done slicing up mother’s leg and had already started to mount some of the frames because the only bits left were the knee and they were the hardest to cut through and you weren’t sure you were strong enough to get the knife through all of the bone. But you worked on it and kept an eye on your watch because in half an hour you would need to shower and get ready so that you wouldn’t smell like mother and nitrogen and knives with rotting blood on them. Cutting away, you almost got a good, thin slice off, but then your mind wandered and you thought about sticking your tongue in Mark’s mouth and holding him so tightly to you, and then your knife slid off of mother’s kneecap and took a chunk out of your thumb.
In a whirl of blood and curses you wrapped your thumb up in a rag you used to clean up whenever mother leaked, and you put her and the frames away in the barrel of nitrogen and headed upstairs to patch up your thumb and shower, and before you hardly knew it, Mark was knocking at the door because it was dark and time for him to be meeting you.
Though your nerves weren’t really any better, you had put a pink BandAid on your finger, and that made you feel a bit better, a bit silly. But you had the courage to open the door and smile and welcome him in, and for a moment you forgot all about the pizza and what movie you were supposed to be watching because he was smiling.
“Oh hi, make yourself comfortable,” you said like a robot, but Mark didn’t seem to notice and you drew in a shaky breath and headed back to the kitchen to cut the pizza and put it in the oven. Mark was talking to you, about nothing important, from the living room while you made the pizza, and you were so scared that you might screw something up, with the pizza or the conversation. You were never that good at multitasking.
Somehow you managed to get the pizza into the oven, but as you were going to put the knife away, something funny happened: you couldn’t let go of it, no matter how hard you tried. The knife just stuck in your hand like it was happy to be there and your mind raced like a rabbit chased by a dog, running round and round a fenced enclosure until its heart went pop and it fell over dead. You had seen a rabbit do that once, and you wondered whether your heart would pop. But it was Mark that was making you so nervous, and maybe if you just popped his heart with the knife, everything would be better. Mother was certainly much nicer frozen solid that she ever had been when she would never let you out of the house, never let you talk to boys, never do anything but learn to cook and sew--and neither of them very well. You stood there for a long time with the knife in your hand while your mouth kept talking to Mark without your brain paying attention to what you were saying.
You certainly liked Mark a lot, but you had liked your mother once too, and that was the problem. You were never sure why she had become such a bitch, but she had, and it hurt, and then you hadn’t had any choice but to stick the drill in her head while she was sleeping, because she hadn’t been feeding you much any more, and she never let you out of the house, not in the last month at least. Mark could turn out just the same. He scared you as much as she did, but not in the same way. And that’s how you managed to put the knife down. He scared you because he liked you, and you liked him; mother had only started to scare you after she stopped liking you. So you put the knife down and hopped over the couch and sat next to Mark and ruffled his hair a little as the movie started, and you had a good time while he was over and you were a little sad to see him go, but at least you weren’t terrified any more.
And when he finally was leaving, he said, “I think you were right, about the colors. But I don’t think it’s a bad thing.”
And of course you agreed, No, no, it wasn’t a bad thing at all to be a little mixed up about things like that.”
“Not mixed up,” he said, “just a different perspective.” And he smiled and you hugged him suddenly when he was half turned to leave and you both laughed and said goodnight and you felt the best you had as long as you could remember.
You were so excited that you couldn’t sleep, so you sat in your laboratory, piecing together your videotape and humming to yourself. Mother didn’t seem to mind the music.

~Sam McLaughlin