Make a Wish - A short horror tale.

God, the things I did for her.

I remember that weirdo Halloween party she took me to, and I remember how sweetly she convinced me to go in drag. "Your features are so fine" she said "no one will know the difference".
To my dismay, she was right. A drunk guy dressed up as what he truly believed was a knock-out vampire even tried to buy a threesome with us. I punched his lights out as soon as he got close to her and everybody else kept their distance from us for the rest of the night. But we had fun, and I would have done anything for her.

I loved to see her smile and I loved the glow mischief brought to her deep honey-colored eyes. That night we went home absolutely drunk on Jack and Johnnie and made love on the back seat of my Tahoe, right in our own driveway. Her black fingernails had been specially polished for that night. She had filed them down to a sharp point, I guess to reinforce the whole vampiric role we were supposed to be playing. I was no vampire vixen. I was just her lover, playing along. My back hurt like hell with all the scratches for the best part of the next week, but every time sweat stung them at work, I thought of her and I was grateful.

I had never been really attracted to the whole goth act. I thought it was a cheap way to get attention, the last resource of mediocre kiddies who wish to be someone or "transcend" without much effort. They claimed they were "lovers of the dark" because it made them different, but there were hundreds of them wherever I went. The autoshop I was a techie at was located downtown Tucson, almost next door to a bunch of clubs and stores for darkie folk, and it was fun to see them going in and out, exactly like watching a ten-second loop of a cheesy vampire movie: all of them looking exactly the same.
Then I saw her and, God, I wished I were one of the acne ridden dorks that were with her. Her stride was that of a young girl, but elegant as Helen´s must have been. She only wore make-up around her eyes, the left one decorated with a symbol I had seen etched on a Zippo lighter, the Eye of Whoras or Whorus or something. Egyptian shit. When she saw me across the street she smiled more like mocking me than out of attraction. And she had a reason. I was doing an oil change under a car and had overlooked to put the portable drain to catch the waste. The oil ran slick and black as old blood in a big puddle on the floor as I was looking at her. I only got back to my senses when Manny came to my bay and slapped me out of bliss. She was still looking at me, and her friends were cracking up in laughter. Fuckers.
That night, when we were closing the bays, a black Lexus pulled into the parking lot, with the silhouette of a female´s head behind the wheel. "Yeah, right" I thought. "Too late, hun, the compressors are down. You´ll have to come tomorrow". I walked towards the car to let her know that our hourly was from 7 to 7 and stopped dead on my tracks when I saw her white leg clad in a pointy leather boot slide slowly from the gloom inside. The heel touched the pavement without making a sound, before the second wonderfully shaped leg peaked out followed by the most glorious set of thighs I´d ever seen. I was nearly expecting ZZ Top´s Ford Roadster to pull in right beside it. Then her head dawned in all its beauty and I was certain I would turn to stone right there. And maybe I should have.
"Hello" she said. "I have a flat tire, and I´m on my way to work. Can you help me?"
"Hmm..." I mumbled. "Look... the compressors are off, we have no air for the tools."
After a long silence and a soothing dive into her gorgeous eyes I offered to take her car inside the shop and leave it there for the next day, and to take her to work on my truck. She accepted and we remained together for the rest of my life. I remember staring at her the whole way to the strip club she worked at. She had looked younger the first time I saw her, but now, with the exaggerated makeup and hair-do, the high heel boots and the teasing vinyl that was the main matter of nearly all her clothes it was harder to tell. She moved into my apartment the next Monday and we became the shadow of each other. I never asked her about her job, or made any comments about it, but she was always exceptionally perceptive and quit two months after moving in with me. She must have seen through my "cool guy" attitude and found out I wasn’t quite comfortable with other men touching her. Plus, she knows how to do many other things. She became a web-designer afterward and we both erased her stripper days from our minds. I don´t even think she needed to do it, I suspect she did it just for the hell of it. I never knew how long she did it, how she started, hell, I don´t even know if she was born here. But I never cared.
Tonight, here in the gloom of her laundry room waiting for her to come home so I can put my blood and rot stained palm on her I wish I had asked more questions. Not that I think anything would be different, not even wishing it was. But I now realize how little I knew about her. I mean really knew. I should have asked more questions. Or maybe I just needed to pay more attention.
Stripper she was no more, but she never stopped being a weirdo. She had all these books on magic, magick (is there a difference?), spells and all kinds of bullshit. She always talked about this Lester Crowling (is it correct?) guy who wrote a book about this Thelma woman, and the book said that sex was magical and that you could achieve anything if you made a wish every time you had an orgasm. Like a ritual or something. It started to piss me off how I had to wait till she performed strange movements and even weirder chants every time we made love, but when she told me that it was like foreplay to her and that it got her even hornier, I was very happy to take part in the charade. Anything for her. I tasted her blood and let her taste mine. I smeared myself in strange smelling potions and I made an ass out of myself trying to pronounce her chants, but those were still the happiest days of my life.
Work was always fierce. All kinds of old farts coming to the shop in their Buicks were my bread and butter. People went to that fucking shop like flies go to a turd. But I liked it. Hard labor is the measure of man, my old man always told me. Plus, the pay is very good, specially for a young and single ASE certified mechanic. I was the youngest of the crew and was already pulling over 5 g´s in a good month. Not bad. But I had work on my mind all the time, even when I was with my princess. Every time we made love and climaxed at the same time, she asked me to make a wish, and every time I wished for something work related. "Please, help me finish that fuckin´old Triumph by Friday. Please, make the tranny for that Camaro arrive on time. Please, put a brain in German car engineers´ heads. Even a small one." I never wondered what she was wishing for. Not once.
Despite being only 21 when I met her I had already had my way around women. I had even lived with two before. Crackheads. I never got married, though. From what I´ve heard, marriage sounds to me like a BMW... sure, it´s pretty when it’s new, but then it turns out to be an overpriced piece of shit that you can’t seem to get rid of. My point is, it was with her that I realized I had never loved before. She was perfect... still is, from what I´ve seen so far. This place, even without her, has a scent that really transports me and makes me forget for a fraction of a second the caked mud on my teeth. I feel a faint sting of nostalgic sadness when I see new dresses, skirts and thongs and g-strings she never wore for me. You were one lucky bastard... at least until a few moments ago...
Whenever my job gave us a chance, we traveled. We used to go down to Mexico a lot. I have family there, but never really got to visit them. We went mostly to small villages in the south that she said she had read about. My baby, always reading. Does she do that anymore? She had her palm read with every fortune teller we ran into, we visited tiny obscure coffee shops where she disappeared for half an hour with the local tarot reader while I sipped my coffee, which she always ordered. All kinds of coffee taste the same to me, y´know? I guess the old witches always told her what she wanted to hear, because every time after having her fortune told, she was even more radiant, like somebody told her she was expecting a baby. And whenever I asked, she smiled at me the sweetest of her heavenly smiles and kissed me. I didn´t care what mumbo jumbo they had told her, I loved to see her happy.
Anyway, on January, a year and something after she moved in with me I started work on a hot-rod. It was a T- Bucket that had seen better days. It belonged to the uncle of one of my regulars, and the story went that he had been working on it for 3 years before he disappeared. No one ever saw him again, al least no one who knew him. Some say he was killed by the Mexican Mafia over a drug deal and buried in the desert. Others, that he simply fled to Mexico or Florida, with his brother. I didn´t give a shit. His lady kept the Bucket for a few years before accepting that hubby dearest was not coming back to finish it, then gave it to his closest relative, who, in turn, gave it to me on account of some work on his SUV. Quite a deal for me. This bucket was no cheap fiberglass kit bought online. It was the real deal, an original '27 Ford Model T. Of course, it wasn´t in the best of shapes and it was plain folly to try to restore it to stock state, so I decided I would build a dragster from it. Fuck Uncle X´s original project, I wasn´t going to be parading around in a car that would remind me of somebody´s granny being fucked for the first time. I got a small-block Chevy V8 that would fit perfectly and started to work on it off hours.
She hated it. Sometimes I got home by 11 or 12 and she would still be awake waiting for me. Knowing that, since I never asked about her jobs, or demanded anything about them, she had no right to pull me away from mine, she simply went back to her rituals. We still made love every night, and love was always present, but she was clearly jealous of the time I was spending with my project car. She became more quiet, but at the same time, mellower. It looked to me like she was playing the "hurt little girl" card to get more time. I promised her I would be done soon, and that she would be proud of her new ride. By summer the only T-Bucket with original body in all the southwest was winning quarter mile races by the handful. And it was named after her.
I won my last race. You can´t take that away from me. That pussy on his Barbie-Doll ´Vette didn´t stand a chance. I smoked him in five seconds flat. But I didn´t get to enjoy the 6 g´s I won. Too bad. Ever heard that autumn smells like death? Well, in my case it was accurate. I swear that halfway to the finish line I started to perceive the sickly stench of rotting meat. At first I thought I had blown a radiator hose, but the car kept going and my gauges did not register any fault, so I sunk the pedal. At the end of the line, an old lady in a huge Cadillac pulled out of nowhere, and that was the last thing I saw. The last thing I imagined, was my princess, heartbroken, angry at me for dying away from her, doing what she hated so much.
I was angry too... I was like, "C´mon lady... a fuckin´ DeVille? At fuckin´ 3 a.m.???!!! Where the deuce are you going????!!!" I hope the old bitch died too. Tonight I saw my reflection on the window at the back of your house before I broke in and man... let me tell you, you die in a T-Bucket crash and there ain´t much left of you. Damn thing doesn´t even have a roof, or seatbelts for that matter and the windscreen is a ridiculously small piece of glass that would not stop a decent sized bird. They must have picked up half of me with a mop and a bucket.
I woke up in total blackness and waited. And then, I waited some more. I guessed Lady Death forgets stuff once in a while too. I mean, everybody forgets something about their work sometimes, right? I felt just like that. I died and there was nobody to take me to the afterlife. No dark tunnel with a light at the end. No Stairway to Heaven, no Ferryman, no drooling jaws of that dog faced dude that´s supposed to take the dead to their judgment. Nothing. Man, you die and there´s nothing. You think that´s bad? It sucks even worse when you live through it. At some point, it was my own smell what pushed me out of waiting. It became unbearable, like being in the wrong side of the seat of a Port-A-Potty. And just as hot. I remembered it was hot the night I crashed, but not as hot as down there, in the armpit of the Sonoran Desert.
I won´t bore your dead ass with the details of how I crawled out, but take my word for it... it wasn´t pretty. I didn´t give you a chance to see it, but my knuckles are bare bone, I mean, bare fucking bone since then. I never peeled them off so bad in 5 years of hard work. It took me hours to get out, but I did. Sometime in the middle of the dig I thought I wouldn´t make it, but the stench pushed me forward. I didn´t want to go back down there. And her, man... I wanted to say "I´m sorry" to her. I wanted to see her again, to touch her, to tell her what I knew about death, since she had always been so interested in it. It was cool in a way, y´know? To have a new story to tell her, one that wasn´t about cars. I didn´t know how long I had been buried down there, I had no clue. But the air in the graveyard was just as hot as it was on the night I died. But then again, it´s Tucson, right? It´s always hell out here.
So I went to our old apartment only to find out that it´s gone. It´s a fucking whorehouse now, man. They demolished the building to the ground and built a new one to make a new Cabaret. Like we didn´t have enough of them already. I went to the desert trying to come up with a way to find her. I was there for a couple of days, but the ravens and coyotes wouldn´t leave me alone, so I came back. I hung out with the bums and cripples down at 4th Ave. for a few days. I knew she liked to hang out there, and most people don´t know the difference between a dead man and a drunk in the dead of the night, we all stink the same.
Then finally one night I saw her... with you. On your brand-spanking-new pussy-ass Audi. And the worst of it is that she was smiling, man... fuckin´smiling... I died and she was smiling. And you, smiling back with your big choppers... man, mine don´t show as bad and I don´t even have lips to cover them anymore. I don´t know what the hell I was expecting but it sure as hell wasn´t to see her with a new boyfriend, happy as a bunny. And on an Audi, of all cars. Maybe I expected her to become a nun or something like that. Or to die, maybe. But it sure cut deep to see her kissing you and laughing with you man... and I swore then that I would kill you.
So, I stayed there until I saw you guys again. By then I was reeking pretty bad and had to stay next to the railway, hidden as well as possible. Someone must have called the cops and reported a dead body lying beside the rails, because one night a bunch of pigs showed up and I barely got away without being seen. Lotsa warehouses down there.
At nights, I would go out to 4th to see if I could find you. And every night, at the same time, you drove by. And every night, I met your car at a further corner down your path, until I found your love nest. Took a while, but here I am.
I feel a little guilty, so I won´t tell you about the sheer pleasure I felt when I busted your head open and saw your brains slither to the floor. Oops... I guess I just did... sorry. But I paid a price, though. My right arm felt right off after I dragged your pretty carcass down here. After I found your house I hid in your backyard for a while, until I learned that she goes alone and comes back on her own only on Wednesdays, and you sit and watch tele and drink beer like an idiot until she comes home. Your day off, I guess. Big backyard, by the way... what do you pay for this place, man? What do you do? How old are you, anyway? Have a thing for younger girls, sir?... you fucking sicko... I guess now I won´t have a chance to ask you... or maybe I will, who knows?
Anyway, I will ask her, when she comes home. Maybe she won´t understand my words, though. My mouth is pretty fucked up just about now.
It turns out, I guess, that it was her wish to keep me forever, in all of those silly rituals of hers. She came and came and came and everytime she did, she wished I would belong to her for all eternity. Well, she got it. But then, she let me go and forgot about me and hooked up with an Audi-riding yuppie. That´d be you, buddy. I hope, for your own sake, that you didn´t play along with her esoteric bullshit, dude. I swear to God you would wish you hadn´t too.

So now, I´ll tell you what I will do. I will hide here, with your remains until she shows up. Then, I will take her to your bedroom and will fuck the shit out of her, to make her come, and come, and come again. I will make her wish I died for good.