Noah Rymer is back and more disturbing than ever. This dark dandy first made waves at The Cultural Futurist with his Suburban Gothic tale Drift. He followed up by reading his poetry at the Cabaret of Secrets salon. Today, he’s taking us on a journey of torment, desperation, age gaps, sadism, and degenerate statements on degeneracy. It’s quintessential Noah Rymer and it’s hungry. Are you ready for your next meal?
The old broad had me trapped up in her apartment for the past two months like some damned lapdog, rich enough to scoop me from the gutters like an alley cat she fancied rescuing; my patron was a cruel mistress, a redhead whose smile cracked around the edges, whose mascara couldn’t hide the madness surrounding her doe-eyes as she prattled about being immortalized, pontificating on the nature of verse as I was hopeless to watch and sit down and write more for her. She was in her forties, rich and quite pretty, sure, but she was also completely mad, and every night I laid beside her I feared Lady Macbeth would wake up with blood staining her hands and that I would be the next victim.
She had me sit on her lap and refer to her as ‘mommy,’ fawning over me in such a saccharine manner adopted only to disguise her bipolar nature, for whenever I stopped giving her attention and tried to write for myself her whole expression changed, and in her eyes were daggers and the smile became a sadistic grimace, and the woman backhanded me across the room till I was spitting blood like a prizefighter in the ring. But then her expression would revert, come up to me with the utmost concern, and dab at my wounds purring “Mommy didn’t mean to hurt you, baby, mommy loves you,” putting my head on her lap and stroking my face with those vicious red nails still dripping with my own blood and staining the floor.
She was a lonely widower who had taken to travel in the wake of her husband’s death, and had an apartment in Madrid as I was crawling the streets and looking for spare change lying in the cracks and crooks of the sidewalk. I had come here with a thousand euros quickly squandered, flaneur that I so desperately wanted to be in imitation of my beloved poet Baudelaire, and everything had fallen through— nobody wanted my writings, not even the magazines that didn’t pay, so I couldn’t even swallow the paper of my contributor copy with water and pretend that I was eating, and my dishwasher gig was taken by a leaner, hungrier kid whom the business could bend over easier, leaving me to slap my last euros down for one final drink before I was to completely, and utterly, expire.
Nadine was my so-called lover’s name, my patron, our lady of the pursestrings, and she had found me there in complete desperation, and so seized upon the opportunity once she figured out that I was a poet. I had to admit, I was swept up by her looks and her interest, and yet naturally hunger was the determinate force that brought me to her doorstep like an orphan seeking a parent— my insides felt like they were being scraped with an ice-cream scoop near-constantly, rare sleep my only respite. I did what I had to to survive, and so I slept with her on that first ‘date’ after she paid for my meal and my drinks and I was too grateful to say no to any proposition of hers. So naturally when she asked if I wanted to live with her and ‘keep her company,’ I pounded upon the opportunity like a tiger to wounded gazelle; but the roles were reversed from the very start— she hunted me.
“James! Jamie, baby, they’re showing some Fellini over at the Cine Dore tonight! I’ll get us some tickets, okay?” And she smiled warmly without so much as a second thought of me being able to escape, and I pondered the circumstances— if I were to leave her household, then my chances of survival would plummet severely. But life was more important than to live, and if I valued my art as much as I thought I did, then it was necessary that I take the risk. So it was settled— I’d make my escape in that dark room and run and run fast. She had a decent build, but I could overpower her easily enough; and I was skinnier than I used to be from the prior starvation, so outrunning her would be no real problem. But when the time finally came to depart to the theater, she carried with her a slightly malicious, lusty little grin that could barely contain her excitement. And at what, I was just about to find out—
She presented me with a fetishist’s collar complete with leash, as if it were a gift.
Nadine’s eyes sparkled with hunger, licking her lips with nervous gusto. “I wouldn’t want my little pet to run away, now, would I?” And with surprising brusqueness forced me into the getup, tightening the collar until it damn well choked me, wrapping the leash around her fist so that she could yank me around with a snap of her wrist. Without so much as a hint of shame she paraded me throughout the Literary District like the boy-toy I had become for her, all the tourists and the locals staring for a couple of seconds then shrugging, probably having seen worse in the looser of the nightclubs down in Chueca.
All the gay residents concurrently adored the whole, sordid display, cheering as we passed by while I violently blushed, as if we were a couple interested in transgressing public relationship norms instead of the embodiment of a voyeuristic, psychosexual practice. I knew, in some way, shape, or form, she was getting off to this, and all I could remember from the movie was the constant tension of the leash, the rash that formed on my neck from the leather rubbing against my skin. She kept getting too hot during the film— during 8 1/2 no less— constantly dragging me into the ladies’ room where I had little choice but to agree to whatever she wanted. All of this happened within the first couple of weeks of us meeting each other.
July arrived with further constraint, my “lover” growing restless from the ever-increasing temperatures and freshly bored with the arduous, abusive lovemaking she inflicted upon me. A nice set of locks were installed on the door only openable by key from the inside, and there were already bars over the windows so most days when she was gone I could do little more but watch from my golden cage the seedy bars and the neon lights and the ladies of the night walk around, asking for a light from the male populace, and sometimes even from a girl. My eyes were my only wings, and even then they couldn’t fly very far.
Mercifully, Nadine gave me complete access to the liquor cabinet, thinking it only proper that her little writer have access to the booze, and with God as my witness I took full and complete advantage, wiping out all those godforsaken memories with mighty flourishes of vodka across the stained mental canvas, a solvent, to erase it all and at times to even forget who I even was, and what exactly I was doing here. But I never had it in me to really drink myself to death, and Nadine knew this, which is precisely why she let me drink in the first place.
My suicide notes, wishes for death, peeled out the typewriter, cryptic and unrecognizable in my idiosyncratic verse stylings, and all that bitch did was glance and say “Oh, that’s nice dear!,” lavishing me with stock praise as she brought the gin to my trembling lips when I was too weak-willed to spit it back in her face. It was bad enough that she had locked me up in her, but a further insult that she barely cared about my artistry and that I was now little more than her little love-doll.
There were no sharp objects left in the house, and neither a rope in sight nor pills to down in desperation as a barbiturate cocktail; she had studied all the films like Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? and Lady In A Cage and was fascinated, most likely turned on by the very idea of trapping someone in her apartment, and she told me so quite freely; on one particularly drunken night she ranted and raved all across her flat, swearing enough to shame a sailor, and she wound up telling me all the details conveniently left out during that fateful first date: in particular, how she came to be a widow.
“My husband, rotten bastard he was—,” she hiccuped, “—I found the man cheating with some cheap whore from the workplace. Now—,” and she took a slug of her Spanish wine, “—I let the broad off the hook, figure she didn’t know and all, but David, oh, David…he got into an, ah, accident, let’s say..paralyzed from the waist down, something t’do with, uh…” and this, she pondered woozily in her inebriated state. “Ah!,” slamming the bottle down to punctuate her thought. “My old man got his lower body crushed with a typewriter— yeah! He was a writer too, baby, I got a type ya knowww…haw haw aah hahhh…and he gott what was coming’ t’him, ya know, once I ‘took care; of the rest of his body— forty flights of stairs can realllyyyyy mess you up, mess ya up beyond repair if you’er in a wheelchairr…” and she kept on hiccuping with her head nodding down, her body starting to tremble slightly.
I fingered my glass with buried concern, scared to upset her any further. I decided the best thing I could do was pour myself a drink. Her eye twitched as I reached for the bottle, her animal savagery taking over, directing her to tackle me with a tigress’s primality. She generously clamped down on my neck with panther’s jaws, slapping me around with her claws, and how my blood ran freely from her nails. She tried to set the bottle down on the table but smashed it by mistake, shards of bottle swimming in the port-red froth and dripping down onto my face. I could feel her hands curl around my throat, the exacting of sadistic pleasure as she plastered her lips over mine and sucked the life out of me, myself barely able to emit so much as a whimper in my throttling.
Her full weight was on me, legs on my chest forcing out every last but of oxygen out of my body, my brain. Blood thumped and sucked through my skull like a tribal drum, and adrenaline shot through me like a bolt of lightning to a tree. I threw the succubus off, Nadine crumpling and falling to the ground. Without a single thought running through my head I instinctively picked up the liquor bottle I had been sucking on the whole night and coldly brained her with an inevitably fatal force, the light in her eyes disappearing as it was replaced with a fountain of crimson vivaciously gushing forth from the blunt force trauma.
I did the best I could with her body— stripping the black widow bare in the bathtub, carefully arranging the scene with disposable gloves. I slit her wrists and ran the tap as a precaution, still left with no easy way to explain the dent in her head but with no desire to stay any longer to justify the wound. I let her soak as I rifled through her bank statements, documents, and purse. It was a clear-cut case of self-defense, I reasoned to myself as I desperately tried to quell my melting mind on the verge of complete deconstruction. I thought of taking a bath, funnily enough, but remembered as soon as I saw Nadine’s corpse that I really couldn’t do that at the moment. But it didn’t seem funny at the time.
I booked the quickest and cheapest flight to not exactly home but somewhere close enough, where I could lay low for the whole thing to blow over, and I’ve calmed myself down to the point where I can drink the whiskey from the airport bar without so much as an alcoholic’s telltale shake and shiver. If the authorities dig too deep I could always tell them it was in self-defense, which it clearly was, but with my story they’d have a hell of a hard time believing me.
I patted the innermost pocket of my jacket, where a nice, sharp straight razor nicked from Nadine’s apartment from her dead husband had been very well-hidden, deftly protected from the metal detectors, knowing I’d have a backup plan if things went a little south; I’ve never been to jail in my life— I’m certainly not planning a visit.
I rapped the counter for the bartender’s attention. He whistled back at me. “Un bocadillo, porfa.” “Para llevar?,” he asked. I shook my head. “Tengo mucho hambre,” and he brought a sandwich out for me. I checked the time— the plane would be boarding soon. I leafed a few Euros out as I munched, and it occurred to me that even in death, the old broad was still footing the bill for my meals.
I was in class when I read this, and it took everything in me to keep a blank face so the prof didn't notice. This is great 11/10.
That's dark.