Under the Chassis

Under the Chassis

Black. And in the pitch dark of night. As a black and starless rag. Smokeless. Blacker than soot. A single point, white and lustrous. As in moon. And a god with barbed hands molesting its face. And moon’s gashed and swollen skin dusted away with wind. He put his other hand on its fissured, chapped lips and played with it. Dead moon. Necro. A cold and empty breath exhumed from the fault of her mouth. No other hole and cavity as in its eyes and ears on its skin. Only a mouth and two lips and a neck slowly being covered by god’s hands, tilted in a sickening angle. As the angle got wider the bones each slowly dislocated and cracked, like little lamps and as each bulb popped the moon got darker and darker. Moon died. Now, it wasn’t night. It was the absence of a night. Or a day. Only darkness. Darkness that engulfed the city.

To be pale, or to be black in the face of world?

In the dark, moonless city, a systemic, sentient old lump of meat was sitting behind the car and resting his head on the wheel. It was Sadegh. Its car yellow and orange. A taxi. A bundle of paper was resting on the other seat, worth 50 Tomans. 3 O’clock and its hands, empty. It couldn’t go back to its two starving off-springs laying lifeless on the floor of its apartment. Children whose mother had a worthier child. It was too late to be behind the wheels. It was too empty to be in its body. It should’ve been at home. With food. But it couldn’t find food. So now it was here. In its car, in the middle of street. Red light above its head, blinking and dripping its bloody light on its wrinkled forehead.

Deathness sparked under the tires of its car. Deathness pirouetted on asphalt. In the woods of uptown. On the vacant sidewalks. On the cold ceramic of the walls. The jinn of death flew across the air and danced on the stoplight, in its yellow hue, laughing. The city was his. This city. The city that had long been relieved from rain. Nestled in iron and dirt that had split faith in half. In this city there was once wind but now there wasn’t any. The clouds have fled from its sky. Now the air was drenched in argon and moon’s blood dripped on some unseeable horizon. No one saw it. Some tongue licked the blood off of moon’s neck.

The war was over. This is all’s left.

On this dead asphalt a pair of luxurious leather shoes walked in dust. Shoes that were once expensive, but not anymore. Also a thin coat. A sweater and dark olive pants. Round glasses and an old face. A balding head that was covered by a fedora. Dariush. Spirits danced around him and he was carrying a box as black as the sky. With incomprehensible patterns on its wooden skin. So beyond logic, indescribable. If you’d try to, it comes out as: petrified gas pumping through sharp veins. But “veins” is a distant analogy. Held the box with one hand and gripped it with his slender fingers. His spotted, wilted hands grasped it tight and with a poor eyesight crossed the darkness of the streets; although he did not need sight.

Tipped.

Hundreds of spears shone from the darkness into the poor eyes. Dariush blocked the light with his free hand. The light in front of his eyes and the shadow on his face was intense. Walked slowly and carefully, around the light and away from its field; curious what sort of horrific creature subjected him to the blinding brightness of its eyes. And to what end. And that monstrous creature was but a yellow taxi Pride. Prideless and unwise. Fragile. Disfigured. He was not sure what to think. Its behavior was discordant and threatening. He, in the middle of street. Pride in the middle of street. As if it wanted to drive over him. But he decided to ignore the cab.

Sadegh decided too. Slammed his foot on the gas and the Pride bolted forward and hit the edge of sidewalk.

While his left foot was just a couple of millimeters away from the tire mark, Dariush looked at the crashed Pride, dazzled. He thought about how he would’ve been crushed by the spinal cords if he hadn’t leaped backwards. About how his body rolled over in blood. How his corpse would be left to rot in someplace far in the mountains. His bones being thrown over the cliff. And how the reverse lights were now awakened. He didn’t have to think about running away. Thinking wasted time. So he picked himself and the box and ran. Ran to the sidewalk and the deep gutter and sturdy trees shielded him from the street. He didn’t think about stopping. If the taxi driver had a gun, stopping would give him an opportunity to shoot. Or he could get out of his car and deal with him itself.

Sadegh drove the car to the sidewalk. The fat man running looked like a duck with plucked feathers in the light of the car’s headlight. He had to die. There was no way. With his rich clothes, his crocodile skin shoes; or snake or what-the-fuck-ever it was. Why did he have to live all fancy and not Sadegh? Hatred gripped his throat. It had to be destroyed. As a worthless husk, it had to destroy its own life. But before, the hatred had to be expressed. It had to bring everyone down to the depths of hell with it. It had to. I had to. You have to come down with me. You have to come down with me, you arrogant fuck. I’ll break your horse’s legs so you can’t look down on me anymore. I’ll break all y’all fucking horses’ legs. Motherfuckers.

The car swatted the parked motorcycle out of the way as if chrome flies. Its bumperless face, stoic and flat. The throat of its radiator was hanging from its broken jaw, sucking the cold, dark air in. One of its eyes was gouged out, dangling from its socket and shining its light on the asphalt and under the chassis. The headless ghost of death shined back.

Dariush heard the shriek of car behind him. He tried to jump back to the street, but fell in the wide gutter and hit his knee on its edge. He ignored his torn trousers and filth drenched blood slowly coating his sore, bare knee. Pulled himself out until the sudden splitting pain in his bones stopped him in his tracks. The best he could manage now was to limp. No longer taking advantage of the gravity and the slope. The scarred beast reversed, trying to find a way out of the sidewalk. He had to think. Maybe he could find a narrow alley, narrow enough that the car couldn’t follow him there. But he couldn’t find any, in a glance. And Prides were too thin and compact to begin with. They could crawl their way into mostly any hole in this city.

A roar. Timeout was out. Get. Get runnin’.

The tires clawed the surface of the asphalt. Over the gutter. To the limping man.

Dariush limped his way to the other side of street. He couldn’t jump. Sat one foot down into the gutter and the water immediately got into his shoe and soaked his sock. placed the other on the sidewalk and pulled himself up. Leaned on the wall. For now, he was alive. He was bent, but he was alive. He could’ve stayed alive if the taxi hadn’t flown through the air and crushed his chest between the hood and the wall.

First, came up blood. Then his lungs were pureed out of his mouth. The few moments he could witness his death was spent in awe and shock. And then, with his feet hanging in the air, eyes wide open, cheek resting on the cold metal of hood, he shut down.

The blood was wiped from its eyes. Saw the blood on the car’s broken windshield. Saw the corpse hugging its car. Exhaled the breath of excitement contained in its lungs. It was over. The man was dead. Pulled out a cig and fired it. Breathed the ghost of darkness from the cigarette’s thin, long body in. And then, breathed it out. It warmed its chest. The warmth didn’t bring life. The warmth was sickly. It tried to reverse. It couldn’t move. The wheels weren’t touching the ground. It’s okay. It could sit there and smoke until the morning. And throw the ash in the car. It didn’t matter.

After an hour the cold hit him. The release that was followed by killing the man has got faint. It got out of the car and looked at the man. There was a puddle of blood under the car, slowly flowing to edge of the sidewalk, crawling into the water in gutter. It thought there was no way it could get away with this. Where the man’s chest was supposed to be there was big hole pressed in by the car. It was not split from half. There was no way it could get the car out of that position so the corpse could fall free.

It circled the car. Looking at the other side. The other side was the same, except there was a box on the ground. Sadegh bent down, inspecting the box closely. Now everything inside him that was alive wanted to know what was in this peculiar box that the man couldn’t trade away for his life. Maybe it was money?

He set the box straight. Before opening it, he eyed the patterns. He stopped. The patterns were unsettlingly foreign. For a moment they made him have second thoughts. But he didn’t have a choice. He had killed the man. Now that he was a disgusting murderer it didn’t matter. Now it was his calling to steal the box and open it. Just to see what’s inside.

The box didn’t have a handle. A lock. Or a button. It had rusty hinges. He couldn’t think about how weird it was that the box didn’t have a lock. He was too scared of the box. Of what could be inside. And the first thing he saw when he opened it was hair. It was hair belonging to a head.

He dropped the box and the head rested in the man’s blood. By an involuntary glance, he learned that the head belonged to a young girl with straight, black hair. She was staring at an unseeable distance with a hateful gaze. With lips completely shut. With a skin bright and vibrant.

A shadow crawled from under the chassis. Stood in the moonlight. The girl’s head looked at him and smiled. The shadow picked the head and put it where its neck ended. Blood on her hair and cheek, the girl pulled out a pocket knife from her torn jeans and jumped on him.

Plunged the knife into his chest. Drew a sloppy line, from the top to bottom, and opened the chest. Slashed the meat and skin away. Cracked the bones and threw them in the gutter. Smeared the blood on her cold body so she could get warmer faster. Licked a bit of it too and continued. Tore the lungs to pieces until she reached the heart. The heart that was still beating. Like a ripe, shining-red apple. She cut the heart out and grasped it in her hands. Like a forbidden fruit, she bit it.