Onyx himself had problems. The main one was that no doctor could give him a clear diagnosis. His answers were always multi-faceted and enigmatic, but they knew something was wrong with him. They didn't know what medication to give him, and his meth-head girlfriend Celes thought he was retarded. She wouldn't give him kids, she wouldn't sleep with him. She just showed up at his pad tweaked out of her mind, cried on his shoulder, insulted him, spasmed around on his couch, and smoked more meth. "I can't do anything with you because I'm a junky and you're retarded," she'd say on occasion. This left Onyx wincing in pain. He took to an anomalous habit as I had done in my gestalt, which was capture birds in cages in precise locations around town, take them home, cook and eat them, then make vaguely human shaped sculptures out of the bones. He used airplane glue, and was high on it most of the time he was creating. He would get calls from Celes's meth dealers, harassing calls which said things like "We gangfucked your girlfriend last night before she came over asshole!" Click. Or "She won't touch you, really? How are we not surprised, idiot." The calls became so frequent he had to change his number, and when they got that one, he just hauled his lot onto the roof under a aluminum lean-to, and started building a giant wire cage full of cells so he could collect and take care of his birds. The sculptures piled up, until one day the meth dealers got onto the rooftop and threw them all off over the side. Onyx shrugged, bought padlocks, and started over. He did receive disability checks, and once all his cells were filled with various birds, he began nursing them with his money. It was ok until one night Celes came over crying and covered in cigarette and pipe tip burns that made Onyx's mouth drop open in irrational rage. "They would only give me... speed if they could put out their cigarettes and pipes on me while I smoked it... I couldn't help it... I'm in a lot of pain, I'm scared to go back over there but I just know I only will go back and with no money on me I don't know what they'll do..." She was crying, and Onyx lay her in his modest bed. Onyx, as calm as a feather descending in air, walked over to Jim Beam's house. "Here, I want to show you something." He took Onyx into his bedroom, and took a small box out from the top shelf of his closet, and opened it. He handed the contents to Onyx. It was a gun. "That's the gun that killed my father and son. I took it, and I hid it." Jim gave him some rounds. "They know I have it, but they don't know where it is, so they're watching me." Jim was on acid at the time. Onyx held it in his hand. It had a pearl finish around the handle, a small shining silver revolver. "Can I borrow this?" he asks. "I wouldn't have shown it to you otherwise." Jim says smearing a line of wet paint on the wall with his paint stained fingers. Onyx runs out of the room, concealing the gun after loading it in front of Jim who watched with utter fascination. He then left, hired a cab, and went to the meth lab. When he got there, he crept in. The room was dark, but he could smell something medicinal in the air. He found the light, and turned it on. Three of the drunken dealers lay twitching in the foul disarray. "Pete? Is that you? I can hardly hear you!" One of them mumbles, slurring most of the words. Onyx then heard a groan, and turned around. There was a corpse sitting in the corner. In its limp hand was a beer bottle filled with blood. There was a gored bullet hole in his torso. Onyx looked at them. "You like guns?" he asks. "Of course Pete, junky over there couldn't pay us." "How about this one?" He draws his gun and one, two, three puts a round into each of their heads. Smells of gunpowder, and the corpses slump with meaty thumps onto the filthy floor within the minute. He puts the gun in his waistband, and walks out after closing the dead junky's eyes in the corner. He went back to Jim's compound, and was allowed to move in, but not after he got his lady, who said "I will marry you if you go to prison for me." Jim Beam said "I know the perfect way to celebrate."
"Look at this." Jim says, and opens a door for Mary, Ian, Onyx, Celes and I. A nude, pale, white-as-snow body lay on a bed. "What is it?" Ian asks. "I think it's a dead prostitute, there's stab wounds all over her torso." We approached to examine more closely, and, yes, it was a dead prostitute. "I found her in a dumpster." "What are you doing rooting through dumpsters?" I ask. "It's a hobby of mine. Trash is public domain. Besides look what I found." "What do you want to do with this?" "I want to give her a makeover, " Mary says timidly. "That's fine, but afterwards I want to tote her out into the glade and cremate her on a pile of stolen wooden palettes on acid." We were speechless, but it sounded like fun. Hell, I had to leave anyway. We all dropped a couple of hits, and were soon hallucinating and very lightheaded. The stolen palettes were already in the glade, they had been driven out there on dirt tire tracks and left there. Tripping, Mary gave her a glistening makeover, as she had not started to rot yet. Soon, she was almost done up like she had been at a funeral home. We had an old army stretcher Jim had stolen from his father's house, and loaded the dead hooker, the stretcher, a case of domestic beer, and a jug of gasoline into the truck and left for the glade as the sun set, sending open blisters spitting blood and ink into the air like geysers. As we walked through the woods, it began to rain. Before long we realized it wasn't raining water, it was raining blood. It ran down out bodies in rivulets and a flock of crows followed us, flying in arcs then landing, all around us in ellipses. Leaves from the earth rose, floated back to the branches of the trees and turned from shades of red and yellow to shades of bright green, then dark verdant. We made it to the glade, the palettes, and mounted the dead hooker on it, covering it with gas. A man with a hand scythe in a wife beater, jeans, and bare feet emerged from the woods in a skull mask swiping the blade upward and downward at the crows, who avoided every strike. Another terrified disheveled businessman emerged from the woods being attacked by a mob of raccoons and skunks, who jumped at him and spit at him, him still terrified, knocking them away with his long bloody arms. I took off my shirt, and my self-inflicted scars opened, sending fountains off blood in all directions. We lit the pyre, and the woman burned. Stained glass windows showed black red light from the branches of the trees, scenes from a religious text that had never been written. We watched in awe, until emerging from the north, a pregnant woman wrapped in a blanket. Almost all of her teeth were gone, or rotted through her skull, which bore a giant swollen bruise above her right eye. She extended her hands, which were pierced with at least a hundred needles, safety pins, tacks, fish hooks, rusty nails. She opened her rotting mouth and screamed, and the pyre exploded in flames and the droplets of blood falling from the sky became rose petals. Terrified, we ran back to the truck and sped off.
