Salvation.

In any festered heart, from a whore, bastard, child, there start no questions, only pain, pet upon till the act becomes an addiction. There is no wet spot worth the entering of labor. Nothing really answers that pinch and its attendant procedural. Humanity’s systems quack wide, anally, regardless, through a lucre mesh, through a status quo theology via paycheck, via slow cremation.

Jane, too fickle to sweat, traced her fingers through a batch of someone else’s along the bus floor. The devil camps at the top of art, she thought. Histories in a rubber-soled pond below her knees. Yet it was always she who reeked of pee. Her own taste displeased her. She’d carried child twice. One loss funded by the friend who persuaded her, the other by the cock that impregnated her. She dared not look a baby in the face where there was no emptiness to fill. At twelve, she ate shit falling off her bike, running from the dogs sniffing her period. When her teeth scraped the pavement, she wondered why her parents never let her keep a pet. Boys came around, naturally. Parents negotiated their heads elsewhere.

Roy rode his trembling sores. What would the world be like had Jesus been a girl? A world stroked and livable, he imagined. Days prior, he’d walked across the city barefoot to feel sane. Each time he stepped on broken glass it reminded him of the first time he felt a needle enter his arm. When Roy was thirty, he fell in love with a fat prostitute whose name he couldn’t pronounce. He let her stay at his squat for the blowjobs. She died ass up in an ally. A swift castration he thought might be worth an ounce.

Beth gripped the choke-chained gold her father bought. She was clean and prim, skirt pleated. Her best friend’s graffiti on a Catholic Church got her community service. With a jerk from the potholed road, she ripped the necklace off her neck. Scared into virginity, kept moral by a step-father, wept over by no one’s mom, she dreamed of bunnies her whole childhood, till she saw the neighbor boy stomp the head of a baby. Instantly light footed and lost within her head, she became a lady.

Bright in the eyes of the driver, the guilt trip everyone lives for, deliverance from sin. The rotating solutions humans dictate falsely. Worlds of words made malleable, none created equal. Acts of redemption spiked within acidifying constituent grew the passengers sick to their stomachs.