Our Dark Prince (The Scottish Play)

CX. Breakfastʼs Served

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    Knock knock.

    "La-La, open the door, baby."

    Anna Mae was dying. As the lights of El Carnicero gleamed, his mama – Anna Mae West-Royce – coughed hoarsely. A death rattle. Her lungs tightened with auxiliary speed, flem oozing from her lips as she spurted out oceans of mucus. Swallowed by a sea of dust. Head pounding as her body coiled into itself, spasming wildly, Anna Mae choked; the windʼs whispers ripping the door from its hinges. Howling, crying, mourning. Lifting his hood, Desmond watched the melanin in her skin grow old and crusty, dying as she was, and sighed when her inky eyes stared at him, damn exhausted.

    "Was you with that white girl again, La-La?"

    Knock knock knock.

    "La-La, baby, please."

    The carrion was red. Beet red. Stacked next to each other, slabs of meat hovered over the ground; tiny slabs of meat, too tiny to be an animalʼs. Saintʼs knife was freshly sprayed in blood, and as Lafayette scanned the first floor, he felt the room. Was trapped in the room. Charcoal, from the furnace in the basement, it mounted towards the sky...blood crying from the meat; fresh, fleshy intestines wrapped around them. And then, it hit him.

    The smell of flesh burning.

    Human flesh.

    Two bullets.

    Lafayette tucked the gun into the back of his pants, hidden under his hoodie. Mama wouldnʼt see anything.

    She was too f*ckinʼ high to realize it. His old man, Saint, he was always breeding...a perpetual hunger, starving it to indulge more in the buttery creaminess of meat. And she, she was too damn blind to see it. So Lafayette played the good son. Feeding him his scraps, and her the illusion.

    Until now.

    Knock knock knock knock.

    "LAFAYETTE!"

    "Robin ainʼt white, mama," Lafayette hummed, closing the windows, ignoring the knocks on the door. Silently, slowly, watching his footwork.

    She laughed, Anna Mae did.

    "She rich. You in bed with a rich woman; my son, a big city wh*re while engaged to Sebastian Prince. She got more white in her bones than she do mulatto. You playinʼ politics with a white girl, La-La."

    She chuckled.

    "Sh-*-*-t. You think you somebody."

    She laughed at that. Cackled. Her laughter was shrill, a cacophony of all the perilous screams she had ever let out slapped into the strenuous labor her vocal chords. His mamaʼs bony fingers, clinging desperately to flesh, they traced the edge of the blunt and smoked slowly; the sole of her eyes barren to him. Crystal eyes of blue, lifeless. In them, he saw...a skeleton. Hell, burning with a desirous need for the crack she consumed, her addiction pacified by his anger. Poverty was a b*tch, but lord, addiction...addiction was a whole other beast.

    She twitched, she laughed, she smoked some more.

    "You think you somebody, mama."

    She froze, dead in her tracks at that.

    "Lafayette Jacque Royce–"

    "No, you donʼt get to disrespect her. I bled for you. I bruised for you. I f*ckinʼ died for you and the old man downstairs. I put food on this f*ckinʼ table, I pay off your d*mn bills, you donʼt get to disrespect her. You donʼt get to say you ainʼt somebody. I am the way I am ʼcause oʼ you and him.."