MAMA'S BOY... 2024.
VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.
Time present and time past, Sierra Greene did not die in 1987. No, that can't be right. Maybe?
Steve doesn't remember. If she didn't die then, she's dead now. It was a long time ago. Let me tell you what I know.
Sierra Greene was a coke-snorting machine. Steve thinks he found God in her bed, pushing into her. The mood ring on her middle finger was always stuck on orange except for when she walked back home high from a party. The stars look like faces sometimes. There's a lot of ghosts up there, she thought. Her father, maybe. He was there, he was angry, and then he wasn't anything. She knew everything that had ever happened then, and her ring shifted to pink. Like the blood in her cereal bowl. Like the pills she stole from the pharmacy. She was a corpse of impulse, even now. Her mother wanted her to eat more, pushed peas and bread across the table, whispered "Oh, honey" like a prayer. She wanted to tuck Sierra in, but instead, said nothing but goodnight. Steve thinks she might've survived if her mother wasn't so scared of telling her no. She ran away every summer. She made Steve's bedroom stink of melting baby dolls and her arms were itchy and bleeding. He yelled, but found himself back inside of her, mind body spirit, the next night. She always came home, eyes wide as bacteria. Then, she went to sleep. And she had the same dream. The one where she creates everything and she is holy. Her mother is dead in this dream. Sierra Greene ruled the world. She woke up feeling the absence of wings.
There are so many things Steve was not allowed to tell her.
1987. Sierra Greene reminds Steve a lot of his mother. The bony elbows. The patterns she weaves on stale smoke floating off to the heaven of ideas.
He touches himself, he dreams. Wearing her clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending this skin is her skin, these hands her hands, these shins, these soapy, bony elbows. Steve swallows Sierra Greene's heart and it crawls right of his mouth. She swallows his heart and flees, but he wants it back now. He wants it back.
He lies on his bed, watching her. He watches her mouth, her eyes fading into a dazy high. There's a cigarette dangling out of her mouth, and he watches it, because she's about to pass out like she always does. She can tell he's about to burst into tears right before he does, but she doesn't ask what's wrong. "Sometimes I think I was born backwards. A gear in my head switched off or something. Nothing we can do." He listens to her slur her words. His cheeks are wet, the air is sticky, thick. And when her head sinks further into the pillow and her mouth starts to leak, he plucks the cigarette from her mouth and finishes it off. Sometimes he thinks about leaving her. But he thinks that it'd hurt him more than it would hurt her. And sometimes he thinks he wants to hurt her. Not to hit her, but to say something that makes her cry, something that strikes a nerve. He blames her for fucking him, for kissing him, for using him when she wants something to love, and he wants to hurt her for that, he wants to hurt himself for letting her do it. He knows it will never happen. He will never say anything to make her cry, and even if he did, she would never cry, not in front of him, or anybody.
Steve is starting to think he needs Sierra Greene like he needs his mother.
She passes out, he picks her up. She throws up, he rubs her back and tucks her into his bed and hides her needles in a place she won't care to look. He lets her play his guitar even though she doesn't know any chords. She vomits into her plate and he'll wipe up the red on his kitchen table. She poisons herself with pills and painkillers, he wipes the sweat off of her face and listens to her sob when she gets sick because he keeps hiding her drugs, the one and only thing she will ever need. There's something wrong with him, for letting himself become her nurse, her record on the shelf, her possession. He hates her. He'll crack a rib for her.
