Psycho Liza after Dulville: Give it over

Green note: Here’s another fast job. Just trying to get down ideas for Psycho Liza episodes (you can read the first episode here).  This is another idea that kicked off via Oneword then came here. Like Slade, who is definitely going to be part of the Liza story. Lance and the Judge’s kid are coming up. Bits and pieces. Chapters on the loose.

“Let’s see where the little bastard threw it today.” Herb opened his front door and peered out. He threw up his hands. “Goddammit!” He sinched up his bathrobe and shuffled across the veranda and down the steps in his slippers.

The morning air was pressurized. Herb looked at the sky for signs of a front. It was blue as ever and the sun was just beginning to work its way up. He shook his head, scuffed down the walkway and grunted as he stooped to pick up the newspaper.

He unfolded it and started reading on his way back up to the house. “Shit fire!” he bellowed.  His wife snapped open the kitchen blinds and darted her wide eyes around the yard.

Herb held the paper up to her and shook it. He hurried into the house and threw it down on the kitchen table. “Don’t that just take the rag off the bush!”

“Good Lord, Herb! What on earth has happened?”

“Look here, M.” Herb pounded the paper with a great, long index finger.

Martha raised her glasses to her nose and began to read the headline out loud, “Woman Holds Up 7-11 With Voodoo Curse.” Martha gasped and put one hand to her breast. She looked up at Herb. “The 7-11 just over on Myrtle and Main?”

“The very same, Herb said. “The Dooley kid was working the cash register. Says here this wild-lookin’ woman came in and said somethin’ to him and he jus’ give her all the cash in the till, no gun, nothin’.”

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Psycho Liza flew out the door of the pub and disappeared into the side alley. She kept to the dirty narrows like a rat to sewer corridors and she worked her way artfully through the heart of Dulville until she reached the blackness beyond the town’s edge.

Clouds threatened the light of a near full moon and the air was a cold sweat that smelled of rust and dogwood.

Liza strode over the back roads and sprang into the ditches at the first glow of car lights on the horizon. There she would wait, barely breathing, until the noise and lights had bled back into the night.

She pressed on until she began to smell the stench of the Darby paper mill and the power of midnight had grown so close and strong as to be unbearable. She could see Highway 319 ahead and she stopped and turned to the waxing moon. Her eyes glowed with its yellows and she whispered to it.

O Ningal, I have thy husband’s power!
Soon we shall sup as queens at table
And all the kings as dogs shall cower
Underneath the blade of Ereshkigal

The wind rose and blew Liza’s long black hair out from her curvy body. She raised her arms to the heavens and her eyes transformed to the blue and indigo of white hot.  Then she plumped up her creamy breasts and clicked her sharp black boot heels South on Highway 319.

Liza heard a car coming far off behind her. She turned and walked backward with her thumb out. The car came on fast then skidded into the shoulder in front of her. It was a beat, old Ford Falcon. She ran to the passenger side and got in.

The driver was a drunken, middle-aged man with beady eyes and a patchy, dirty beard. His sweat was heavy with the smell of ammonia and he had a nervous little laugh. “Well lookee here, if it ain’t Elvira, Mistress of the Dark! Heh heh.”

Gale force storms rumbled in Liza’s head and the moonlight that filled her eyes became obscured by blackened clouds.

“Don’t say much, do ya?  Heh heh.” the drunk said.

Liza’s black eyes pelted the drunk with the torrential rains of her sickness.

Your one and only purpose is come
For soon you shall be divinely birthed
No longer drunk and howling hokum
As Ningal severs your ties to this earth

The drunk leaned back from her. His eyes had seen her silky black wrap. “Say is that blood on your coat, girl? Heh heh.”

“Why no, Hon,” Liza cooed. “It ain’t.” She shimmied her wrap from her shoulders and took it into her hands. The silk caught the moon’s light as she moved it like water flowing. She winked at him. “Let me show you the pleasures of the dark like only I know how,” she said all smoky.

The drunk perked up. “Well now yer talkin’! Heh heh.”

“I’m Liza”

The drunk offered his hand. “I’m Percy. Heh heh.”

Liza grabbed his hand with an unnatural force and twisted it to the right. He howled with the pain and followed his ripping arm, turning with it out from under the wheel and into her lap and she entwined and held the wrap like a vice around his neck until he stopped kicking and fighting like a wild beast.

She snatched the keys from the ignition and dragged dirty Percy out of the car and around to the back of it. She unlocked the truck, hoisted him up into it and slammed the lid down. “Drunk fuck,” she said.

Liza got into the driver’s seat and took off down the highway. She drove until the needle twitched on a quarter of a tank and she looked for exits to gas stations. She got off at exit 25 to Wrightsville and screeched up to the pumps at a 7-11. She stepped out and squinted wild yellow eyes around to gauge the action.

Her hair whipped in a sudden wind and she clicked her boot heels up to the door and yanked it open. She blasted in and stopped with the wind. Everyone froze. She fixed her eyes on the cashier and hissed, “Yahdoh machte spiro shakti,” and he opened the cash drawer, gathered everything into a bag and mechanically handed it to her. She snatched it from him and tore out the door, filled the tank and drove off, South on 319.

Fin

Click here for more on prompt “#273 – Give” from other Sunday Scribblings participants.