MIKELA by Jamelia K

FLASH: TEEN

“I’d love to go back to my school days and do it all over again,” says Jamelia K, “you know how it goes, knowing then what I know now...but the funny thing is, I reckon I’d go right along and make all the same mistakes, only I’d enjoy them more this time.” Jamelia K writes last thing at night, before bed. The drawing nights gets her mind in gear for plenty of gritty urban characters and themes. “Seasonal change has a physiological reaction in the body,” she adds.

~~~

One moment the dark street was dead with only light rain present but the next I counted 17 kids giving it toes from one end to the other. The first was a boy clutching his arm, telling anyone who would listen that he’d been hit with a crowbar. The last was Michaela, probably spelt Mikela, knowing kids these days. She was taller than the others and had probably caused whatever had happened to happen. She had troublemaker written all over her pretty face. They all passed me standing at my front gate drinking my steaming coffee without a second glance in my direction. I’d always looked old for my age and hitting my mid-twenties did me no favours. Being clean-shaven would help if I wanted to mooch with the pups on my estate, so I dashed in, attacked my face with the Wilkinson Sword, and got into my new white Converse kicks.

5 minutes later at the end of the street, 2 police cars had dispersed the gang. A couple of BMX bikers pulled wheelies up and down while 2 sisters in pyjamas sat on the kerb. Mikela, the tough girl, was chit-chatting with a bobby, displaying all the front of an untouchable mafia boss. I lingered and hovered until able to catch a quick word with her.

“Hey M, what happened, someone get a beating?”

She asked her friend who I was. I’d overheard her name but maybe I shouldn’t have used it if I didn’t want her to think I was a stalker. Next time she looked at me, I took a risk and flashed a bottle of vodka from my inside jacket pocket. I smiled a friendly smile, trying to look as un-stalker-like as I possibly could. I asked the bobby if it was illegal to smoke dope on the street, playing about with him, but it was when I mentioned cocaine that I had Mikela’s undivided attention.

Soon after, Mikela and I were bombing it around the block in my convertible. Her friend Rachael was in the back. I had to tell her BMX cronies to f**k off after they disrespected me with some foul insults, and half-expected to return home to find my windows bricked. I hand-brake skidded outside the offy to buy some Rizla and Pepsi. Mikela rolled a perfect cone while I refilled half-emptied cans of the pop with cool clear vodka. After a few rounds of cocaine sniffing off the tip of my house key I pressed the pedal to the metal again, our throats well and truly numbed with 50 Cent booming from my base box.

“You’re the dude at number 34 who always watches us in the park from your front gate,” Mikela said. I think the coke was making her horny because every time she addressed me, she called me dude, reached over and touched my leg. It was never my attention to get into her panties but I did start to get a tent in the crotch of my FatFace jeans. Despite this distraction, I told myself that my ‘no touching’ rule still applied. She wasn’t jail bait, but I still had seven years on her. I wasn’t out to ravage her on the 1st date: I wanted something that would last.

I was bored and lonely and seeing her dossing about the estate so often up to all kinds of foolishness took me back to when I was that age without a care in the world. I hated the fact that I was leaving those days behind for good and chilling with her stopped that from happening. She released natural endorphins and serotonin between my ears. She was suave and dapper and trendy and moody and naughty and lippy and sexy. She had bags of bad bitch attitude, she called me dude, and she wore makeup like a woman twice her age. If I could pierce her rhino skin and get in with her on some kind of emotional level, she would start coming in mine and we could get to know each other. I’d be her boyfriend, if she wanted, no worries about that, I’d tap it till the morn’, but I’d also be her pal, big bro, and guardian to boot. You might think of it as drug-pushing, but in my eyes I am doing her a favour by saving her money.

I will always be the one who gave her her very 1st driving lesson on a farmer’s field while high. The only thing is, she ruined the occasion by becoming distracted by constant text alerts on her £15 phone. She demanded that I drop her off in the shadiest corner of the estate. The guy who dragged me out of my car and gave me three blows to the head with a crowbar may have been her ex or pimp or relation or who knows what, but after being left in a mess in the gutter and robbed for all I was worth, labelled a pervert and a sick kidnapper, Mikela either couldn’t hear me or couldn’t care less as I lay there broken, calling her name over and over, until she was just a distant shadow under a street light, and her laughter was just a sound effect of the wind.

© J.K MMX
DNM Fiction®

Another one from Jamelia?

http://piebald77.blogspot.com/2010/08/kiss-it-better-by-suicide-mistress.html

KISS IT BETTER by The Suicide Mistress

DNM FICTION®

EDITED BY A.MICHAEL
The Suicide Mistress is Jamelian K’s pseudonym. Her stories include Farewell Sad Life and Please Don’t Go Down Harrower’s Lane. Unbeknown to many more cheerful folk, the female misery genre is actually quite popular. Did the Anne Frank diaries have something to do with that? Jamelia 'Serious' K studied creative writing at Bolton Uni and currently lives in Burtonwood. She is now 23 years old and of ethnic origin.

I feel I have to add an extra note each time I feature Jamelia in DNMF. I think the trick with this one is what she has left out. It’s a read-between-the-lines-er, It’s a fill-the-missing-pieces-in-yourself-er. There is as much going on beyond the text as there is within it. What we see here is only the iceberg tip of what this story has to say, although somehow she has made it complete enough to not warrant a second part (although I insist she follows on!) They do say writers write about what never happened in their lives.
Adrian crept down his carpeted stairs with a baseball bat aimed over his shoulder. His wife was locked in the baby’s bedroom, having already called the police. The sound of smashing glass from downstairs had woken them both.

Whoever had broken into his home would not have the run of the place while he and his family cowered upstairs, waiting politely for them to leave. No sir, not on his watch. He wasn’t afraid of no common burglar.

Why the alarm hadn’t gone off, he had no idea. Perhaps he forgot to set it properly. Nobody ever really expects and much less prepares to hear it one day. Or night. What time was it now, half past one or two in the morning?

He remembered the story of that farmer who had shot burglars. He would have to be careful with the amount of reasonable force he used here. Hopefully there would only be one of them. A desperate drug addict looking for some jewellery or car keys. Cretin.

Navigating the turn in the stairway, Adrian tiptoed the last three steps to enter the hallway, silent in his woollen socks. Whoever had illegally entered his household had turned the living room light on.

He inhaled and exhaled, heartbeat drumming, adrenalin flowing. He was not so much afraid as angry and violated. After counting to three, he jumped through the doorway and shouted at the top of his voice.

The young lady in his living room flinched backwards. She wore army-patterned pants and a light grey hoodie with an orange fringe poking out down to her eyes, cut perfectly flat across the bottom. Her eyes were big and blue on wide, podgy cheeks.

“What the––”

The young woman calmly placed several twenty pound notes on his coffee table, which he had picked up from Ikea just yesterday. “I hope that covers the cost of the window,” she said, “it’s all I have.”

Adrian noticed blood on her sleeve. Probably from climbing in. He recognised her face, but he didn’t know where from. He felt he ought to lower the baseball bat but he still felt threatened. Maybe she had an accomplice.

The young woman detected his anxieties and told him she was alone. It was almost as if she knew him and he had invited her around for a chat.

He suddenly felt awkward and self-conscious in his nightwear. “What the hell are you doing?”
“Don’t you recognise me? It’s Shelly, from the 42 Route. I introduced myself last Wednesday.” She dropped her hood. “I get your bus.”
Ahhh, yes. Nobody could forget that haircut. This was the girl who always had the right change in exactly the same coins, every night of the week at 5.35pm, from Hedge Lane to Wickers Grove.

Adrian found himself speechless. His eyes darted back and to from the money she had laid down, the blood on her sleeve, her orange fringe, and her untied laces. Her hands rested harmlessly by her sides. Her fingernails were goth black.

She gazed back at him, unblinking, features accentuated by badly-applied make-up. It was almost garishly-applied, he thought to himself, like she’d been cast for a gruesome theatre production.

“Adrian?” His wife called from upstairs. “Are you there? Adrian?”

“Why don’t you let yourself out and go,” Adrian said under his breath to the young woman, in as much as an authoritative tone as his dry voice could muster. “I will see you on the bus tomorrow and we’ll talk about it then.”

The young woman unzipped her hoodie to reveal a naked surface of pale white skin from throat to navel. She crossed the short distance between them and peered up into his eyes. Both her hands clasped her heart and tears gushed from both her eyes.
“Will you fix my soul, Adrian? Will you repair me? You are my only chance.”

Adrian’s grip on the bat slackened. His brow creased. His head shook slightly to one side, analysing her from an angle on his canted neck.
“Peck me, here. That’s all you have to do. End my suffering.”
He did so, rather than deliberate on it. Her breastbone was hard and hot on his lips. Then he pushed her away, picking up her money from the table and stuffing it into her pocket. She didn’t resist, zipping herself up and smiling widely, a joyous revel in her beaming eyes, skipping towards the front door and melting into the night like a silver ghoul, sending a whispered thank you from the garden like a musical note on the wind.

“It’s okay,” he called to his wife. “It’s okay, hun.”

Two minutes later he was lying to the old bill as well
TBC......
© Jamelia K 2010Zombie Publications