Thought Catalog - Cicada, Ladybug (Chapter 12) lyrics

Again, Pillar and I are center, but this time I'm cradling the white co*k. Earlier, its muddied gut tract grazed my forearm and goosebumps froze up to my bicep. Never clucking only crooning, it swivels its head from Rex to Pillar to Tick to gone. I ask Pillar, “Do I smack it?” “If you wanna get shanked in the hip. No, no more,'omes,” says Pillar. From his bear paw, Rex sags like a rubber chicken. His right foot is folded against his stomach as it should be, but his left, his left, his left, is a broken twig. It points forward from the knee but breaks at the shin, so only the orange skin keeps the flinging foot attached. It's lynched. Tick eyes Pillar and says, “Set ‘em up.” “Foo', Rex can't even stand,” replies Pillar. “Stupid, b**h. You just want it finished. You just want the money.” “f** the bet then.” “Set ‘em up. Till the white b**h is dead. Set ‘em UP.” An experienced brawler, Rex gazes up for the second round and clucks when Pillar pets his crown. Pillar says to me, “Rex first,” then plops him down. Rex is ink splatter. He's a bear rug. He's roadk**, droopy from rain and decomposing into the gutter. “He's done, foo'. He's done.” Tick hurdles over the chicken wire into the coliseum, marches to Pillar, then sneers up at his larger compatriot, both shirtless and freckled from the sun and tattooed with the marks of our tribe. These are your influences. I want out. “Move,” shouts Tick, so Pillar waddles back. “Stupid b**h.” He cranes Rex up by choking him and punches his skull. “Chill,” says Pillar. Tick chucks Rex's narrow body into his elbow then swallows his head. I coil back. Is he biting it off? But then Tick's cheeks bulge. He's blowing. He's blowing to inflate Rex's pink balloons. Blowing to drag poker chips from Pillar's side of the table to his own. Blowing to cling to the little money he's yet to pay to our smack dealers. Blowing to resuscitate himself from Spyder. And it sounds like a gag, but Rex finally chirps inside Tick's throat. It's a resurrection. Tick wants a resurrection. I want a resurrection. Tick says to me, “Put it down after I drop ‘im.” And for the first time, the horns drawn on Tick's forehead frighten me. So after Rex lands with a ploof and his sides bellow around him, I spew forward white water from a bucket. Rex inhales to crow, but the white pokes its beak into his eye and ruptures it. Rex twitches with a wink while the white bird snarls onto his throat, twirls its body around the pole of his esophagus, and stakes its finger fangs into his side. Rex tumbles over his snapped foot, exposing his belly. The white bounds onto it and mangles mangles mangles. Rex's head bombs into the dirt and his chin sack flaps over his jaw. But the white continues to gut him, tearing out his innards, like a maniacal magician yanking from a black box an endless red handkerchief, who with every pull and splatter, cackles at the sight of more. Rex cries no alarm clock, no co*k-a-doodle. The farmer will sleep in. Snooze.