Kong and the Girl

The first thing one notices in Dahlia's room is the three-foot inflatable gorilla. It once sat in the display window of Nob Hill Tattoo, keeping company with a reclining rainbow-breasted mannequin. Dahlia's father removed the beast's pierced testicles as soon as Dahlia dragged it home from the dumpster, but long days sunning himself in the display window of 325 Central Avenue had already marked the gorilla with indignity: his black shine sapped to a dusty charcoal, no longer able to retain air, marked by the indelible smell of cigarette ash, even after Dahlia's father sprayed the fucking thing all over the yard with the garden hose. But here he sits, rescued by Dahlia, muscular legs twisted tight to keep the air up in a collapsing torso, diligently straddling her computer screen.


This graying castrated ape has the word KONG! written in black marker across his forehead followed by an exclamation point. It is not clear if the punctuation signifies a yell, as in, KONG! God-damnit, how could you let them do this to you? Or, if the gorilla himself defiantly proclaims to the world, Fuck you, I'm KONG! Or, perhaps this is not Kong at all, but some other simian, forever labeled with what to him is no more comprehensible than the sound of a hammer on a bell, a hollow KONG! echoing from a nameless primate's inner most recesses.


Head fallen forward on a collapsed neck, he looks down in thought, or exhaustion, or perhaps he is huddled against the a/c Dahlia's father blasts to help someone be cherry-cheeked and charming like a good girl. In any case, KONG's eyes rest on the computer screen below, where a younger version of himself leaps upward from vine to vine, chased by two-dimensional alligators that click their jaws in syncopated time. It is old, the dance these beasts perform, downloaded from the 80s by Dahlia's nostalgic father as an attempt to turn that girl onto something besides wearing black and talking to that disgusting ape all day.


The little Kong climbs, and the big Kong waits, and the little Kong sprints between vines, and the big Kong waits, and the little Kong hops to the very top of the screen, but the big Kong only grows bigger in comparison. And just when little happy Kong reaches up toward the gleaming duct tape marking the place where Kong's testicles used to be, he falls–that last vine too high or too slippery. And big Kong waits, the word on his forehead, collapsing emphatically into any thoughts he might guard.


Kong waits, and Dahlia comes. Dahlia, with her bleeding hangnails that brush over him, her incessant whispering–Sit up straight Kong! Look at me Kong! Cross your legs Kong!–with her dry lips pressed against him, her breath whistling through his valve, lifting the plastic of his chest from where it rests, creased and cracking against an airy heart. Kong seems to nod as Dahlia twists his legs, his torso, anything to keep the air inside. When Dahlia grows tired of fighting the ape, she sets her skull-faced, ying-yang-ringed fingers rolling and banging across the keyboard, a symphony of clicks urging the baby Kong upward, alligator saliva stringing from his ankles, music dinging and bonging until the built-in speakers crackle, the whole mess reaching up in an absurd and pathetic way toward some grander music, some less digital prayer.


During this electric ceremony, Dahlia's mouth opens and closes without her knowledge. Her lips twitch, forming around things that are almost words, as if her body knows something she does not, as if her jaws expect at any moment to snap shut around Kong as he races upward toward that indelible tattoo marking the forehead of a graying deflating sexless facsimile of himself: the eighth and most terrible wonder of the world.


Before the beast falls, before the one's and zero's organize themselves into the inevitable, leaving Kong to stare down at himself in failure, deep within Dahlia, something begins. It is as if she were filling too fast with air and despite the holes bursting in her body, the pressure only increases. But it is not air, so when her lips wrap around it they cannot catch it, when her tongue tries to press it into meaning, she is left licking dryly at her teeth, when she bangs her fists and promises to throw herself against the walls, it only grows faster.


It grows the day Dahlia meets that rainbow-breasted mannequin in the tattoo shop, to get a piercing of her own. It grows when she leaves home in a tangle of fuck yous. And it grows each time she is forced to return, to fall back into the jungle of dusted pink dahlias that still dot the wallpaper of the room saved just for you, sweetie.


It is this thing, the way it chases her away from herself, that makes her leave for the last time, that sends her ten-thousand miles from the Midwest, to where she stands now, at 29 years of age, on the bell platform above Tongdosa Temple, closing her eyes against 5 am sky that flashes off a silver roof, trying not to slip on the ice-covered oak planks while she rings a 2,000 pound prayer bell again and again and again–KONG! KONG! KONG!–the head monk snatching at her arm, shaking his smooth hairless face at her. She wants to scream until the sound rips through the cartilage of her bony chest. She opens her jaws until the skin cracks. She sucks in the air that will be her scream. But she can make no sound.


Instead, the bell reaches down inside her, playing its foot-thick iron vibrato across her vocal cords, matching frequencies with a note she has never heard. The bell's sound KONGs out from within her–deep, dark, and almost human. And she grows hoarse with it.

Ekleksographia:
Wave 4.1.c

August, 2010

Fiction

Allen C. Jones

Allen C. Jones has published work in Zillah, The Bitter Oleander, Flaming Arrows, and various other literary magazines. He served as the 2009 poetry editor of Southwestern Review. Born and raised in Northern California, he hopes to return there before he dies. He is always already finishing his verse novel.