The Screaming Orgasm by Holly Beynon
Photo by Luciann Photography from Pexels
I look at myself on the floor.
The body dropped like dirty clothes, brown hair knotted in a bun with an old tartan scrunchie. It’s a trip, seeing yourself from the other side. Look, her black trousers, invisible socks, her on-your-feet-all-day ballet flats. Face a blue mask. A pale button. My body. She is mine. Fuck off with your sharp objects, your demons, and your mangled masculine rage.
He came out of the men’s toilets, sliced open my stomach, stabbed Rox in the back, and lurched out the way he came in. Such a flimsy cameo, totally dated. In a film, he’d be written out, but in real life, the worst things come at you from nowhere. Otherwise, you’d be ready.
In his mad eyes, I was a demon. His hair needed a brush, but that was the least of anyone’s problems. His shoelace was untied. It’s the little things you notice, times like that. His filthy socks.
The Screaming Orgasm
Ingredients:
2 tbsp white rum
2 tbsp dark or golden rum
2 tbsp triple sec
1 tbsp grenadine
1 tbsp orgeat or almond syrup (Monin is fine)
Juice of ½ a lime
Maraschino cherry
Method:
Quarter-fill an old-fashioned glass with crushed ice. Place all ingredients in shaker. Not the cherry, dummy. Shake. Pour into glass. Garnish with aforementioned cherry. Serve with a smile and a dehydrated lime wheel.
Rox and I are closing up at The Shrunken Head cocktail bar when the three dead girls burst in demanding Fireball shots.
‘I fucking told you to lock up,’ Rox says.
The chain is pulled tight, padlocked across the closed doors, but I don’t argue. It’s late and Rox is tired. Everything is my fault. The failure of the dead to respect closing time, or locked doors. Everything.
She is checking the bottles in the speed rail. ‘Get rid of them, or you’re fired,’ she barks, not glancing up at me.
I take a deep breath.
‘We’re closed,’ I say, walking towards the dead girls. Then Rox screams. I turn as the Tanqueray bottle she was holding explodes on the floor. She disappears behind the silver-topped bar, and behind her is the man with the knife.
The first dead girl watches this, one eyeball loose and swinging like a single Chair-O-Planes fairground ride. Her feet are bare on the artisan tile floor. The second girl slumps in the gloom, her back to us all. She is on fire, she is burning. It hurts to look at her. Smoke from her crackling hair curls up to the exposed pipes of the boujee-industrial ceiling of The Shrunken Head. She smells of the iron-taint of a butcher shop, she looks like pounded beefsteak. The third girl, holding her own head in place, rolls her single good eye, the one not blackened.
‘One down,’ she says, to the thin air where Rox isn’t.
Mai-Tai
Ingredients:
2 tbsp dark rum
2 tbsp amaretto liqueur
85ml orange juice
85ml pineapple juice
1 dash grenadine syrup
Method:
Fill a highball glass with ice cubes. Pour in rum and amaretto. Top up with half orange/half pineapple juice. Add a splash of grenadine, but not too much. Serve with a grimace, and the promise of a second chance.
‘You don’t get a second chance,’ says Chair-O-Planes, as if I didn’t know that.
I am very far away, you don’t know me. I bet you didn’t come here for death. Me neither.
I was just at work.
I’ve worked at bars before, but never a place like The Shrunken Head, where you’re expected to take pride in your work like it’s a career and not the latest shithouse means to pay bills and eat. Here, you call yourself not a cocktail waitress but a mixologist. You wear a white shirt, you shine your sensible shoes. You buy yourself a notebook, write down every recipe, every rule, and you learn them all by heart. The hardest part is free pouring. You measure amounts just by counting, using speed pourers plugged into bottles. This place might be the best cocktail bar in Bristol, but its high rate of staff turnover? That’s its major standout.
My first week here, Assistant Manager Pete said, ‘You have to really want this.’
Rox nodded. ‘Go hard,’ she said, ‘or go the fuck home.’
Rox is meaner than a thistle in shit. Once I messed up an order of six Mai-Tais and she squirted liquid fire in my eyes. She made me stand there with my eyes wide open and she sprayed it straight in my face. You know what liquid fire is, right? Proof alcohol in a spray bottle, spray it over a cocktail and Woomph! Up it goes. Super dangerous, just ask Jesse, the girl with no eyebrows. Burned me the wickedest red-eye ever known. Within the walls of The Shrunken Head, Rox is above the law, truly terrifying.
She runs the bar on mistrust and snitching. ‘It’s dog eat dog, my bitches,’ she says.
She drives a blue Porsche. She won Miss Bristol a few years back.
‘Did it for the bants,’ she tells us, arching one perfectly thick brow, and everyone swoons to the floor. I despised her on first sight, but the night after my first shift I masturbated twice in bed, furiously, thinking of her chestnut hair and her limbs like they’re hewn from fine cedar wood. I came hard, teeth gritted, like I was furious. A screaming orgasm. If you are on her bad side you might combust like a swallowed fart, nobody would say a word. Her rare good side is heaven, warm yellow sun on your upturned face. Rox is living proof the incredibly beautiful are monstrous, and they start out at management level. I mean they’re practically born looking down. Rox has never scrubbed a floor or flipped a burger and I know she’s never wiped a bum. Maybe her own.
Maybe not.
Lavender Collins
Ingredients:
40ml Bombay Sapphire gin
Juice ½ lemon
2 tbsp lavender syrup
80ml soda/sparkling water
Lemon slice
Method:
Squeeze the juice of half a lemon into a Collins glass. Add lavender syrup and gin. Stir, counting slowly to 30 as you do. Do not think about the last thing you said to your mother. Breathe in through the nose, out through the mouth. Fill glass with ice. Top with soda water, garnish with a lemon wedge. Serve with an uncontrollable twitch in the right eye, and a kick to the shin of the nearest man with a weapon. Wrestle him to the floor if you can, but you have to be quick.
Too late.
The Shrunken Head is hell to me but there’s no denying, it always smells amazing. Neck-wound sniffs and says, ‘You smell like a Nanna’s pants.’
I say, ‘Our special next week is Lavender Collins, you should come by.’
This is cruel of me, these girls are way beyond next week and gin-mix cocktails, but I spent the early morning making lavender syrup out the back, it hums off my hair like a meadow in high summer. This has been the longest day, I’m tired, and there’s blood everywhere.
‘Fuck you,’ says Chair-O-Planes.
Pressing my palm to my stomach, I feel my own pulse. It is unravelling. I close my eyes momentarily and listen to the roaring white noise of rushing time. I am very still.
‘He’s cut you wide open.’ Chair-O-Planes closes in. ‘Did one of you call for help?’ she asks. ‘Has Elvis left the building, babe?’
‘I can’t remember,’ whispers a pinprick voice in my head. My phone is in my coat pocket, in the cloakroom. It is too much. Rox with her back sliced like a fish. Too much.
Folding the dishtowel laying on the bar, feigning an attitude that I could straddle any given body and show them a good time, I purse my lips, flipping the towel over my shoulder.
Looking Chair-O-Planes dead in the eye, I ask, ‘No really, what can I get you?’
‘Fireball shots,’ says Neck-Wound, holding her head straight. When she speaks, a high whistle of air blows from the dark gash gaping ear to ear.
‘We already told you,’ adds Chair-O-Planes.
‘Okay,’ I shrug. ‘I can get you Fireball shots, if that’s what you really want.’
She appears in my head. Think, says Chair-O-Planes. Think. Her voice is an unexpected trill.
It was late. We were locking up. It was just me and Rox, and the man with a knife who’d snuck in through the back. We didn’t know he was there. You won’t hear much about him. Here, he has only a walk-on part. Actually more of a lurch. Later that night, if you see the news, you’ll know they caught him in the park further along the river, the other side of the bridge. A man can get away with a high degree of madness on a Saturday night, but he had a knife soaked in my blood and he was screaming. He swore he saw demons, and maybe he did. Maybe he really did.
I wish we’d locked the back door. It would have saved a lot of trouble. The dead girls burst in afterwards, practically useless first responders. But fast, I’ll give them that.
If you’re having trouble here, think how I felt. A little omniscience would do us all good, but what can I say?
You’re going to need to focus, Chair-O-Planes thinks.
I take a deep breath. It catches, my throat raw. I step behind the bar. My feet are light and my head swims, like I mainlined thick coffee. I don’t check on Rox, because honestly? I hope she’s not alright. I hate her, sleeping in her pool of blood.
‘Now,’ I say. ‘Listen.’
I hold my arm outstretched like a showgirl, to the premium bottles lining the back wall. Like a showgirl who’s got this licked, a mixologist who knows just what she’s doing.
‘...This is the best cocktail bar in Bristol. Name your poison.’ I stretch out my hand, smile my best heartbreaker’s smile. A glob of blood swells at the tip of my finger.
The bottles span the length of the bar. They rattle like glass teeth when the dead girls look at them.
‘I don’t want a Lavender fucking Collins,’ says Chair-O-Planes.
My fingers tingle.
Neck-Wound lets go of her head a split-second and it starts to tip back. ‘Shit!’ She gurgles.
My stomach lurches. ‘Don’t do that,’ I say. ‘Don’t let go.’
She looks so sad. Her left eyelid is swelled tight, a cartoon purple puff.
‘Someone really socked you, huh?’ I say, as if that’s the worst of it.
‘I’m not thirsty, anyway,’ she replies, blood bubbling from her neck.
Mad-Eye Martini
Ingredients:
(for the Martini):
20 ml Hpnotiq liqueur
40 ml vodka
80 ml lychee juice.
(for the eyeball garnish):
1 canned lychee
¼ tsp. cherry conserve
1 blueberry
Method:
Drain and dry lychee, fill cavity with cherry conserve and stuff with blueberry (blossom end facing outward- this serves as the ‘pupil’ of the eye). Skewer with cocktail stick.
Pour liqueur, vodka and lychee juice into shaker filled with ice. Shake and strain into chilled cocktail glass. Balance skewered lychee eye across glass. Serve wearing an eyepatch and run towards customer screaming, or with a knife between gritted teeth. Serve with the implication that one day, life will be danced to the sound of Nina Simone’s Wild Is the Wind. Here is a pamphlet purporting to detail the steps. While that piano is playing, nothing can kill you. Serve with your mother’s blessing, a pickled walnut or a fortune cookie that cracks itself open to expose a tiny blank page. Serve with the wind at your back. Serve with the sun on your face. Serve because life is momentary. Or because it is endless. Your choice. No one is supervising, at this point.
That’s their poison, I tell myself, gathering what is needed in front of me. The melon floral scent of skinned lychee turns metallic on the polished silver bar, but I smell nothing. It does, though. You know it does. I squeeze a little cherry jam into the pit-hole of each lychee, pushing a blueberry in, blossom side facing outwards. The jam bleeds into the anaemic flesh, it really looks like an eyeball. I lay all three in a row. They gaze up at me, their maker.
I run my finger along the liqueurs until I find the Hpnotiq. When I turn back, Chair-O-Planes leans across the bar. The three lychee eyeballs swivel around to look at her, but they aren’t alive. It is a fruit-based mechanical trick, and I snort-laugh that embarrassing way, through my nostrils, like a pig. Turns out dying isn’t any more elegant than normal living.
‘Know what happened to her?’ Chair-O-Planes whispers, gesturing at Beefsteak, in the gloom by the doors. I shake my head, I don’t want to know. She is still burning, flames lick the top of her head. The wood-panelling behind her has charred, she is a portable nightmare.
‘Don’t talk like I’m not here,’ says Beefsteak, and I shudder, I can’t help it. Her spoken voice is gluey. Her words carry on a puff of smoke. When she coughs, a sizzle. She is the closest thing to horror I’ve seen. The worst of it is the fear she gives off. She has carried it all the way here, she will carry it forever.
‘Her boyfriend beat her with a baseball bat until she was a lump on the floor.’ Chair-O-Planes whispers. ‘Then he lit her on fire. She was still alive. Apparently, when they found her, they couldn’t tell what it was. She’d crawled out of the apartment and into the stairwell. Left a grease trail behind her.’
Don’t, I think.
Chair-O-Planes smiles.
Can you hear what I’m thinking?
‘What do you think?’ she says.
You can go back, thinks Chair-O-Planes. You’re slipping, but there’s still time. Barely.
‘Don’t tell her that,’ says Neck-Wound. ‘We’ve come all this way.’
Chair-O-Planes leans her forehead onto mine, across the silver bar. Her loose eyeball sticks to my cheek and the lychee eyes between us sigh. Don’t question it, you weren’t there.
I want this, you must tell yourself. I want this. You have to really mean it. Say it like you mean it, a hundred times.
There are voices outside. When the doors burst open, bright lights, and the meanness of the night yawns in. Time has stretched like a cat, moments like claws. It is after 2am, when darkness is proven loneliest. That’s a scientific fact. The air hits me, like anytime you leave a bar and your drunkenness sucker-punches you. I hand out glasses. I am a mixologist after all, Rox. Do you hear me?
Stab In The Back
Ingredients:
Whatever dregs of wine you can find. It’s very late.
20ml Don Pedro brandy
40ml orange juice
Soda/sparkling water
Slice of orange
Method:
This one is after-hours, and for you alone. Fill hi-ball glass with ice. Combine wine, brandy and orange juice in shaker. Pour into glass and top up with soda water. No, forget the orange juice. And the soda. You know what you’re doing. Garnish with the realisation that time is not a straight line but travels circuitously, back to the start of something else entirely. It was always there, waiting. Skip the ice, you’re cold already. Can you feel the years fall away like old skin? You’re lying on the floor. Can you feel the floor cave in? Yes, I can. The three dead girls reach out their hands: one burning, one bloodless, one pulped to the bone. They are realer than anyone who ever touched them. Rox is screaming. You finally woke up then, bitch? She’s been useless, unless she called emergency. Did she? The Shrunken Head can go to hell, and Rox with it. The thought of her is a hot coal in your bellowing gut.
All the best girls are dead.
You look up at Chair-O-Planes, try to smile. Isn’t that a question of time?
Place your hand to your belly. There is a lot of blood, it covers your hand. If you reach to touch the hands of those three girls, it will be the last thing you ever do. But you knew that, didn’t you?
Are you going to live?
Open your eyes, Rox is screaming. Look at me.
Blood smears red across the orange slice garnish. The dead girls are watching, each holds a glass aloft.
Serve in a pool of blood, because there is so much of it. Serve with whatever is at hand. But do serve.
Holly Beynon
Holly lives on a farm in Dorset. She has previously worked as a shepherdess, and a freelance illustrator. She is currently employed at SARSAS, a support service for survivors of sexual violence. She has had short stories published internationally, in print and online. She has six dogs and one daughter.