I slept for exactly four hours before I woke up. I didn't need a clock to know how long I had been asleep. It's what always happened to me when I took ecstasy. I would crash hard, sleep for four hours, and then I was AWAKE awake. There wasn't a chance in hell that I could go back to sleep. I wanted to get up, move, go, go, go. Luckily, Eric had been content to let me sleep on top of him so, thankfully, I wasn't trapped. He still whimpered in his sleep when I crawled out of his embrace, which I thought was adorable, even if somewhat heartbreaking.
I went downstairs and poked around in the kitchen. I wanted to make Eric breakfast but the extent of my culinary skills was pretty limited. I knew how to work a can opener and I could scramble eggs. And what I meant by scrambled eggs was that I didn't know how to keep from breaking the yolk when I cracked the egg into the skillet. But Eric didn't have eggs. All he had was ingredients, frozen stuff, raw stuff. I didn't know what to do with any of that. He did have coffee and a coffee maker. I could make coffee, right? Apparently not. I followed the instructions on the can but nothing was happening. I was still staring at the coffeepot when Eric walked into the kitchen.
"What's wrong?" he asked.
"It's not working," I grumbled.
"Don't tell me that." He started examining the coffeemaker. "I live on this stuff."
I stepped back to let him try to figure out the problem. After a few seconds of having his hands on the infernal machine he accusingly growled at me, "Did you put hot water in this?"
"Yes."
"Holy fuck, Rain. Cold water. Don't you know how to make coffee?"
"Umm. No?" I flushed in embarrassment.
"How the fuck do you not know how to make coffee?" he groused, taking the machine apart and dumping the water out. "It won't perk if the water is already hot."
"I'm sorry," I told him. "It should say that."
He spun the coffee maker around and, on the back, it clearly said 'Warning: Do not add hot water.'
"Well shit," I groaned. "I never learned any of this shit. I didn't have a kitchen until a year ago. And the one that I have isn't really worth the title."
"Never?" His expression was one of surprise and concern. It was that touch of pity that I hated so much.
I sighed. I had to get this over with eventually. It was as good of a time as any. "When I was little I had a good foster mother. Mama Kay. She was good to us. There were four foster kids with her but she got busted dealing and went to jail so we were all farmed out to other homes. I was eight or so. I spent the next couple of years in a really bad place until I couldn't take it anymore. I split. I was ten. When I got picked up they didn't believe me about how bad it was so I was labeled as a troubled kid. Only the worst kinds of foster homes would take me. I kept running away. Every time I got picked up on the street they would send me someplace new. The last time I already told you about. I've been on my own since then. I guess they figured that I was a lost cause and stopped looking for me."
"Well, we'll add basic kitchen skills to our list of things that you need," he said as he started the coffee brewing. To give him credit, when he turned back to me, he didn't have a shred of pity on his face. I was grateful.
"I just wanted to make you breakfast," I pouted and he grinned.
"Breakfast isn't something that I do very often so I don't have much here. We'll need to go shopping if you want breakfast foods. If you're hungry right now I can make biscuits and gravy again," he offered.
"Would you show me how?"
He chuckled. "I'm cheating. The biscuits are already made." He turned the oven on, set it to broil, and pulled something encased in aluminum foil out of the freezer. I watched him carefully as he sliced four frozen biscuits, fried some crumbled breakfast sausage and made cream gravy. He toasted the biscuit halves, added the cooked sausage to the gravy, then he poured it on top of the plated biscuits. He made it all look easy as hell. We ate standing up in the kitchen. He had a table but it was covered in discarded pieces of mannequin anatomy.
"I need to clean this place up." he said, glancing around at the disarray. "I'm getting the itch to work but not on this."
"I'll help," I volunteered. I couldn't cook but I could lift and carry.
"Thanks."
We spent the next couple of hours cleaning and stacking the miscellaneous parts and pieces by the door until the warehouse resembled an apartment-slash-workshop, if you ignored the body parts stacked up like firewood.
He sighed at the pile and gathered some of it up. "Come on," he said, picking up his keys.
I filled my arms and followed him out the door. We walked around the building to the back of the parking lot where he set his load down on the ground and pushed aside the honeysuckle vines hanging over the fence to reveal a gate. He unlocked it and opened it, gathered up his pile again and stepped through. I followed.
I had never noticed the gate before but, in the year that I had been coming to his place, only the last few days had been during the daylight. We stepped into a small courtyard area with a metal shed. He unlocked the shed while I stared at the monolith in the center of the twenty foot square courtyard.
"What is this?" I asked.
"It's my mausoleum," he informed me.
"No," I responded. "This."
He turned from the shed and glanced over the unfinished statue that had me fixated. It was probably eight feet tall and carved from white marble with black and gray veins running through it. Though incomplete, the design was clear. It was a demon with a human in his arms almost completely obscured by the membranous wings of the demon. They were face to face and the demon was either kissing or biting the neck of the human in his embrace. The human had long hair but, in its rough state, the face was androgynous.
"A very expensive piece of trash," he scowled.
"It's beautiful, Eric," I breathed.
"It's Vallejo," he replied.
"Val-what?"
"Vallejo," he explained. "Boris Vallejo is a painter. The further that I got into this the more it looked like Vallejo to me."
"Why didn't you finish it?"
He reached out and ran his fingertips over the marble. "Being influenced by someone else's work is one thing. Outright mimicry is not acceptable. Vallejo's work is beautiful but it's not me." He dropped his arm. "Sometimes I do things that just aren't me."
I managed to peel my eyes from the sculpture in order to focus on Eric. "Of course they're you. They have to be. They come from you so they are part of you. Maybe it's just not the parts that you're accustomed to."
He took the body parts from my arms and stacked them in the shed with many other discarded incomplete works. I scanned the mess of forgotten art. "Does anything ever get revived?"
He shook his head. "Not yet."
