Pink Leather Church of Suffocation

Celine was starting to panic. Just at the corners of her mind, the eating again crushed inward. Taking its time.

Pulling into the parking lot, she glanced in the rearview mirror and once more saw nothing. Was it possible? Actual nothing? No strip of suburban pavement. No pulpy red sun. Even the void-eyed man who eternally camped in the median, apocalypse or not, wasn’t there hawking oranges. Just a pulsing membrane of blank.

Maybe she’d finally gone nuts.

She closed her eyes and breathed deep the way she’d practiced in group, but still the picture boiled up. Whole sections of her universe being lopped off, eaten. Swallowed by pink. And then, the entirety of what was real, her life once so vast with possibility, contracted like an anus. Earth became the United States; the United States became Arizona; and currently, all of reality down to this southwest corner of Scottsdale, specifically the streets between East Earl Drive and Camelback Road. She had no money and this was her last chance and she was supremely fucked.

If she’d been born rich, it wouldn’t be such a drama. Going insane while rich wasn’t half bad, according to Robin Fuller, the white lady from group with the jangly bracelets. Your insanity could stretch out. Buy a zoo? Sure. Fill the zoo with ex-husbands? Legal? Who cares! Bribe the cops! And is that the Vespa from Roman Holiday?

And on and on.

But if you were poor? Oh boy, were you in for an uphill battle of rashes and insomnia and constipation and ageusia. Celine knew that well. Her insanity had nowhere to go but in. She’d become cage rather than conduit, and it resented her for that. And no matter how long she held out, at some point it would win and turn her body into an unmanageable burden.

People these days couldn’t stand the insane poor. Why’d you let yourself slip into madness?! If you couldn’t afford it?! Her family had screamed all those finer points to her, in so many words. They couldn’t wait to get the OK to stick her in a nice cheap cement room. For her own safety. Where gorilla orderlies could wipe her ass with a sponge on a stick and force-feed her mush through a funnel. For her own safety! For indulging her id like that, without any savings. She saw such dooms on the horizon if whatever it was didn’t hurry up and swallow.

Adjusting her necklace so the bulky turquoise stone faced up, Celine Delgado-Lopez got out of her car. Stop it, she told herself, repeating what she’d learned. Negative thinking won’t help you. Don’t fortune tell. Trust the process. You’re an upcoming leader of the southwest sales market. You trust the Rachel LingrossTM way.

She shook her head and went into the trunk and started heaving out materials for the beauty conference. Much of it seemed like junk, but that wasn’t for her to deicide. RL marketing told you what you needed. In life. In everything. Group said she should find a passion. She unloaded it all there in front of her dented, sticker-filled, superchrome bumper. i’d rather be in tuscon. Display boards, banners. frybread=life. Giveaways. Catalogues. one bad relationship away from a county song. The pile was massive and she was pouring sweat and the pink was sucking all the air out of the blazing dripping parking lot. baby on boar—

Her eyes locked at the jagged edges of the half-ripped sticker. Baby. Baby. Her little Conan had died five months ago during labor. A freak accident. Crushed by her “extremely narrow vagina.”

It wasn’t your fault. They’re lying about your body. This is an intrusive thought.

Like most people, Celine believed the infamous “extra suture” was just some stupid frat-bro fable. But now she knew. She didn’t care what her husband claimed, or what the doctors said—it was the only explanation for what she saw. That stretched skinny body underneath the sheet.

The miserable fact was, after her first birth at her husband’s request, the doctor must have stitched her up in order to “keep her pussy tight.” Yes, Doctor Blalock had sewn her up good. Because by the time her second son, Conan, was being pushed out, her torturous vice of birth canal reformed his soft bones into one long centipedal anatomy. Eyes fishlong and to the sides, mouth melting, thin flaps hanging from the dorsal line, the body, the body, the body. Conan was dead-born a mutant. She never even got to hear him cry.

Group was helping her cope with those “delusions.”

One had to remember that doctors were just and honest gods. People let them saw off their feet and bore holes in their heads, because they promised to do it in altruism.

Celine had been sat down, told. That it was impossible. It was her body that’d betrayed her. She had to stop these things! Doctors were not perverted little shit-eating tyrants. Their authority wasn’t based entirely on getting you to believe that sickness was inherent to the body, that your body was the enemy, tamable through their fierce medical knowledge alone. They were good. No doctor would perform such a procedure. Remember the oath! The sacred Hippocratic oath!

When she kept bringing it up, the twisted broken oozing shape of her little boy, they started to look for any excuse to make her go away. Maybe she’d been drinking during pregnancy? Maybe postpartum? They were just trying to help. Postpartum was known to cause delusions. Maybe she needed to go talk with people. Group therapy was known to produce excellent results.

She could sit and talk in a goddamn hen circle forever, but she’d never forget. She just didn’t bring it up anymore. How her doctor was wearing pink that day (his skullcap). That pink had been eating her world, encroaching from all angles. Pink hats. Pink songs. Pink pills and drinks and it was talking to her, leading her where she needed to go. How one night on her computer she’d seen a pop-up flashing pink. The purest and brightest ever. And known. The Rachel Lingross Total Beauty System. The answer. Her passion. It promised women could change their lives in only months.

 “You’ll need to take all your items to your assigned booth, ma’am,” the girl at the registration table said, materializing, sitting there in a fuchsia scrunchie behind a neat stack of registration papers.

“I know…I know,” Celine said, still catching her breath. It was early and the Amarillo Civic Center hadn’t yet turned on the air. Thick and pink, she wheezed.

 “You’re, uh, blocking the way?” The girl at the registration table was getting annoyed.

Celine made her way to the booth. This was it. Today she’d sell enough to make top-tier. Get enough money to leave her husband. She was close and could almost hear Mrs. Lingross’ voice in her head: “You’re special, Celine. One of a kind.” Of course, all RL sales associates were required to watch a minimum of twelve instructional DVDs before a conference, so it could’ve been residual.

Schlepping her boxes forward, she passed tables full of Korean foreskin creams, serpentine silver gadgets whirring menacingly. It smelled like burnt hair and everyone was as slick and smooth as seals.

By the time her booth was looking presentable, she was drenched. Her perm stuck to the front of her forehead. She fanned her crisp white catalogues out on the table like hillbilly teeth. She looked around, but nothing—no customers yet.

“First year?” a small blonde woman called from her booth across the river. She had on large diamond earnings and a matching tennis bracelet. The green badge pinned to her lapel read trish baker, senior vp.

“First year!” Celine waved back, although they really weren’t that far away. She opened a new eyeshadow palette called Midnight Sex Heist.

Where are they coming up with these names? she thought. Rumors on the RL message boards were Mrs. Lingross had been getting into some pretty creepy stuff lately. That she’d let fame and fortune go to her head and was bathing in cow urine and drinking hobo blood and eating endangered species of lizards with beet greens to try and reverse aging. But Celine didn’t participate in such gossip.

Trish smiled, possibly. “Aww. Well, just try and do your best and I’m sure everything will turn out.”

“Thanks! You too!” Celine wanted to walk over and take eye pencil to her smug, lovely, pore-free skin. Write “cunt” in Soulhusk Brown or Electric Chair Smoke or Virgin-Melting Lava.

She started to get up, to let “insanity” take over, but was frozen. She felt a weight like an immense tongue. Right there, huffing, just behind her back.

The pink had arrived.

“Hope I ain’t disturbin’ nuthin’? Ya look like ya in deep thought ova here.” Celine looked up and the familiar hate-happy cheer was not coming from her instructional sales DVD, no, it was truly here and it was Rachel Marth Lingross in all her glory.

She had to squint. Bilious pink, beaming so powerfully she could hear it. A million beetles screaming.

“Mrs., uh, Lingross,” she said, letting out a puff. “Thank you for taking the time to come down and check on us. I, um, didn’t know you were coming—not that it’s bad you did. It’s great! Can I please get you anything? Is there anything you’d like to see? I have a sales pitch customized for the convention. You could look it over?”

“Ha! Oh, child, no. Ya so sweet. Like Ju-ly drippin’ down and bottled up. Look’t ya’ll here.” She looked over the booth in amusement. The upper quadrant of her face had a waxen quality that twitched and trembled when she attempted smiling.

“Yea,” Celine said, almost in apology. “I hope the booth looks alright?”

“Fine. But I do hava few new products I’d like ya ta debut.”

“OK,” Celine said.

“Come with me.”

Aura jangled in Celine’s head and she felt like she was being crushed with ecstasy and the beetles were now hooting and dancing.

She followed Mrs. Lingross through a wormhole of pure pink heavenly light.

The hotel was bright and thick and it was just across the street from the civic center. Maybe. The two women sat quiet in this little island-sac.

Celine was beyond excited. Pink flexed the walls around them inward. Inward, then outward. Breathing. Eating.

“Do ya know why I had ya come ‘ere, child?” Mrs. Lingross’s voice seeped out her mouth, flowed down her chin, neck, breasts, and onto her lap where it became a snaking river that swam towards Celine.

It climbed up her arm and shoulder and jet-squirted from there into her ear.

Celine blinked. “I don’t, ma’m.” She looked up from where she sat on the shiny moss-green bedspread at the pastel painting of a woman (strangling ducks?) in a pond.

“Ma’m?” Mrs. Lingross took a dainty hand to her chest. “Sheesh. Do I look tha’ old?”

“I’m sorry, Ma’m—I mean, Mrs. Lingross. You were calling me child, so I just thought.”

“Hon, ya just calm down now. Ya look like ya swallowed a cricket.” She gazed down and smoothed a wrinkle in her skirt.

“Sorry.”

“I call ya ‘child,’ because that’s what ya are now. I’ll jus be honest. Been runnin’ a pilot program on ya.”

Celine felt so warm and good all of the sudden. “On me? How?”

“Ya were the first one ta click the ad.” She swished her hand in the air. “Don’t ask me, the boys behine’ the computer had it all rigged up ta target the perfect individual. I can see now it worked just fine…whateva they did. Ya almost dere. I want ya ta succeed. Get ya where ya wanna go.”

The warmth intensified and the room breathed in tighter and Celine felt that everything was actually happening. She wasn’t crazy. Such things as eating pink were true, because they had just met and it was impossible that Mrs. Lingross knew her, knew what Celine wanted. But she looked right then like she did. Her eyes were mean with glitter and maybe the gossip was true also and she really had eaten lizards and done black magic and learned how to change women’s lives.

“I’ll do anything,” Celine said.

“That’s perfect, child. Just what I like ta hear.”

She went over to a small chromium desk in the corner of the room. She opened the black lacquer box resting there. Inside was a contraption—tubes, pumps, glass gauges with plungers erected out the top. A spiteful little machine.

Mrs. Lingross turned it on and it started to sputter. It was loud and sounded like it ran on gasoline.

            Mrs. Lingross, Rachel Marth Lingross, RL, the pink star of Celine’s future hope, spun around. She put her hands back and leaned against the lip of the desk.

“Go inta the closet an put on the suit inside,” she said in cold serious tone.

Celine went to the closet. She opened it. Inside hung a limp skin. A pink leather gimp suit. Over the eyes and mouth were silver zippers.

“Yes, get inside,” Mrs. Lingross said.

  Celine did, feeling no shame of undressing. She only felt warm. She got into the suit and zipped the eye and mouth holes.

“Now come an sit on the bed again.” The voice rang.  

Celine, in utter darkness, completely eaten, felt around for the bed. She smelled the tight pink leather. This will make it happen, she thought. I will go to a new place. She started to feel hot and sweaty, like being pushed through a very narrow passage.

In suffocating pink, nothing left but a single voice.

“Before we get started,” Mrs. Lingross said, “I want ya ta take my personal makeup kit. Here. Yes, take it in ya hands. Open’t an take out the Foundation. Yes, take ‘er out. Do ya really wanna be part of the RL family? Be born anew? Unzip the mouth hole. Take the Foundation and eat what’s inside. No. Don cry. This will make the machine work better. Oh yes, child, you’ll be so pretty.” Celine heard her start clapping and giggling. “Now ya can be pretty on tha inside. I want all yer organs pink. Lubed up good. Don’ worry. Don’ struggle. A couple hours on this machine and ya time will be pink—ya smell, ya mind, ya feelings. When ya do good in my company, ya life one color. This is what ya want, hon. Trust me, when ya choke the pink air, when ya truly die in it, yawl be beautiful!”

Celine felt a squeeze.

Saw a light.

Heard a pop.

Garth Miró is a writer from Brooklyn. His work has appeared in Litro, Sundog Lit, Expat, Misery Tourism, Shark Reef, and PoliticsNY.com. He was a semifinalist for North American Review's 2021 Kurt Vonnegut Prize.