Quinn’s Blank Stared Effigy<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n I couldn’t leave just yet; she needed to ensure I felt something.<\/p>\n Slithering past the melody of lost hope, my sister Quinn swore she could hear a bellowing hum from time to time, and she would pause<\/p>\n with certainty at random moments, and say, “There’s that noise again.”<\/p>\n As a kid, I never understood why she\u2019d say she heard a noise. A noise I’d never heard, but I did feel something.<\/p>\n Every time she would ask if I, too, heard the hum.<\/p>\n Like a gust of wind that never touched the skin but rippled through the soul as if the wind was blowing through my orbital lens into my mind’s eye a lucid something streaming through me, looking dead at reality, causing my vision to shutter.<\/p>\n Like her hearing, my vision would flicker and something weird would happen; she would hear things and I would feel things. She would listen to something and ask me, and I heard nothing.<\/p>\n Nostalgia is when Quinn was trying to convince me of the noise I never heard.<\/p>\n “You don’t hear it? That hum, that bellowing hum, It’s an androgynous tone.”<\/p>\n “Androgynous?” \u00a0I had to ask.<\/p>\n We were kids, I had no idea what that word meant, but I felt like I did. Grandma used to tell me that Quinn “was older by the seconds.” Grandma doesn’t know how many seconds but knew that Quinn was older “by the seconds.” The truth is, I don’t know how. Then, I knew that Quinn was much older than myself and grandma.<\/p>\n Quinn explained, “Yeah, it’s like a female and male combined or some sexless something that is non-binary to what we think gender is, or ought to be.”<\/p>\n “Gender? Ought to be?\u201d I thought to myself. \u201cSo, the voice is like a robot?”<\/p>\n “No. Yeah, but something like that, I guess, but more like a robotic-angelic voice.”<\/p>\n I knew then that Quinn, indeed, was hearing a sound. I wondered then,<\/p>\n “Is it coming from above?” No one ever felt so identical, simulating to my essence, Quinn’s soul was yet so antiquated, so different from the makeup of my youthful soul.<\/p>\n She softly smushed my cheeks together, stared right into my eyes and whispered proudly,<\/p>\n “The noise is coming from every-<\/p>\n where.” I could still hear the long drawn out\u201cwhere\u201d making it sound like waaareee<\/p>\n My only sibling, my sweet sister Quinn she was smart, too intelligent. As kids, I swore that she was some divine being who could hear some particular echo or some type of swan song that permeated from space. Quinn was picking up on whatever strung outwardly from that celestial, unknown epicenter. Silking from there is a black-like vapor accompanied by a particular sound on Earth\u2014a sound that is eerie yet familiar.<\/p>\n I wasn’t there,<\/p>\n but I’ve heard people say that twins have this psychic thing about them, and although we were separated, being miles apart from each other, at times, I swore Quinn was near me.<\/p>\n Before I left for deployment, before I got in my car to take that long cold drive to Fort Drum. Something kept me in bed.<\/p>\n For the first and the last time, I heard that noise.<\/p>\n I heard that bellowing hum. But this time, the noise came with no feeling nor gust of something; instead, as I could imagine brushing my teeth,<\/p>\n A flash, an instance of insight where I could see Quinn.<\/p>\n I wasn’t hallucinating, but I was watching something. I couldn’t get out of bed. I saw her.<\/p>\n I saw that Quinn didn’t hear the banging at the door or the ceramic mug break, followed by several more hard bangs, Nor the shout coming outside the door, “Ma-am, you have to get out!”<\/p>\n Quinn was an artist of surviving, like a still image, some celestial sheen glistened over her body, and next to her bed, where shards of metal shone on top of the dresser with her slinking pajama pants hanging off the corner, a half-lit joint propped in, wedged “just right” on the ashtray, and her body, Quinn’s body – my sister’s body added zest, some flavor of life creating a cinematic gradient filter of despair, \u00a0creating an image too crooked to frame.<\/p>\n Still, there was an art of something radiating out of my sister’s room.<\/p>\n In the dark, as kids, my sister Quinn would ruminate. She would talk to herself, as I do sometimes. Gothic with her self-expression, it was as if the darkness was using her like a wind-up doll. She wore black all the time and wore it with an iridescent flare.<\/p>\n I couldn’t get in the car just yet; I couldn’t leave to be the man my father had never been. Still, in bed, I could only daydream about Quinn’s conscience, pondering the sum of her pain. In her mind’s eye, she watched a flurry of mental images weighing the sum of her miserable life’s experiences\u2014my poor sister.<\/p>\n I have heard people say that twins have this psychic thing about them.<\/p>\n I rarely desire to think about the past, but I can’t shake off this uneasy, haunting feeling today. I’m not David, but Quinn. She is compartmentalizing experiences of the pain others have caused her, myself included. \u00a0Quinn calls this checklist “The totalities of my woes.” As if I were her, lying in bed, there was this transmutation, a crossing of souls, something inexplicable to science. I wasn’t David, but I was meshed with Quinn.<\/p>\n “What is she doing?” My innocence spat. A rapid blink indicated that there was a brisk of life before she decided to part ways. Lying down, Eyes shut, squinting harder, Quinn, like David, is known for talking to her-himself.<\/p>\n “Funny that there’s light even in darkness,” Squinting harder, “I could see a lot of life in the dark.” Her hands reach out. She’s covered in black ink, attempting to grab the things that aren’t there. She lets out a sigh, inspired by the things we reminisce. “In the dark,” Quinn repeats. “With our eyes shut. We could see various colors, not in our dreams but in the dark. Together, we are alive. Don’t you see the colors? Well, I do; I see purple-orange, flowing with teal, yellow, and red, assuring blue has a spot in the collage of everything, and colors dance; they are fluid, floating all around us, radiating light within the darkness. I see all of this while being alive.” Quinn watches, and I enter deeper, not as deep as a cut nor a tattoo, but alongside Quinn together, we enter “deep-deep” into her thoughts.<\/p>\n ENTERING that spotless place found in the mind. Where rooms are buried and in them, containing weaving memories of our lives, are the inner workings of the machinery, an ENCHANTED loom which is the brain.\u00a0Lighting up: It transcribes, causing a shimmer that exposes all of the ghouls who desire nothing better but to hide. We hide our love ballads from a world unkind. Now, for us, some mental rooms were left unkempt, abandoned as if something was left behind to die\u2014<\/p>\n Animating Quinn’s life. We rise to walk down the cobbled steps of a past time, where fragmented memories from a European genealogy vex us, with unwarranted beatings from our fathers, and the insidious rape from our neighbors instilled a sort of rage that led her to spiral downward.<\/p>\n “Deeper.”<\/p>\n I’ve heard people say that twins have this psychic thing about them.<\/p>\n Quinn shows me that underneath the Vatican. Somewhere buried deep inside, amongst the living and the dead, there’s an unobservable but left-in-sight, a well-kept catacomb encircling skulls, the moonlight spotted in the middle, stood a statue shrouded with gold linen; a monument, which was an effigy depicting a religious-Luciferic Papal Goat. “Quinn always knew of this place,”\u00a0I whispered. And on the base of the monument, inscribed in Latin,\u00a0“Behold, The Baphomet. A magnificent creature seeking to illustrate the dark vapor found within us All. Amen.”<\/p>\n Fortified with misery, Drenching our ego In darkness. Which creeps on us every night.<\/p>\n Here on Earth, Quinn could feel her celestial kin keeping her company alongside the heartaches she routinely festers at. At times, she has dreamt that she is nervously clasping her hands and could feel someone lurking behind her.\u00a0“I hear the sounds of a weeping widow.”\u00a0Said a near but distant voice. “That’s not the hum,”\u00a0I said unseen, far to myself. She wasn’t surprised, instead soothed by the presence of this being. She awaited the voice. And simultaneously, both voices fell to a whisper.\u00a0“There you are.”\u00a0Like a glitch, life pixelates mirages, glitching in; what was ever distant to Quinn now is ever close\u2014uplifting her head. Inching up closer. They meet between that shared space of that encompassing darkness found around us. And gently, the figure speaks.\u00a0“You did it again.”\u00a0We nod to agree as grief arms us all with misery. But together, Quinn found much-needed comfort with that type of company. She starts to wake up, but her “Saint”\u00a0fades away before she wakes. Before she’s fully awake, before the eyelids are lifted, our imprinted feeling of an initial image resonates with a series of thoughts stemming from an experience that may forever haunt us. But Quinn remembered before she woke up, she recalled lights inside of her while colliding with this entity as one. It Smiled. Quinn fanged; she opened her mouth, swarming out of her were raging bees moving violently, expressing grief and all that Quinn hates.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I couldn’t get out of bed, and she couldn’t hold her eyes shut much longer, and what she had just experienced in the dark was long gone.<\/p>\n Being awake to Quinn was “unwarranted”\u00a0like the bad memories some innocent people keep. Quinn\u2019s head is near the headboard which rests by a window. Wafting in was that shitty outside air of life. Quinn is awake. Lifting her torso, she utters, “Damn,”\u00a0Rubbing her eyes, Quinn’s foggy vision clears right up straight into Luis’s orientation.\u00a0My first thought was Luis’s age. “He looks much older than us.”<\/p>\n Quinn tended to whisper at times and as “you know, Quinn talked to herself”.<\/p>\n To others, at times, her voice sounded muffled.<\/p>\n “come back, fuuuuck.”\u00a0She sighs.<\/p>\n “Huh”?\u00a0Uttered Luis.<\/p>\n Quinn hates looking at him. “Huh, what\u2019s wrong\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cNothing\u201d. \u00a0Quinn stares right at her floral printed pillowcase when replying.<\/p>\n “You said some shit, I’m sure you did, you woke up and said some stupid shit\u201d.<\/p>\n “What I said Luis was maybe or something; I’m not sure.”<\/p>\n “Ohh, I thought I heard you say some other shit.”\u00a0Luis starts to get ready to leave.<\/p>\n Lying flat back down, she appears to Luis as a lifeless body. But being fully alive, breathing.<\/p>\n She is conscious with a pillow over her head. Calming her breathing, Quinn hears everything. Aware of her surroundings, she focuses on the breathing of those noisy neighbors alongside the notifications on their phones. She scouts for that specific “noise,”\u00a0a noise she swears she hears from time to time. Listening for it through the squeaks and creeks penetrating the cheap drywall. “Ears like a dog”\u00a0our grandma would say. Quinn even picked up on the sirens blaring down the block. She could tell from what direction they were coming from.\u00a0Feeling that cold draft, like Quinn tends to do, she loses herself in her thoughts.We both can’t get out of bed; Quinn’s face is buried into her pillow, and she lets out a huge sigh. With the corner of her left eye, she becomes enamored with her nightstand. Her pale face gloomed a decorative melancholic frown. “The lyrics to a sad song”\u00a0Quinn mumbles. Next to her pajama pants was her “journal”\u00a0where she had bookmarked that special page using a Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride pen.<\/p>\n Spatial icons are not only visible images but also vibrate as sounds, perverting us into something unique and commanding some of us to devolve, falling deeper into despair. Her lips move, “she’s trying to find that sound”\u00a0I said. \u00a0Quinn Hums a sad lullaby, “hmmm. Do not sleeeep, my staaarling, hmmm sleep my dooooe, She is wrapped in currrrt— she will bu-ry you, inside her fur..\u201d Quinn would pause and resume the tune, \u201chmmm my breathe you breathe it carries you, hmmm, my breathe you breathe it carries you\u2026 Do not sleep. My darling”<\/p>\n “What is the name of that song”<\/p>\n “Anti-lullaby”!!<\/p>\n I blurted out but she didn’t hear me.<\/p>\n Her attention swiftly splits. Quinn starts picking up Luis’s unpleasant scent; she caves her face harder into the pillow. “This fucking creep.”\u00a0Letting out another sigh. She hears. “Hey baby girl, you want anything from the store?”\u00a0“don’t reply,”\u00a0I said with anger. In some instances, Quinn could be defiant. Remaining silent, she thinks of the dreadful day she met Luis. “I met this creep four years ago. I was on my own, and now, he just barges in on me from time to time. He takes what he wants uses my benefit card and eats my food. Gives me shitty weed. Ah fuck, he just takes advantage of me”\u00a0Feeling a sensation that stems from some internal unprocessed trauma, she repeats. “Takes advantage of me.” None of this was ever consensual. While contemplating Luis’s age, education, and blood type, she briefly spawned a smile. For a split second, her face lit up. I know exactly what she is thinking about the snacks at Byrne Dairy’s gas station. I bet that is where she met this Luis guy. Outside of that local\u00a0“funky, methee gas station, probably asked her if she was okay,”\u00a0“and “I wasn’t, I needed help and\u2026 uhm”\u00a0As quickly as the smile came, her face planted with a sprite of anger, “and I hate this fucking place”<\/p>\n Fire truck sirens go by. Luis wasn’t her problem, nor communistic or fascistic regimes for me, but it was the town of Croswell that bore the brunt of our struggles. Quinn found herself in what she called an “unfortunate circumstance of existing.”\u00a0Her life, like many others in the small city of Croswell was a subject to be studied in which our miserable lives and the systems that govern us are analyzed inside of universities and by bureaucrats for some sort of enrichment. Our mother was addicted to pills and died while we were young. Our father. Well, our grandmother wishes Quinn never met our father. Something wasn’t right with him, and like Grandma would say, “he always took advantage”\u00a0Sometimes most of times being the male twin was beneficial.<\/p>\n Quinn hated our father. Thinking about it while suppressing those dark memories, she’s interrupted. “Don’t do something stupid.”\u00a0He rose from her bed, buckling up his pants. Smiling with his head held high. “Baby girl, you heard”?\u00a0Luis would repeat it. “Baby girl”!\u00a0He said with a stupid smirk. Quinn cringed every time she heard It.\u00a0“My baby girl,”\u00a0he repeated, with that daft curve staining his grill that he called a smile. Coming back to bed to caress her body. Luis like most men are unaware of how aware Quinn has been the entire time. “Don’t- do something stuuu-pid,”\u00a0The audio came slowly into her head. She blurts out. “Like what! Kill myself?”\u00a0An idea she thought she kept inside. “No, Quinn, please, Quinn, Feel Good”\u00a0I started to get nervous. “Just feel good”\u00a0I repeated, “Please, feel good”<\/p>\n I’ve heard people say that twins have this psychic thing about them.<\/p>\n For some degenerate reason, Luis was\u00a0“super”\u00a0sure of himself.\u00a0“Stop talking to her”\u00a0I wanted to yell.<\/p>\n “Quinn, look at me baby girl, don’t allow those demons to win! Don’t be stupid, baby, and do something so stupid.”<\/p>\n He stared at her ass the entire time.<\/p>\n “You can’t let demons win. Baby.”<\/p>\n Grabbing, creating a firm shake with her ass.<\/p>\n The idiot whispers.<\/p>\n “You can’t. You gotta fucking conquer this whole shit and fully become a demo, baby girl a fucking gremlin” The idiot smiles.<\/p>\n Quinn doesn’t listen.<\/p>\n “Please don’t listen to him” but she listens. Not to us. But listening for that noise. That bellowing hum. Her lips move.<\/p>\n \u201cYou look ridiculous with those face tattoos”<\/p>\n “Huh? What did you just say to me”<\/p>\n Inching up away from the bed closer to Luis\u2019s face. Quinn stares at him.<\/p>\n She asks. “Are you sure about that”?<\/p>\n “About what, life or becoming a demon\u201d ?<\/p>\n \u201cBoth\u201d Quinn doesn\u2019t look away.<\/p>\n \u201cLife is worth living Quinn so listen to me. Look. I am older than you I have more wisdom than you And trust me life is not about becoming the best fucking angel or the best God or Goddess for fucking mommy and daddy. That’s all bullshit. Here on Earth is about being aware of your time and being on demon time, You have to take advantage of that fucking time Quinn!”<\/p>\n Quinn didn\u2019t ask the question for an answer instead Quinn asked hoping that whatever idiotic reply was followed by the sound she so desperately wants. “Funny, he said, demon, I have always felt like a demon”<\/p>\n “but you’re not.”\u00a0I cried with gloom.<\/p>\n She glances at her journal, notices an engraving. Reading, “R.E.L.A.X.”<\/p>\n “Please feel good, Quinn,”\u00a0I repeated.<\/p>\n But overpowering my melancholic plea was a voice resembling that androgynous tone.<\/p>\n “Write it down, baby girl,”\u00a0said the voice.<\/p>\n But it wasn’t Luis’s nor mine. It was a voice buried deep inside Quinn’s subconscious, and it spoke. “Don’t do something stupid,”\u00a0we heard it again, but Luis had already stormed out of the apartment minutes before they barged in. I couldn’t get out of bed. I couldn’t get into my car and drive to Fort Drum. Not yet. As If she was looking at herself, I was near her, both with starry eyes mesmerized by the moment. Tranced by the vibrant hue, Quinn notices the black-lit candle beside her journal and the flame dancing over, striking the window panels. Catching flames, her room begins to glow. “Don’t do something stupid”<\/p>\n Banging at her door, followed by a yell,<\/p>\n “Quinn\u00a0“Get out, Please Quinn!”\u00a0Yelled the neighbors.<\/p>\n Us, Her and I two children, too afraid to move, stood still and watched. Riveting all around her, there is a silk-like dark vapor. Saint John calls it “A celestial poison concocted by the evil deeds of men”<\/p>\n While lying on her bed inside of her room.<\/p>\n Quinn thinks of all the good she has lost. As if a cigarette was lit. Near her, Silking was a certain vapor that started to form. This riveting smoke glossed over her nightstand. Quinn, fully aware of it, began to breathe it in.\u00a0“Stop this Quinn”\u00a0I turned to little her and said.<\/p>\n She\u2019s embracing this dark vapor.<\/p>\n “David, it\u2019s like going home”<\/p>\n Spoke the little girl next to me.<\/p>\n The blackness shaded the white around Quinn’s eyes,\u00a0ever black. Losing hope. Quinn imagines herself frantically burying her thoughts in paper, jotting down, transcribing soon-to-be memories. Shadowing the Ghost of Lust, something wicked has pillaged her heart. Now, with ink and a perceivable pad, she transmutes the pain. \u00a0Fading with her memories, she thought she had written.<\/p>\n But the little girl spoke,\u00a0“If cries were to rhyme, the agony felt by my soul would relate to those sad songs I’ve never composed. And if my life was on Broadway, I would be that dumb loyalist who donated everything never to miss a show. Now I write this down to say that I am tired of Quinn’s Broadway the story of our lives David which is constantly animated by the meat woven around my Soul\u201d My sister’s top lip quivered. The feeling was made real by that emotional swank that was elegantly timed. That punch to the gut Slowed everything down to the pace of a gloomy metronome.\u00a0It has been over ten years since I have seen Quinn, and I’ve heard people say twins have this psychic thing about them. She needed to ensure I felt something before I was deployed to boot camp.<\/p>\n “You hear that noise?”\u00a0Said little Quinn<\/p>\n I didn’t hear the noise, but there was an angelic pitch to her voice, and for the first and last time, I heard the noise. The androgynous angelic voice<\/p>\n “yes, Quinn, I do,”\u00a0\u00a0I cried. “Yes, of course, I hear the noise.\u201d\u00a0I cried some more. \u201cI hear it!”<\/p>\n Little Quinn pointed at the bed, “listen\u201d She softly says.<\/p>\n \u201cWouldn’t it be nice to lay here and cry all day?\u00a0And purge all of this sadness out\u201d?<\/p>\n \u201cGive it a try,\u201d\u00a0Quinn hears a voice. “And near me are Gillette razors that are cut so thin. That I’ll barely feel the sting.”\u00a0If there is a Cut, now is a time to cut followed by a drip, drip. \u00a0Startled by the amount of blood, she smiled.\u00a0“Oh wow”\u00a0lips quiver, \u201cit’s ice cold\u201d Vision flickers, \u201cnow I see It.” \u00a0Watching the drip, she says,\u00a0“It’s too dark.”\u00a0Fading, fizzling out, she blinks. The room is dark struck by a light, a silhouette of Saint Anthony of Padua holding baby Jesus, is shadowed on the wall. Goosebumps spore all around us. She looks up.\u00a0“What’s that sound.”\u00a0She shivers.\u00a0“I could hear the screech that children make when there is too much fun. I could see the colors And most importantly I could see you. I see you my David. Sweet beautiful David, you never took advantage and you always felt what I heard”<\/p>\n “Twin.”\u00a0I cried out.<\/p>\n “None of this was our fault.”\u00a0Little Quinn said.<\/p>\n It does not escape me that Quinn is freeing the inner fiend found buried deep inside that catacomb she dreamt and knew about.\u00a0“Dear Papal Goat”\u00a0she whispered.\u00a0“Finally committing to something, I took into account all of my wishful thoughts of transforming into someone else but before that I noticed all the slits that my arms were missing. Granting my twisted feelings their wishes. I begin to cut deeper in order to exercise all forms of exorcisms”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n “Quinn’s Blank Stared Effigy” was selected as winner of the Collin Anderson Memorial Award in Creative Nonfiction.<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n Wilson<\/span>\u00a0Garcia<\/strong>, a master’s student in English at SUNY Cortland, is an aspiring author from Washington Heights, NYC. Passionate about storytelling and the role of ideas in society, he explores how language and narrative shape perception and meaning. A SUNY Cortland alumnus, he is dedicated to examining the impact of words on culture and thought.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n
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