Eliza

As Keith gets closer to the potential threat in the kitchen he realizes it's just a woman. She's half naked and Keith immediately see's something that most people would be very eager to keep hidden. This woman standing at the counter has a tail. She turned around and he just continued to stand there staring at her. She realizes that she is naked and covers herself up with a towel and apologizes. Her eyes were dark, deep blue with dilated pupils and black hair against white skin. She was in the middle of making a sandwich and she calls him over, she's very friendly and offers to make him one. When she is finished she invites him downstairs into her bedroom. He's quite skeptical about following her down into her room but she was very convincing. He begins to follow her, it was dark but he still got a good view of her from behind. He could see it pressed up against the towel, long and slender...moving just a little bit..he was strangely arroused by it. When they get to her bedroom she asks him if he's ready and opens the door. Drawings and sculptures all over the walls, she was an amazing artist. Ominous and disturbing, her artwork was frightening in a way. Keith tried to speak, tried to tell her what he thought of her art but he couldn't think of the words to say. She could tell there was something on his mind and she tried to comfort him. "just relax...don't think about anything. just let it all go." She leans in towards Keith, her chest pressed up against his back and she whispers "You saw it didn't you? you saw my tail, and you liked it, didn't you" he did. One of the guys from upstairs comes in and tells Keith that Todd is looking for him. Keith gets up and tells her she has to leave, she tries to convince him to stay but he couldn't.

Bag Action

Keith was still thinking about that day that he helped Chris in the woods. She was all he could think about. Keith and his from Todd were on their way to some guys house to pick up weed. In the car Todd kept talking to Keith but he wasn't listening, Chris was the only thing on his mind and the fact that it was Friday and he just wanted to get "loaded". They got to the house and it seemed a little sketchy, as soon as Todd knocked on the door a dog was going crazy behind it. They just heard a voice saying "who is it" and then a guy with a mustache opened the door very slowly. They started smoking as soon as they got into the house, Keith sat in silence the whole time and thought about Chris. Todd hands him a joint and the guy selling it just says "That should take care of you alright". Keith just thinks to himself "But it didn't get me where I wanted to go. I wanted to be somewhere nice. Some place where I wouldn't have to listen to a bunch of burnt out college dipshits talking the talk."Finally after hearing enough of everyone's bullshit, Keith gets up and asks if he can grab a beer. He walks into the dark kitchen, he can hear someone moving around...

Cut

Keith and his friends, like always, are sitting in the woods gossiping and smoking weed in their little spot called "planet xeno". Keith's friends are aware that Keith is in love with Chris, so they tell him about something they heard going around the school. They talked about that night when she went swimming and how everyone saw it, the huge tear down the center of her back. "She's got it! She's got the bug! Her back was all messed up! The skin on her backbome was like...breaking open..yuck!" Keith is clearly upset by what he is hearing because all he does is stand up and walk into the woods. He doesn't want to believe that Chris would do something so stupid. While he was walking through the woods he see's Chris getting undressed. I'm not sure if this is a dream, or he's imagining it, or it's just a strange coincidence. But he just stands there, while she's getting undressed and watches her. While she's putting on her pants she falls and gets a piece of glass stuck in her foot. Keith comes running out of the woods to help her, and while he is looking at the dark open wound he realizes that he's seen it before. He's mesmerized by this dark gaping wound, finally he pulls the glass out of her foot. He takes off his shirt and rips it to make a bandage for her foot. He helps her up and she thanks him for all his help, waves goodbye and smiles. "That was all I needed. When she smiled at me, all the stupid, ugly stuff just drifted away." As he waved goodbye he saw the dark stains on his fingers and it all came back. "Blood...HER blood, dark and real. I'd been marked with her blood...it was a sign. I didn't know where or when or how, but she was going to be mine. It was going to happen. It had to happen."

Who's Chris?

Rob is making his way through the bushes. He's in the cemetery again. The cemetery that him and Chris spent that night together. Once he makes him way through the bushes he see's a bunch of his friends who are now starting to see the effects of "the bug". I think Rob realizes that he is soon going to look like them. Next he see's Chris leaning up against a grave stone, her pants are pulled down and there's a bottle of wine and beer bottles next to her. She asks him for a light for her cigarette, her cigarette starts changing shape and looks as though it were alive. Rob starts apologizing to Chris, obviously he feels guilty for not taking responsibility and willingly giving her this horrible STD. Finally Rob wakes up to his girlfriend Lisa asking him "Who the fuck is Chris?" Rob is really confused and acts like he doesn't know who Chris is. "Don't try acting all innocent with me! You may know how to lie but that little mouth on your neck sure as hell doesn't!" I think Lisa isn't upset by the fact that her boyfriend had sex with another girl, but that Rob gave her the bug as well. Lisa was starting to form webbed fingers.

Racing towards something

Chris is sitting by herself against a tree, drinking beer out of a coffee cup. She's talking to herself while her friends walk over to see why she's being so anti-social. They ask her to come over to the party, but she refuses. She would rather sit by herself and think about how happy she used to be, and how fucked up everything is now. It first started while she was at a party. All the guys were swarming around her but the only guy she was interested in was Rob. They start talking and he suggests that they leave to go somewhere more private to talk, typical. While smoking cigarettes and drinking wine Chris and Rob start walking to a cemetery close by so they're not so out in the open. When they get to the cemetery Chris is immediately all over Rob, he tries stopping her so he can tell her something. Clearly he has a secret, but as naive and young Chris is she interrupts him and tells him "I know, I know". Rob was confused but didn't question it, but was still hesitant when he kissed her. While things were getting intimate between the two of them Chris notices something..."Rob was still there moving hard, eyes closed. And then....god, it happened so fast...it was dark, I remember kissing his neck...kissing him and kind of pulling open his shirt and...and then seeing something...something weird." She noticed the tiny mouth on his chest, it was making strange noises. Chris panics, they both start panicking. Chris asking why there's a small mouth on his chest that makes awful noises. And Rob wondering what Chris supposedly knew about. "But...you knew...you said that you knew." The next couple days were extremely awkward, Rob refused to talk to her about it in school. Chris, still sitting by the tree, drinking beer and being anti-social is offered another beer by a guy Steve then he asks her if she wants to go swimming. When they get to the lake there's a bunch of other people there, cheering on one of the other guys to go swimming. He strips and jumps in the water, Chris does the same. Chris realizes everyone else was staring at her, laughing and whispering to each other. She doesn't understand why they're laughing but she continues to walk into the water, what she doesn't know is her skin is tearing down the middle of her back...

Swimming Hole

This section of the novel is disturbing to me. Chris is sleeping and clearly dreaming. She sees a group of guys standing around the water looking like they're about to go swimming. Then all you she sees is one of them naked and their penis starts to curl. "Naked. Huh. Kind of like a corkscrew...or a pig's t tail..a snake." Chris looks down and realizes she is naked as well, about to walk into the water. Before she goes in she steps on a large piece of glass. She sits down and pulls out the piece of glass that's stuck in her foot and with it she pulls out a rolled up piece of paper...like a scroll. On it was a drawing of a snake swimming with a group of dark figures. They're all swimming in filth, floating garbage, french fries, old burgers..and they're eating it while they swim. Keith is in the water with her and offers to give her something to eat... something that looks like a large bug, she refuses to take it because she is being pulled under by what looks like a snake. The snake ends up being Keith himself. Then she sits up from her bed and pulls the skin right off her back and throws it out of the tent she's in and into the woods...I believe that when she supposedly wakes up, she is still in her disturbing dream. The dream might not even be a dream at all, it's a premonition.

Planet Xeno

The next section in Black Hole is somewhat confusing to me. Keith and his friends are in the woods smoking weed. Keith talks about "Planet xeno" and how difficult it was to get there but when you did it was beautiful. "It was like being in a cocoon...a soft insulated green world". It was basically just Keith and his friends favorite place to smoke, "The perfect place to get stoned...that is, until all the weird shit started coming down..." Keith is zoning out while his friends talk about "the bug" that's going around, Keith's friend, Todd saw this other guy Rob in the bathroom at school "checking himself out" but was actually looking at the small mouth on his chest. They realize that Keith hasn't said anything for a while, he's looking in the woods frightened because he sees something or someone. Instead of ignoring it Keith and his friends try to figure out what it is. They go deeper into the woods and find a baby doll strapped to a tree, a bunch of trails running up the hillside, and a tent filled with clothes, comics, and candy bars. As Keiths friends are raiding through the tent he goes off further into the woods by himself and finds skin that was shed off by a girl, all of her skin. This is the part that is confusing to me, I think that the skin belongs to Chris. In the next section she has a dream of herself ripping off her skin in the woods, so I'm unsure if it is in fact a dream or reality. Then he hears someone behind him, it's a man that is horribly disfigured. "It was just too fucked up to be human, but somehow, deep down inside I knew it was. His mouth was all busted up...broken teeth sticking out of pink gristle...his lips started moving and wet, sloppy sounds came out." As he is rushing to get out of the woods he sees others...dark figures moving in the woods.

Biology 101

I am currently reading a graphic novel by Charles Burns. The book is called "Black Hole". This book is essentially about a sexually transmitted disease, the teenagers in the book refer to it as "the bug". The bug is spreading like wild fire among all the teenagers in Washington during the mid 70's. The strange thing about this disease is it manifests in many different ways. Regardless, if you have it you will eventually start to notice a grotesque deformity. These deformities include, a tail, boils on your face (or other parts of your body), a small mouth on your chest, etc. In most cases the teenager with the disease either dies, or becomes so disfigured that you can barely recognize them. In the first scene of the book two of the main characters(Keith and Chris) are in their Biology class. Keith has an obsession with Chris and is very excited at the fact that him and Chris are lab partners. What Keith doesn't know is Chris will soon become a carrier of the disease. Keith passes out while him and Chris are dissecting a frog. Before he passes out he says "I froze. I can't explain what happened. It was like a deja vu trip or something....a premonition. I felt like I was looking into the future...and the future was messed up. I was looking at a hole...a black hole and as I looked, the hole opened up"