Her body was sprawled in a demented cross, not unlike the
fragment of necklace torn from her neck a lifetime before. Her rustling breath
both racked and aided her startlingly human verve; she took solace in the
shrouding darkness for he could not
be seen in her line of sight. Head twisted roughly to the side with the
appearance of a woollen doll, and certainly with the fragility of such a
plaything, the last few stragglers of blood slithered from within the jagged
edge of torn tissue. The colour of her skin had drained away as he had retreated from society. This
irrefutable fact – coupled with the remnant of a warped sense of history – was
what bound the two together.
And what had led him to this.
A quick punt to the rocking chair and it began to slowly
convulse as she did; the thud mingled with her strangled breaths, spilling into
the compilation of sound as mere background noise.
He flickered between the dark aura of a chthonic deity and
the latent vestige of that frozen
organ concealed inside his chest cavity, a segment of which she had formerly
and malevolently stolen from him.
Bitch.
"You brought this on yourself," he whispered
matter-of-factly. "I hope you realise that," he paused, gathering his
words, "and I hope you realise that I had to do this, for purely selfish
reasons I know, but you have no one to miss you apart from... you, and even you
can't perform miracles from beyond the grave. I'd always wondered what my last
words would be to you, so much so that it was bordering on a juvenile fantasy. I
could have gone for the cliché, but I'm not one for following the crowds, you
know that. Then I thought, hey, I should construct a prayer of sorts, but
neither one of us was the religious type, and, besides, no one would be here to
listen, and that would have been a real shame. So, this is me being
spontaneous. You said you wanted that, didn't you? Spontaneity." He
grinned. "It's your lucky day, darling, I'm giving you the whole bloody
shebang."
He swam in an oasis of magnificent death; the water had
lapped at his heels on many occasions, but, with gleeful satisfaction, the
plunge into ecstasy had been made. Metaphoric horns receding behind his
hairline, he grappled with the decrepit, splintering chair at the far end of
the room, struck down by returning rounds of memories…
…Abdomen undulating as the adrenaline stained her tightened
body, with an animated guise, she advanced towards the man who could do no
wrong.
She let him have it.
Each strike, jab, blow, resulted in a squirming of
internal organs, the metallic taste of warm blood to batter his tongue, and a
crack as knuckle met unguarded skin. Conventionality did not have any place
there, only blind terror and the struggle of human life. All of his
insecurities, his fears, his crushed aspirations scattered into the strained atmosphere
as one amorphous catalyst for revenge. The
rocking chair clattered against the hard ground, its gait so rapid, so violent,
so uncontrollable, that it sent him even further towards the edge – that nearing
edge between sanity and the tumble into madness.
Nobody could have stopped it.
But, if nobody could have stopped it, then why would a steadying
rise of a foot, a hardened clutch around the wooden ankles, or a period of measured
waiting have brought an end to the ominous heaving?
Perhaps a better phrase would have been: nobody needed to
stop it, because he had done so himself.
Back in the room, he melted into the dark background of the walls, (as to shield his uneasy expression), though such camouflage was not needed for his past had sealed her eyes close in a futile attempt to either retain some gold-dust-like energy or blot out his features. The latter, he reflected, was less probable.
Even when he looked upon her now he could only see one
thing: the weeks, months, years of discoloured skin and broken ribs. He had
taken care to mirror those on her; her bone had splintered like timber, her
scream had erupted like that of a newborn, raw, poignant and needy. But he
wouldn't harm a child. They were innocent, light of nature, and hers was dark.
Her breathing slowed. The rocking chair creaked to a halt.
