#and as he speaks the red car blazes over the horizon flashing in his mirror before parking right into seb (safely) | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

spookyspaghettisundae · 3 years

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Bullets Only Buy Time

Loud rap music thumped from the radio inside the car. Some old stuff from the ‘90s, but it all blended together. The smell of weed smoke hung heavy in the thick clouds, billowing out of the cracks framing the vehicle’s windows. The dead of night made way to the deep blue twilight of dawn.

Still, that uneasy feeling weighed down his gut. Tension in his torso, like every muscle was so taut, steeling itself like tissue constantly only seconds away from cramping up. He did not quite feel sick to his stomach, but even his insides felt weird, tingly. D-Baser took a long drag from the blunt and passed it over to the younger man beside him, on the driver’s seat: Kid Lizard.

No matter how many times he had staged these takeovers, it never got easier. D-Baser had checked his guns more than once. Nothing ever took off the edge. Drive-bys were usually easier to keep some mental distance to.

Knowing you were gearing up to kill some people? Up close and personal? Always the tougher deal.

He checked his sub-machine guns again.

Lizard arched a brow and let his disdainful look sweep up and down the guns resting in D-Baser’s lap and hands.

“You keep checkin’ that shit like that, it’s gonna fall apart from wear 'fore we even walk in that sorry-ass joint,” he told D-Baser. “'Sides, we’re gonna need some special toys for this crazy mothafucka.”

D-Baser clicked his tongue, shook his head.

Lizard’s nostrils flared and smoke shot out of them like jets, like a dragon’s breath. He held the blunt back out to D-Baser.

“I got some tequila in the back if this ain’t enough to calm yo nerves,” Lizard told him.

D-Baser clicked his tongue and shook his head again. He rolled down his window, letting some of the heavy cloud of smoke escape. Cooler morning air poured inside, carrying the salty smell of the sea. Almost soothing. He had come to love that smell and had even missed it a bit.

“A'ight, suit yourself,” Lizard said in a high-pitched tone, smirking. He took another long drag from the blunt and placed it in the ashtray. “Might change yo mind later.”

D-Baser was doing his damnedest to zone out. He could not stand this sort of casual talk. Never liked the way some of the other muscle in their crew—especially younger ones like Lizard—did all their little rituals of chest-pounding and braggadocio to get themselves in the right mindset to walk into a place, guns blazing, and waste some sorry motherfuckers.

Unlike them, he fancied himself more Zen. Turning inward, almost like meditating. Not that he cared to learn anything so spiritual—out of respect towards ancient traditions—but just because it worked better for him. Accordingly, D-Baser’s focus blurred as he stared blankly ahead of himself.

“Shit, man, I need you on top of yo game tonight,” Lizard said. He slapped D-Baser on the chest with the back of his hand to tear him out of his trance, earning himself a glare of contempt from his homie. “I’m tellin’ ya, this one’s gonna be a weird one.”

He pointed at the five-story apartment building they had parked outside of, across the road. The silver rings on Lizard’s hands glinted in the dim light from the rising sun.

“Why the fuck are we waiting till it’s light out, anyway?” D-Baser asked him with a sneer. “The heat’s response is faster like this. What the fuck is the boss thinkin’?”

Lizard stopped pointing. His attempts at acting cool melted away and he had likely forgotten whatever he wanted to say. A lop-sided smirk stayed plastered to his face, revealing gold-plated front teeth that sparkled in the rays of morning sunlight.

The fiery ball rose across the horizon, blood-red and slicing through distant clouds.

“He didn’t tell ya nothin’, huh?” Lizard said. It did not sound like a question.

D-Baser averted his gaze and stared at the horizon. Seeing it always gave him a weird sense of nostalgia—marveling at that same vista of the morning sun as it bathed the silvery skyline of all the towering high-rises in all manner of beautiful colors, and the broken dreams it painted in his memories—mixed with the misery and death he had seen ever since and authored with his own two hands.

Those hands looked clean right now. Scrubbed them clean plenty of times before. Palms marked with wrinkles and lines, some scars from knife cuts and other scratches. How long had he been in the game already?

Another backhanded slap to his chest from Lizard brought him back. He glared at his homie again, and the tension started making way for anger. The red heat welling up in his belly rose and almost reached his hands, almost made them curl up to strike back as a little lesson.

But he appreciated it—the anger was good now. It balanced out the tension somehow.

Lizard still grinned at him like an asshole and opened the driver’s door, getting out.

“C'mon, lemme show you the toys. Yo peashooters only gonna help you so much today,” Lizard repeated.

He rounded the car to approach the trunk. The sigh that escaped D-Baser rattled out into a groan and he followed suit. The hip hop track thundering away inside their car resonated outside of it, and only know did he really consider that their targets in the block across the street might be aware that they were there.

Thick, heavy curtains masked the insides of the building. In the small cracks between them, only darkness lurked behind grimy windowpanes in desperate need of proper cleaning. That darkness stared back at D-Baser. Like something or someone in there watched.

Watched him.

He tore his gaze off the windows and the eerie absence of anybody behind them and looked at the contents of the open trunk. Lizard had already popped the lid and made a sweeping gesture with his hand, like some sort of goofy stage musician presenting his main act.

D-Baser had to look twice. He did not quite believe what he was seeing. He had expected an overkill of guns and ammo back here.

Not this.

Arrays of pointy silver rods, wooden stakes, diamond-encrusted and gilded crucifixes, mean-looking machetes, and small plastic vials with cheap stickers depicting the Holy Mother Mary.

“Yo, what the fuck is this?” he asked Lizard.

D-Baser picked up one of the sharp-tipped silver rods and weighed it, surprised by how heavy it was.

“Yo, put that shit down,” Lizard cautioned him, shoving his hand and the stake back down towards the trunk and looking around to see if anybody had seen it.

D-Baser glared at him and resisted, shaking the silver stake at him.

“What’s this Dracula shit? You fuckin’ kidding me here? Y'outta your fuckin’ mind?”

Lizard’s grin widened, so much so that it had to hurt. His gold-plated teeth drew D-Baser’s attention again, the engravings of the letters forming “LOVE” upon them on full display. D-Baser hated Lizard’s look so much. Such pretentious, flashy bullshit.

“Boss said we’d be needin’ this. That’s why we’re waiting for sun-up, yo. I’m baffled he didn’t tell you nothin’,” Lizard said, the pitch in his voice rising with each sentence.

D-Baser rolled his head, letting his neck emit some cracks. Lizard patiently awaited his response.

“I just got back from a gig outta town, haven’t met up with the boss since I got back. You seriously tellin’ me the boss thinks that Marv and his boys are fucking Draculas or somethin’?”

Lizard cackled, asking, “You been seein’ that pretty piece o’ meat on the other side o’ town? I get it.”

“Whatever—get off my ass. Answer my fuckin’ question, foolio.”

Lizard’s wide, shit-eating grin slowly crumpled, reverting to the former lop-sided smirk until it fully faded from his face. Something dark flashed in his eyes.

“Yeah, boss said this, all serious-like. Like, he slapped the shit outta OGC when he started ripping into him with jokes about his Nosferatu rant.”

Lizard was dead serious. D-Baser read it clear as day, mirroring how the warmth from the morning sun was spreading throughout his limbs as it hit upon his skin. You could not make this crap up.

Now the nausea set in.

“You gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” D-Baser muttered.

No reply from Lizard. D-Baser took a deep breath and weighed the metal stake in his hand again.

“Well, fuck. Is this like the movies? Bats, stake through the heart, heads off, garlic, and all that shit?”

Lizard grabbed a stake, some holy water, a cross, and one of the machetes, sticking the objects into his belt and pockets.

“Not gonna lie, homie. I don’t think the boss really knows himself. He sent me and Noize around town to round all this shit up and he didn’t seem to really have a specific plan.”

D-Baser stared at Lizard. The anger dissipated. He was not mad at this kid anymore.

“Shit. Boss finally fried his brain with some of the hard shit? I saw some shit outta town, but this is the whackest shit I’ve heard or seen all my fuckin’ life,” D-Baser said.

He felt like he was standing beside himself, like he was listening to himself speak. All of this was surreal in so many ways. So unsettling that, rather than sinking in, he was slipping out of his own body for a spell. Whatever he was preaching to Lizard right now, it reached his own ears with delay, like it had to pierce through a fog in his mind first. Everything he said, he said it more for himself than anything else.

Kid Lizard was still just a kid, as far as D-Baser was concerned. Sending them in broad daylight, armed with vampire hunting “toys"—as Lizard had aptly put it—to make a hit on some lowlife punks trying to muscle in on their turf?

Whatever unhinged crap the boss was sending them to do, doing it like this was bound to get the kid killed.

Then D-Baser looked up. That darkness behind the windows of that apartment building, it still loomed. Looked back at him, like something there stared at him with burning malice. The heavy bass continued to thump from inside their car, the blunt smoke had all escaped from it, his vision of the block unobscured.

The darkness, it leered. Lusted.

Lizard stayed silent.

D-Baser wondered right then and there if he was not losing his own mind. The tension was fully back, and he stuck one of the silver stakes into his belt. Crammed two of those ridiculously cheap-looking plastic holy water vials into his pocket and snatched one of the machetes, cradling its grip in his palm for a moment.

"Gotta be fuckin’ kidding me,” D-Baser repeated, muttering again. “Need to have some serious words with the boss after this shit.”

Lizard slammed the trunk shut and made his way back to the driver seat where he grabbed his guns.

“Sun’s up, my man,” Lizard remarked.

D-Baser returned to the car’s front as well but pushed past Lizard and grabbed the blunt from the ashtray, firing it up with his lighter again in one fluid motion, and taking a deep, long drag.

Blowing the smoke back out sounded like a hurricane to him, drowning out the thunder of his own heartbeat in his ears, the blood pumping furiously in it, carrying an appetizer of adrenaline to come. He felt it in his bones. The music still droned, though the rapping rhymes barely got through to him in any comprehensible fashion.

It did nothing to remove the edge. If anything, D-Baser felt even worse than before. Muscles so taut they felt like steel being bent to the point of snapping. His stomach had made a 360-degree twist and he counted his blessings that he had not had a bite to eat all night, or it would have probably splattered out onto the dirty curb right about now.

Where he looked at the asphalt, where sidewalk and street met in gritty marriage, he almost saw that imaginary spray of projectile vomit. Then his mind’s eye replaced it with splatters of blood.

D-Baser looked at Kid Lizard. Lizard shot him another stupid grin, theatrically brandishing his pistol and machete like some idiot posing for a lousy movie’s promo poster.

He did not even have it in him to sigh at the kid. Deep down, he knew this was not going to end badly. Lizard was going to die.

And while he silently refused to believe that vampires were real, the shadows behind those windows, leering inside the building, that darkness maintained their oppressive air. Like the curtains were hiding some ominous presence. His mind refused to combine the thoughts of some goons like Marv and the fictional concept of vampires.

Then again—had they ever seen him out in daylight?

D-Baser tossed the blunt away and leaned inside to grab a sub-machine gun. He checked it again, assuring he could shoot some motherfuckers.

“Fuck it. Let’s go kill Dracula.”

He marched towards the building with newfound determination, tightly gripping the weapons in his hands. Lizard followed with delay, taken aback by D-Baser’s fierce pace and sudden burst of determination. This was how his generation rolled.

Vampires, no vampires—did not matter one lick, all just some dumb motherfuckers who needed wasting. That was the way of this city. That was his way.

As these things always did, time slowed down and sped up in equal measure. Like a blur, D-Baser acutely registered every small detail around him and yet none of it really breeched his consciousness, waiting with unholy patience to crash down on him once his day’s work was done.

Kicking in the door, wood splintering and something smashing into a glass table, hostile reaction waited. Crept around the shadows for a few seconds. The dust had yet to settle around D-Baser as he stood inside the entrance, gun raised, allowing his eyes to suggest to the dark premises within.

Then the hissing started. People inside, hissing at him like feral cats.

The sub-machine gun’s muzzle roared to life with flashes of light, unleashing bullets all at three different targets. Figures lunged at him, leapt at him from several directions. He barely swiveled, bracing against the recoil with years of experience and training the sleek little steel weapon on each of them, gunning them down like anybody else.

One of them twitched after eating a dozen shots. Then another. He only realized after the fact that sharp fingernails had scratched his leg from the floor where one of them dropped. He rammed the metal stake right into a rib cage.

Not as deep as he had hoped. It thrashed and clawed at him, fingernails scratching up his shirt and skin like little knifes. The struggle was on, thrashing against each other as a person riddled with ten bullet holes wrestled with D-Baser at the door.

Kid Lizard was somewhere inside now, screaming, dragged through the darkness of the room by two figures, the motes of dust dancing in the meager light pouring in through the front door.

The third one had gotten up faster than D-Baser had expected, and the searing pain of fangs piercing the flesh, and blood being sucked out—it all hurt like hell.

Gritting his teeth, he did not scream. He would not. Did not want to give this creep the satisfaction. He instead slammed the vamp into the doorframe and then threw himself out with it into the sunlight.

D-Baser groaned with pain as the human figure clinging onto him—fangs sunken deep into his shoulder—exploded into flames. The fire licked at him and burnt his skin, wracking his body with searing pain. D-Baser shouted and kicked and flailed around, throwing the creature away from him, sending it rolling onto the sidewalk where she went up in bright flames like a dry bale of hay.

His own clothing had not caught fire, fortunately. Unfortunately, judging by the phenomenon he was witnessing right now, vampires were real after all.

D-Baser did not really have the capacity to concern himself with such thoughts right now, though.

Lizard’s screams behind him had died down and made way for pained, gurgling noises, orchestrated and punctuated by what sounded like wet bags of meat slapping against hard counters. Or flesh tearing. It was not like D-Baser was familiar with this sort of noise. Motherfuckers he normally dealt with tended to use guns and knives, not claws and fangs.

Emitting a string of profanities as he shot a glance down at the deep wound on his shoulder, from which blood rhythmically and menacingly pumped out, D-Baser ejected the clip from his gun and he inserted a new one to replace it with a motion reflecting his callousness and routine.

The gurgles from inside the apartment briefly sounded like Lizard was whimpering and pleading for his life.

D-Baser’s gun flared up with more automatic fire, short burst after burst peeling the horrific monsters off Lizard’s mangled, twitching, half-dead body. The vamps only reeled; the bullets only bought tiny windows of time. The stakes were not as effective as D-Baser instinctively believed.

A glint of sunlight flared up off the surface of the machete as he slung it out of its place on his belt.

More work to do.

Always work to do for men like him, in a city like this.

—Submitted by Wratts

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mistresssalem · 6 years

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We Are Both Here

THE WALLS LOOK TO BE COMPOSED OF WATER, liquid pouring in a steady motion to create the illusion of solidity. I see My reflection in it. I reach My fingers through it. Sharp cheekbones turn to distorted ripples. I place My palm along the cement behind smooth lies of mirror images so it looks like I’m missing a hand. Think about what else I’m missing. Stare into the dark end of the long room. Smell the liquor on her breath as she sloppily pushes past me hips swaying beneath the silk she drips in …and I wind up beneath the persistent shower finally seeing past it. The shove of those sharp hips show me I wasn’t leaning against a wall at all. My hand rests on a flattened cardboard box. My two feet are above me. The boom box from my parents’ basement that they sold at a garage sale instead of giving me plays so loud it rattles just like My bones do when I break dance without my skin. Went behind and beneath to see My skeleton and now I can’t stand without knowing where up is…

It’s past midnight. I’m awake. I’m way up on my way higher. Mom’s on a date again and Dad’s snoring like a freight train I can hear from two stories beneath his bed. I went with her, my best friend in high school, to the next town over to kick it with the cokeheads. I left to eat pills with my boyfriend. Get pulled over half a mile from home on her way to pick me up only for cops to find a baseball bat in the trunk of his car. I could see the flashing lights through MDMA-addled eyed from just a block away. Beautiful red and blue lights illuminating particles in the air like a patriotic invitation to pull a stunt. I stood on the porch while the lights blazed trails through the night until I was brave enough to walk towards those lights and do whatever I could to get her out of this…

We’re fifteen. The lights are like exploding amoebas of kinetic energy and I’m suddenly suspicious they could be alive. Walking toward them on more drugs than I could name unable to see past their beauty to the risk, the allure of drowning in this patrol car aurora overcoming the total stupidity of my intention. My feet move one ahead of the other on their own as my eyes bounce back and forth in their sockets trying to chase the trails those big brick lights drag through thick black sand filling the desert of my pupils. Try to focus. Try to fucking focus. He’s handcuffed and she’s sitting on the curb talking to one of the officers. They are a target I must hit despite feeling like I’m inside of a solar flare so I take aim. Beautiful red and blue lights. I might be floating. I might really lose it. A bright white light cuts through the consideration like a round beam meant as a meal for the hungry black machines in my eyes. I stop dead in my tracks and stare down the barrel of a flashlight into a face I did not recognize atop a decorated blue uniform I knew all too well.

“Where are you going, young lady?”

The round spotlight of his intimidating industrial flashlight eclipsed all else for just a few seconds while I stammered until the red and blue lights behind his head like a religious painting of a Saint and their glowing halo were so beautiful again that even fear couldn’t compete with this feeling.

“I was waiting for my best friend to meet me at my boyfriend’s house so we could walk home together. She called me to tell me that the person giving her a ride had gotten pulled over and she was now stuck just a block from me while he was apparently getting in trouble for something she had no involvement in…”

He fumbles with the flashlight shining the jarring spotlight creating a veil much to his advantage again distracting me from the red and blue pulsating veins of color making me feel much heavier, so much heavier that I fall harshly back to earth while specific memories of tonight’s hedonism and how I might just be totally fucked were jangling their way up to the surface of that stupid wall of water, just an illusion to make us feel safe from them. Suddenly the gun in his holster is taller than us both. I’m surfing a slanted sidewalk doing everything I fucking can to keep My pupils from doing that crazy vibrating thing that ecstasy provoked and making a list in my head of all the things I’d give up just for this cop to stop shining the fucking light on me. Aiming it straight into My eyes again waving it around as if trying to frighten me he opens his mouth to speak again, a hole in the darkness that I’m beginning to think could swallow my future.

“Your friend was riding with someone not only violating their license terms by driving this late at night…well, your friends had a bat in the trunk. Now what would they need a baseball bat in their trunk for?”

I am pretending to cry because now I’m privy to the fact that all of these lights and uninvited interruptions to my night were due to a baseball bat in the trunk of a car which makes me want to laugh hysterically and another sweaty wave of euphoria is creeping up and over and around and into me while my laugh-crying at least allows me to finally break eye contact with my new friend here or really just to smash my fists into my eyes so I can avoid having to look into the evil eye of his stupid flashlight.

“I’m sorry officer, I’m so sorry! All I know is that my friend and I were ready to walk home together like we do most nights in the summer and for some reason the person giving her a ride was pulled over… I don’t know them myself, and she’s just an acquaintance of theirs taking advantage of their offer for a ride over here to meet me. Now is there-”

Euphoria is now something I can literally feel coursing through my veins while anxiety rises a bit in the pit of my stomach but the beautiful red and blue lights return to their original state of invitation and I’m about to ask the very first favor of a police officer in my short lifetime if I can make my teeth stop grinding long enough to finish this sentence and then it’s like divine fucking intervention when he FINALLY appears to be able to make out my form in the darkness without the aid of that evil spotlight- I feel every breath fill my lungs and suddenly I am stupefied by the possibility of my existence as euphoria showers me the hardest it has all night and the creeping feeling that I’m not going to like his answer to the question I’m about to ask. Those. Square. Shining. Lights. Am I on a television game show and all of this is a test? Am I alive? Fuck, I’m about to ask a cop for a favor.

“-WAIT A SECOND, I KNOW YOU! I KNOW YOU, DON’T I? YOUR DAD TAUGHT ME WHEN I WAS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL! HE COACHED MY BASKETBALL TEAM IN HIGH SCHOOL! Wow, your Dad is a great man. You know, I don’t how he would feel about all this, but he did so much for me that I can at least do something for his daughter. Now, that’s your friend over there, and where were the two of you about to walk?”

My body seems to change composition after his words fully sink in because I’m much lighter again and don’t feel like any part of me is on the sidewalk or the street and suddenly the snoring middle-aged father I crept past in favor of drugs is the one person on this earth who will get me out of this weird mess before I’m done peaking. I start thinking that shit isn’t so bad as I’m spewing my answer back at him praying to the gods of designer drugs for my absolution.

“Oh! Yes, that IS my Dad! Wow what a coincidence! I even had him as a teacher myself, imagine that! Yes, my friend over there lives just 2 blocks from me and we usually walk home together when we’re out late during the summer just to be safe. I am so so sorry she was with a driver you found to be breaking the law- like I said, she doesn’t have anything to do with that! Can I please walk her home? Both of us need to get home and I know I’m feeling a bit freaked out by all of this!”

My friend is hunched over seated on the edge of the curb, feet dangling onto the street, staring dejectedly through her red hair down into black concrete. Suddenly I’m feeling like all of this was just an elaborate game made up by the universe to ensure that I would spend a decent part of my night with my new best friends, those big flashing light boxes. I am answering him and inside my head I am ahead of myself asking myself if, in the end, I’ll be able to walk all the way right up to those lights, close enough to touch them! That’s where my friend is sitting… that’s all I want really- not too much to ask. Let two underage girls walk home alone at 2 am super probably high on drugs knowing that your middle school industrial arts class was such a standout part of your life that it’s worth doing dumb favors for. I fucking love it.

“Wow, amazing. Your Dad is the man. Make sure you tell him I said that about him, okay? Now look, you and your friend can walk home together as long as you both promise that neither of you will get into a car with this driver again. You shouldn’t be here hanging out with people like that- older kids from the next town over are nothing but trouble. Now you go get your friend and make sure you go straight home, and remember- tell you Dad that I say hi!!!’

The lights. The sidewalk is flat just like the horizon and the flashlight is back in his belt and I’m floating toward her, toward the lights, I am, in this moment, God. I am God. There is no more surfing the tilted ground, just floating elegantly above its surface. Walk up to her, pull her to her feet. Whisper into her ear to follow me. Stare into those beautiful lights for a precious few seconds, just feet away from me. Relaxing My jaw to open My mouth wide as if I can eat the lights. Say thanks and bye to the cops. Pretend I don’t know my other friend in cuffs shaking his head furiously at the sky as if he was just too dumb to realize that God is right here inside of me. Thank the gods he pretends not to know who I am and goes on taking his rage out on the above. The trails linger in the corners of my eyeballs, the euphoria tastes like chemical lollipops and she and I laugh our heads off while we walk back to her house. We cling to each other so as to stay on a somewhat straight path. We decide we must have Frosted Flakes. We pop into a friend’s house at 3 AM to “borrow” some milk and walk all the way home with said milk in a cup. Eating frosted flakes leaning up against the marble counters in her kitchen cackling at the irony of the night feeling the flex of the hands of time on the clock, always mocking us, reminding us… these are not our homes. Our homes do not belong to us.

Nothing is ours, not even ourselves. Our parents own everything. Our parents are just as insane as we are.

I walk the blocks back to my house in swift silence still admiring the trails of light flinging their way through entangled tree branches and the way traffic signs reflected on the shiny dewy concrete of early early morning. Disable the alarm, slip off my boots, shimmy up the stairs into my room to the soundtrack of the freight train snoring along reliably two floors above me. Mom's bedroom is empty and I wonder who she's trying to impress tonight. There is still a heavy chunk of time between me and morning, so I make the illuminated console of the boom box my parents got me for my birthday this year after my tantrum regarding their sale of the ever-coveted ghetto blaster of my youth my ultimate entertainment center. Phrases like “BOOMING BASS” dance in time with one another to the silence between me being awake and me admitting I’m awake. Phrases made of letters shaped like rectangles to conform to the limitations of display technology back then could have been one or one hundred colors in real life and it didn’t matter to me- I saw thousands. New phrases popped up every so often like messages from secret stations I couldn’t even tune in to.

Steps on the staircase, my Dad descending to use the bathroom and head out for his ritual coffee and newspaper… I’m under the covers eyes fixated on the glowing phrases of my stereo slowly beginning to develop gratitude for sliding right off of a slippery fucking slope hours before to land in a bowl of frosted flakes.

Is this how it’s supposed to feel? Like everything ever since I started snorting and swallowing and smoking last night was leading up to this moment laying here alone staring into the blinking display and I’d be lying if I said I wanted to take any of it back but I wonder where to go now.

I keep going.

What happened then has been living in my head for years while my Dad still thinks that he smelled cigarette smoke on me when I came out of my room that next morning because I'd gotten bold during the night with Mom out on another date and decided to light up in my bedroom closet.

I kept going.

Now it isn’t then anymore. Here is the other side of the flowing mirror where we do whatever it takes to keep ourselves on the right side of the stream. A quick tug and I’m soaking wet but I’m looking into my own eyes again, deadened by the strange malaise of the constant water wall… it makes no noise, it appears to simply cycle on its own with no attachment to any pipes or plumbing… Mirror mirror on my teenage wall, who is the most disillusioned of them all? Nothing could ever be so fair as those pulsing lights and the unfamiliar feeling of not having control - and not needing it either. These days we don’t speak much, but I know none of them forget that night.

I go on dancing. I tear off my skin. Coming out of in. A skeleton. This is the way it has always been…

rattle your brittle bones at me

a sun rises in each socket

They keep staring into the wall failing to ever see past the shallow reflections of themselves. The girl who bumped me through to the other side is in the dark end of the long room, her night eyes oddly bright, movements exaggerated for the enjoyment of the crowd hanging off her arms… She twirls. Her heels are tall and sharp defining the infinite slender length of her legs with a straight cut around the ankle and a serpent woven around the heel. I am choking on my apple now. I would still put the apple in my mouth just as I’d still eat all the pills and potions that set such carnage in motion… I used to chew the apple elegantly. I used to enjoy the rich and surprisingly sour flavor. Now the apple just fucking chokes me. She keeps dancing, the room spinning now as the wall becomes a whirlpool that gravity is pulling me inside of along with the rest of them- I do not want this whirlpool. I want my damaged decisions just as they were made, not as they would have been made for me. I am spitting up blood, shards of glass embedded in the apple are sawing through the hologram I wear, and the people begin to notice that I have no skin. I reach out again to thrust My hand through the wall of water once again and find it to be made of glass, simply a standard sheet of mirror, endlessly repeated throughout the club…

Her thighs are surprisingly thick and I find Myself wondering if she is powerful enough to end my breathing by wrapping them around my neck and squeezing, dangling her slender ankles and high heels down my bag while I asphyxiate.

I am choking on the dagger stem of her apple while agonized faces turn from my naked bones and find appeal in her whirlpool. My hands bleed punching the glass. The apple tells me everything I need to know once my splintered teeth have managed to crunch its glass composure into small enough pieces to feel scrape their way into my system… I already knew everything. She’s beautiful dancing with her long legs seductively wrapping around the occasional flirt and dark eyes shooting their strange beacons from the dark end. They know the water. They’ve seen their perfect selves in their reflection, never thinking to search its backing, confident in their solid states of self assurance she so kindly gives them instead of this shrapnel apple they do not know nor will ever come to be able to comprehend is the kinder option. Look away from the skeleton, missing my skin and openly broadcasting a feeling of… disembodiment. Disembodied from the world, disembodied from the appearance of skin on my skeleton and what it turns me into, and deeply indebted to the very apple that caused me to bleed out while everyone else fell down the whirlpool.

My head is not always attached to the rest of me.

I want this apple even though it will kill me. I want to know and feel the reality of the loss of innocence I never had a chance of retaining, I’d like to steal this opportunity of true sight from the sharp-hipped succubus who unknowingly presented it to me with the plucking of this apple from the cobwebs threatening to creep into the corners of her life.

Her allure will eat you alive. Pretend that you have what it takes to keep up with her until it’s too late to turn back. She loves trophies. She is a trophy, coveted by her collection, made all of you always too slow to see her game in time to have a chance at winning. Kill yourself trying to make her happy so you can keep up that false reflection on all four walls around the web she has spun upon the dance floor, every twirl another shot through your already-thinning resolve

My honesty will have you falling in love with me. I kill myself trying to keep myself happy and you will wind up like all the rest- saying those words, regret in your voice but resolve sounding louder… I love you BUT… I wish you would accept it. You love the thought of me, the idea of me, the representation of unbridled lust for living it for myself and you really thought, you really, really thought that you would live it for yourself with me… The miles to go before I sleep will always stand in between the place we could meet- your closed eyes and head on dreams the opposite of my black pupil machines. When you wake up in disbelief that I did not sleep you’ll first find it intriguing, perhaps even challenging. Joining Me for delirium is your first step toward gone. Every staircase is assembled in the order you create based on your need to conquer and keep me, not a single one built to last. A week awake, a week asleep.

She’s the one you want to bring home to Mom. Kill yourself trying to keep her happy. Perfect can’t admit to flaws, so when she wants some give her all. Look in the mirror every day until you just can’t remember living any other way- perfect and plastic, Malibu dream house, the spinner of spirited tales- yoga classes, family vacation, as long as she’s smiling your insides aren’t vacant. Look at yourself on those water walls, you’re just one of SO many at her Ball- clinging to the swinging of the illusionist Queen. Kill yourself making it into her scene.

My manner of cutting myself open to spill out my guts is ugly and so are the innards of my synthetic counterpart. She lives an artless life while my life imitates art. We are both here.

My transparency turns you away from Me, how can lies be prettier than truth?

Her pre-paid perfection has you noose-necked hanging on tight ready to lash out and kill to still be at her side tomorrow night

My habit of haunting my own hallways in my mind with the skeletons I tried to pair mine with remind me to remind you just who you are fucking with

I kill myself slicing fat flanks of meaty stories off myself to feed you fat with only to find that my truths are a poison and storytelling was the death of us both

We are both here

We are both me

We both want you

We know you'd pick poison over plastic

#poem #poetry #writing #writer #secrets #story #stories

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