I.
Giant, multicolored sails litter the rolling turquoise waves of the Pacific. From this distance, they’re like flecks of paper mache swaying back and forth in the wind, waving little goodbyes as they drift farther and farther out.
There’s a hard metallic clank as the hatch locks into place.
“All set,” a twanging southern voice calls out. In the mirror, a slim shape in a tank top and a straw Stetson gives a thumbs-up, a radiant smile etched on a heart shaped face.
Abigail has this weird ritual for customers. Once the hatch slams shut, you lean on the horn a few times.
The dazzling smile she always gave as she narrated a giggling tale of weird nostalgia left you weak in the knees. Abby just had that magic about her.
This is the only time since I met her that I don’t answer.
My mind is stuck on the spin cycle of chaos and it won’t shut off.
I don’t hear her shout my name, or notice her tap on the windshield with her knuckles. I don’t hear the crunch of gravel as she wanders off.
But I sure as hell hear the brutal crack of a pistol when she returns. My eyes swim red and I let out a high-pitched shriek of fear.
I have a death grip on the steering wheel when I find her, hips cocked, a finger plugging one ear, and a slim arm pointing a cowboy revolver into the dirt. She winces when her eyes refocus on mine. She mouths a regretful apology as she walks back to the truck.
“Bad habits from a crazy granddaddy,” she mutters, leaning in over the rolled down passenger window. She pushes back the Stetson.
I try to smile; it comes out lopsided.
“You okay, hon?”
A sigh whistles through clenched teeth. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“Sooner trust a coyote in sheep’s skin claimin’ he was born to be white and fluffy.
She pops the door open and eases in, cursing as her bikini clad ass hits the hot white leather of the bench. She drops the revolver on the seat, pulls a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from nowhere, and props snakeskin boots up high on the dash. Her legs are long and copper smooth. Makes me a bit jealous. I’m so pale you can almost see my veins.
She tries offering me the bottle and I give her a look - alcohol at eleven in the morning? Makes my stomach turn. Her toned shoulders shrug as she unscrews the cap and takes a sip.
I remember when she told me that a country girl never stops being a country girl, even after you give her a California tan and put a surfboard under her instead of a horse.
She doesn’t push me. She doesn’t say anything in fact. Country charm. Country patience. I’m grateful for it. Gives me time.
“Ever get that feeling that something inside you is just… wrong?”
Abby arches a thin black brow. She knows I’m not the chatty sort, so this means heavy shit.
A sigh.
“It’s like a scab, I guess. You know something’s off when it festers, but you can’t really see what that something is. Just that it’s there, that it’s eating away at you like poison. And you want to do something about it… but you’re afraid. And then it scars over, trapping that awful thing inside you.”
I shrug, at a loss at how to continue.
Abby just takes another sip from the bottle. Then another.
Silence.
The sun rises higher in the sky as minutes tick by. It’s awhile before she says anything and I can sense her tiptoeing around the phrasing.
“I felt that once,” she says.
“Really?”
Her pink mouth curves down. Blue eyes cloud, as if remembering something she wishes she hadn’t. She tucks a loose strand of black hair behind an ear. “Well, maybe not like that. My mother did though. I think. Got herself into mess of trouble for it too.”
She takes another drink and holds the bottle out to me again.
I take it this time, gagging down a small mouthful of the bitter liquid.
Abby takes the bottle back with a smile. “Not for delicate little birds like you,” she laughs, breaking the dark mood for a moment.
We sit in silence for a while, watching as the sailboats finally creep over the horizon.
I look over at her; trails of sweat slope down a dusty cheek. The bottle of Jack is half gone and she’s flushed a rosy pink.
“What do I do?” I ask. Deep down, I know that those four words are a labyrinth of meaning far deeper in complexity than the singular answer I’m likely to get.
She takes off the Stetson and runs a hand through shiny curls.
“After my mother… granddaddy took me in and gave me the kind of advice a girl never really forgets, especially at thirteen. He told me that sometimes the only way to face the devil inside you is to jump right down into hell and see if you take a shine to Satan hisself.”
“And what happens when you like what you see?”
The question stumps her. She’s tiptoed right into a minefield.
She looks at me sidelong. “I s’pose you try not to let him steal your soul when you’re not lookin’.”
What if it’s already gone?
“Taryn?” she asks.
“What is …” I don’t finish. Those very pink lips of hers press tightly against mine. I can taste the whiskey on her breath. This time it’s delicious.
I groan when her hand runs up my inner thigh. I push her away when her fingers try teasing inside my paint stained Capri’s.
She’s beet red and chewing her bottom lip.
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “Always wanted to. Don’t know why.”
Yes, she does. And it pains her.
“I have something for you,” she whispers. “Wait right here.”
She slinks out of the pickup like a cat, snakeskin boots crunching over the gravel as she heads over to a house that looks like a modernized barn. I let my eyes follow the sway of her heartbreaker ass until she disappears inside.
I want to speed off. But I don’t. I stay. Guilt can really weigh like an anchor sometimes.
When she returns, she drops a wooden basket of strawberries in my lap. They look like glittering rubies.
“Best yet,” she grins. “Finally figured out granddaddy’s secret. I’m sure you’ll put them to good use.”
She leans inside the cabin and whispers in my ear. “Do what you need to, honey.” Then she pulls away and slaps the door. I lean on the horn. She grins wide.
O/o\O
That moment when the clutch drops, and the old Chevy 5 rockets forward like an over eager virgin, sparks a rush of addictive adrenaline led by white-walled tires.
I close my eyes and inhale the salty ocean spray as the cherry red pickup speeds along the coastal highway, the dying sun drenching the sky in pastel brilliance.
I find the red button at my hip.
The seatbelt clicks, releasing me from pointless bonds of safety.
My eyes flutter open when the speedometer hits eighty-eight and I wish I could throttle back in time, course correct whatever horrible trauma I can’t remember suffering. But life’s a heartless bitch that enjoys kicking you back into the mud. It has no regard for what I want.
I press harder on the gas pedal and the pickup roars with delight.
Ninety-five.
The steering wheel rattles.
Lift-off.
I’m blissfully free, nothing under me but a squishy leather bench and hunks of restored metal.
I flick on the radio and a song crackles to life; a smooth tenor belts out a staccato lyric: “Buhbuhbuh-Bennie annnnd the Jeeeeetssss.”
The truck swerves into the other lane. It’s liquid fire in my veins as the creature inside me spits awake, cursing in anger. I have to fight with the wheel to bring the Chevy back under control. The creature screeches until I get the radio turned off.
I decelerate and pull off to the side.
I’m a mess. My skin’s cold and clammy.
I lose track of time until my nerves settle and I pull back onto the road.
Out over the ocean the sun is a squished blood orange as it dips over the horizon.
A supernatural heat starts to burn in my belly as I continue the rest of the way in unnerving silence.
II.
When the automatic sensors register the Chevy, small globes of muted silver flicker on in patterned pairs, illuminating the winding path up to the house in fuzzy light.
I ease off the gas and the pickup coasts to a crawl.
The breeze slicing through the cracked window is welcomingly cold on my cheeks and I can hear the natural, midnight tones of hooting owls and buzzing crickets drifting in through the trees. Their melody is a haunting dance.
My foot jams the break pedal on pure instinct.
I sit there, following the cones of pale yellow piercing the dark. I wait for something, maybe my Muse, fickle and fleeting, to get off her ass, to tell me what to do for once, instead of just directing the movements of a paintbrush. I’d be satisfied with a simple yes or no. Raised hairs. A pounding heart.
Nothing.
Not even a tingle. There’s just calm steadiness, like the body already accepts what the brain can’t. Or won’t.
The trees murmur with rustling leaves as a silhouette with green eyes slinks quickly through them, staring right at me before dashing off. I wait for claws to reach through the window and tear my throat to a bloody pulp.
Still nothing.
Too many October nights spent curled on the couch with horror movies, wine and twizzlers my only companion until Grayson gets home.
I let out a thin laugh that breaks into a snort and lift off the break.
O/o\O
When the Chevy eases around the wide, neatly manicured bend in the driveway, my sweaty palms slip on the ivory steering wheel.
The midnight sky slopes unfathomably low to the ground and a golden moon swings with pendulum grace from invisible threads, almost scraping the roof of the tinted glass house. It swings low enough that I want to reach out and pull it down, see if it tastes like cheese. Or just give it hard shake, like a snow globe, and see if a tiny man falls out.
O/o\O
My sandaled feet crush a bed of flowers into the paved cobbles when I slip from the truck, releasing an intoxicatingly sweet fragrance that sparks a familiar feeling in me, one that I can’t quite place. I bend down and bring a handful of white to my nose.
I breathe deep and colors explode into blinding neon hues that blush across the white petals before firing out, drenching first the house, then the sky in kaleidoscopic rainbows.
A word forms on my lips, something that has an inherent magic all its own. It tastes like strawberry wine at the tip of my tongue and rouses a faded memory of a story I can’t remember reading: a lost girl in a blue dress with a bow in her straw blonde hair.
“Wonderland,” I whisper.
The large trellis walkway stretching up to the patio is smothered in dark foliage so thick it creates a miniature forest canopy. Sheets of dark flowers in alien shades weave in and out of the latticework and wind around the cherry stained wood of the posts.
As I walk toward the house, thin lines of moss branch out like circuitry through the interior of the trellis, carving an eerie path of electric blue through the inky black tunnel.
I duck inside and push through the foliage and I’m assaulted by sensation. Impossible scents mingle like hot milk and cocoa with a touch of tongue tingling spice. It’s like being in a living garden bakery. No need for cooks, just larges vines that brush the skin like slippery, silken hands.
Despite the strangeness of everything, I can’t contain the smile forcing its way across my lips. I want to believe this is his doing; that he’s even more than I think him to be.
I vaguely remember that night in the club, under the heavy buzz of Tequila and great music. I don’t know why I said those words, only his response.
‘I’ll jump down that hole after you if I have to, kitten, even if it’s into the jaws of Monty Python’s rabbit.’ A terrible line really, but …I also remember his nimble fingers, wet with whiskey, pushing past my damp panties under a black marble staircase.
Six months was a still a thing, right? Halfway to something is a kind of achievement. You’re halfway to fucking it up or halfway to making magic.
I push the door open. My hopes depress faster an addict’s needle. For a pregnant moment, I try convincing myself of some magical gesture of romance, even the darkly comedic sort.
Black humor and pranks are his style.
“Hopeless delusion,” a voice whispers, so softly it doesn’t even register with me.
O/o\O
The house is chilly as I creep inside. The metallic flavors of smoke float in a heavy cloud of sulfuric grey. My feet want to carry me through the maze-like halls to the back of the house. I’m not sure why. Morbid curiosity I guess?
Which is silly, because it’s these moments in horror movies that I always want to slap the heroine for making all us girls look like brainless bimbos. Turn around I always say. It isn’t worth all the pain and misery.
Thing is, you can’t feel curiosity through the TV screen. You can’t feel that addictive pull at your navel, temping you, goading you.
As I wind my way back, chilly drops to freezing and the blanket of brightly colored flowers that followed me in from the driveway thins out. What begins to replace them is frighteningly beautiful.
Bat-orchids.
Sinister. Velvety. Alien. Black tendrils fan out from the petals like snakes. My heart clenches. The creature inside me stirs, seems to resonate with whatever it is I’m walking into.
My feet hit something hard and circular and my ankle rolls. I have to throw an arm out wildly, juggling the box of strawberries in the other. My sandals are a broken ruin, straps torn. A curse splutters over my tongue when I see what I tripped on.
Spent bullets.
They’re everywhere, littering the bed of orchids like poisonous silver beetles.
My eyes drift to the walls and find jagged holes spelling out crude lines of twisted poetry. There’s an elegant quality to the verse, no matter how suggestive the content is. But it isn’t the poetry that makes my heart thump out of sync. No, it’s the glossy photograph tacked to the ruined plaster.
The figure in the photo projects outward, like she isn’t quite part of the portrait, but isn’t really part of the space outside the print either. Alabaster skin glows ghostly silver in the black and whites. She’s slender and delicate, like a willowy waif, but the sardonic smirk that curls her mouth betrays any sort of innocence.
As I move through the hallway, I find more photos tacked up. Each one is progressively more erotic, more revealing: at first it’s just a face, the upturned swell of a breast, a finger pressed to pursed black lips. Gradually, she materializes like a shade in the night. Despite the cold, my skin flushes hot. Behind that twisted, lascivious smile is rage, coiled about a violent lust.
There’s a story flashing in her eyes, slanting down her pale skin - a nightmarish one.
The creature inside me hums in helter-skelter rhythm as I make the last turn.
O/o\O
The tale plunges from teasing eroticism into filthy, magnetic perversion. A twisted laugh echoes from deep inside me; my vision blurs. When my eyes snap open, color bleeds from the photos in garish hues.
There’s a dull ache between my eyes. It’s the feeling I get when I zone out, let creativity sink it’s claws into me until hours disappear and canvas after canvas is filled with paint.
I used to think I was in control of the brush, creative expression given real, tangible life. Now I know better. It’s been her all along, trying to fill in the holes of a life I can’t remember.
I can’t breathe.
She shimmers electric green, naked and ethereal, a crazed glint in her eyes. She’s not looking at me, but beyond me. Blackberry lips twist. “Let me show you.”
I stumble back, sliding on more bullets.
I fall.
The photos spin in hypnotic swirls. Colors bleed to silver and sable before pulling apart to form tiny, pixilated cubes of light.
The cubes slide into place and it’s like watching a movie from the 50s. I swear I can hear the clicking of a projector in the background as the countdown flashes across a dirty screen.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Hands reach out from the screen and pull me in.
One.
Erotic hell.
III.
A girl hunches behind a tattooed man, one hand working between his legs while the other teases his ass. Fine white powder arcs along his lower back. A figure obscured in shadows reclines in a rocking chair in front of them, observing the show as he nurses a dark bottle of liquor.
The girl presses her nose to the powder, takes a deep snort. Her eyes glaze and she shakes her white-blond hair.
“Fuck, that’s good.” She giggles and licks her lips.
The shadowed man gestures.
Her head lowers again, then again, until only a bit remains. I see a wicked grin split her face as the drug takes hold. She wets a finger and slowly collects the rest, like she’s polishing off the sugar from a box of powdered donuts.
She rises up on her knees and leans over the tattooed man. She bites his shoulder, whispers in his ear.
He grunts a strangled, “Fuck,” as she plunges her powdered finger into his muscular ass, right up to the knuckle.
When she finds his prostate, his body lurches forward and she rides him down, giggling all the way, into the soft mattress.
Another body pulls from the shadows. He’s lean, hard, and his eyes are red-rimmed. He paws at the girl’s hips with awkward movements, trying to slot his drugged up cock inside her. He keeps missing, both holes, his shaft just sliding between the crack of her ass. She snorts impatiently, reaches back, and captures him in a tight fist. His cry of pain fades to pleasure when she eases him inside her messy cunt.
The cloaked figure waves again, like a depraved maestro, conducting the symphony of wet slaps and animalistic grunts.
The projector clicks. Another scene.
She’s splayed out on the floor, ringed by naked, masked figures. They pull on engorged cocks, cackling as they spout profane derision. To them, she’s nothing but a toy to slake their lusts. Thing is, they’ve got it all wrong. They’re just mindless drones with pretty cocks and sculpted bodies. I know because I can hear her, scuttling about the edges of my mind with a throaty whisper.
“Let me show you what you are.”
A cherry stem twirls between shiny lips like a toothpick and she stretches with feline grace, red gems of fruit rolling off her body. They watch, enthralled, as she drags the tip of a chocolate covered banana across erect nipples. When she dips lower, tracing the length of her leaking pussy, the room is filled with harsh jeers. She moans as the banana parts her slippery folds and pushes inside.
The chocolate melts on contact with her creaming cunt. The scent is a bullet to the head, more addictive than caffeine, more dangerous than misplaced trust.
She loses control, lost in a sugary dance, burning under the leers of men she doesn’t even know. The banana crumbles apart inside her fiery hole just as she tenses up, hips lifting off the floor, back arching.
Magic.
Her pussy twitches and a banana split of syrupy cum oozes out of her flared lips. A cacophony of ragged grunts echoes all around her and hot semen splashes over her in waves, coating her from head to foot. She wriggles this way and that, trying to catch all of, as if it’s ambrosia.
When they finish, she wears an expression of inexhaustible exhaustion. They make crude jokes about a new class of high-end art as she paints a mural of lust over her body with their filthy leavings.
She smiles wickedly, crooks a finger. Tells them to take a more direct role this time.
They fall upon her like starved vultures.
Click.
Overturned poker tables litter a dim-lit room. Stacks of money lay crumpled and abandoned, soaking up rivers of spilled tonic and gin. No one notices the masked figures slinking inside. No one notices the panel slide up from behind the bar, revealing a safe. And no one notices the gold ingots being emptied from it along with a thick stack of files.
No one cares.
Sweat slick bodies wriggle with slippery, serpentine movements over sticky wood floors. A man with a goatee and a half-moon scar on his cheek has the blonds’ hips propped up on a pillow, her breasts flattened against the floor.
He teases a thin-necked bottle against her pink star, eases it inside. The girl sobs, begs him to pull it out. He spanks her ass, tilts the bottle, and tells her the wine is worth more than he’s paying for her services.
Then his dick replaces the bottle. He pounds her ass with abandon, wine sloshing around with a filthy churn. Fingers curl in her tangled braid. He directs her movements with urgent tugs as she feasts on the blushing crotch of a pretty Asian.
Glass shatters. The goateed man doesn’t notice. He’s entranced, watching the navy blue wine leak from the blonde’s ass, stained her pale legs. He spanks her, grunts in acknowledgement when begs for it harder. Faster.
The blond notices though. She winks as the last of the masked figures picks up the gold bar he dropped on a $500 bottle of scotch. He stares. She curls a finger, licks her lips. He takes a step forward, then stops. Shakes his head. She frowns in amused disappointment.
He takes off his mask, blue eyes flashing. “Later,” he mouths.
“Definitely,” she purrs, just as a creamy load fires up her sphincter.
Click.
The photos explode in number, filling every inch of white space on the walls. And the monster inside me brings each one to depraved life. Drugs. Sex. Pounding music. Flashing cameras. Wild howls. The squelching beat of hard dick in dripping pussy. The blonde multiples in number and each time the shadowed figure is there, nursing a dark bottle, a bowler hat obscuring his face.
Click.
The final photo is blown up, hangs from the ceiling, spinning round and round. There’s no visceral imagery clicking along like a spool of film this time. It’s just a static moment caught in time.
She straddles a dark muscular frame, head thrown back, mouth parted, skin glowing blue, wild hair hanging in damp curls.
I know her. I know them.
Because I’m the girl in the photos, from the tattoo blazing across slim shoulder blades, to the freckled constellations that dot their pale skin. The biggest tell, however, the thing that can’t possibly be replicated, can’t be faked; the crisscrossing scars between the upturned swell of my breasts.
“Do you see?” the voice inside me snickers.
The glass house shatters, tears apart at the seams.
A scream rips from my throat.
IV.
Everything is dark.
I feel lighter than air, like a zephyr floating off the ground.
Heat fills me. Consumes me. I burst through a void of ice and all around me, steam hisses like angry snakes.
Something howls within me, pushes out with a concussive force until I shatter into a thousand scorched puzzle pieces.
I’m dying.
Spinning.
Flailing.
Ascending. Descending.
Hell. Heaven.
They’re all the same in that they’re all so utterly meaningless right now.
My heart skips to a stop. I start to fade.
Everything is quiet.
O/o\O
Heat is what pieces me clumsily back together, new pieces overriding old ones, everything melting into something new, monstrous.
Rebirth.
The blood boils in my veins until I can see it, tracks of blinding, rusted orange fluid that pumps through me like the rivers of magma beneath a volcano.
Reality bends into chaotic nightmare.
I stop falling.
A disembodied mouth materializes in front of me. Heat flares as I reel back. It curves into a wide Cheshire grin. Familiarity pokes me with needle-like precision. I know the smile. I see it in the mirror everything morning, grinning back at me, teeth all neat and white and straight.
The mouth twists into an erotic, mocking smirk, like the girl from the photos. Me.
It’s the sort of smile that knows something you don’t and takes sick pleasure in the fact. It’s the sort of smile that torments you, because deep down, it knows you better than you do, in all the ways that matter.
The mouth blurs and vanishes completely. I spin around and it blurs back into focus, except something else blurs into focus a second later, filing in the empty spaces around the smile with bone and skin and muscle and hair, until the smile no longer just floats there like a marionette.
I stare, and stare, and stare. That Chesire grin is still the same. Still mine. But the hair is burnished copper instead of blonde. The skin is freckled and tan instead of creamed alabaster. And the eyes are black star sapphires, crackling with lightning and filled with hunger, greed, lust, and… well, I’m not sure if life really applies.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, those eyes frighten me. They spark a niggling burst of déjà vu, familiarity you can hold in your hand a split second before it slips through your fingers like oil, gone, yet trace amounts left behind.
The smile widens into a silent laugh, reading the confusion and fear pulling over my face.
Then I’m falling again. The heat burns hotter, faster. A hole opens up. I’m swallowed like a psychedelic drug. There are flashes of white, colorful top hats, and the faces of naked playing cards given frightening life. The tattoo on my back is molten fire, a white-hot brand pressed to skin. The ink pulses and moves, bubbling as the jaws open, the pointed teeth leaking neon blood.
The laugh unhinges, echoes all around me like an exploding bomb. Then it breaks and becomes a snarl of demonic passion. It singsongs a broken, disjointed rhyme that cuts me to pieces.
Warm fingers lace with mine, stopping my descent. The Cheshire grin floats back, a puppet without strings; blackberry lips start to part.
It chants the tattooed phrase on my back. It’s the perfect line for perfectly broken imagery.
I lean forward, entranced… press my mouth against those blackberry lips.
They taste like candied fruit. Sharp teeth bite down on my tongue.
Fire erupts from every pore in my body. The tattoo grows and envelops me.
I scream.
“Do you see now?”
“No.
No.
NO!”
I don’t want to see.
But it’s already too late.
I plunge deeper into miasmic abyss.
V.
Like Plato’s hellish cave, fragments of dim light warp twisted shapes off the slippery black surface of the chrysalis. At least, I think it’s a chrysalis. I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.
I can’t move. I can’t feel. And I can barely see.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Five thousand, three hundred and forty-nine beats.
When you realize you can’t hear your heart anymore, can’t feel it hammering against your ribs, sanity starts to slip.
“Slip, slip, slip,” tiny voices tease, “just like the rest of us.”
Five thousand, three hundred and forty-nine lies.
“Do you see now? Do you, do you, do you?”
Yes. I can. I’m sorry. I try to mean it. I really do. But this nightmare is pulling me apart.
“No. No you aren’t, you trashy harpy!” they singsong.
As if any of you would be sorry.
Silence.
Are there winners and losers when all you’re doing is fighting a thousand twisted versions yourself?
The only thing I’m sorry about is seeing them and… not so much remembering them, but feeling them. They push and push, forcing sensations and emotions on me. Sins. Pains. Guilty pleasures. Raging hate.
A nickel-plated pistol.
Rain slick streets.
Five bodies.
A river of crimson.
Each version of me has its own jagged scar, its own story to tell.
Dimly lit clubs. Drugs I can’t even pronounce. Sex so depraved, so powerful, it breaks you.
Park benches near a placid lake.
They all flow by in harsh, imperfect clarity, less visceral than before, but no less painful, no less maddening.
“Mad, mad, mad!” the voices jeer.
Who the fuck would apologize for not remembering that? Not living that?
Thump. Thump.
Five hundred more lies.
I wonder what I’ll look like when this chrysalis cracks open. Nothing angelic. Nothing beautiful. I know that now. I’m insane. Not delusional.
I picture tattered wings oozing from my back like tar. Canines sharpened to fangs. Tongue forked. Flaming eyes and unquenchable lusts for hard dick to suck the energy from. You know that type of monster.
Succubus. Demon. Hellion.
The mirror-like surface above me shimmers like ripples of a vicious liquid. A hand reaches down into the abyss, grabs hold, and yanks me up into the light.
I fall into shallow water. It hisses and sizzles upon contact with my superheated skin.
I try getting up, but my feet tangle. I fall back into the water and steam rises in a thick cloud.
I close my eyes and just lay there as the water evaporates around me, hoping it might take me with it as it rises up out of this nightmare.
“Now that’s delusional,” a youthful voice calls out, “and totally unimaginative.”
The steam thins and I open my eyes. Large flakes of ash float down around me like burnt leaves.
I look up.
A giant playing card hovers above me. The scorched outline of a woman in a Victorian-style bubble skirt glows an angry reddish orange. In the corner is a smeared Q with a bleeding, misshapen heart beneath it.
Queen of Hearts.
“I hope you weren’t still hoping you might be the heroine in this story, T. A sweet, innocent girl like Alice just doesn’t suit us. I think the Red Queen fits perfectly. Villainous. Insane. Unfathomably sexy. Being bad is so much more fun, right?”
I try struggling to my feet again and my legs wobble on spiked heels.
“Come on out. It’s perfectly unsafe.” A bell like laugh rings out, clear and true.
Giant, multicolored sails litter the rolling turquoise waves of the Pacific. From this distance, they’re like flecks of paper mache swaying back and forth in the wind, waving little goodbyes as they drift farther and farther out.
There’s a hard metallic clank as the hatch locks into place.
“All set,” a twanging southern voice calls out. In the mirror, a slim shape in a tank top and a straw Stetson gives a thumbs-up, a radiant smile etched on a heart shaped face.
Abigail has this weird ritual for customers. Once the hatch slams shut, you lean on the horn a few times.
The dazzling smile she always gave as she narrated a giggling tale of weird nostalgia left you weak in the knees. Abby just had that magic about her.
This is the only time since I met her that I don’t answer.
My mind is stuck on the spin cycle of chaos and it won’t shut off.
I don’t hear her shout my name, or notice her tap on the windshield with her knuckles. I don’t hear the crunch of gravel as she wanders off.
But I sure as hell hear the brutal crack of a pistol when she returns. My eyes swim red and I let out a high-pitched shriek of fear.
I have a death grip on the steering wheel when I find her, hips cocked, a finger plugging one ear, and a slim arm pointing a cowboy revolver into the dirt. She winces when her eyes refocus on mine. She mouths a regretful apology as she walks back to the truck.
“Bad habits from a crazy granddaddy,” she mutters, leaning in over the rolled down passenger window. She pushes back the Stetson.
I try to smile; it comes out lopsided.
“You okay, hon?”
A sigh whistles through clenched teeth. “Would you believe me if I said yes?”
“Sooner trust a coyote in sheep’s skin claimin’ he was born to be white and fluffy.
She pops the door open and eases in, cursing as her bikini clad ass hits the hot white leather of the bench. She drops the revolver on the seat, pulls a bottle of Jack Daniel’s from nowhere, and props snakeskin boots up high on the dash. Her legs are long and copper smooth. Makes me a bit jealous. I’m so pale you can almost see my veins.
She tries offering me the bottle and I give her a look - alcohol at eleven in the morning? Makes my stomach turn. Her toned shoulders shrug as she unscrews the cap and takes a sip.
I remember when she told me that a country girl never stops being a country girl, even after you give her a California tan and put a surfboard under her instead of a horse.
She doesn’t push me. She doesn’t say anything in fact. Country charm. Country patience. I’m grateful for it. Gives me time.
“Ever get that feeling that something inside you is just… wrong?”
Abby arches a thin black brow. She knows I’m not the chatty sort, so this means heavy shit.
A sigh.
“It’s like a scab, I guess. You know something’s off when it festers, but you can’t really see what that something is. Just that it’s there, that it’s eating away at you like poison. And you want to do something about it… but you’re afraid. And then it scars over, trapping that awful thing inside you.”
I shrug, at a loss at how to continue.
Abby just takes another sip from the bottle. Then another.
Silence.
The sun rises higher in the sky as minutes tick by. It’s awhile before she says anything and I can sense her tiptoeing around the phrasing.
“I felt that once,” she says.
“Really?”
Her pink mouth curves down. Blue eyes cloud, as if remembering something she wishes she hadn’t. She tucks a loose strand of black hair behind an ear. “Well, maybe not like that. My mother did though. I think. Got herself into mess of trouble for it too.”
She takes another drink and holds the bottle out to me again.
I take it this time, gagging down a small mouthful of the bitter liquid.
Abby takes the bottle back with a smile. “Not for delicate little birds like you,” she laughs, breaking the dark mood for a moment.
We sit in silence for a while, watching as the sailboats finally creep over the horizon.
I look over at her; trails of sweat slope down a dusty cheek. The bottle of Jack is half gone and she’s flushed a rosy pink.
“What do I do?” I ask. Deep down, I know that those four words are a labyrinth of meaning far deeper in complexity than the singular answer I’m likely to get.
She takes off the Stetson and runs a hand through shiny curls.
“After my mother… granddaddy took me in and gave me the kind of advice a girl never really forgets, especially at thirteen. He told me that sometimes the only way to face the devil inside you is to jump right down into hell and see if you take a shine to Satan hisself.”
“And what happens when you like what you see?”
The question stumps her. She’s tiptoed right into a minefield.
She looks at me sidelong. “I s’pose you try not to let him steal your soul when you’re not lookin’.”
What if it’s already gone?
“Taryn?” she asks.
“What is …” I don’t finish. Those very pink lips of hers press tightly against mine. I can taste the whiskey on her breath. This time it’s delicious.
I groan when her hand runs up my inner thigh. I push her away when her fingers try teasing inside my paint stained Capri’s.
She’s beet red and chewing her bottom lip.
“Sorry,” she mumbles. “Always wanted to. Don’t know why.”
Yes, she does. And it pains her.
“I have something for you,” she whispers. “Wait right here.”
She slinks out of the pickup like a cat, snakeskin boots crunching over the gravel as she heads over to a house that looks like a modernized barn. I let my eyes follow the sway of her heartbreaker ass until she disappears inside.
I want to speed off. But I don’t. I stay. Guilt can really weigh like an anchor sometimes.
When she returns, she drops a wooden basket of strawberries in my lap. They look like glittering rubies.
“Best yet,” she grins. “Finally figured out granddaddy’s secret. I’m sure you’ll put them to good use.”
She leans inside the cabin and whispers in my ear. “Do what you need to, honey.” Then she pulls away and slaps the door. I lean on the horn. She grins wide.
O/o\O
That moment when the clutch drops, and the old Chevy 5 rockets forward like an over eager virgin, sparks a rush of addictive adrenaline led by white-walled tires.
I close my eyes and inhale the salty ocean spray as the cherry red pickup speeds along the coastal highway, the dying sun drenching the sky in pastel brilliance.
I find the red button at my hip.
The seatbelt clicks, releasing me from pointless bonds of safety.
My eyes flutter open when the speedometer hits eighty-eight and I wish I could throttle back in time, course correct whatever horrible trauma I can’t remember suffering. But life’s a heartless bitch that enjoys kicking you back into the mud. It has no regard for what I want.
I press harder on the gas pedal and the pickup roars with delight.
Ninety-five.
The steering wheel rattles.
Lift-off.
I’m blissfully free, nothing under me but a squishy leather bench and hunks of restored metal.
I flick on the radio and a song crackles to life; a smooth tenor belts out a staccato lyric: “Buhbuhbuh-Bennie annnnd the Jeeeeetssss.”
The truck swerves into the other lane. It’s liquid fire in my veins as the creature inside me spits awake, cursing in anger. I have to fight with the wheel to bring the Chevy back under control. The creature screeches until I get the radio turned off.
I decelerate and pull off to the side.
I’m a mess. My skin’s cold and clammy.
I lose track of time until my nerves settle and I pull back onto the road.
Out over the ocean the sun is a squished blood orange as it dips over the horizon.
A supernatural heat starts to burn in my belly as I continue the rest of the way in unnerving silence.
II.
When the automatic sensors register the Chevy, small globes of muted silver flicker on in patterned pairs, illuminating the winding path up to the house in fuzzy light.
I ease off the gas and the pickup coasts to a crawl.
The breeze slicing through the cracked window is welcomingly cold on my cheeks and I can hear the natural, midnight tones of hooting owls and buzzing crickets drifting in through the trees. Their melody is a haunting dance.
My foot jams the break pedal on pure instinct.
I sit there, following the cones of pale yellow piercing the dark. I wait for something, maybe my Muse, fickle and fleeting, to get off her ass, to tell me what to do for once, instead of just directing the movements of a paintbrush. I’d be satisfied with a simple yes or no. Raised hairs. A pounding heart.
Nothing.
Not even a tingle. There’s just calm steadiness, like the body already accepts what the brain can’t. Or won’t.
The trees murmur with rustling leaves as a silhouette with green eyes slinks quickly through them, staring right at me before dashing off. I wait for claws to reach through the window and tear my throat to a bloody pulp.
Still nothing.
Too many October nights spent curled on the couch with horror movies, wine and twizzlers my only companion until Grayson gets home.
I let out a thin laugh that breaks into a snort and lift off the break.
O/o\O
When the Chevy eases around the wide, neatly manicured bend in the driveway, my sweaty palms slip on the ivory steering wheel.
The midnight sky slopes unfathomably low to the ground and a golden moon swings with pendulum grace from invisible threads, almost scraping the roof of the tinted glass house. It swings low enough that I want to reach out and pull it down, see if it tastes like cheese. Or just give it hard shake, like a snow globe, and see if a tiny man falls out.
O/o\O
My sandaled feet crush a bed of flowers into the paved cobbles when I slip from the truck, releasing an intoxicatingly sweet fragrance that sparks a familiar feeling in me, one that I can’t quite place. I bend down and bring a handful of white to my nose.
I breathe deep and colors explode into blinding neon hues that blush across the white petals before firing out, drenching first the house, then the sky in kaleidoscopic rainbows.
A word forms on my lips, something that has an inherent magic all its own. It tastes like strawberry wine at the tip of my tongue and rouses a faded memory of a story I can’t remember reading: a lost girl in a blue dress with a bow in her straw blonde hair.
“Wonderland,” I whisper.
The large trellis walkway stretching up to the patio is smothered in dark foliage so thick it creates a miniature forest canopy. Sheets of dark flowers in alien shades weave in and out of the latticework and wind around the cherry stained wood of the posts.
As I walk toward the house, thin lines of moss branch out like circuitry through the interior of the trellis, carving an eerie path of electric blue through the inky black tunnel.
I duck inside and push through the foliage and I’m assaulted by sensation. Impossible scents mingle like hot milk and cocoa with a touch of tongue tingling spice. It’s like being in a living garden bakery. No need for cooks, just larges vines that brush the skin like slippery, silken hands.
Despite the strangeness of everything, I can’t contain the smile forcing its way across my lips. I want to believe this is his doing; that he’s even more than I think him to be.
I vaguely remember that night in the club, under the heavy buzz of Tequila and great music. I don’t know why I said those words, only his response.
‘I’ll jump down that hole after you if I have to, kitten, even if it’s into the jaws of Monty Python’s rabbit.’ A terrible line really, but …I also remember his nimble fingers, wet with whiskey, pushing past my damp panties under a black marble staircase.
Six months was a still a thing, right? Halfway to something is a kind of achievement. You’re halfway to fucking it up or halfway to making magic.
I push the door open. My hopes depress faster an addict’s needle. For a pregnant moment, I try convincing myself of some magical gesture of romance, even the darkly comedic sort.
Black humor and pranks are his style.
“Hopeless delusion,” a voice whispers, so softly it doesn’t even register with me.
O/o\O
The house is chilly as I creep inside. The metallic flavors of smoke float in a heavy cloud of sulfuric grey. My feet want to carry me through the maze-like halls to the back of the house. I’m not sure why. Morbid curiosity I guess?
Which is silly, because it’s these moments in horror movies that I always want to slap the heroine for making all us girls look like brainless bimbos. Turn around I always say. It isn’t worth all the pain and misery.
Thing is, you can’t feel curiosity through the TV screen. You can’t feel that addictive pull at your navel, temping you, goading you.
As I wind my way back, chilly drops to freezing and the blanket of brightly colored flowers that followed me in from the driveway thins out. What begins to replace them is frighteningly beautiful.
Bat-orchids.
Sinister. Velvety. Alien. Black tendrils fan out from the petals like snakes. My heart clenches. The creature inside me stirs, seems to resonate with whatever it is I’m walking into.
My feet hit something hard and circular and my ankle rolls. I have to throw an arm out wildly, juggling the box of strawberries in the other. My sandals are a broken ruin, straps torn. A curse splutters over my tongue when I see what I tripped on.
Spent bullets.
They’re everywhere, littering the bed of orchids like poisonous silver beetles.
My eyes drift to the walls and find jagged holes spelling out crude lines of twisted poetry. There’s an elegant quality to the verse, no matter how suggestive the content is. But it isn’t the poetry that makes my heart thump out of sync. No, it’s the glossy photograph tacked to the ruined plaster.
The figure in the photo projects outward, like she isn’t quite part of the portrait, but isn’t really part of the space outside the print either. Alabaster skin glows ghostly silver in the black and whites. She’s slender and delicate, like a willowy waif, but the sardonic smirk that curls her mouth betrays any sort of innocence.
As I move through the hallway, I find more photos tacked up. Each one is progressively more erotic, more revealing: at first it’s just a face, the upturned swell of a breast, a finger pressed to pursed black lips. Gradually, she materializes like a shade in the night. Despite the cold, my skin flushes hot. Behind that twisted, lascivious smile is rage, coiled about a violent lust.
There’s a story flashing in her eyes, slanting down her pale skin - a nightmarish one.
The creature inside me hums in helter-skelter rhythm as I make the last turn.
O/o\O
The tale plunges from teasing eroticism into filthy, magnetic perversion. A twisted laugh echoes from deep inside me; my vision blurs. When my eyes snap open, color bleeds from the photos in garish hues.
There’s a dull ache between my eyes. It’s the feeling I get when I zone out, let creativity sink it’s claws into me until hours disappear and canvas after canvas is filled with paint.
I used to think I was in control of the brush, creative expression given real, tangible life. Now I know better. It’s been her all along, trying to fill in the holes of a life I can’t remember.
I can’t breathe.
She shimmers electric green, naked and ethereal, a crazed glint in her eyes. She’s not looking at me, but beyond me. Blackberry lips twist. “Let me show you.”
I stumble back, sliding on more bullets.
I fall.
The photos spin in hypnotic swirls. Colors bleed to silver and sable before pulling apart to form tiny, pixilated cubes of light.
The cubes slide into place and it’s like watching a movie from the 50s. I swear I can hear the clicking of a projector in the background as the countdown flashes across a dirty screen.
Five.
Four.
Three.
Two.
Hands reach out from the screen and pull me in.
One.
Erotic hell.
III.
A girl hunches behind a tattooed man, one hand working between his legs while the other teases his ass. Fine white powder arcs along his lower back. A figure obscured in shadows reclines in a rocking chair in front of them, observing the show as he nurses a dark bottle of liquor.
The girl presses her nose to the powder, takes a deep snort. Her eyes glaze and she shakes her white-blond hair.
“Fuck, that’s good.” She giggles and licks her lips.
The shadowed man gestures.
Her head lowers again, then again, until only a bit remains. I see a wicked grin split her face as the drug takes hold. She wets a finger and slowly collects the rest, like she’s polishing off the sugar from a box of powdered donuts.
She rises up on her knees and leans over the tattooed man. She bites his shoulder, whispers in his ear.
He grunts a strangled, “Fuck,” as she plunges her powdered finger into his muscular ass, right up to the knuckle.
When she finds his prostate, his body lurches forward and she rides him down, giggling all the way, into the soft mattress.
Another body pulls from the shadows. He’s lean, hard, and his eyes are red-rimmed. He paws at the girl’s hips with awkward movements, trying to slot his drugged up cock inside her. He keeps missing, both holes, his shaft just sliding between the crack of her ass. She snorts impatiently, reaches back, and captures him in a tight fist. His cry of pain fades to pleasure when she eases him inside her messy cunt.
The cloaked figure waves again, like a depraved maestro, conducting the symphony of wet slaps and animalistic grunts.
The projector clicks. Another scene.
She’s splayed out on the floor, ringed by naked, masked figures. They pull on engorged cocks, cackling as they spout profane derision. To them, she’s nothing but a toy to slake their lusts. Thing is, they’ve got it all wrong. They’re just mindless drones with pretty cocks and sculpted bodies. I know because I can hear her, scuttling about the edges of my mind with a throaty whisper.
“Let me show you what you are.”
A cherry stem twirls between shiny lips like a toothpick and she stretches with feline grace, red gems of fruit rolling off her body. They watch, enthralled, as she drags the tip of a chocolate covered banana across erect nipples. When she dips lower, tracing the length of her leaking pussy, the room is filled with harsh jeers. She moans as the banana parts her slippery folds and pushes inside.
The chocolate melts on contact with her creaming cunt. The scent is a bullet to the head, more addictive than caffeine, more dangerous than misplaced trust.
She loses control, lost in a sugary dance, burning under the leers of men she doesn’t even know. The banana crumbles apart inside her fiery hole just as she tenses up, hips lifting off the floor, back arching.
Magic.
Her pussy twitches and a banana split of syrupy cum oozes out of her flared lips. A cacophony of ragged grunts echoes all around her and hot semen splashes over her in waves, coating her from head to foot. She wriggles this way and that, trying to catch all of, as if it’s ambrosia.
When they finish, she wears an expression of inexhaustible exhaustion. They make crude jokes about a new class of high-end art as she paints a mural of lust over her body with their filthy leavings.
She smiles wickedly, crooks a finger. Tells them to take a more direct role this time.
They fall upon her like starved vultures.
Click.
Overturned poker tables litter a dim-lit room. Stacks of money lay crumpled and abandoned, soaking up rivers of spilled tonic and gin. No one notices the masked figures slinking inside. No one notices the panel slide up from behind the bar, revealing a safe. And no one notices the gold ingots being emptied from it along with a thick stack of files.
No one cares.
Sweat slick bodies wriggle with slippery, serpentine movements over sticky wood floors. A man with a goatee and a half-moon scar on his cheek has the blonds’ hips propped up on a pillow, her breasts flattened against the floor.
He teases a thin-necked bottle against her pink star, eases it inside. The girl sobs, begs him to pull it out. He spanks her ass, tilts the bottle, and tells her the wine is worth more than he’s paying for her services.
Then his dick replaces the bottle. He pounds her ass with abandon, wine sloshing around with a filthy churn. Fingers curl in her tangled braid. He directs her movements with urgent tugs as she feasts on the blushing crotch of a pretty Asian.
Glass shatters. The goateed man doesn’t notice. He’s entranced, watching the navy blue wine leak from the blonde’s ass, stained her pale legs. He spanks her, grunts in acknowledgement when begs for it harder. Faster.
The blond notices though. She winks as the last of the masked figures picks up the gold bar he dropped on a $500 bottle of scotch. He stares. She curls a finger, licks her lips. He takes a step forward, then stops. Shakes his head. She frowns in amused disappointment.
He takes off his mask, blue eyes flashing. “Later,” he mouths.
“Definitely,” she purrs, just as a creamy load fires up her sphincter.
Click.
The photos explode in number, filling every inch of white space on the walls. And the monster inside me brings each one to depraved life. Drugs. Sex. Pounding music. Flashing cameras. Wild howls. The squelching beat of hard dick in dripping pussy. The blonde multiples in number and each time the shadowed figure is there, nursing a dark bottle, a bowler hat obscuring his face.
Click.
The final photo is blown up, hangs from the ceiling, spinning round and round. There’s no visceral imagery clicking along like a spool of film this time. It’s just a static moment caught in time.
She straddles a dark muscular frame, head thrown back, mouth parted, skin glowing blue, wild hair hanging in damp curls.
I know her. I know them.
Because I’m the girl in the photos, from the tattoo blazing across slim shoulder blades, to the freckled constellations that dot their pale skin. The biggest tell, however, the thing that can’t possibly be replicated, can’t be faked; the crisscrossing scars between the upturned swell of my breasts.
“Do you see?” the voice inside me snickers.
The glass house shatters, tears apart at the seams.
A scream rips from my throat.
IV.
Everything is dark.
I feel lighter than air, like a zephyr floating off the ground.
Heat fills me. Consumes me. I burst through a void of ice and all around me, steam hisses like angry snakes.
Something howls within me, pushes out with a concussive force until I shatter into a thousand scorched puzzle pieces.
I’m dying.
Spinning.
Flailing.
Ascending. Descending.
Hell. Heaven.
They’re all the same in that they’re all so utterly meaningless right now.
My heart skips to a stop. I start to fade.
Everything is quiet.
O/o\O
Heat is what pieces me clumsily back together, new pieces overriding old ones, everything melting into something new, monstrous.
Rebirth.
The blood boils in my veins until I can see it, tracks of blinding, rusted orange fluid that pumps through me like the rivers of magma beneath a volcano.
Reality bends into chaotic nightmare.
I stop falling.
A disembodied mouth materializes in front of me. Heat flares as I reel back. It curves into a wide Cheshire grin. Familiarity pokes me with needle-like precision. I know the smile. I see it in the mirror everything morning, grinning back at me, teeth all neat and white and straight.
The mouth twists into an erotic, mocking smirk, like the girl from the photos. Me.
It’s the sort of smile that knows something you don’t and takes sick pleasure in the fact. It’s the sort of smile that torments you, because deep down, it knows you better than you do, in all the ways that matter.
The mouth blurs and vanishes completely. I spin around and it blurs back into focus, except something else blurs into focus a second later, filing in the empty spaces around the smile with bone and skin and muscle and hair, until the smile no longer just floats there like a marionette.
I stare, and stare, and stare. That Chesire grin is still the same. Still mine. But the hair is burnished copper instead of blonde. The skin is freckled and tan instead of creamed alabaster. And the eyes are black star sapphires, crackling with lightning and filled with hunger, greed, lust, and… well, I’m not sure if life really applies.
For reasons I cannot comprehend, those eyes frighten me. They spark a niggling burst of déjà vu, familiarity you can hold in your hand a split second before it slips through your fingers like oil, gone, yet trace amounts left behind.
The smile widens into a silent laugh, reading the confusion and fear pulling over my face.
Then I’m falling again. The heat burns hotter, faster. A hole opens up. I’m swallowed like a psychedelic drug. There are flashes of white, colorful top hats, and the faces of naked playing cards given frightening life. The tattoo on my back is molten fire, a white-hot brand pressed to skin. The ink pulses and moves, bubbling as the jaws open, the pointed teeth leaking neon blood.
The laugh unhinges, echoes all around me like an exploding bomb. Then it breaks and becomes a snarl of demonic passion. It singsongs a broken, disjointed rhyme that cuts me to pieces.
Warm fingers lace with mine, stopping my descent. The Cheshire grin floats back, a puppet without strings; blackberry lips start to part.
It chants the tattooed phrase on my back. It’s the perfect line for perfectly broken imagery.
I lean forward, entranced… press my mouth against those blackberry lips.
They taste like candied fruit. Sharp teeth bite down on my tongue.
Fire erupts from every pore in my body. The tattoo grows and envelops me.
I scream.
“Do you see now?”
“No.
No.
NO!”
I don’t want to see.
But it’s already too late.
I plunge deeper into miasmic abyss.
V.
Like Plato’s hellish cave, fragments of dim light warp twisted shapes off the slippery black surface of the chrysalis. At least, I think it’s a chrysalis. I can’t be sure. I can’t be sure of anything anymore.
I can’t move. I can’t feel. And I can barely see.
Thump.
Thump.
Thump. Thump.
Thump.
Thump.
Five thousand, three hundred and forty-nine beats.
When you realize you can’t hear your heart anymore, can’t feel it hammering against your ribs, sanity starts to slip.
“Slip, slip, slip,” tiny voices tease, “just like the rest of us.”
Five thousand, three hundred and forty-nine lies.
“Do you see now? Do you, do you, do you?”
Yes. I can. I’m sorry. I try to mean it. I really do. But this nightmare is pulling me apart.
“No. No you aren’t, you trashy harpy!” they singsong.
As if any of you would be sorry.
Silence.
Are there winners and losers when all you’re doing is fighting a thousand twisted versions yourself?
The only thing I’m sorry about is seeing them and… not so much remembering them, but feeling them. They push and push, forcing sensations and emotions on me. Sins. Pains. Guilty pleasures. Raging hate.
A nickel-plated pistol.
Rain slick streets.
Five bodies.
A river of crimson.
Each version of me has its own jagged scar, its own story to tell.
Dimly lit clubs. Drugs I can’t even pronounce. Sex so depraved, so powerful, it breaks you.
Park benches near a placid lake.
They all flow by in harsh, imperfect clarity, less visceral than before, but no less painful, no less maddening.
“Mad, mad, mad!” the voices jeer.
Who the fuck would apologize for not remembering that? Not living that?
Thump. Thump.
Five hundred more lies.
I wonder what I’ll look like when this chrysalis cracks open. Nothing angelic. Nothing beautiful. I know that now. I’m insane. Not delusional.
I picture tattered wings oozing from my back like tar. Canines sharpened to fangs. Tongue forked. Flaming eyes and unquenchable lusts for hard dick to suck the energy from. You know that type of monster.
Succubus. Demon. Hellion.
The mirror-like surface above me shimmers like ripples of a vicious liquid. A hand reaches down into the abyss, grabs hold, and yanks me up into the light.
I fall into shallow water. It hisses and sizzles upon contact with my superheated skin.
I try getting up, but my feet tangle. I fall back into the water and steam rises in a thick cloud.
I close my eyes and just lay there as the water evaporates around me, hoping it might take me with it as it rises up out of this nightmare.
“Now that’s delusional,” a youthful voice calls out, “and totally unimaginative.”
The steam thins and I open my eyes. Large flakes of ash float down around me like burnt leaves.
I look up.
A giant playing card hovers above me. The scorched outline of a woman in a Victorian-style bubble skirt glows an angry reddish orange. In the corner is a smeared Q with a bleeding, misshapen heart beneath it.
Queen of Hearts.
“I hope you weren’t still hoping you might be the heroine in this story, T. A sweet, innocent girl like Alice just doesn’t suit us. I think the Red Queen fits perfectly. Villainous. Insane. Unfathomably sexy. Being bad is so much more fun, right?”
I try struggling to my feet again and my legs wobble on spiked heels.
“Come on out. It’s perfectly unsafe.” A bell like laugh rings out, clear and true.
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O/o\O
My ears fill with mocking applause when I finally swing a leather-clad leg over the lip of the evaporated creek.
“Someone deserves an award for climbing out of a creek bed wearing knee high stiletto boots. The others were shit at it. You’re not as helpless as you look, are you?”
I snort. My hands and knees are caked with red earth and a thin film of sweat makes my skin shine. I look up from my kneeling position in the grass to find the voice.
A slim figure hangs upside down from a thick tree branch, a crimson curtain of hair spilling out like blood from the back of an ivory mask. A powder blue top rides high on her chest, revealing an expanse of tan skin. A sickly green gem sparkles at her navel.
She’s humming along, seemingly oblivious to my approach as she thumbs through a leather bound book.
“Eff’in amazing what our mind records, huh?” The masked figure swings back and forth from the branch, never looking up from the book.
I struggle forward; the spiked heels make my knees wobble and shudder.
“Twisted thoughts and nasty fantasies,” the voice continues. “Every dark little deed. They’re all there if you know where to dig.” She stops on a torn page and runs a finger down stained yellow paper. “And you have a giant treasure trove of dirty perversions. Does Grayson know?”
I see red. The monster in me rages. If I’m the Red Queen, that’d make her…
“No, I’m not the Mad Hatter in this story,” she giggles. “You aren’t following along very well.” An exaggerated sigh, “It’s kind of annoying.”
“Fuck you, you …”
“I’m not a crazy bitch either,” she finishes for me. Her masked head shakes, hair whipping like flames. Her right hand leaves the book; she extends her middle finger. “Nuh-uh. Nope. No way. You are.”
O/o\O
When I’d zone out in my studio, lost in the haze of strong pastels and white canvas, I’d sometimes sneak a joint. Just one. Almost like a ritual. For the first few weeks, it was a habit I hid from Grayson - until he found me one day out on the porch, home early from the office. I remember stumbling over some excuse as he plucked it from my fingers, took a drag, and pressed a weed flavored kiss to my lips. After that night, we’d sometimes work out way through a bowl, get high as a kite, and slow fuck our way through his collection of Bob Marley vinyls, until we passed out.
But most of the time, it was just that one joint in the heat of creativity, my mind wandering off. During those times, I’d drift off into Wonderland. I’d think what a time Alice had. The things she got to see. I used to want to disappear like she did. Now I’m wishing I never had dreams like that. This isn’t Alice’s Wonderland. This one is blackened. Scarred. Ugly.
“Just what is it you want?” I whisper.
“To give you perspective, my queen,” the girl taunts.
“My name is Taryn.” I spit it out, trying to sound confident, unafraid. But the words come out brittle and weak.
“No. It isn’t.”
She snaps the book shut and it disappears. Then she starts swinging gently back and forth, slowly at first, and then quickly, violently, until she’s vaulting from the bough, twirling and spinning in a cloud of crimson, before landing neatly on her feet.
She mock bows and skips close, white skirt fluttering up, revealing freckled thighs and stripped panties.
“Do you like it?” She’s pressed in tight now, running cold hands up and down my arms.
Her ivory mask leaves me shivering more than her icy hands. One side twists into an exaggerated expression of joy, the other, sadness.
“I do. It’s such a fun dichotomy. Melpomene and Thalia. Tragedy and comedy. When you mash them together, that’s when you get a real story. You can’t help but root for the bumbling underdog, even when you know they’ll wind up dead. Like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Hopelessly fascinating idiots. Kinda like us, huh?”
I don’t know what to say. Her twisted intelligence betrays her youthful voice and slight figure.
I settle for the biggest question I’ve had since I pulled Grayson’s Chevy up to the house.
“Why?”
She taps a finger to her head and a girlish peel of laughter echoes from under the mask.
“Finally! They thought you’d never ask. They don’t have much respect for you, you know.”
“Who?”
She waves her hand, ignoring the question. She jumps back and waves her warms out wide.
“Why? Why? Why? Why?” she singsongs. “Because.” The ivory masks consorts, melts into an expression of monstrous hate, before snapping back to its original state. “Because, Taryn, this was the only way. They wanted to scare you. Show you all the nasty little things you’ve done and don’t remember doing. I told them it wouldn’t work. That you’d just try to forget again.”
My mouth goes to cotton and I scream at the demon inside me, hoping maybe it will have answers to what’s happening to me. But it doesn’t answer. All there is… is heat.
“They’re so simple minded. It’s vexing. Though you can’t expect much from identities molded to be drug-addicted sluts with high sex drives. Sharing the same space with them is nauseous. I’m sure you agree.” Grey eyes twinkle from behind the mask.
I try to get a word in… but there’s really no point. I don’t even know where to begin. All I can do is listen, no matter how fucked up this is all is.
She pulls in close. Her arctic mint breath whistles from the mask in a heavy rush.
“Go on, ask me.” She taps her head again. “I know you better than you know yourself. The question is burning you up.” She reaches out and cups my cheek with an icy palm. “Literally, I believe.”
I swallow thickly. “Who are you?”
She twirls.
“The prize in a game of chess. Imagine that. Every girl’s dream when she grows up. A bargaining chip for selfish jerks.”
The blurred image of teenager hits me between the eyes. I flinch backward.
“You’re trying not to remember, aren’t you?”
A finger pushes my chin up.
“That’s just what he wants. You know that, right?”
“Him?”
She nods. “I know you’ve seen him. The bastard in the bowler hat. You’re his pasty white princess. The blank late of this twisted… family. You’re his favorite. Did you know that? Artsy and innocent and demur. The best mask for jobs like sweet little Grayson.”
I slap her hand away. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” I lie.
Her body freezes up. “Yes, yes you fucking do,” she spits.
“What do you want?” I cry out helplessly. “Just tell me what you want.”
She skips off and starts pacing erratically. “Revenge.”
“That’s all?” I whisper.
I throw my arms out wide to the scarred wonderland. “You made all this, dragged me through hell… for that?” Abby’s words about facing the devil and ‘taking a shine to him’ hit me hard. The absurdity of all of this finally drowns me and a wretched laugh bubbles up from my throat. It’s the manic sort, the villainous sort. I laugh till tears pool in my eyes.
Her high, bell-like laugh joins in, creating a fucked up harmony of insanity.
“No, it’s not very original, is it? But a girl has to do what a girl has to do.”
I can feel her smile, even if I can’t see it.
“Yes, of course there’s a catch,” she purrs, reading my mind. “You finally get your turn in the cage.”
I’m running before she even finishes, pushing through dense vegetation and oversized flowers that nip at my heels. Everything blurs by in neon waves.
The thing about nightmares though, especially the ones given frightening life, is that there’s nowhere to run to.
My stiletto boots catch on a jutting root and I tackle the ground.
I try fighting when cold hands pull me onto my back. I’m just a painter though. She easily pins my arms to my side.
“Silly, bird.” She clucks her tongue as she straddles me. “I’m not cruel you know. Not like him.” Her gray eyes storm.
I know now whom she means. I wish I didn’t.
“Fuck you,” I spit.
She grins wide, teeth impossibly white. “Let’s play a game you and I.” Her hand glides down the corset and under my tattered skirt. “When you beg me for it,” cold fingers trace up and down my slit, “you lose.”
“You’re fucking twisted, you crazy bitch,” I snarl.
She taps my nose.
“We’re all twisted here, Taryn.” My tattoo burns to life. “Especially the ones that can’t admit it.”
Her fingers keep tracing and I bite down a moan. Not that it matters. I’m sure she can feel the thin fabric starting to dampen already.
“There won’t even be losers,” she whispers in my ear. “So much better than a silly game of chess.”
I think of struggling again, but the monster inside me is waking up, responding to the girl’s feather cold touch. My blood boils. Alternatives don’t exist in nightmares. I have to play. And the fucked up thing is… part of me wants to play.
“Of course you do,” she teases, thumbing my clit.
I gasp. “And if I win?”
“I’ll let you forget. That’s what you want, isn’t it? Back to the fake, idyllic life I should have had. Back to being his perfect little puppet, dancing on his tainted strings.”
‘Jump right down into hell and see if you take a shine to Satan hisself.’
“Or we could just sin together,” the girl says.
I shiver and look up close at her for the first time. Her powder blue shirt has a rabbit with a machete and a line of text.
-Don’t Fuck with Bunnies-
I want to know what’s under that mask. But I think I already do.
She snaps her fingers and the light winks out.
VI.
All around me, oversized mushrooms shimmer electric blue, the tops contracting and expanding out like giant jellyfish pulsing through the ocean.
The demon inside me rattles its leash, pleading to be cut free. I slap it away. Something far more powerful has my attention.
A cacophony of voices echoes in hypnotic melodies. The sound is velvety smooth and frayed at the edges, like melted dark chocolate and cheap vodka. Their music washes over me like a warm desert with a side of ice cream. It’s not so much a song as it is a symphony: dark, alien, slithering, and tantalizingly erotic.
My knees part and my hips rise off the ground. A cool hand palms my superheated mound and presses me back into the earth. There’s already a keening cry on my tongue.
Her ivory mask is wet ice against my ear. “Shhh, I love this part,” she whispers.
It only takes a second that lasts an eon to know why.
Dark fractals of rainbow mist twist and bend down from a crumbling sky.
Doorways, I think.
No. Wormholes. They’re wormholes connecting to a higher plane of existence.
Heaven.
No.
Not heaven… and not really hell either.
This is something entirely different. A world of sweet, delicious sins that’d make even the devil himself burn to ash.
O/o\O
They appear like phantoms from the mist, spectral shades of semi-translucent skin, raven locks of hair cascading down sculpted shoulders. I can see the blood rushing through their veins, the sparks of electricity that flare to life as nerve endings communicate. It’s captivating and frightening and disturbingly arousing.
They are…
Adonis breathed to life, blown from shimmering crystal glass into a dozen beautiful copies. A hundred. A thousand. I don’t know. I don’t care. They glide through the void with unnerving, inhuman grace, tumescent cocks bouncing between muscular thighs.
This can’t be real.
“Of course it is,” that youthful voice teases. Her fingers trace my lips. “What did Guildenstern hypothesize, darling?”
Another set of fingers pinches my clit and I shudder.
“I don’t know,” I whimper.
“Of course you do,” she husks. “The more witnesses there are to your true, filthy nature, the more real this all becomes.” Her cold fingers hook inside me. “Or something like that.”
My skin burns. My cunt drools. My toes curl. The heat inside me radiates out, becomes a feverish itch. Then her fingers are gone.
The demon in me howls in angry need.
Icy mint breath caresses my ears.
“Why don’t you let it out,” she singsongs. “You’ll feel so much better.”
I’m afraid. I’m beginning to realize what the monster inside me is as it pulls at its leash like a rabid dog, jaws snapping, mouth foaming, barking profane lusts.
“Afraid of what?” she giggles, reading my mind again. “Losing yourself?” “Darling, you’re already lost.”
I hate you.
She cups my cheek, presses her thumb against my lips. “I know.” She pinches an erect nipple, squeezing until I yelp in pain. “And I hate you. That’s why this will be so…” a throaty purr,” fucking…” another pinch,” amazing.”
She pulls away, leaving my body tingling, my legs splayed open like a worn down whore offering free rides.
The symphony of alien voices grows in richness as they creep closer, their movements terpsichorean.
I try to look away, count the heartbeats that aren’t there.
Twelve beats.
The symphony grows louder.
Thirty-nine beats.
I see symbols etched into their bodies like brands.
Seventy-eight.
Clubs. Hearts.
Eighty-three.
Spades. Diamonds.
Ninety-nine.
Their pale blue eyes piece me and the lies shatter like glass. I mewl like a needy kitten, hips arching up.
One hundred.
Silk cloth drops over my eyes and the phantoms wink out.
“Liars don’t need to see,” she whispers.
Something damp and musky is pushed into my mouth.
“Liars don’t need to speak.”
My moans of protest are muffled and halfhearted.
“Liars don’t need to hear.”
Something fills my ears and all sounds are snuffed out like a flame reaching the end of a match.
The corset, unlaced by the masked girl, is ripped violently from my body, the stiff ribbing scratching the sides of my breasts.
Icy hands do battle with the scorching heat of my skin, teasing and arousing, drawing strange symbols I can’t decipher. The monster inside knows them though. The leash stretches and my body vibrates.
I try shrinking back into the grass and the dirt below, imagining a giant palm reaching up from hell and just ending it all with a fiery embrace. But something is locked firmly about my ankles and wrists.
The bonds of control start slipping.
You never had control.
O/o\O
Wet mouths latch onto the upturned swell of my breasts. Teeth pull on my aching nipples, rolling the sensitive buds as they harden to stone.
Cold lips and talented tongues trace highways of arctic pleasure that melt between my legs and steam in the hollow of my neck. I have to bite down on the scrap of silk in my mouth to keep from screaming, to keep from losing this fucked up game before it even begins.
My muscles tense when my knees are pressed together and pushed roughly into my chest. A long tongue slithers into my cunt, lapping away with hungry need. The movements are rough, uncoordinated… desperate. This particular oral assault isn’t about me. It’s about him. It. They.
I’m just a toy. A tool. My flooding slit is the oasis in the desert, ambrosia for the hopeless creature dying of thirst.
I scream out, but everything is silent. Hot drool pools into my makeshift gag, leaks from the corners of my mouth, only to be licked away.
The mouths multiple and they lap greedily at my skin, desperate for every last bit of moisture bleeding from my pores.
It’s not enough.
Never enough.
The mouths all pull away at once and I whimper pathetically through the gag. I feel abandoned. Cut off. Just drifting in the void of nothingness.
I’m pulled back when a hulking frame mounts my smaller body, hooking my legs over broad shoulders. Lush lips capture my own in a bruising kiss. I pull at the restraints, desperate to mold myself into the muscled phantom.
They hold fast.
The blindfold loosens and pale blue light trickles in. I don’t think it’s by accident.
She wants me to torment me.
Hips shift. My existence quakes.
The cold spongy head of a pulsating cock is buried deep inside my slick pussy. It’s like a blade of ice being pushed into my guts. I spasm around it like a vice, clinging tightly as it pulls out with painstaking slowness, inch by incredible fucking inch, until only the tip remains.
An unbearable pause begins.
Through the breaks in the blindfold, I stare into frozen blue gems that stare right back, bottomless pools of fractured ice that torment the leashed monster inside me.
And beyond those frozen gems, the phantom’s translucent skin is a glass mirror I see myself reflecting back from.
My eyes are wild, animalistic coals of demented lust. My hair, tasseled and wet, is plastered to a face that’s ghost white and gaunt. And the smile Grayson always said he loved is twisted into a snarl, my pale lips stained a blue so deep it shimmers back and forth from navy to violet.
I try turning away, boiling and freezing with unwanted emotions of disgust and enchantment. But strong fingers capture my jaw and hold me in place.
“No.” The voice above me is a black pit of greed. “No. No.”
The demon in me howls. The leash stretches. I can sense the chains weakening.
“Want.” The word is a distorted chant that echoes into the infinite.
“Want.” More voices pick up the chant and the symphony returns with decadent splendor, slithering over me like slippery tendrils. I can hear gongs smashing, violins screeching, trumpets wailing, the beautiful notes all plunging into hateful sin.
“Want!”
Mad giggles ring out. Soft hands stroke my ears and tear away the blindfold. The crimson haired viper returns, slate eyes blazing through the dueling visage of her ivory mask.
“It’s time to join the filth,” she purrs. “If you won’t let it out, I will.”
She crawls forward on her knees, straddling my head. I look up and see a small teardrop of fur between her legs that flickers like blue flame.
“Excuse me,” she laughs, dragging her cold crotch over my forehead, piercing herself on my sharp nose with an exaggerated moan, before settling smoothly over my mouth. A syrupy glaze leaks out of her flared lips as she gyrates slowly over my sealed lips.
I yelp when she reaches back and gives my wet hair a rough tug.
“Don’t waste it,” she hisses. “I’ve been saving myself… just for you.”
My mouth opens, grudgingly at first, then desperately, my tongue folding inside her creaming slit. Her musky sweetness is strawberry ice cream and chocolate lava cake. It’s liquid arousal that exists only in dreams.
“This is my wonderland,” she cackles above me. “My twisted, scarred wonderland. And everything is exactly how I want it to be. I never said you’d have a fighting chance.”
Fingers trace over the crisscrossing scar between my breasts. The air bends and vibrates. She starts to sing, mixing textured notes with the phantoms’ cresting symphony.
Time warps. The fevered itch becomes delirium. Delirium becomes a higher state of being. The chains in my mind sizzle and smoke, the leash melting to black tar.
“HEAT!” The word is a roar of elation as the cold, forgotten mushroom head skewers me, barreling forward until it bumps unceremoniously against my womb.
Insanity smothers me in an embrace that is frighteningly delicious.
My body shudders in unholy pleasure.
Burn. Burn. Burn. Burn. Fucking burn, you selfish whore.
The movements are violently meteoritic, heavy balls slapping against my pale ass like comets peppering the moon.
Smack.
Smack.
Smack.
The crimson haired devil’s hips spin like a broken carousel. Fast. Out of control.
“Drink me,” she screams. “Eat me!”
I wish I could say I put up a fight. I wish I could say I didn’t give her what she wanted. That I just closed my mouth and let her gyrate in angry frustration.
But sanity slunk off a long time ago. Was never there. I wasn’t even me anymore. I never was.
I let go.
And the demon launches off the melted chain, tackles me… consumes me in a raging inferno.
I go supernova…
O/o\O
And I plunder that ice cream cunt like it’s only meal I’ll ever get in this fucked up wonderland of sweet hellish sin.
How she screams and wails as she fucks my mouth with wild abandon. It carves a twisted Chesire grin along my lips as her pussy gushes sweet nectar. I roll her clit between my teeth and she takes hold of my small breasts, twisting the nipples with cracked nails.
I revel in the sharp pain unlike the others. I can feel a warm gush of fluid drench the meaty cock rutting away inside me. It’s uncut perfection.
I lock my ankles around the phantom’s bulging neck and the pace and strength quickens. Thick fingers dig painfully into my hips. He shifts his head and bites at my calf.
Then something interesting happens. Color starts to bloom in the phantom’s translucent skin, cream-colored waves congealing and spreading out just below the surface. I can feel his body warming, siphoning away heat like a vampire. Except, the heat is transforming the phantom, not me.
Violent thrusts plateau and explode into a higher plane of brutality and the symphonic song that had been spilling from the phantom’s lips frays and snaps like a high tension wire. I jam a thumb inside the tight ass of the crimson haired devil and she quakes, that delicious snatch creaming all over my face.
The phantom lasts a few beats longer before hot semen splashes inside my belly, filling me up until it oozes out around his shaft like a melting ice cream cone.
And wonderland blurs.
The phantom pulls out and blasts a few more rounds of spunk like a water hose, pearlescent streams of fluid splattering my chest. The redhead falls to the side and I get a good look at the now bronzed Adonis before his skin spider-webs and shatters into a cloud of psychedelic dust.
Before I can process what happened, another phantom mounts me, rutting wildly away. More heat is siphoned off. My veins glow like rivers of pulsing magma. Each burst of scalding semen leads to another explosion of colorful dust.
Wonderland becomes one giant, fluctuating afterimage running on psychedelic, hedonistic repeat. I can only process bits and pieces.
I’m flipped over. Pressed into the ground. Hard smacks rain down on my ass like a meteor shower until the pain is too intense, too pleasurable, even for me. I become a limp fucking toy in tight embraces that transform from arctic winter to blistering summer.
Pump. Pump. Cum.
Explode into dust.
Pump. Pump. Cum.
Explode into dust.
It’s a never-ending dance that leaves my cunt deliciously raw and my head fuzzy.
VII.
There’s a sticky squelch filling my ears when I come to in an exhausted, languid haze.
My eyes flutter open to the image of her ridiculous mask.
Melpomene and Thalia.
Tragedy. Comedy.
The splicing of two discordant concepts we can’t help but love. It’s Inhumanly human.
She hums a haunted tune, small hands massaging my muscles, working a thin film of cooled semen into my skin. She traces a sticky slick finger over my pursed lips.
Do you understand now?
The demon inside me whimpers in the corner, strung out and worthless.
I reach up, thumbs running over the smooth ivory. I pull it away and crimson hair cascades out obscuring her face. I brush a damp tangle away.
I do. I wish I didn’t.
She leans down, whispers in my ear. “It’s time to end this, darling,”
I can’t breathe.
“Get on your knees.”
My body moves of its own accord, following the barked command.
She eases behind me. Something hard and rigid slaps against my ass and slides along the cleft of my ass to my over stimulated pussy. I recoil in frightened shock.
“What did I say?” she giggles. “In this scarred wonderland, I make the rules. Including… “ She drags the throbbing shaft along my slit, “modifications.”
“You’re fucking mad.”
She spanks my ass with childish glee. “Didn’t we already go over that?”
I turn around and glare.
“Oh, I love that expression.”
“Fuck off!” A ragged banshee screech leaves me hoarse.
“With pleasure.”
She slips inside with frictionless ease, my gaping wet hole well lubricated by copious amounts of semen.
“This gives whole new meaning to fucking yourself, doesn’t it?” she cackles.
Her sick joke turns my pussy to a sopping mess and I feel like a twisted bitch from hell in depraved heat.
She bends over me, licking the sweat from my back, tracing the tattoo between my shoulder blades. “Say it,” she whispers,
“No.”
“Say it!”
“Go fuck yourself, bitch!”
She pauses in her thrusts. Another set of mad giggles has her hard stomach vibrating against my ass.
“Darling. That’s. Exactly. What. I’m. Doing!”
There’s a wet plop as she pulls from my steaming core. The blunt head slides up, presses against my tight, virgin star.
“No,” I cry out. “I haven’t.”
“Haven’t what? Taken a nice fat cock up this slutty little hole? Of course we have! In every filthy way. We’ve even had wine poured down it like a good little whore. I bet you’d like that, wouldn’t you?”
Sharp nails drag down my back, arc over the swell of my ass cheeks.
“Wouldn’t you?” she repeats.
She doesn’t possess the patience to wait for an answer. Not now. Not when she’s so close to winning.
She lunges forward without preamble, the fat sticky head parting my tight muscular ring, pushing in to the root until her groin molds to my ass.
For the last time, I shatter into a million scarred puzzle pieces. A million scarred memories. They take their turn in the spin cycle of chaos before racing back in picture perfect clarity. Every single damaged identity is fused together, one-by-one-by-one.
Dark lusts I’ve long denied fall from my lips, our lips, like acid, corrosive to any last remnant of inhibition, any last remnant of denial about what I am, who I am.
“What our name?” the crimson haired girl screams. It’s a cry of desperate longing and pained need.
All of a sudden I’m on my back, gazing into storming grey eyes. Blackberry lips capture mine in a searing kiss of self-recognition.
I shake my head and whimper pathetically. Hands circle my throat and squeeze.
“What’s our name?” she screams again.
My eyes glaze over from the lack of oxygen I still seem to need. She doesn’t notice.
I’m grinning wide, matching the ugliness insider her. I finally know a secret she doesn’t. And it burns her up. I know it from the way she thrusts with erratic jabs, skewering my dark cavern over and over again as musky juice flows from my flared cunt like the river Styx, shuttling the name she wants further and further into the abyss.
The last note of a song hits and I realize I know it. She used to play it on a Steinway.
“What’s our name?” she screams one final time before flooding my guts with volcanic fire.
I see white and everything starts to fade. Steel bars are already dropping. She tries to stop them, to delay the switch. But it’s an eternity too late.
VIII.
It’s a jaw-clenching peal of thunder that finally jolts me awake.
And the first thing I feel is a familiar twitch sparking in my feet, an instinctual need I haven’t felt in a very long time. To feel hard pavement burning away beneath them, mile by mile, until I’m doubled over, panting with the kind of pain that makes you feel alive.
The second thing is the plush stool my ass is planted in, my knees drawn in tight to my breasts. The comforting sound of a strong, if erratic heartbeat thumps in my ears. I can’t stop shivering even though it feels like someone threw me in a sauna and nailed the door shut. A sickeningly familiar jazz number trickles through the dark room. It brings back awful memories.
A throaty voice laughs bitterly inside my head.
“Your turn,” she rumbles.
I shrug her off though. I’m stronger than that ivory skinned bitch.
Thunder roars again, like a wounded animal, and a jagged bolt of lighting opens up the sky like a sheared off scab, bathing the world above me with veins of electric blue blood. The angry blue pulls in the silver gleam of the moon and the mixture arcs through the skylight.
A pale arm stretches out in front of me. Pale. Not tanned and freckled. I reel back in shock. Heat burns. I’m not on fire. I am fire. The demon came through the door with me.
I laugh, a high-pitched wail that echoes. Of course, I think, of course. I’d hoped but… it doesn’t matter. Nothing ever really matters when you finally break free.
Another vein of lightning fills her studio with harsh blue light. My laughs turn to mad choking giggles.
Paint drips like black blood from the brush clenched tightly in my left hand. Giant murals fill every scrap of space in the studio. Wild colors. Neon colors. Garish colors.
A Stetson wearing girl in cutoffs works her way through an amber bottle.
A turquoise ocean dotted with sailboats.
An old red pickup, shining like new in the sunlight.
An ivory mask.
Playing cards.
Bat-orchids.
And a mural of painted bullet holes spanning out a length of text:
-Welcome Home-
The paint is congealed and wet and the images seem to pull from the walls like slippery specters.
Something catches my eye. I uncurl from the stool with a whimper and drop down to hard wood floors. I stand there. Frozen. Warm fluid leaks down my naked inner thighs and there’s a raw ache between my legs, a desperate need that hasn’t really been filled yet.
It’s a need that rages as I look down at the overturned easel, a black switchblade, and the painting beyond.
A jagged line in the canvas opens up like a gaping maw ready to swallow me where I stand. But I can still make out the main image, painted with frightening precision. The face of a man in a bowler hat… finally pulled from the shadows.
‘I see now’, she whispers, almost apologetic. “Look.”
Another face hides in the corner, colors smudged by tears. It’s a face I know all too well, one I thought I’d never grow tired of.
The ache between my legs pulses and I run a hand down a paint stained chiffon, exploring the unfamiliar smoothness of my vulva. I plunge a finger into the hot filthy mess of my cunt, swirling it around before drawing it out and popping the cum slick digit into my mouth.
The thing is though… love can easily turn to hate.
Despite everything, I can’t stop the Cheshire grin pulling open unfamiliar lips.
A final blast of lightning lights up the room and her tattoo, our tattoo, burns like a branded arctic scar.
