Monster

A short fiction, loosely based in non fiction.

I shrug, irritated, trying to shake loose this feeling of being monitored. The sky was too bright, the air too tight, my skin felt at odds with my body. I don’t know how best to describe this feeling of a lit fuse simmering beneath flesh pulled too tight on bones, at any moment this could all come crashing down.

I didn’t want to smile for the camera, for the eyes on us. The last thing I wanted to do was participate in this falsity knowing what I knew. I could feel his breath on my neck, maybe he was blissfully unaware of the seething hatred I had for him, maybe he knew when he looked at me and saw the dead, blackened eyes of someone who prayed for his ending every time he looked away from me. Maybe he knew at night I stood under the running water with my eyes open, letting the water burn at my precious vessels, hoping the caustic burn would fend off the pot boiling over another night.

I shifted in my seat while his fingertips crept across my thigh, every touch sizzling with the electricity of a live severed cable. I didn’t want this. I didn’t want him. He over-poured himself a glass of whiskey and offered me the same, I smiled hollow and told him I was moderating myself. I had no desire for sobriety, this was a desperate bid for alcohol stained lips not to spew forth every moment of hatred and vitriol. It grew inside me like an abscess, borne of an innocuous splinter of the first time his mask slipped. Every day the ache festered, tissue died and swirled into the murk. His smug face when his game of “no thats what I meant to say” stopped being funny, another wound draining into the rot. “I didn’t know she was so young” became a clot that strangled the blood flow to extremities that hardened into obsidian eschar. “Isn’t this what you wanted” became so necrotic and gangrenous, I could scarcely tell where I stopped and the decay began.

He thought he was safe, he thought his secrets were safe. I know he thought I was pathetic, I had no teeth, I had no spine. I was broken down to my smallest pieces, he carefully and systematically took the thorns off of every one of my branches, I lost my wilderness to his surgical precision. His love was a funerary pyre I threw myself upon, when I kissed him my mouth filled with dirt. There was nothing pure, nothing salvageable about what we had, except maybe the inextinguishable flicker inside me would find its flesh and blood and become what it needed to be.

I would feel his hand slink down the small of my back, a performance to feed the eyes that stared. There was a dance between us, we did what we had to to buy time before they could smell the death that was yawning wider between us. There was no respite for a woman who craved violence, and no safety for the man whose head it would rain down upon. We would dance what we had rehearsed, feverish in the knowledge that this would end badly, this would end in the bloodshed watchful faces craved. We washed our hands in the same sink, there was no room in the mirror for two faces.

Bones groaned and splintered into dust in the nights I lay there, unable to sleep with my rage and the sound of air fighting his body. It was like the whole world was at odds of his existence - something so foul, so bankrupt of any morality, time warped around him. In the dark I fantasised of towering over him, my rib cage opening and spreading like the maw of a beast, spreading wider and wider until my flesh carpets the floors and ceilings of the room and his shame begins to collapse him into himself like a dying star. I wanted to feel my eyelids tear from my skin, the thousands of eyes that should bear witness to his private atrocities bubbled out, spilling down my cheeks in a foam of foul surveillance. I wanted my teeth to fall and rain down on him, the empty sockets birthing forth fingers to direct the condemnation that was written for him. His fear paralysed him, my rage catalysed me. I wanted to feel my jaw loosen and fall away from me, like soft rotting fruit, hitting the ground with a sick wet thud, and from the cavity formed, I wanted to scream and wail sounds so dark, so forbidden that all ears were deaf but his. I wanted to become the thing he feared the most.

Daylight would leak in, he would wake well rested and I would begin the act again. Quietly sewing frayed edges of flesh together, mopping up the bloodshed. All I wanted was to be the monster he deserved.

I write often about the other of being chronically ill, my ten years in the adult industry, the eldest daughter though experiment and attempts at scraps of poetry and fiction. It would be lovely to have you here <3

~Z