Perfection

He was perfect. He was just like I'd remembered him, down to the very touch.

Of course, his eyes had grown sunken – he was very tired; it was only natural. Those eyes used to burn green like the sun scorching a tall plain. It was natural and vivid and bright. The color was still there, but just a little diminished. Only a little, though. He was still wonderful.

His hair, once golden blonde, had taken a paler, thinner shade. I remember the scent of that hair, the feeling of my fingers running through it when he kissed me. Soft hair and soft lifts made me float while the hardness of his form, of his strength brought me down to earth again again. When he held my hips, I held his hair, and we were balanced. Paired. We were two men and one energy. We were whole. I could almost feel it again with just a look.

Those lips were a little dry, cracked in a place or two, but the injections were holding nicely and his teeth were still so perfect white. He'd seen a dentist, David. David was always smiling, too, but not the way my lover smiled. David smiled like a liar, like a thief. Like a monster in his closet. David stole from me, from us...but he did such lovely work, we'd both have to admit.

His shoulders, his arms, his chest were almost flawless. The little punctures had been carefully, so carefully sewn, with such loving attention to dismiss the carelessness of a moment's passion. David couldn't have done that – David wasn't a doctor, he was a fucking dentist. He didn't have hands like mine, or a heart like mine. He didn't love him or trust himself like we had. So why- ...it didn't matter. David wasn't holding him tonight. I was. We were together again. Perfect. Flawless.

Just like I'd remembered him...only this time, he promised to be better than he'd ever been.

A slight flutter in his heart resounded in mine. Or was it just my heart beating twice as fast?

Does it matter?

Cracked-Up Reflection

(More song lyrics. Imagine a fast 1-and-2 pace, sort of piano mad, banging on the keys with breathless pauses. Might sing it sometime if bribed well enough.)

Don't look at me with your problems,

Don't look at me when it all comes due, now

Don't come to me with your sad eyes.

Don't come to me with the tantrum's through, I've

Seen you without all your makeup.

I've seen you outside of lace and leather, and

Frankly, I liked you more bound up.

Liked you more with a social gag, I've

Found my-self

Lose-ing pat-ience

With..your...shit.

Found my-self

Deaf to...your...cries.

And I've

Found my-self

Los-ing air

In my lungs when

You o...pen your mouth.

All my joy falls out. Why?

There's this new pain inside my ear,

And I think it might be your tongue,

Are those barbs new or have you hidden

Them behind that lovely stud?

That I admit blew my mind right...I

Thought that silver burned the devil.

Lesson learned, and I learned right.

You learned me wrong, but now I'm teaching.

Found my-self

Los-ing pat-ience

With...your...lies

Found my-self

Bleed-ing...right

Through my ears, and...

Found my-self

Cry-ing one too...

Man-y times.

You open your mouth

All the truth falls out. Why?

I said...why?

I guess I knew better.

Guess I signed up for

Every-thing that you lied to me, but...

I guess that I could do much better

Could get all this sweat

Off of my brow...

Get...you...off...my...brow....

Found my-self

Los-ing time...with

Your bull-shit.

Found my-self

Hap-pil-y

...Walk-ing a-way

Found my-self

Breath-ing air

For the first time...

For the first time since you...

Opened...your mouth...(Since you)

Opened...your mouth...(I said, since you)

Opened...your mouth...(Oh, God...)

Just shut...your fucking...mouth.

The Escape

It was over.

The running, the terror. He'd never run so fast than when those memories were at his heels. His father's eyes. His father's hands. His father's reach. He'd been held so fast and so safe for so long that he'd wondered if his legs would fly if he were given the chance.

The third row of fresh scars upon his back taught him the truth, and gave him all the speed he needed.

He'd walked streets and slept in gutters. He'd found the life in parks to be different from the life on roadsides. He found the deeper forests and the silent songs of deep ravines. He walked with his back laid bare among the muck, the trash, the rain, and the burning sun. He walked until he hungered, till he starved, till he thirsted. His only direction – away. Away from the cultured wilderness of home, from the pavement that chased him with police cars and posters.

Away.

When he collapsed, he collapsed into a running creek. The smooth rocks cut his belly, his chest, his face. The water flowed around and through him, licking at his wounds, stealing away his breath. In his mind, he was rushing down that river.

He followed its course through old, rusty pipes, held in place by cement, a testament against the endless floodwaters that would rise again like the sun, long past when men could hold them. He flowed on past the barriers, down a rushing dam like a diver. He crashed into a thousand pieces and his shards joined the great Mississippi, slow and wild and thick. He was drunk on the history of it, man and path, and the path grew older still than man's touch. He did a little dance as he waved by New Orleans. (The floodwaters howled and sang, for they were ready for another drink.) He fell into the ocean.

He found a merlin there, wild and strong. It tore a fisher from his boat, tore the hook from its bloody lip, and his own bloody kiss found a comfortable brother. They swam hard and deep, hunting and eating and living and fighting. He was alive, with a fire in his spine and a weapon down the line of his eyes. He was whole.

He woke up in that empty little creek and his blood tasted strong with mercury. He stood up, unhungry. Unstarving. Unthirsting.

He starting walking. South.

Blood From the Heart

The shot rang true. She died like all the rest, a sudden slump and a pool of blood.

There was no romantic meeting of the eyes, no slowing of time. People described time slowing down all the time in the stories, but it never slowed for me, never stopped either. It just marched on at its usual pace. Every hour felt like an hour, every eternity like an eternity. Watching her die felt like four painful seconds, and the pain wasn't even mine.

Her hair had changed – she'd had it shaved, scarred her face. No one knows when the raping and the murder started, or who started it, but the very worst of either side had turned to it like sport, roving packs of animals with guns and machetes and rocks, torturing and using 'the enemy'. The enemy...we'd all drank wine together a few short months ago. Then the talk of gods came about, or was it wealth? Tribes? It hurt me to remember, to even think of it. Time went on for me, and it left the reasons behind.

Her eyes were still that burning brown I remembered – I didn't have the time to close them, and every moment I looked into them was a moment I wasn't looking for life. The image stuck with me, though. I saw her eyes in everyone. Brown over blue. Brown over green. Brown over black. I killed her three more times before I hit cover to reload, and the pain I felt was just the same – a recoil shudder and a locked door. I wouldn't feel this now, couldn't feel this now.

I remembered the hell I went through to even learn her name. She'd been kept under lock and key by that father of hers, a lion of a man with old attitudes and older prejudices. I'd yelled at him every day, worked at his shop, did everything I could to earn his trust. He denied me every time, until I stood beside him when my cousins set that shop aflame. I thought I'd gone through hell to see her.

I thought I'd gone to war.

She was dead now, and I didn't miss her. I missed myself far, far more.

Time never stops, nor waits, nor slows. It simply flows, like blood from the heart.

Unprompted: Retreat

It started out simply enough – a sensation of pressure within the ears. I thought nothing of it. I'd been swimming, living, singing, and far, far worse at the spa retreat. It was only natural that God would throw an ear infection my way as a sort of biological penance. I felt like I deserved it, that I'd earned it. It was a minor discomfort to balance out the best of bliss in the best of places.

At the time, I thought it only fair.

The sensation was a minor annoyance for several days. A slight pain here and there, a sensation like flowing water at times...it wasn't anything I hadn't felt before. At the worst, it sometimes felt like a fly were wiggling about inside my head – disturbing to say the least, but no sort of agony. I ignored it with drink and painkillers, and set about my daily fun. A mistake, perhaps, but how could I have known?

The first headache struck me on the fourth day, a sudden jackhammer strike into my temple that left me gasping on the ballroom floor. I laughed it off, once I could breathe again, but the damage was done. They'd left me room for air – no one came closer. They could smell the illness in the air now, and they were all afraid.

The headaches spiked and worsened, slowly at first, but growing closer and sooner with each passing hour. The sensation is liked to the contractions of a pregnancy, or a slowly awakening heartbeat. I am not so poetic; to me, it felt like a methodical villain were piercing my ears with an ice pick according to some devious calendar of his own design. It was just off enough from clockwork to leave me constantly wondering, constantly worrying. The pain only worsened with the surprise.

By the seventh day, I could no longer speak. I was mad with pain, drowning in it, gasping it in with every breath. I had to be restrained, and I was not alone. Complaints of ear infections were on the rise, and the part of me that couldn't scream was made to laugh for hours on into the night. They attempted to sedate me – it failed utterly. How can you offer chemical peace to a body so wrapped in the heartbeat horror of this agony? It only made me laugh harder, of my own free will.

That was the next to go. By the ninth day, my teeth had distended and then fell out completely, replaced with blackened, hungry needles. They moved and writhed and cut my gums apart like they were paper. The blood in my mouth was more satisfying than a drug, laced with the dulling poison coursing through my sweating skull. It was my first taste of relief...and a promise besides.

By the tenth day, the needles had progressed down my throat, thick enough to tear my neck restraint apart. It cost my the flesh on my wrists, but I was free. I was so hungry I hardly heard the scream of the nurse, or of the orderly. The sounds soon turned to pleasant moans in any case, murmured complaints of angels crawling into their ears, cracking their skulls. I hear the whispers of the others now, vibrations in my now-invaded skull.

I felt so much better now. When I'd signed up for this retreat, I'd felt alone.

No longer.

Unprompted: Skids

The first thing I remember is the smell. This vivid, acrid smell rising through the burning air. It had weight - substance. The smoke was part of it, burning my eyes and filling my lungs and nose with this roasted sensation. After that came the rubber...the heat of the metal.

The blood.

A long streak drug from my feet, all the way down the block to the end of the line. Police raced and dashed across it. A fire truck was parked alongside it, flashing lights and gleaming in the street lamps. It seemed too clean for the street. Untested. Unready. Paramedics were milling about. Milling - not hurrying.

It was then that the scent of meat caught my nose. I vomited.

I opened my eyes...followed the trail.

I vomited again.

Part of me wishes I knew the poor woman.

Part of me is glad I never will.

Unprompted: Quiz Night

(This one goes out to my favorite minion. If you don't hear from me in a week...take my stuff.)

“Look, I KNEW, all right. I fuckin' knew! Lay off!” Two shadows worked in the night, where other shadows eithe ignored them or gave them a wide berth. Shadow time was supposed to be quiet. Then again, these two were not known for their subtlety at the best of times.

“I'm sure you did. You simply didn't offer that answer for a deeper, spiritual reason that I'm certain reveals the depth and glory of your character.” The calmer of the two actually worked the least, idly twirling a knife around two fingers. An occasional slice here and there would part the air, but never with much fanfare, and never without a certain lazy precision.

The other was more brutal. Rather than a blade, she used her bare hands, cracking and tearing open the poor bastard's rib cage with her fingers, before digging about inside the inner workings. “I was going to pick it. Fuck you! Shut up! I was GOING to pick it!”

“I'm agreeing with you, if you hadn't noticed.” The long, thin blade slit through layers of flesh...dermal armor...bone...dust...this one was rotting quickly. The ruin did such havoc on their goal; the reason for that was as mysterious as the self-cleaning aspect of their prey in the first place. The calm one found it perplexing. “Perhaps you were under some duress, or by a sense of fair play, decided to belay your genius?”

“FUCK my genius, I HAD it, okay?! The answer, the points, the whole fuckin' SHEBANG! I just...y'know what, how about you just get the fuckin' heart and let's get the fuck out of here. I wanna get back to the quiz!” Lungs were thrown over her shoulder, squishing into a meaty, stinking sulfur on the hood of some poor bastard's car. She backed away. “You're so damn smart, YOU do the fuckin' retrieval.”

“Your anger is irrational, I would just like to say. I support and stand by you, one hundred per cent.” The way he spoke, you could catch the clip of every syllable on his tongue. He licked his lips, then crouched over the dead...let's call her a woman. The maw of fangs and look of growing distress made the distinction difficult to truly claim. The knife flashed once, twice, thrice, and then in a great moldy cloud, it was done. The calm one held up the heart like a gem, grown over with fungus and wires like a sick joke unto nature. Indeed it was. “With that, we can move on?”

The woman lunged onto him, ignoring the blood and the muck and the grime, and she kissed him with all of the vulgar passion in her tiny, powerful frame. “You know I fuckin' knew the answer, right? I fuckin' knew?” She purred up at him.

“Of course, my dear. How could you not? When a vampire question comes up at the bar quiz, you're fated to win. It's as simple as that.” He kissed her back, but then grimaced as she punched his chest. He felt something crack, but simply smiled – it wasn't the first or the last time, after all.

“I fuckin' KNEW!”

“Of course, of course.”

“...You buyin' the next round of wings?” She smiled.

“The heavens could not stop me.” He smiled as well.