The "Creative Writing" forum, which includes Retro Game Reviews, has been archived and is now read-only. You cannot post here or create a new thread or review on this forum.
Yes, my darling, why else would I drag you into this husk?
Bare-board walls, gaping, light-rimmed holes, steel tools and copper pipe lying abandoned among the uniform dust.
Real romantic.
It doesn’t take much - a flicker of consciousness, a seed of doubt, of boredom - and I am away.
Nothing - yet everything at the same time. A sweet, guiltless release so far removed from the mortal thrusts and sighs she had in mind, it is almost impossible to understand why she would desire them so much.
But I suppose she knows nothing more.
Well, perhaps the last few seconds have given her pause for thought.
Her hands are suddenly stroking nothing but the lazy night air, seeped through empty window frames. Her hushed, rapid words find only echoes. Nothing remains with her, except the faint smell of burning flesh. But I do that on purpose - a nice little touch, just for her.
Before her scream finds sound - pushed to the edge of understanding upon seeing a human heart lying bare upon the floor, beating slowly, contentedly, to itself - I am inside. Further in than even the most boastful hunter / night-stalker / casanova / sleaze.
I swirl around tight inside - a skinny little tornado of patchwork souls - wrapping her up inside of me. One within the other within the other. And then, so smoothly, her breath is mine - her body, her mind, her everything. I cut the scream off she so naturally started and shift my weight a little: not bad. Not bad at all.
Oh, I see. She’s a whøre after all. That’s real nice.
I suppose things did progress a little too easily. But still ... a heads-up would have been nice.
Then again, I’m hardly one to be casting judgement here.
Let’s see ...
Her name is Antoinette Hetaera, aka Desire, for those who asked or cared (few of either.)
She works for money or coke - or anything resembling the first or the second when she’s had enough of the second, or enough of the first to acquire enough of the second.
Her mother was much the same, not even realising she was pregnant until the clients started holding onto her stomach for leverage. She managed to OD on rat poison, grass seed and a needle of Baby Bio, but not before passing on the tricks of the trade.
Well, good for her.
Antoinette's body is light and fragile - she hasn’t eaten for as long as I can remember. Every movement is tiring. Her skin is a horrid mesh of welts and bruises, the awkward lumps of badly healed breaks, twisting black constellations of cigarette burns. There’s a lot of pain.
I open a tiny gap in my shroud of souls, back to the real her - she can keep the pain for the moment, I don’t need that. But the bitterness, the resentment and the tiny spark of hope that never managed to go out - these I take, stitch them evenly into the fabric of myself.
I - or she, whichever way you look at it - stoop / stoops down and picks the still-beating heart from among the fallen plaster. A bit dusty, but still good - the last guy had a nice bit of generosity in him, despite being a big fat paedo. I place the heart gently into the pocket of her long coat, feel it tap out a happy rhythm against her skin - yes ... actually quite a lot of skin showing. In retrospect, probably quite a big clue vis-à-vis the whole whøre thing
Not much of a life for a twelve-year-old. But she’s got a better one now - another step towards perfection. It’s all good.
*
Home.
Well ... near enough for me, it doesn’t really matter.
My land-lady blinks at me through her letterbox, as always. The whites of her eyes are heavily veined and sweating; pupils tight, hard little knots of suspicion. She has good reason to be suspicious, of course - rarely has the same person entered my little flat twice. But I try to reassure her - give her a nice wave: arm up straight, waggle the fingers like some over-zealous surgeon. The same little wave every time ... I hope she at least appreciates the gesture.
The rent gets overpaid, and the room’s usually empty for her to do whatever she does with it. There’s usually a faint smell of lubricant / animal faeces / incense around the place - traces of hastily erased chalk patterns on the floorboards - metal splinters in the bed sheets - a few spots of red among the grey dots of mould climbing up the half-peeled wallpaper.
Whatever, I get my peace.
If you stand really still and wait for a gap in the screams and shouts, a lull in the endless rumble of vehicles streaming along the elevated motorways overhead and a break in the splutter and hum of dirt-clogged generators and dying light bulbs, you can hear them.
Beating in perfect time with each other, the eight thousand, three-hundred and seventy-four hearts of my hand-sewn soul.
But I don’t have time to stop and wait now - not the hours / days / months it would take for a suitable sliver of silence to appear in the churning, shifting noise patterns of the city.
The floorboards pop up so easily against my surprisingly well-groomed fingernails - at least Antoinette had some sense of style - and soon, so soon, they are exposed.
Sitting neatly between the joists, nestled down close to one another, thirteen thousand, five-hundred and eleven perfectly square black boxes (five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven empty.) Depending on who I am - on whose eyes I look through - they are made differently.
Today they are all glass - smoked, smooth black glass. So thin, and yet so strong - the pitiful light drawn deep into the faultless sides. Good choice.
I take an empty box from the stacks - my tiny hands shaking, tired and weak, bereft of energy. I think I’m coming down, too. That’s not nice. I’ll need a fix pretty soon, or things could start getting nasty.
anyway ...
And I take the heart from my pocket, such a beautiful object, growing and shrinking in my palm. The box opens up for me - a fragile winter flower blossoming to accept new life. And in the organ goes, the open vessels suckering onto the glassy walls like long-starved leeches, the muscles pumping a little more easily.
I feel it, the patch of generosity from the last guy (how quickly pointless personal details are forgotten) binds tighter with the rest. My stitching glows and tugs the pieces into shape, and I am away again, further down the path to perfection - by my calculations, five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven steps to go.
*
ƒuçk ƒuçk ƒuçk.
I need some coke.
This little whøre must need half her body weight a day to stay perky.
I usually keep some around the house for such an event - it happens more often than you’d expect - but she managed to ruin that as well. Decided to feed her up a bit, but it turns out she’s also anorexic or bulimic or allergic to food or something. Quite a mess.
So now I’m vomit-stained and so desperate for some - any - cocaine, I’ve chewed these wonderful nails into ripped and ragged claws. And standing in the street, wearing the not-much she brought to the party, freezing my bøllocks off.
Well, I probably would be if I had any.
It’s a bit strange. I always get hooked on the gender of whoever was last, like its the first time again. But souls don’t have genders, there’s no need.
It’s hard sometimes, being so undefined. Such is the sacrifice for perfection, I suppose.
“Hey, bi†ch.”
Bi†ch?
I suppose he means me. There isn’t anyone else around.
He grins like an angel, or a drunken lunatic. I’m guessing the second.
She knows him, I see, quite the regular - as faceless / nameless / guiltless as the rest, only slightly more violent. But he pays in crack, and so, right now, I couldn’t give a s**t.
He jerks a thick yellowed thumb up towards a nondescript window in a nondescript apartment building. The algae-smothered concrete is cracked up to the sixth floor, constant erosion by oppression and pollution sending a steady stream of fine lung-clogging dust down to greet us. Various flooded tenements bleed stained and pungent tears down the sombre façade.
Perhaps not so nondescript after all.
Someone - hunched up on the roof’s edge under the thundering flyover - has come to their senses. I skip lightly over a red / brown puddle, taking brief delight in the lightness of my present form. If it wasn’t for the endless shaking, craving, creeping madness, starvation, near-hypothermia and the ear-splitting crack-and-spread of a body hitting the tarmac behind me, I might have smiled.
*
I wouldn’t recommend this as a profession.
Probably one of the few ways to make a decent living these days, but the hours aren’t very sociable.
As I shudder back and forth, I can see a good five floors upwards through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Far above, some broken-toothed kids leer at me, grubby little faces peering over the sodden chasm. Something warm and bitter drips into my mouth and I try to sit up, only to find my hair stuck fast in something I’d rather not think about. A ball bearing cracks into my skull just above my eye, and two frantic red-webbed laughs echo through the building towards me. I feel the blood climb and trickle down my cheek.
ƒuçk this.
A glimmer of something I can’t quite describe crawls from inside of me - inside of her - then I am away and free again, and she no longer exists. Old Mr. Wheeze shudders to a tight-fisted, twitchy climax-of-sorts and opens his eyes, to find himself lying awkwardly on a human heart.
With some reluctance, I am inside - one turn for another - and smothering all his confusion away under reams of billowing patchwork souls.
Oh great. He welcomes me with that pitiful post-act feeling of guilt and shame, a slime-slick trail of rancid seed sitting congealed on my thigh, and a body so full of alcohol I can almost hear it rotting my liver. I hate being inside the drunk.
Before I can dwell too long on the sad excuse for a life this man leads, I turn and pluck the promised crack from his damp clothes, only to realise I no longer need it. An embarrassing oversight.
No matter ...
I wipe the warm ooze from myself on the only section of the sheets not stained similarly and dress hurriedly - frantic, confused whispering filtering down from five floors above. I pick her delicate, trembling heart from the centre of the bed and tuck in inside his coat - making sure her beautiful spark of hope site neatly with the others, deep in my tapestry of perfection.
I pause in the doorway to examine my new host.
But there is nothing.
There’s nothing here I can add in with the others. No good in this one - it’s all been rotten away to some twisted black lump of wet nothingness. The good long-bled into phials and taunting faces.
This has never happened before.
Out of my irritating drunken stupor comes a even more irritating thought.
What with all the good I’m taking ... what’ll be left but the bad?
Nono, that doesn’t matter. There’ll be enough. There has to be.
I stagger from the stagnant room inside my useless host.
Five-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-six to go.
*
Bare-board walls, gaping, light-rimmed holes, steel tools and copper pipe lying abandoned among the uniform dust.
Real romantic.
It doesn’t take much - a flicker of consciousness, a seed of doubt, of boredom - and I am away.
Nothing - yet everything at the same time. A sweet, guiltless release so far removed from the mortal thrusts and sighs she had in mind, it is almost impossible to understand why she would desire them so much.
But I suppose she knows nothing more.
Well, perhaps the last few seconds have given her pause for thought.
Her hands are suddenly stroking nothing but the lazy night air, seeped through empty window frames. Her hushed, rapid words find only echoes. Nothing remains with her, except the faint smell of burning flesh. But I do that on purpose - a nice little touch, just for her.
Before her scream finds sound - pushed to the edge of understanding upon seeing a human heart lying bare upon the floor, beating slowly, contentedly, to itself - I am inside. Further in than even the most boastful hunter / night-stalker / casanova / sleaze.
I swirl around tight inside - a skinny little tornado of patchwork souls - wrapping her up inside of me. One within the other within the other. And then, so smoothly, her breath is mine - her body, her mind, her everything. I cut the scream off she so naturally started and shift my weight a little: not bad. Not bad at all.
Oh, I see. She’s a whøre after all. That’s real nice.
I suppose things did progress a little too easily. But still ... a heads-up would have been nice.
Then again, I’m hardly one to be casting judgement here.
Let’s see ...
Her name is Antoinette Hetaera, aka Desire, for those who asked or cared (few of either.)
She works for money or coke - or anything resembling the first or the second when she’s had enough of the second, or enough of the first to acquire enough of the second.
Her mother was much the same, not even realising she was pregnant until the clients started holding onto her stomach for leverage. She managed to OD on rat poison, grass seed and a needle of Baby Bio, but not before passing on the tricks of the trade.
Well, good for her.
Antoinette's body is light and fragile - she hasn’t eaten for as long as I can remember. Every movement is tiring. Her skin is a horrid mesh of welts and bruises, the awkward lumps of badly healed breaks, twisting black constellations of cigarette burns. There’s a lot of pain.
I open a tiny gap in my shroud of souls, back to the real her - she can keep the pain for the moment, I don’t need that. But the bitterness, the resentment and the tiny spark of hope that never managed to go out - these I take, stitch them evenly into the fabric of myself.
I - or she, whichever way you look at it - stoop / stoops down and picks the still-beating heart from among the fallen plaster. A bit dusty, but still good - the last guy had a nice bit of generosity in him, despite being a big fat paedo. I place the heart gently into the pocket of her long coat, feel it tap out a happy rhythm against her skin - yes ... actually quite a lot of skin showing. In retrospect, probably quite a big clue vis-à-vis the whole whøre thing
Not much of a life for a twelve-year-old. But she’s got a better one now - another step towards perfection. It’s all good.
*
Home.
Well ... near enough for me, it doesn’t really matter.
My land-lady blinks at me through her letterbox, as always. The whites of her eyes are heavily veined and sweating; pupils tight, hard little knots of suspicion. She has good reason to be suspicious, of course - rarely has the same person entered my little flat twice. But I try to reassure her - give her a nice wave: arm up straight, waggle the fingers like some over-zealous surgeon. The same little wave every time ... I hope she at least appreciates the gesture.
The rent gets overpaid, and the room’s usually empty for her to do whatever she does with it. There’s usually a faint smell of lubricant / animal faeces / incense around the place - traces of hastily erased chalk patterns on the floorboards - metal splinters in the bed sheets - a few spots of red among the grey dots of mould climbing up the half-peeled wallpaper.
Whatever, I get my peace.
If you stand really still and wait for a gap in the screams and shouts, a lull in the endless rumble of vehicles streaming along the elevated motorways overhead and a break in the splutter and hum of dirt-clogged generators and dying light bulbs, you can hear them.
Beating in perfect time with each other, the eight thousand, three-hundred and seventy-four hearts of my hand-sewn soul.
But I don’t have time to stop and wait now - not the hours / days / months it would take for a suitable sliver of silence to appear in the churning, shifting noise patterns of the city.
The floorboards pop up so easily against my surprisingly well-groomed fingernails - at least Antoinette had some sense of style - and soon, so soon, they are exposed.
Sitting neatly between the joists, nestled down close to one another, thirteen thousand, five-hundred and eleven perfectly square black boxes (five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven empty.) Depending on who I am - on whose eyes I look through - they are made differently.
Today they are all glass - smoked, smooth black glass. So thin, and yet so strong - the pitiful light drawn deep into the faultless sides. Good choice.
I take an empty box from the stacks - my tiny hands shaking, tired and weak, bereft of energy. I think I’m coming down, too. That’s not nice. I’ll need a fix pretty soon, or things could start getting nasty.
anyway ...
And I take the heart from my pocket, such a beautiful object, growing and shrinking in my palm. The box opens up for me - a fragile winter flower blossoming to accept new life. And in the organ goes, the open vessels suckering onto the glassy walls like long-starved leeches, the muscles pumping a little more easily.
I feel it, the patch of generosity from the last guy (how quickly pointless personal details are forgotten) binds tighter with the rest. My stitching glows and tugs the pieces into shape, and I am away again, further down the path to perfection - by my calculations, five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven steps to go.
*
ƒuçk ƒuçk ƒuçk.
I need some coke.
This little whøre must need half her body weight a day to stay perky.
I usually keep some around the house for such an event - it happens more often than you’d expect - but she managed to ruin that as well. Decided to feed her up a bit, but it turns out she’s also anorexic or bulimic or allergic to food or something. Quite a mess.
So now I’m vomit-stained and so desperate for some - any - cocaine, I’ve chewed these wonderful nails into ripped and ragged claws. And standing in the street, wearing the not-much she brought to the party, freezing my bøllocks off.
Well, I probably would be if I had any.
It’s a bit strange. I always get hooked on the gender of whoever was last, like its the first time again. But souls don’t have genders, there’s no need.
It’s hard sometimes, being so undefined. Such is the sacrifice for perfection, I suppose.
“Hey, bi†ch.”
Bi†ch?
I suppose he means me. There isn’t anyone else around.
He grins like an angel, or a drunken lunatic. I’m guessing the second.
She knows him, I see, quite the regular - as faceless / nameless / guiltless as the rest, only slightly more violent. But he pays in crack, and so, right now, I couldn’t give a s**t.
He jerks a thick yellowed thumb up towards a nondescript window in a nondescript apartment building. The algae-smothered concrete is cracked up to the sixth floor, constant erosion by oppression and pollution sending a steady stream of fine lung-clogging dust down to greet us. Various flooded tenements bleed stained and pungent tears down the sombre façade.
Perhaps not so nondescript after all.
Someone - hunched up on the roof’s edge under the thundering flyover - has come to their senses. I skip lightly over a red / brown puddle, taking brief delight in the lightness of my present form. If it wasn’t for the endless shaking, craving, creeping madness, starvation, near-hypothermia and the ear-splitting crack-and-spread of a body hitting the tarmac behind me, I might have smiled.
*
I wouldn’t recommend this as a profession.
Probably one of the few ways to make a decent living these days, but the hours aren’t very sociable.
As I shudder back and forth, I can see a good five floors upwards through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Far above, some broken-toothed kids leer at me, grubby little faces peering over the sodden chasm. Something warm and bitter drips into my mouth and I try to sit up, only to find my hair stuck fast in something I’d rather not think about. A ball bearing cracks into my skull just above my eye, and two frantic red-webbed laughs echo through the building towards me. I feel the blood climb and trickle down my cheek.
ƒuçk this.
A glimmer of something I can’t quite describe crawls from inside of me - inside of her - then I am away and free again, and she no longer exists. Old Mr. Wheeze shudders to a tight-fisted, twitchy climax-of-sorts and opens his eyes, to find himself lying awkwardly on a human heart.
With some reluctance, I am inside - one turn for another - and smothering all his confusion away under reams of billowing patchwork souls.
Oh great. He welcomes me with that pitiful post-act feeling of guilt and shame, a slime-slick trail of rancid seed sitting congealed on my thigh, and a body so full of alcohol I can almost hear it rotting my liver. I hate being inside the drunk.
Before I can dwell too long on the sad excuse for a life this man leads, I turn and pluck the promised crack from his damp clothes, only to realise I no longer need it. An embarrassing oversight.
No matter ...
I wipe the warm ooze from myself on the only section of the sheets not stained similarly and dress hurriedly - frantic, confused whispering filtering down from five floors above. I pick her delicate, trembling heart from the centre of the bed and tuck in inside his coat - making sure her beautiful spark of hope site neatly with the others, deep in my tapestry of perfection.
I pause in the doorway to examine my new host.
But there is nothing.
There’s nothing here I can add in with the others. No good in this one - it’s all been rotten away to some twisted black lump of wet nothingness. The good long-bled into phials and taunting faces.
This has never happened before.
Out of my irritating drunken stupor comes a even more irritating thought.
What with all the good I’m taking ... what’ll be left but the bad?
Nono, that doesn’t matter. There’ll be enough. There has to be.
I stagger from the stagnant room inside my useless host.
Five-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-six to go.
*
Page:
I like it, I like it, I like it alot.
Yes, my darling, why else would I drag you into this husk?
Bare-board walls, gaping, light-rimmed holes, steel tools and copper pipe lying abandoned among the uniform dust.
Real romantic.
It doesn’t take much - a flicker of consciousness, a seed of doubt, of boredom - and I am away.
Nothing - yet everything at the same time. A sweet, guiltless release so far removed from the mortal thrusts and sighs she had in mind, it is almost impossible to understand why she would desire them so much.
But I suppose she knows nothing more.
Well, perhaps the last few seconds have given her pause for thought.
Her hands are suddenly stroking nothing but the lazy night air, seeped through empty window frames. Her hushed, rapid words find only echoes. Nothing remains with her, except the faint smell of burning flesh. But I do that on purpose - a nice little touch, just for her.
Before her scream finds sound - pushed to the edge of understanding upon seeing a human heart lying bare upon the floor, beating slowly, contentedly, to itself - I am inside. Further in than even the most boastful hunter / night-stalker / casanova / sleaze.
I swirl around tight inside - a skinny little tornado of patchwork souls - wrapping her up inside of me. One within the other within the other. And then, so smoothly, her breath is mine - her body, her mind, her everything. I cut the scream off she so naturally started and shift my weight a little: not bad. Not bad at all.
Oh, I see. She’s a whøre after all. That’s real nice.
I suppose things did progress a little too easily. But still ... a heads-up would have been nice.
Then again, I’m hardly one to be casting judgement here.
Let’s see ...
Her name is Antoinette Hetaera, aka Desire, for those who asked or cared (few of either.)
She works for money or coke - or anything resembling the first or the second when she’s had enough of the second, or enough of the first to acquire enough of the second.
Her mother was much the same, not even realising she was pregnant until the clients started holding onto her stomach for leverage. She managed to OD on rat poison, grass seed and a needle of Baby Bio, but not before passing on the tricks of the trade.
Well, good for her.
Antoinette's body is light and fragile - she hasn’t eaten for as long as I can remember. Every movement is tiring. Her skin is a horrid mesh of welts and bruises, the awkward lumps of badly healed breaks, twisting black constellations of cigarette burns. There’s a lot of pain.
I open a tiny gap in my shroud of souls, back to the real her - she can keep the pain for the moment, I don’t need that. But the bitterness, the resentment and the tiny spark of hope that never managed to go out - these I take, stitch them evenly into the fabric of myself.
I - or she, whichever way you look at it - stoop / stoops down and picks the still-beating heart from among the fallen plaster. A bit dusty, but still good - the last guy had a nice bit of generosity in him, despite being a big fat paedo. I place the heart gently into the pocket of her long coat, feel it tap out a happy rhythm against her skin - yes ... actually quite a lot of skin showing. In retrospect, probably quite a big clue vis-à-vis the whole whøre thing
Not much of a life for a twelve-year-old. But she’s got a better one now - another step towards perfection. It’s all good.
*
Home.
Well ... near enough for me, it doesn’t really matter.
My land-lady blinks at me through her letterbox, as always. The whites of her eyes are heavily veined and sweating; pupils tight, hard little knots of suspicion. She has good reason to be suspicious, of course - rarely has the same person entered my little flat twice. But I try to reassure her - give her a nice wave: arm up straight, waggle the fingers like some over-zealous surgeon. The same little wave every time ... I hope she at least appreciates the gesture.
The rent gets overpaid, and the room’s usually empty for her to do whatever she does with it. There’s usually a faint smell of lubricant / animal faeces / incense around the place - traces of hastily erased chalk patterns on the floorboards - metal splinters in the bed sheets - a few spots of red among the grey dots of mould climbing up the half-peeled wallpaper.
Whatever, I get my peace.
If you stand really still and wait for a gap in the screams and shouts, a lull in the endless rumble of vehicles streaming along the elevated motorways overhead and a break in the splutter and hum of dirt-clogged generators and dying light bulbs, you can hear them.
Beating in perfect time with each other, the eight thousand, three-hundred and seventy-four hearts of my hand-sewn soul.
But I don’t have time to stop and wait now - not the hours / days / months it would take for a suitable sliver of silence to appear in the churning, shifting noise patterns of the city.
The floorboards pop up so easily against my surprisingly well-groomed fingernails - at least Antoinette had some sense of style - and soon, so soon, they are exposed.
Sitting neatly between the joists, nestled down close to one another, thirteen thousand, five-hundred and eleven perfectly square black boxes (five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven empty.) Depending on who I am - on whose eyes I look through - they are made differently.
Today they are all glass - smoked, smooth black glass. So thin, and yet so strong - the pitiful light drawn deep into the faultless sides. Good choice.
I take an empty box from the stacks - my tiny hands shaking, tired and weak, bereft of energy. I think I’m coming down, too. That’s not nice. I’ll need a fix pretty soon, or things could start getting nasty.
anyway ...
And I take the heart from my pocket, such a beautiful object, growing and shrinking in my palm. The box opens up for me - a fragile winter flower blossoming to accept new life. And in the organ goes, the open vessels suckering onto the glassy walls like long-starved leeches, the muscles pumping a little more easily.
I feel it, the patch of generosity from the last guy (how quickly pointless personal details are forgotten) binds tighter with the rest. My stitching glows and tugs the pieces into shape, and I am away again, further down the path to perfection - by my calculations, five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven steps to go.
*
ƒuçk ƒuçk ƒuçk.
I need some coke.
This little whøre must need half her body weight a day to stay perky.
I usually keep some around the house for such an event - it happens more often than you’d expect - but she managed to ruin that as well. Decided to feed her up a bit, but it turns out she’s also anorexic or bulimic or allergic to food or something. Quite a mess.
So now I’m vomit-stained and so desperate for some - any - cocaine, I’ve chewed these wonderful nails into ripped and ragged claws. And standing in the street, wearing the not-much she brought to the party, freezing my bøllocks off.
Well, I probably would be if I had any.
It’s a bit strange. I always get hooked on the gender of whoever was last, like its the first time again. But souls don’t have genders, there’s no need.
It’s hard sometimes, being so undefined. Such is the sacrifice for perfection, I suppose.
“Hey, bi†ch.”
Bi†ch?
I suppose he means me. There isn’t anyone else around.
He grins like an angel, or a drunken lunatic. I’m guessing the second.
She knows him, I see, quite the regular - as faceless / nameless / guiltless as the rest, only slightly more violent. But he pays in crack, and so, right now, I couldn’t give a s**t.
He jerks a thick yellowed thumb up towards a nondescript window in a nondescript apartment building. The algae-smothered concrete is cracked up to the sixth floor, constant erosion by oppression and pollution sending a steady stream of fine lung-clogging dust down to greet us. Various flooded tenements bleed stained and pungent tears down the sombre façade.
Perhaps not so nondescript after all.
Someone - hunched up on the roof’s edge under the thundering flyover - has come to their senses. I skip lightly over a red / brown puddle, taking brief delight in the lightness of my present form. If it wasn’t for the endless shaking, craving, creeping madness, starvation, near-hypothermia and the ear-splitting crack-and-spread of a body hitting the tarmac behind me, I might have smiled.
*
I wouldn’t recommend this as a profession.
Probably one of the few ways to make a decent living these days, but the hours aren’t very sociable.
As I shudder back and forth, I can see a good five floors upwards through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Far above, some broken-toothed kids leer at me, grubby little faces peering over the sodden chasm. Something warm and bitter drips into my mouth and I try to sit up, only to find my hair stuck fast in something I’d rather not think about. A ball bearing cracks into my skull just above my eye, and two frantic red-webbed laughs echo through the building towards me. I feel the blood climb and trickle down my cheek.
ƒuçk this.
A glimmer of something I can’t quite describe crawls from inside of me - inside of her - then I am away and free again, and she no longer exists. Old Mr. Wheeze shudders to a tight-fisted, twitchy climax-of-sorts and opens his eyes, to find himself lying awkwardly on a human heart.
With some reluctance, I am inside - one turn for another - and smothering all his confusion away under reams of billowing patchwork souls.
Oh great. He welcomes me with that pitiful post-act feeling of guilt and shame, a slime-slick trail of rancid seed sitting congealed on my thigh, and a body so full of alcohol I can almost hear it rotting my liver. I hate being inside the drunk.
Before I can dwell too long on the sad excuse for a life this man leads, I turn and pluck the promised crack from his damp clothes, only to realise I no longer need it. An embarrassing oversight.
No matter ...
I wipe the warm ooze from myself on the only section of the sheets not stained similarly and dress hurriedly - frantic, confused whispering filtering down from five floors above. I pick her delicate, trembling heart from the centre of the bed and tuck in inside his coat - making sure her beautiful spark of hope site neatly with the others, deep in my tapestry of perfection.
I pause in the doorway to examine my new host.
But there is nothing.
There’s nothing here I can add in with the others. No good in this one - it’s all been rotten away to some twisted black lump of wet nothingness. The good long-bled into phials and taunting faces.
This has never happened before.
Out of my irritating drunken stupor comes a even more irritating thought.
What with all the good I’m taking ... what’ll be left but the bad?
Nono, that doesn’t matter. There’ll be enough. There has to be.
I stagger from the stagnant room inside my useless host.
Five-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-six to go.
*
Bare-board walls, gaping, light-rimmed holes, steel tools and copper pipe lying abandoned among the uniform dust.
Real romantic.
It doesn’t take much - a flicker of consciousness, a seed of doubt, of boredom - and I am away.
Nothing - yet everything at the same time. A sweet, guiltless release so far removed from the mortal thrusts and sighs she had in mind, it is almost impossible to understand why she would desire them so much.
But I suppose she knows nothing more.
Well, perhaps the last few seconds have given her pause for thought.
Her hands are suddenly stroking nothing but the lazy night air, seeped through empty window frames. Her hushed, rapid words find only echoes. Nothing remains with her, except the faint smell of burning flesh. But I do that on purpose - a nice little touch, just for her.
Before her scream finds sound - pushed to the edge of understanding upon seeing a human heart lying bare upon the floor, beating slowly, contentedly, to itself - I am inside. Further in than even the most boastful hunter / night-stalker / casanova / sleaze.
I swirl around tight inside - a skinny little tornado of patchwork souls - wrapping her up inside of me. One within the other within the other. And then, so smoothly, her breath is mine - her body, her mind, her everything. I cut the scream off she so naturally started and shift my weight a little: not bad. Not bad at all.
Oh, I see. She’s a whøre after all. That’s real nice.
I suppose things did progress a little too easily. But still ... a heads-up would have been nice.
Then again, I’m hardly one to be casting judgement here.
Let’s see ...
Her name is Antoinette Hetaera, aka Desire, for those who asked or cared (few of either.)
She works for money or coke - or anything resembling the first or the second when she’s had enough of the second, or enough of the first to acquire enough of the second.
Her mother was much the same, not even realising she was pregnant until the clients started holding onto her stomach for leverage. She managed to OD on rat poison, grass seed and a needle of Baby Bio, but not before passing on the tricks of the trade.
Well, good for her.
Antoinette's body is light and fragile - she hasn’t eaten for as long as I can remember. Every movement is tiring. Her skin is a horrid mesh of welts and bruises, the awkward lumps of badly healed breaks, twisting black constellations of cigarette burns. There’s a lot of pain.
I open a tiny gap in my shroud of souls, back to the real her - she can keep the pain for the moment, I don’t need that. But the bitterness, the resentment and the tiny spark of hope that never managed to go out - these I take, stitch them evenly into the fabric of myself.
I - or she, whichever way you look at it - stoop / stoops down and picks the still-beating heart from among the fallen plaster. A bit dusty, but still good - the last guy had a nice bit of generosity in him, despite being a big fat paedo. I place the heart gently into the pocket of her long coat, feel it tap out a happy rhythm against her skin - yes ... actually quite a lot of skin showing. In retrospect, probably quite a big clue vis-à-vis the whole whøre thing
Not much of a life for a twelve-year-old. But she’s got a better one now - another step towards perfection. It’s all good.
*
Home.
Well ... near enough for me, it doesn’t really matter.
My land-lady blinks at me through her letterbox, as always. The whites of her eyes are heavily veined and sweating; pupils tight, hard little knots of suspicion. She has good reason to be suspicious, of course - rarely has the same person entered my little flat twice. But I try to reassure her - give her a nice wave: arm up straight, waggle the fingers like some over-zealous surgeon. The same little wave every time ... I hope she at least appreciates the gesture.
The rent gets overpaid, and the room’s usually empty for her to do whatever she does with it. There’s usually a faint smell of lubricant / animal faeces / incense around the place - traces of hastily erased chalk patterns on the floorboards - metal splinters in the bed sheets - a few spots of red among the grey dots of mould climbing up the half-peeled wallpaper.
Whatever, I get my peace.
If you stand really still and wait for a gap in the screams and shouts, a lull in the endless rumble of vehicles streaming along the elevated motorways overhead and a break in the splutter and hum of dirt-clogged generators and dying light bulbs, you can hear them.
Beating in perfect time with each other, the eight thousand, three-hundred and seventy-four hearts of my hand-sewn soul.
But I don’t have time to stop and wait now - not the hours / days / months it would take for a suitable sliver of silence to appear in the churning, shifting noise patterns of the city.
The floorboards pop up so easily against my surprisingly well-groomed fingernails - at least Antoinette had some sense of style - and soon, so soon, they are exposed.
Sitting neatly between the joists, nestled down close to one another, thirteen thousand, five-hundred and eleven perfectly square black boxes (five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven empty.) Depending on who I am - on whose eyes I look through - they are made differently.
Today they are all glass - smoked, smooth black glass. So thin, and yet so strong - the pitiful light drawn deep into the faultless sides. Good choice.
I take an empty box from the stacks - my tiny hands shaking, tired and weak, bereft of energy. I think I’m coming down, too. That’s not nice. I’ll need a fix pretty soon, or things could start getting nasty.
anyway ...
And I take the heart from my pocket, such a beautiful object, growing and shrinking in my palm. The box opens up for me - a fragile winter flower blossoming to accept new life. And in the organ goes, the open vessels suckering onto the glassy walls like long-starved leeches, the muscles pumping a little more easily.
I feel it, the patch of generosity from the last guy (how quickly pointless personal details are forgotten) binds tighter with the rest. My stitching glows and tugs the pieces into shape, and I am away again, further down the path to perfection - by my calculations, five thousand, one-hundred and thirty-seven steps to go.
*
ƒuçk ƒuçk ƒuçk.
I need some coke.
This little whøre must need half her body weight a day to stay perky.
I usually keep some around the house for such an event - it happens more often than you’d expect - but she managed to ruin that as well. Decided to feed her up a bit, but it turns out she’s also anorexic or bulimic or allergic to food or something. Quite a mess.
So now I’m vomit-stained and so desperate for some - any - cocaine, I’ve chewed these wonderful nails into ripped and ragged claws. And standing in the street, wearing the not-much she brought to the party, freezing my bøllocks off.
Well, I probably would be if I had any.
It’s a bit strange. I always get hooked on the gender of whoever was last, like its the first time again. But souls don’t have genders, there’s no need.
It’s hard sometimes, being so undefined. Such is the sacrifice for perfection, I suppose.
“Hey, bi†ch.”
Bi†ch?
I suppose he means me. There isn’t anyone else around.
He grins like an angel, or a drunken lunatic. I’m guessing the second.
She knows him, I see, quite the regular - as faceless / nameless / guiltless as the rest, only slightly more violent. But he pays in crack, and so, right now, I couldn’t give a s**t.
He jerks a thick yellowed thumb up towards a nondescript window in a nondescript apartment building. The algae-smothered concrete is cracked up to the sixth floor, constant erosion by oppression and pollution sending a steady stream of fine lung-clogging dust down to greet us. Various flooded tenements bleed stained and pungent tears down the sombre façade.
Perhaps not so nondescript after all.
Someone - hunched up on the roof’s edge under the thundering flyover - has come to their senses. I skip lightly over a red / brown puddle, taking brief delight in the lightness of my present form. If it wasn’t for the endless shaking, craving, creeping madness, starvation, near-hypothermia and the ear-splitting crack-and-spread of a body hitting the tarmac behind me, I might have smiled.
*
I wouldn’t recommend this as a profession.
Probably one of the few ways to make a decent living these days, but the hours aren’t very sociable.
As I shudder back and forth, I can see a good five floors upwards through a gaping hole in the ceiling. Far above, some broken-toothed kids leer at me, grubby little faces peering over the sodden chasm. Something warm and bitter drips into my mouth and I try to sit up, only to find my hair stuck fast in something I’d rather not think about. A ball bearing cracks into my skull just above my eye, and two frantic red-webbed laughs echo through the building towards me. I feel the blood climb and trickle down my cheek.
ƒuçk this.
A glimmer of something I can’t quite describe crawls from inside of me - inside of her - then I am away and free again, and she no longer exists. Old Mr. Wheeze shudders to a tight-fisted, twitchy climax-of-sorts and opens his eyes, to find himself lying awkwardly on a human heart.
With some reluctance, I am inside - one turn for another - and smothering all his confusion away under reams of billowing patchwork souls.
Oh great. He welcomes me with that pitiful post-act feeling of guilt and shame, a slime-slick trail of rancid seed sitting congealed on my thigh, and a body so full of alcohol I can almost hear it rotting my liver. I hate being inside the drunk.
Before I can dwell too long on the sad excuse for a life this man leads, I turn and pluck the promised crack from his damp clothes, only to realise I no longer need it. An embarrassing oversight.
No matter ...
I wipe the warm ooze from myself on the only section of the sheets not stained similarly and dress hurriedly - frantic, confused whispering filtering down from five floors above. I pick her delicate, trembling heart from the centre of the bed and tuck in inside his coat - making sure her beautiful spark of hope site neatly with the others, deep in my tapestry of perfection.
I pause in the doorway to examine my new host.
But there is nothing.
There’s nothing here I can add in with the others. No good in this one - it’s all been rotten away to some twisted black lump of wet nothingness. The good long-bled into phials and taunting faces.
This has never happened before.
Out of my irritating drunken stupor comes a even more irritating thought.
What with all the good I’m taking ... what’ll be left but the bad?
Nono, that doesn’t matter. There’ll be enough. There has to be.
I stagger from the stagnant room inside my useless host.
Five-thousand, one-hundred and thirty-six to go.
*
Page: