Down the Rabbit Hole

This is one of those nights when you wake up groggy and disoriented and everything seems so distant and faraway and you find that you’re in the midst of giants. Your entire head vibrates excruciatingly as their thunderous footsteps make contact with the ground, one after the other, and the nerves in your temples are throbbing so vigorously it’s a wonder they didn’t explode into a mess of blood and capillaries. The giants are all around you, talking and laughing and occasionally one steps over you delicately - but other than that they do not seem to notice you. You’re watching them with disinterest until one of them leans down and grabs your shoulders and shakes. Hard.

“Alice,” the giantess shouts, “Alice, get up.”

I blink once. Twice. And my eyes begin to focus on the face inches from mine, her eyes wide with – what, fear? – for that few seconds until it is apparent that I have not overdosed and am still very much alive, thank you very much.

“Tara,” I croak, “water. Please.” I’m still lying pathetically on the floor – which pretty much explains the roomful of giants.  

“Jesus Christ, Alice, are you trying to kill yourself? How many goddamn pills did you do?”

Tara licks her red, red lips, livid; and I want to tell her. I want to tell her that I went to this place called Wonderland and by God, it wasn’t called Wonderland for nothing. There were all sorts of magnificent creatures – gryphons and unicorns and even mock turtles (which according to the Queen is what mock turtle soup is made from). I want to tell her that it was a place where animals talked, like in Narnia, and they sang rhymes and had the most outrageous croquet games. I want to tell her that there was a Queen of Hearts, who was pudgy and rather stout but oh, how she loved having people’s heads cut off. “Off with his head,” she would say, “off with his head” because she liked the way it sounded, “off with his head” because she can.

I could stay there forever because they were all mad. Everyone was mad and no one cared that monsters live behind my blue irises and my teeth were stained with blood. The Duchess served me soup with too much pepper and put a baby in my arms who turned into a pig. I didn’t want a pig any more than I wanted a baby so I slaughtered it and made a pork pie. Everyone at the tea party enjoyed it and the Mad Hatter pulled me aside and told me it was the best he had ever eaten and he kissed me but his mouth was full of porcelain chips and they cut into my lips and my tongue. He tasted like pork and hats and madness. 

Only the unicorn saw me for what I am. “You’re a monster,” he said, but he got into a fight with the lion over the White King’s crown and died with his flank torn into ribbons before he could warn the others.   

Oh Tara dear, I want to say, wouldn’t you have taken all those pills too if they brought you to Wonderland?

Anastasiya

He met her in the woods one evening, when he strayed off the path and left his drunk, stumbling friends to the vodka in their hands and the alcohol-laced songs in their throats. He didn't drink that night, not because he held any personal intolerance or disdain for intoxicants but because the night was unusually beautiful and he had wanted a clear mind to enjoy it.

The first time he laid eyes on her he didn't think she was human; at second glance, he knew from the pit of his heart that she wasn't.

It wasn't just the fact that she was hauntingly beautiful, or that her translucent skin glowed under the light of the moon, or the way her hair fell long and straight to the base of her naked spine. It was the ethereal way she moved, as though her movements were unrestricted by the laws of the world; every gesture was a foreign language, a mystery as old as the Stonehenge. Her silver eyes were a flux of sadness beyond comprehension, as though she had seen the world and learned all there is to be learned and was irreparably scarred by the knowledge.

He was in love and they both knew it.

When he brought her back everyone wanted to know where he found her. They wanted to know her name, where she came from and whether she spoke Russian. They were charmed yet intimidated by this exquisite and lovely but unbearably cold (even for the winter-born Russians) woman. His sisters were unsettled by this strange woman who did not or would not speak. He brushed off their inquisitive probings and would only tell them to call her Anastasiya.

Anastasiya, they whispered. Resurrection. They didn't know what to think of her.

He did. He knew exactly what she was and yet he couldn't leave her to save himself. He told her that she could do whatever she wanted with him as long as she belonged to him. She would go back to the village with him as his wife, she would have a name - a beautiful name befitting her nature and she would not hurt any of the villagers - he would keep her satiated.

And so, when the doors to their room were firmly closed and bolted for the night, she slipped him out of his heavy moleskin lined fur cloak and tunic and small clothes until he was naked and shivering in the cold Russian winter. She pressed her lips to his partially open mouth and commenced to suck. At first it was just soft and pleasant, the way a lover's kiss feels like; but then his eyes grew wide as she began to suck harder and soon she was sucking away his blood and his soul and all of his being. She sucked away his consciousness and his dreams and his deepest fears. She sucked away all that was his and all that he was. He was dead and she was gorged to the brim, her body humming and vibrating with the stream of life force she just fed on.

But by morning it was apparent that he was coming alive again. Resurrected. His heartbeat was feeble and he was still pale as a corpse but he was alive. He wasn't too sure how it worked - whether it was her innate healing powers or if he just didn't really die - but it soon became a pattern that fell into place without fail. He died every night and was resurrected every day. He would like to believe that it was because she loved him in her own way, loved him, and wouldn't bear to let him die.

"Do you love me?" he once asked her. She was silent, as usual, but her lips curved into a cold, cold smile.

Mad World

I

She had become a phantom. That was it. Standing in front of the mirror, her hair unkempt and eyes deadpan, she could see it – that she had been fading away for the past… what? Five days? Three weeks? She had no idea how long it had been since she was in this catatonic state. Her mind vaguely registered that this should have been alarming, should have warranted a larger reaction compared to this idle curiosity. And yet she found that she could not have summoned the energy to elicit the appropriate emotions even if she wanted to.

Her eyes skated over the image in the mirror with the same mildly curious look: over the pallid, sallow cheeks and the once-luscious lips; along the gentle slope of her slumped shoulders down to her arms hanging limply by her sides. But it was her eyes that captured her attention. They stared back at her with the same indifference: one eyebrow minutely raised as if in mockery or as a challenge. The look in her eyes was dead. There were no other words for it. It was pure and utter blankness.

They say it happens when you wander too long in your own subconscious mind.

II

"We're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad."

"How do you know I'm mad?" said Alice.

"You must be," said the Cat, "or you wouldn't have come here."

III

Mad - em. ay. dee.

M.A.D, as in:

Morbidity – the batshit crazy cat lover who was so poor she couldn’t even feed herself. She carves out chunks of her thighs for her hungry cats.

Agony – the sweet twin sister of suffering. She is forged in the womb of humanity and born from the marrows of desire. She is the blood pumping through our veins and the breath we hold in our lungs.

Despair – the poison that spreads through your mind like the Black Death. It ravages your soul and eats up your hopes and your dreams. And when you’re cold and dead and gone, it will shit on your corpse and dance on your grave. 


Madness. The satire of humanity. 

Secrets to the Grave

I'm scared of dying because I don't want the doctors to perform an autopsy on me. I don't want random strangers to cut me open where I've so skillfully hidden my secrets. I don't want people to see my charcoal heart, where lies and flaws left their indelible stains. I don't want them to see my shriveled lungs, where I've stopped breathing years ago. I don't want people to see the gruesome contents of my stomach, where all the words and thoughts and feelings I've swallowed rotted away over the years. I would rather have insects and maggots eat me away and have my secrets seep through the soil of the silent earth. I would rather not die at all.

Dear You,

There was once a girl who spent so much time building castles and worlds and perennial universes;
her arms are islands and her feet are mountains.
The wind is her breath and the ocean her blood but at the same time, she is the island and the mountain, the wind and the ocean.
She is not here, or there, or anywhere but she is everywhere.

She spent nights trying to find her voice. She had it once, long, long ago. But the only memory she had of it is vague and unintelligible; she couldn't even recognize it.
So now she goes around knocking from mouth to mouth, trying to retrieve her lost voice.

She's a dreamer but such a strong one. Hurricanes that would leave her devastated come and go. New hearts are drawn over old, smudged and crossed out ones.
Torn seams and lost faith are stitched back onto her soul.
Her teardrops are the infinitesimal stars in the sky. She who dreamed and dream still of love.

On Feelings

I would like to write a book solely on feelings. I want to document and categorize every feeling known to man. I want to untangle the intricate and complex feelings and translate them into words. I want to catch the stray ghosts of feelings and inject into them a magic chemical that would make them solid and preserve them in formaldehyde. I want to tape them in my scrapbook of feelings and label every one of them. Then I will be named Prof. of Feeltology and win a Nobel prize for my amazing discovery.

The Masked Girl

It has become a routine that has to be done daily - a ritual, almost. She stands in front of the floor-to-ceiling mirror with a basin of water in one hand and a small towel in another. She forces herself to look into the mirror and suppresses the disgust and utter horror as she wets the towel and dabs at her face (if it can still pass as a face).

The softness of the towel on her skin is delicious. Slowly, gently and with a deftness that could only hint at regularity, she removes the flakes of skin from her purulent flesh. The pinkish, raw sinewy muscles on her face contracts when she opens her mouth. The foul-smelling pus that flows down her throat is carefully cleaned.

She lifts up a rubber mask from her dresser and puts it on, careful to secure the edges. Make-up is applied to make her face more realistic, more natural. At best, she looked as though she had had a bad plastic surgery, at worst the bleeding is too heavy to put on a fake face at all. She looks at herself proudly, admiring the face that her own hands had produced.

He wouldn't recognize her now. No, she had been beautiful once and he had been the devil. If she had known better she wouldn't have made the deal with him but he had been so charming, so alluring. Let me love you and let me be with you and I'll give you anything. Anything. Well, he did. He let her love him and let her be with him and he wanted her face.

But you know what they say, a deal's a deal and he got her goddamned face. She hopes he does it justice. Pretty faces are hard to come by, after all.

When Love Dies

"It's a stillborn," the doctor says, mopping his brows with a spotted kerchief. "I'm sorry." And he genuinely does seem so.

We would not look at each other. Instead, we fixed our eyes at the mass of bloody flesh in my hands, in our hands. I am looking at it with all my remaining energy, as if I could electric-shock it into living and pulsing again, as if we did not feel the wet coldness seeping through our fingers. It is stiff already, our dead love, rotting and decaying away in our hands until it finally disintegrates. Now it is just my hand in his, the drying blood the sole indication that we had any love between us at all.

At night we sleep together one last time, his knees fitting in the back of mine and his chest cushioning my back. We are both trembling and sobbing quietly, because we know, know with absolute and uncanny certainty that a single escaped cry would break us down and tear us apart. My hair is soaked with his tears.

It is no use trying again. How many loves have we revived only to lose them in the end? How many times have I felt the doctor's shiny scalpel slit through the thin skin of my chest, only to remove my gasping love, deformed and grotesque, as it is? How many times have he dug the graves to bury our loves?

No more.

No more.

Advice for February:

Be nice to people this month. Smile, but take care to ensconce your sharp, jagged teeth. Laugh kindly at people's jokes, but do not spout blood. Speak softly, as to not wake the slumbering demon in the confines of your mind. Ignore your belly, you do not want to eat humans. Keep your hands occupied, try not to pull out your nails when you're nervous. Lock your heart in a jar, it had never been a good influence. Bathe in formaldehyde everyday, or you will be plagued by gnats and maggots. Do not go near the animals, they will shriek and hiss. Eat with a fork and a knife, but do not concentrate too much on the knife - or the fork too for that matter (you don't want to kill somebody). Finally, look into others' eyes with loving kindness and do not let the insanity show.

The Girl Who Had Maggots

Once upon a time, there lived a girl who was in love. And when her love died, she had him encased in the concourse of her mind and would not let him go. Soon, the corpse began to fester and maggots infested her mind. 

The maggots originated from the soft tissues of her brain. Slowly, leisurely, they ate her brain as she slept. And sleep she did often. When she cried the maggots wriggled out from the corner of her eyes and slid down her cheeks. Still, she did not notice the maggots because they were clever: they took turns eating her brain so that she felt nothing. But they were breeding now, and the maggot babies were hard to control. They cried and they wanted more.

One day, she woke up with a spitting headache and was left with no choice but to call the doctor. The doctor came and felt her head and pronounced that a surgery was to be taken place immediately. She consented. And when the doctor had her head cut open, the maggots came squirming and writhing out, their pale white bodies intertwined like lovers'. The doctor gently wiped away the maggots to reveal a moiety of brain left.

The girl died. And so did the maggots.

Tomorrow

Soo... I've been studying today and I sort of panicked when I realised that I've not studied for English at all. So I went online to search for past year essay questions and voila! Year 2007, Question 5, Title: Tomorrow. Tell me what you think about it. =)
______________________________________________________________________

As she lay amidst the rubbles with the dusty air coating the insides of her throat, all she could think about is a song by ‘A Chorus Line’. It starts with “kiss the day goodbye, the sweetness and the sorrows…"

Because that is why it is so dark in here, isn’t it? It is the end of a day and tomorrow… tomorrow she’ll be free. Someone will have found her by then.

The feel of the cool wood beneath her bare feet, the smell of a freshly painted stage, the mild sting of the harsh stage light on her eyes as she struggles to adjust her vision… Her head swims in the ocean of audiences before her, soaking in the light of admiration, the sweet luscious words of endless compliments. Her fingertips brushes the soft fabric of her immaculate satin gown – she is the Wicked Witch of the West today, and tomorrow she will be Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the day after tomorrow she will be Wendla in Spring Awakening.

The piano starts and the flurry of crystalline notes fall like snowflakes on the pavement. Out of the silence there leapt these perfectly formed and discrete notes, these multitude of cascading sounds that clash together magically, miraculously in harmony. She could close her eyes and soak the music into her soul; she wants to eat up the glissandos, she wants to lick clean the gorgeous throbbing arpeggios. But handsome, blue-eyed Alex is singing to her - in the guise of Fiyero he is declaring his love.  Her mouth parts on its own accord and out pours forth a current of lyrical melody, so sweet, so smooth and so infinitely enthralling that she herself is caught by surprise.

The duet ends and as Alex kisses her forehead the lights dimmed until she is lying in the darkness again. The excruciating pain that shoots up her left leg is over and numbness has taken its place. She is still there under the debris, buried deep in crumbling concrete.  Tomorrow, she promises herself, tomorrow everything will be well again. She will be saved, and the dream of singing in Broadway will never again appear as a figment of her imagination.

Tomorrow she will be Wendla, and Alex, her Melchior. And together, they will sing and dance in their secret meadow. She could feel his large, warm hand on the small of her back and on her neck as their souls are joined in the union of voices. Wendla will not die in Spring Awakening tomorrow, and Melchior will not suffer the loss of his heart. They will be together forever and ever and ever, for endless tomorrows.

With that thought her mind went black and she never had another thought again. It is the dawn of the morrow and she is dead, taking with her the death of her dreams. The world will never see her again, as Elphaba or Ophelia or Imogen or her personal favourite, Wendla. Alex will suffer the same fate as Melchior, but eventually someone else will take her place as Wendla. Someone else will take her place in Alex’s heart and the world will be right again. The pain of the family grieving for their loved ones who died in the bombing will ease with time. Their memories would fade. The world still rotates on its axis and the tomorrows will still come.

“Kiss the day goodbye, and point me towards tomorrow…”

Her Love Story

Lying at the bottom of a lake, where the sunlight is too weak to penetrate, where she is shrouded in complete darkness, she longs to be remembered. 

She feels safe in the heart of the lake. The gentle current nudges her but she is tangled in seaweeds, her hair is caught in the rocks and she remains where she had sunk. In the blessed darkness, in the water-clogged silence, she can finally sleep for a millennium of nights. Everything seems so slow and far away where she is. The water swirls in a drugged sluggishness, cradling her the way her mother never did. 

She wonders about him up above - it seems so distant and so otherworldly. She wonders if he would remember her years from now. The girl who drowned. It sounds so romantic, so tragically beautiful that she almost want to drown again. The feel of water rushing into her lungs, filling her up, squeezing the emptiness out of her soul... 

She longs to be remembered through stories told; how she had been forced to swallow her fears, her voice and finally her love. The stories are bubbling inside of her, threatening to spill. If she opens her mouth it would all come tumbling out: black and viscous, putrid and repugnant. It would pour from her; from her mouth and her eyes and her ears until she is flaccid and depleted. 

Lying at the bottom of the lake she muses about the greatest love stories ever written: of Romeo and Juliet and Cleopatra and Mark Antony. He loved her and she loved him. And now that she's dead, her's will be a love story amongst star-crossed lovers. 

Please Love Me

It seems that I've gotten used to loving you without having you around. Those bitter days spent longing for you: for your chin resting on top of my head, for your fingers interlaced with mine, for your arm draped around my shoulder; those days are stacked in the darkest corner of my subconscious mind.

Once a while on a rainy day I leaf through the yearnings, the pangs of desire that arched my body and stole my soul - because that's what you do to me. Science proved that when a star dies it forms a black hole that sucks everything, even light into its abysmal void. And that's what your absence is like - a black hole, sucking my innards and my soul, even the light of my life into an event horizon. It sucks and pulls and pulls and sucks until I lie as empty as a shell.

Even if I tried to forget you, even if I have you incarcerated in the dustiest room of my mind, you would've seeped between cracks under doors and through keyholes. And as though in revenge you would've haunted me night and day, with your face imprinted on the back of my lids, so that even in sleep I dreamt of you.

And I would've hated myself for being willing to continue loving you in misery, just for the smallest chance that you would love me too.

Air

They say that she would never wake again. She lies perfectly still on the bed, arms demurely set on both of her sides, eyes gently closed. She drifts in and out of consciousness, and she listens.

The men and women, they whisper - yet they couldn't have spoken much louder. The hiss of breath that escapes from the gaps of their teeth as they whisper, the brush of fabric on naked skin as they unconsciously shift their position; all these are aberrantly loud to her. As though she is the air that occupies the room. The constant beeping of the monitor pulsates through her, she could dance a jig to the rhythm, yet she couldn't feel it. She wanted to touch it - her heart - but she couldn't find it. 

Air. She could be the air. She tests the notion in her head. She would be everywhere then. She could diffuse through the tiniest pore, she could inhabit him. She could occupy his mouth, fill his mouth with her and only her. She could slip through his shirt, lie on his chest as he sleeps. She could breathe on him, she could lick him, she could squeeze him with all her might and he would not have noticed. 

Her dreams then, would have come true: she had always wanted to be just like Ariel, the little mermaid. Only instead of becoming a mermaid, she becomes air.

They Would Never Know

He woke up crying that day. It was a full-blown sobbing spell, the kind that burned the back of your throat and ripped your lungs apart. It had been 40 years since he had cried the exact same way, the heart-wrenching weeping that would've been too ugly in reality but would be perfectly complacent when submitted to words.

He had thought that he was too old, too wise for the ardent feelings that young people seem to display these days. He had himself fooled that she was completely obliterated from his mind, that he wouldn't know her even if he saw her again. 

And yet, there she was, standing by the window with her back to him. He saw her again, with the halo on her golden hair and a mole on her neck. He wanted to touch it, kiss it.  Are you an angel? She was in his class, and he nearly flunked the first semester having spent every lecture staring at her. 

Then, miraculously then, she talked to him. She let him hold her hand when they took long walks to the city, where he lived. She let him kiss her, hesitantly at first, the brushing of lips. When she agreed to marry him he felt like dragging her to the nearest church and have the priest marry them immediately. 

There was a fight. It was stupid, really. But they were proud. Relentless. She wouldn't look at him, wouldn't listen. He was terrified by the look in her eyes, such cold animosity. Cry, yell, wring your arms, anything but standing there, watching me with those hard, unforgiving eyes. And in his fear he sought out to be stubbornly unyielding, the same frosty mist clouding over his eyes to shield the fear. 

He walked away. 

He would never know that she would have ran towards him - had he showed the slightest hint that he still loved her - arms flung open to embrace him in her bosom, to repeat the word I'm sorry over and over again until he silence her with a kiss. He would never know that she prayed so hard for him to just stop walking away from her and turn back, that her whole body shook with the ferocity. 

He would never know that she did not remarry, and she would never know that neither did he. And they never knew that it would be the last time they would see each other ever again. 

The Death of Beksinski

There were days when he could not get out of bed; when he wallowed in his week-old pyjamas, slept in grease and sweat. But who was there to witness his disgrace? He was alone in the studio, surrounded by paintings, sculptures, all by his own hands. They were never judgemental in their gaze - perhaps they were too lost in their own grief, in their own torment that they did not notice. Perhaps they adored him the way children adores their parents.

He wanted to hold a congregation to prove that the old cliché, that every cloud has a silver lining was total bullshit. His son had committed suicide a year after his wife's death. Could people have misinterpreted the message of this cliché? Could it be that the silver lining was originally meant as a strike of lightning that does further damage rather than the equivalent of a rainbow? He had so many questions, so many God damned questions that even God himself could not have answered.

When he painted he created life. He painted skeletons and death and gore but it pulsated with life. He felt the pain in his deformed figures, throbbing in sync with his heart and he wanted to tell the man in his painting, I hear you, I know how you feel.

Often he lost himself in his painting, in the furious stroke of brush, as if he was uncovering rather than painting. He was an archaeologist, removing centuries of dust and sand to reveal pulchritude. He was an anatomist, detailing each human bone with care. He was a murderer, tearing skin off his shrieking victims, watching the blood gush vibrantly red from the wounds.

Life is ironic this way. He was suicidal, manically depressed for most of the time in the duration of six years after his son's death. In the year 2005, he was found dead in his apartment. He was not a victim of suicide, rather, he was stabbed to death with 17 stab wounds.

If he had committed suicide before the incident, would he have died a far more pleasant death? Would he have died peacefully in his sleep after swallowing some pills? Did the thought perhaps flash across his mind as the murderer stabbed him, continuously for seventeen times? Or was he afraid that his blood would splatter across his paintings and ruin them?

It's funny how we sometimes reach our desired destination but with an alternate, less preferred mean of getting there. If he had known that, would he have wished to live instead? Or would he have complied with what fate has in store for him, seeing the pain only as a collateral cost in order to achieve the eternal peace? Was he certain that he would've rejoined his family after his death? Did he have any doubt that he could've been stranded in a void, utterly alone, bodiless, cold, cold to the very core? Or was he just tired of the world, tired of being lonely?

I have so many God damned questions, so many that God himself could not have answered.

The Fear

The fear is a caged beast, it hibernates at the best of times, warm and snug in its cozy den, buried deeply so that it is out of sight, and thus out of mind. At unfortunate times it wakes, ravenous and voracious, and its hunger seemed insatiable.

It opens its black mouth; putrid, malodorous. The fear swallows all. It swallows the fragile hope, who is desperately clinging for dear life to the edge of consciousness. It swallows warmth, laughter, glee and tramples over the rainbows, until they lie on the ground, barely alive, like butterflies with broken wings.

The world is dark again, for the beast has drowned the sun. The sun lies at the bottom of the ocean, grey and bloated, and the fish consume its flesh. At night, the beast drain the moon of her flux of silver and drink the elixir; emerging more pernicious and malevolent as ever. It is starving, and it cannot stop.

There are screams everywhere. The earth vibrates with the screaming. It subdues the fear for a while, but it immunes itself against it. It feeds on the screams, sucking and sucking the waves of voices until there is silence. I claw at my face like the man in Edvard Munch's Skrik, eyes wide as saucers, mouth a perfect 'O' and no sound issues forth. I am locked in time, screaming and scratching and forever silenced. 

The beast does not feel remorseful; it does not feel the rage as it tear apart the lakes, nor does it feel the euphoria that is often acquainted with insanity, at the carnage it has committed. It is what it is – a beast. And it feels nothing.

French Champagne

To: Armand. And Rachel.

Lying on crumpled, broken wings... a drunken mess in the midst of a city that never sleeps. The stagnant air smelled of spilt champagne and cigarettes. What sort of god would have allowed the devil himself to creep into the room of his faithful follower as he slept? I don’t know how long I watched from the shadows... not daring to make a sound lest I disturb his peaceful slumber. The minutes ticked by... painfully slow as I approached the bedside, gazing down upon his face for the very first time. 

He was just as beautiful as I had imagined... this fallen angel.

His eyelids fluttered and a low, incoherent mummer escaped his full lips. I reached down to remove the half empty bottle that leaned against his chest, setting it quietly on the floor beside the bed as I moved to sit beside him. Dark hair spilled over the sweat soaked pillows and his head turned ever so slightly to one side granting me a perfect view of the vein that pulsed just beneath the taut skin of his throat. I leaned closer... drawn in by the heat of this mortal body so near to me. It would have been so easy.

My face was so very near to his that I had to fight back the urge to wake him... to jolt him out of his sleep for the sheer satisfaction of seeing the fear in his eyes when he realised that his personal demon had sought him out and that this perfect predator had been victorious in the first round of this dangerous game we played. 


Instead, I lowered my lips until it touched his smooth, white neck; the blood throbbing in his vein almost palpable and let my fangs pierce a little hole into the perfect skin. Champagne and more champagne, the lovely bubbles and sweet, sweet delight. But I didn't plan on sucking him dry - not tonight.

Bold with my own devious little victory, I brushed my lips lightly over his. He tasted of defeat and expensive French champagne. His lips parted and he moaned softly as my fingers moved through his thick hair. I wondered if my gentle touch had stirred dreams of some lover from the past. Those very same pale, musician's fingers could have crushed his skull if I so desired. 

I wished to whisper into his ear, voice so low it could've been his imagination, that the Devil isn’t real. That horned demon that tormented him as he slept is nothing more than a figment of a demented imagination. The hell he feared existed only within the boundaries of his own mind. I am the Prince of Darkness. There is no greater evil than that which I have shown him.

"Enjoy your bed of cold, damp stone, my love. And take comfort in the knowledge that the only creature out to steal your soul has already had a taste of it."

Burning Sea

He had the face of an angel. Yet I saw crypts when I looked at him, and I heard the beat of kettledrums. I saw torchlit fields where I had never been, heard vague incantations, felt the heat of raging fire on my face. And they didn't come out of him, these visions. Rather I drew them out on my own. 

The anguish was almost palpable in the screeching of the violin. He slashed the strings of the violin with wild, violent strokes and it seemed as if  it was screaming in pain. He ripped into the song, he tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed and he seemed to lean his whole body into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. And yet, above the tormented screeches of the wooden thing, there existed a kind of beauty. 

It is the kind of beauty you see in the red of the blood. Sometimes, you see a gash on a dying man's throat and you are mesmerised by the rich, velvety blood flowing out of the hideous wound. You secretly think how similar the colour of blood is to the colour of a deliciously red goblet of burgundy. 

I see it in his eyes. I could see that he was sorely tempted by the dancing flames and I watch their ethereal movements from the reflection in his eyes. He longed for their feisty tongue to lick him into dust and ashes. 

Sometimes, it was as if when I looked into his eyes I was standing alone on the edge of the world... on a windswept ocean beach. There was nothing but the soft roar of the waves and the soft, white sand beneath our feet. When I look into his eyes now, all I see is an ocean of raging fire, ready to consume anything and leave no trace of the person behind.

I guess this is the good part of it, being burnt to nothing; this way, you are saved from the inevitable humiliation of a horrible, decaying corpse. And I wonder if this is what everything, to him is about. 

The Mary Celeste Massacre

Lady Beatrice was devastated when she heard the news. A month ago her only son had boarded the HMS Mary Celeste, one of the grandest ships her sleepy town had ever seen.

One morning, Lady Beatrice was out gardening and was surprised when a boy came running to her breathlessly. "The ship, ma'am..." he gasped. "They... they found the HMS Mary Celeste near the port..." She immediately set off for the port while the poor boy was still catching his breath. They found the HMS Mary Celeste. Found? What did he mean by "found"? 

A motley crowd was already gathering near the port and Lady Beatrice squeezed through the crowd with difficulty. Apparently, everyone on board was found dead and the ship had simply drifted back to the port. The bodies had already started decomposing and it was concluded that they were dead for at least two weeks.

That night, Lady Beatrice sat on a cliff overlooking the port. The moon shone down and the ship lurked in the dark almost sinisterly.

"You killed Matthew and everyone on the ship, didn't you?" Someone behind her said. "I saw you that night, sprinkling poison into the tea leaves and I didn't know you were planning on murdering them!"

Lady Beatrice turned around slowly and found herself staring at her son's sobbing fiancee. "Stop this nonsense and come closer, child. Let me see you clearly." Catherine stepped forward into the light reluctantly and screamed when she was suddenly pushed over the cliff.

"My Matthew was a good boy," Lady Beatrice whispered to herself, tears glinting in the moonlight. "He was a decent boy until he wanted to become part of the crew and leave his mother alone in this godforsaken town. I just want to be with my little boy... Forever..." She peered downwards at the crashing waves for a moment and jumped.

I'll always be with you, my Matthew...