*author's note: This story was originally me trying to write a piece of prose and it kind of grew like kudzu so, here we are. If you can't tell this is a feminist retake on the Adam and Eve story in which Azrael is a god/organized religion/male establishment-figure, wanting to keep Eve in the dark away from her power, her friend is the serpent, revealing her position of powerless acceptance of abuse, the apple is self-actualization and empowerment, and Kiran is the new Adam, accepting her power and loving her for it. I mean no disrespect to any Christians out there; I just took an idea form the Bible and moved it around. The italics imply a flashback.*
A girl runs down a hallway, her feet sounding against the worn wood like so many falling apples. Her hair flies like sinful doves around her face. She is running from nothing. But, at the same time she is running from everything. Or maybe she is running towards something. She doesn't know anymore. She thinks she may have once, but that was a long time ago.
The end of the hallway is nearing, a solid door leading to a courtyard. She knows she should slow down, she should open the door so she can keep running, but her feet increase their harvest time tempo. She feels like the fabled unstoppable force. She wants to stop, or she wants to want to stop, but she can't, or she doesn't. Whatever the case, she slams into the firmly closed door and slumps down nursing her now aching shoulder.
Guess she wasn't so unstoppable.
Now the tears come. The tears that probably should have been there hours, days, months ago now stream down her cheeks under the mask of a bruised shoulder. They mingle with her sweat and the blood from a bite she inflicted on her lip as she fell to form a sticky salty metallic coat on her parched tongue.
She hasn't had anything to drink in over a day, and nothing to eat in longer. She hasn't wanted to eat, wanted to move, wanted to breathe. But she had kept on breathing. And now she has to keep on moving. She has to keep running. But for now she sits on the floor with her back to a door with an aching shoulder and a shell shocked heart.
She's thinking of the past weeks, of how everything went from glorious to horrific in a matter of hours, or so it seemed. She had had it all, a home, a new sense of self, a boyfriend, a wonderful friend, a will to live and to love.
And now it was all gone. She didn't know who she was anymore.
She had gotten this boyfriend. His name was Azrael and he was perfect, tall and golden and lithe with poetry in his pale eyes. He gave her a new identity. He called her his angel, his Goddess, his Muse. He would hold her in his arms and sing into her hair.
But then, on other days, he would ignore her to write cramped scribbled pages in a battered notebook she was never to touch. Those were the days when she would sit quietly at his feet like a kitten until he looked down at her. Then she could crawl into his lap to breathe kisses onto his temples. Then she could be his Angel, his Goddess, his Muse.
But the days when he would hold her and sing grew less frequent, and the days of waiting changed. Sometimes he would never look down. Some days when he did it was only to shoo her away.
Some days it was to hurt her. He would grab her wrist so that she felt the tiny bones move together like beads. He would yank her up so she was standing awkwardly close to the anger in his eyes. He would shake her and curl his cherubim lips when her eyes grew wide with fright. Then he would shove her away from him and storm out. She would lie where she fell for hours like an abandoned fruit half devoured.
But then even that changed. He wouldn't stop with just the shaking. Sometimes she would be bleeding by the time he left, sometimes bruised. Sometimes she wouldn't even remember him leaving.
But there were still days when he would sing. And somehow those days were worth it all. Worth the anger, worth the waiting, worth the blood.
But her friend, her wonderful terrible friend came to see her one day. She arrived just minutes after he left. It had been an alright day as the days went, not a singing day, but not an unconscious day either. She had a bruise under her right eye and a split lip, but nothing else was visible yet. She had known she would have more tomorrow.
Her friend took one look and burst into tears.
"How can you let him do this to you?" she screamed again and again.
"I love him," she had mumbled through numb lips and the words fell from her bloody lips like rosary beads. Over and over again. Like a mantra of desperation.
That was when he had burst back into the room, searching for a misplaced pen. He looked at her friend and saw her tears, her rage. His eyes smoldered with mania.
"Rave…" she had murmured. "Azrael, she's fine, Azrael, she was just leaving."
But no, her friend hadn't been about to leave her there. Not with him. So her wonderful terrible friend had started yelling. She said horrible things, true things, hurt things. Azrael just stood there like a statue of a lion.
Then he pounced.
He had killed her. He had murdered her wonderful terrible friend with his fists and his old pocket knife.
When the police had found her she was covered in blood. Hers, his, her friend's all hopelessly mixed into a macabre masterpiece on her once white dress. She had killed him. She had finally fought back, avenging her friend and herself, with nails and teeth and bony fists and his stolen knife.
They told her a neighbor had heard a young woman screaming. They told her it would be ok. But none of them wanted to get too close to her. They were standing in a careful arch around the corner where she crouched, still holding the knife, still bloody, still numb. They were trying to ask her what happened, if she did it, when she did it why she did it. She hadn't heard their questions. She hadn't cared. She wanted to feel and she wanted to end. She had brought the knife down in a jagged sweep up the length of her forearm. A sharp warmth like adrenaline jetted through her veins.
Then they moved, grabbing her even before she had finished the motion.
She didn't remember much else after that. Disconnected scenes float through her mind of the hospital, the asylum, the doctors, the nurses.
She sighs where she sits leaned against the door. So much has happened in her short life.
She had gone from an Angel, a Goddess, a Muse to a victim, to a witness, to an avenger, to a suicidal, to a… something.
She traces the scar on her arm with a chewed finger nail. What is she now? A runaway? A survivor? She doesn't know. She feels like a broken pomegranate, all sweet juice spilling out and sharp dry pith exposed and a shattered husk of former perfect rose tinted beauty.
She does know that she needs out of this 'center for abused women,' or whatever they wanted to call it. It is a homeless shelter. And she isn't homeless.
So she rises to run again. All the way back to the crumbling apartment where she once almost caused three deaths.
On the way she feels like an unstoppable force again, as the wind drives shards of ice into her exposed face like cupid's arrows. She had been a runner in middle school, but had given it up for music in high school. Now she is a starving artist in Nashville, without a penny to her name.
She stops in front of her building and makes her way to her place. She thinks momentarily what a strange phrase that is, one's 'place," as though a person has no other place in the world other than their current address.
Still shallowly in thought, she stands on the very tips of her sandaled toes to reach the spare key on the top of the door frame.
She knows as soon as she walks in with her breath swirling incense before her like a Catholic priest that all her questions began and ended in this place. It isn't hers after all. It's his. It will always be Azrael's.
She looks at the peeling wallpaper and the worn floors. The wallpaper is a novel, each layer a chapter in this building's long story.
The floors sing of dancers, of high heel evenings, of barefoot summers, of cowboy boots and chucks, of a million footsteps, of a thousand days, of a hundred lives.
The last chapter is written on the walls of the living room in bold red letters. The blood is smeared like preschool paintings.
The last song creaks under her feet as she walks to run a shaking twig finger across the dried crimson.
She can feel him here, Azrael is here.
But not.
He can't hurt her now. She knows. But it doesn't stop the butterfly wing goose bumps or the lightness of her head. She can smell his warm dry feral skin and she can feel his desert wind rattle laugh in the bones of her ear, not a sound but an earthquake.
And her friend is here too. An intruder, yes, but here nonetheless. She can feel the tears hit the floorboards with rain beat rhythm and her angry cries still coiled in a beautiful dance with her death song. She can feel her wonderful terrible friend in the thrum of her blood.
An apple sits in mamba green glory on the coffee table like an artwork. She picks it up, bemused, knowing it wasn't here when she left.
It is a beautiful thing, perfect. The skin is taut and smooth and shining like well loved drum head. And it is more symmetrical than the Vitruvian man.
And she is hungry. She has been hungry for a long time. She never can manage to get enough to eat. She had been thin. And now she's gone past thin. She has a cat in her stomach and metal for teeth. She is starving. And this apple is so perfect.
She takes a bite. And it's an explosion.
She can smell the wilting roses on the mantle and the dust on the bookcase. She can feel the winter sun on her skin like weak tea on her tongue.
Her senses haven't been this good in months. Perhaps she has risen from her ashes. Though, she can't remember being burned.
Maybe she has changed.
She can see the wounds on her heart and the shadows in her mind. She can feel them like scars and cobwebs. And she can learn from them or brush them aside as she sees fit.
That night she puts on her leaf green dress, the vintage silk wrapped tight to her ribs and floating like wings from her hips. She wears her hair in waves of primal red lust around her painted face.
She goes out. At first she is wandering, weaving in between coffee houses and bars and recording studios and tiny boutiques. But then she sees the record store that she knew from her life before Azrael played Indian pop in the evenings and turned into a dance club right out of Bollywood. It used to be her favorite haunt. Maybe it could be again.
As she walks in a slight man with eyes like black cat fur and skin like teak wood and hair like velvet nearly trips into her. She catches his arm and smiles like the moon into waterfalls. He smiles back and he is refracting her light and her beauty into a thousand rainbows.
'Hi,' he breathes. He can feel himself falling like Superman. 'I'm Kiran. May I have this dance?' Her eyes are the sunlight and the dust motes and the fate threads he was named for and he is lost in them, lost to her. He holds his breath and prays to all the gods he knows for he has never dreamed he possessed such passion.
'Yes.' She says this so definitely, with such commitment, that her own voice, so long a whisper, sounds like a war cry.
'What is your name?' he asks shyly.
'I am Eve.'