P U R G E

guns, razors, knives


THERE'S A PLACE IN THE DARK WHERE THE ANIMALS GO. You can take off your skin in the cannibal glow. Juliet loves the beat and the lust it commands. Drop the dagger and lather the blood on your hands, Romeo.


Chilling . . . cruel and heartless, in the ruthless passions of love, lust, and war, so few know the taste of happiness, and yet they pass through Life unseen, unloved, and unheard. For every bruise there is an underlying kiss, and for every lie there hides a bitter truth. They say misery loves company, yet in the still of the night, on the soft of my bed, I find myself so very alone.

Between lust and repulsion, I tilt my lips with curious invitation. You are a mad man, and women, love that. Let me tell you, monsieur: for every 'no' you receive, you must be delivered a thousand 'yes.' Must you lure us with the silken warmth of your honeyed seed? Gush the gaping gasps from our glistening mouths at the sight of you bold and hard? Bait the bitch that

barks and bangs you, beautiful? Indeed, men fall wayward whim to the wanton invitations of women; to their wicked curves, their devouring mouths, their hungry lips, their promising warmth and curling tongues. Women idolized for their devastating beauty, their sweet sensuality, their provocative grace, and all the erotic secrets that shrines the sexual temple of their softly sinuous bodies. Paramours dreaming from a fevered bliss, lust is the devilish ache between your legs, the moaning heat on my hips. There is no place on your body I haven't kissed.

My love is restless. My heart is on fire. Burning beneath your touch, one taste of you is all that I desire. Your thirst is irresistibly refreshing, undeniably rejuvenating, wholeheartedly inviting, and dangerously impure. You are what I'm looking for. You are what I need. A predator. A murderer. A psychopathic hunter. I crave the electrifying thrill of dangerous seduction, the unadulterated devouring of a twilight feast—the wolves baying in the ravaged, moonlit distance to tease the shivering sweat from my sweet skin. Anything to fill this wretched hollow, this aching hunger, this harrowing pain that constantly consumes the nourishment from the miserable fever of my porcelain bones, that drives me up the wall with maddening insanity and sexual rage. If God ever showed me a more sweeter revelation; it was the chain of love that handcuffed me, to you.


THE STREET SALIVATES WITH RAIN .

The gale thickened as it wrapped violent winds about his form.

Each step was a witty cadence. Each subtle . . . ripple precision of strength coiled around his painting fingers, quietly screaming with vigor. He let a dissatisfied frown cut neatly through his features in a sudden, satirical spasm; waiting, waiting. Drawing the cigarette from his tangled fingers unto his lips, he softly chided.

He smokes to forget the recollections of the times when he was socially unacceptable; the times in which he mattered to no one (he might as well have been a pebble on the ground).

The door suddenly unhinged from the frame with a groan, and his lips twitched from their grimace and yielded into a satisfactory grin; a soothing cure that oft brought contagious expressions. It lacked the cruelty it held before, and permitted, but the smallest mercy of his dying "kindness":

Eyes feasting upon the enchanting female figure that danced so promiscuously before him.

With a lean shoulder up against the doorframe and a sexy feline swagger to her voluptuous hips, the feisty strawberry-blonde gave him a harsh look of seething femme fatale bemusement. Wrapped in a towel, her golden locks curled over her delicate collarbone, the fullness of her lips quivering into a harsh line of girlish disapproval just as everything had dawned on her at once.

he remembered this little Miss America, her venomous crooning and scathing animosity; raking fingers across his male flesh as she pulled a dagger to his neck and uttered a banshee's wildcat snarl

"don't disappear"

"do you always exchange pleasantries with knives out, darlin'"

Gin? What the fuck are you doing out? Her flippant voice fell to deaf ears as his male stare momentarily passed over her half-nude body; complemented . . . by dint of zesty fire, and pungent skin doused in Old World spice and war-paint, the bronzed harridan—ah, my shrewish woman, Xanthippe—saunters atop the luscious limbs of serpents, moving with the feral grace of a prowling puma; iridescent hips grinding, devastating sinew thrusting, sparking a wicked beacon of modern Carnality's erotica, and aphrodisiac desires. She is the dark Goddess of She'ol, embellishing a crafty gypsy's vivacity and flamboyant body talk—lurking Poseidon behind tarnished turquoise mirrors.

He swallowed quietly and swallowed hard. "And when I thought you could never become more beautiful, still you gain countenance."

Fuck you, came her silken mezzo-soprano drawl, hissed hotly. Foaming rabid with sickening-sweet rancor that slipped Death threats into his ears; this, the biting temper of a woman scorned. Oh dear, was he in trouble already?

"Darli—"

"Call me by any other name, and I shall dash the blood from your throat. I know what you are, Gin. You bring poison; and victims mistake your kiss for the cure." Rustling, thrilling golden pinions of unkempt, disheveled curls, feral, elongated fangs driving against the pale flesh of her cerise mouth, Rangiku vindictively tongued in wild, flaming aggression, and so profusely, her lips nearly bled in all her violent passion. Brazenly locking intense eyes with the menacingly sly Duke as he flaunted the grotesque glory of his sadistic splendour, her porcelain gaze tilted askance, stoic and stone-cold in their rapacious hunger; a delicate and calculating gesture . . . so feline in predatory allure.

He is volatile, chaotic; everything that makes one pause and consider, why? And anything done on impulse, the cheap adrenaline thrills of Life and Death. Dusty romances, decay, things that have survived the onward march of time; wilted flowers and mayflies and anything ephemeral, fleeting, innocent only in their temporary status. Brutality and tenderness, nature's dog attack on a lengthy leash, deceived hopes and the let-downs of others—how he adores letting down others. Cacophony and dying cries, last words with meaning, last words without meaning. Familial strife and broken knives. The catalyst when things fall apart; continents or governments or someone's composure. Futile efforts, the struggles of his victims, the inevitability of their deaths and watching them come to terms with that fact. All the things commonly feared, all things considered anathema to sensible people: the repulsive, the tumultuous, the monsters of society. The silence after a death rattle. Every villain at work, anyone doing what they do best—providing that's torture, murder, chaos, his favorite words, a lexicon of hate. He is the cause. He is the glory. He is the beauty of the breakdown, the slow decay of coherence and morals, the inevitable backslide into Original Sin.

She wasn't much of an angel, either.

"My dear, our last meeting was less than kind," he murmured solemnly—fucking hypnotic snake—and crossed to her, and took her hand and kissed it:

"Allow me to apologize."

She watched his face as his mouth moved to speak, meaningless words that slipped like toxic smoke through the damp, sultry air between them. She watched that Devil's smile.

Displeased.

The Cheshire smile has become something of a cliché; like a photo negative on one's eyelids, the image of his toothy grin remains long after the cat, itself, has gone. The same is true of an encounter with Gin, from the labyrinthine complexities of his remarks, to the feeling of having been made a fool of that lingers after his departure. And yet, he spurns the cliché: his comments probe and provoke and offer no insight into one's own life, no illuminated path from the horrors of the conscious. He thrives on the discontent of others and ensures its continuation with a few pointed statements. Entering into conversation with him, this poetic Victorian bastard, is a dangerous task: attempting to delve into his psyche would doubtlessly, and invariably, prove fatal. Some things are better left hidden from the world, black pearls secreted from the shattered remains of Pandora's box. Some things are so dark as to annihilate light. Nurtured by hatred, schooled in the cruelest corners of She'ol's vast kingdom, and cloaked in the shadow of his own arrogant enigma, it is no surprise that Gin has embraced his apocalyptic destiny with open arms—his Life has all of the required ingredients to produce a monster. And indeed, he has become the perfect villain. His outward calm—marred only and occasionally by victorious snarls or vicious sneers, expressive Roman lips curling to emphasize his ease—betrays little of his inner turmoil. Conflict resides within him, devouring whatever tender heart he may (doubtfully) once have possessed. Stuck forever in second place, he strains against the bit with teeth bared and claws out, the archetypal monster beneath the bed. Confident and passionate, capricious and charismatic, Shakespearean language like gunfire from between the pearly crescents of his teeth. He is really nothing more than a tempest in a bottle. His composure is a glass facade for the violent nature beneath, transparent to the discriminating eye, and he makes, but a feeble effort, to veil his vices. Man and beast, a fox in more than name alone, one can neither justify, nor rationalize, the actions of a mad man. The modern Hamlet, grimly baroque in his murderous schemes: slitting necks, one petty crime at a time.

Hissing a woman's dismayed incentive, her carnal purr deliriously touched the hard length of the man's toned shoulder-blades, as with arachnid grace, she, too, cautiously circled the ravishing beauty of his tall, athletic form; the scarlet lulling injection of her impassioned voice discreet in their voracious allure, while softer fingertips touched so carefully, painted the lines of his handsome face; tracing dulcet feel against the smooth contours of his chiseled jawbone, while long, drumming talons swept their elegant obsidian nails gently over the fullness of his lips in a ghost of a kiss. You smell of cigarettes, bourbon and whiskey.

A man who likes to gamble with bullets and romance, indeed. "M'love," she began softly, her seductive voice scarce above an amorous whisper, leaning closer in a gentle gesture, she continued huskily, deliciously, dangerously. "You make me a very, very miserable woman."

Crucified in your impassioned embrace, there is no escape to a man's hungry obsessions. Much to his painful unwillingness, he gently pried himself from her heated kiss (an unstated need and thirst for desire): "Come, let's not dally with such trivial matters. Pour me a glass of champagne, and let's skip to dessert." My dearest, if I could pin you against the wall now and have my way with you, I'd get a taste of Heaven. Putting out his cigarette on the wet cement, he stepped inside the threshold of Rangiku's home—with her consent, of course. It was quieter inside, and far warmer.

No longer, was she compassion incarnate, with a virtuousness that had infuriated iniquitous onlookers; the naïve, thoughtful woman of the large eyes and sensitive mouth that had expressed her caring nature so quickly and unmistakablyher pleasure at sudden acts of kindness and her displeasure at deliberate cruelty. No longer, was she the mere dancing-girl (a babylon's maiden whore) who extorted a cry of lust and concupiscence from strange men by the lascivious contortions of her body; who breaks the will; masters the mind of a King . . . by the spectacle of her quivering bosoms, taut belly and tossing thighs; she was now revealed, in a sense, as the symbolic incarnation of world-old Vice, the sensual goddess of immortal Hysteria, the Curse of Beauty supreme above all other beauties by the cataleptic spasm that stirs her flesh and steels her musclesa monstrous Beast of the Apocalypse; indifferent, irresponsible, insatiable, insensible, inscrutable, poisoning.

Poisoning indeed, this black magic woman, Gin laughed almost silently and deliberately.

"Sit, stay, and look pretty." Rangiku fastened a wicked smile, flitting to the kitchen.

Don't struggle like that or I will only love you more. For it's much too late to get away or turn on the lights. How easy would it be to abuse the expected? To bend against the thoughts that hold you on hallowed ground, set you in place for a timeless course? What if I did just what you didn't want me to do, to find that you desired it all along? To suffer your inevitable uncertainties, your ruthless, flighty behavior that drives nerves to the end of their brinks, rattling the chains with anguished pleas for mercy. To turn it all around and relish it with a delicious knife, to devour all I see. All I want. All I have. All I need. Everything I encounter, all swallowed down with an envious lust, now, now, and now. I can't wait until tomorrow. I can't wait the next hour. My patience is a ticking bomb, and you're in my chaotic path. Your best chance is to clutch tight and close your eyes, because you've pushed too hard, too far. I could only take so much, so much a burden until I would crack underneath the pressure. And I'll tell you, the turmoil is all the more sweeter. I'm going to be the one to say I told you so. "Remember me?" I breathe against your mirror, press the fragments of your cracked skin and let my nails emboss the outline of your features with an artist's deft touch. Don't shake your head, don't try to hide. Kick and scream and bite and scratch, the blood is only all the more fiercer. Let the razor kiss deep, far, and true. "You better." Threat like a shot in the dark, caressing those eyes and writhing beneath the anxiety of our past grievances. Dysfunction like a candy to my lips, bleeding sweet, luscious delicacy in my mouth, pouring from the cracks by your beautiful cry of a dying moan. Probing fears with ineluctable perseverance, stirring hatred with the sinuous extent of my skill. It will all become familiar to you and you will drown in it, choke on it, driven to the edge by the matched grace of your own sins. I call out from a distance. Watch. Listen. Die, die, die, my darling. Burn faster, you are so much prettier when you're afraid. "Yes, darlin'."


THE UNIVERSE IS HOSTILE, SO IMPERSONAL. Devour to survive. So it is, so it's always been.


AUTHOR'S BLAH:

Yes, yes, yes. Because I didn't explain the summary in the [former], I'll just have to say that this is a "vampir-istic" story. Yeah, I'm sick of Twilight, too. I couldn't think of anything original.

READER'S BLAH:

N/A

JUKEBOX:

My Own Summer (Shove It) - Deftones ["hey you, big star, tell me when it's over"]

You've Seen The Butcher - Deftones ["i wanna watch the way, you creep across my skull"]

Rev. 22:22 - Puscifer ["and you would, too, if the sexy devil caught your eye"]

Schism - TOOL ["the light that fueled our fire then has burned a hole between us, so"]

The Package - A Perfect Circle ["nod and watch your lips move, if you need me to pretend"]

R&R

- S.M.