philophobia: a fear of falling in love
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Art Baker had learned that you could do a lot of things with money. Even bring back the dead. Not literally, of course, but close enough for a delusional, half-dead product of a life of poverty.
Money could buy you houses, Baker had bought a huge one, with what seemed like thousands of rooms (or perhaps he just had forgotten where he'd gone and hadn't gone before.) More rooms than he would ever need.
The only one he really needed was the gigantic, empty parlor coated in blankets of dust and filled with what seemed like small, velvety benches.
That room was where he kept the corpses.
It had started out as a habit, a sort of a collection. Like the way people collected dead butterflies and shoved pins through their abdomens and hung them in little glass boxes on re walls. It wasn't much different with people, really. He was just collecting. And besides, his corpses had meaning to him, unlike butterfly collectors' squashed, decaying butterflies.
Baker gently removed the burgundy velvet covering of one, coughing slightly in the cloud of dust that rose up around him. He'd made sure that each and every one of them got perfect treatment, lying in their glass coffins surrounded by fresh flowers. He smiled to himself, pulling the lid of the coffin open and looking down at the boy inside.
"Good morning, Barkovitch." Baker reached down and tucked a bit of hair behind Barkovitch's ear. "You don't look so well this morning." He stroked Barkovitch's cold cheek, moving to straighten the dead boy into a sitting position. This was his Prize. The corpse of every one of the musketeers, and Barkovitch. All nice and cleaned up, of course, with the appropriate surgeries performed on their broken bones and torn up skins.
Almost as though they were alive again.
It was funny, how Barkovitch had been everybody's bitter enemy in the Walk, always yelling and insolent. And now he had been silenced completely, sentenced to complete and other peace. Baker vaguely wondered whether Barkovitch felt bliss in his last moments.
"It's alright. They can't hate you anymore," Baker cooed, leaning over to plant a kiss on Barkovitch's lips. They were always cold and dry and somehow welcoming, because Barkovitch never kissed back like his first and only girlfriend had in school.
Her name had been Eden Thatcher and she'd never really loved him. She'd stuck her tongue into his mouth and whispered sweet nothings but her eyes had always been open when she kissed him, and he knew that she only wanted to make him squirm and get the pleasure out of making him want her more than she wanted him.
Baker sighed and pulled a rose out from the bed of flowers he'd laid Barkovitch on and gently pricked his forearm with it, softly dragging the point along his skin and watching the scarlet drip from the wounds with a sick fascination. Barkovitch loved him. He knew that he was dead, and Baker was alive, but that didn't matter. Dead people were the only ones worth feeling anything at all for. They couldn't hurt you. They knew nothing of money or fame or questions or life. They just smiled back at you and let you kiss them and didn't say a word.
He leaned down and gave Barkovitch another kiss, this time a wet, sloppy one to contrast with the dry coldness of the other boy's mouth. When he closed the coffin and slammed the door to the parlor shut, the wound on his arm still dribbled a trail of blood across the carpet.
a larmed yelling i do not know why i wrote this and if you're now completely grossed out and never want to speak to me again im so sorry