"I traded in my hope for a hangover and a headache. I'm contemplating rope, but can't tie knots that great."
The door to The Asylum jerked open. A man stepped through, immediately stumbling over the awkwardly raised floor just ahead of the doorway.
He made sure his next few steps were long and low, in an abysmal effort to cover up his embarrassing trip. This, of course, only resulted in making him look like some kind of ancient shaman performing a sacred blood-ritual, but it calmed his spirits, nonetheless.
Nobody inside paid much attention; just another nameless face obscured by the red and violet lights that pulsated throughout the dirty bar. He made his way over to the bartender, his eyes surveying the floor for any other out-of-place oddities.
"Whiskey. On the rocks, p-please," he stammered as he approached, his confidence still semi-shattered from his fall.
The bartender responded with a deep, pig-like grunt; the kind you'd expect to slip out while lifting something far too heavy for you. He smelled of wet-dog and vomit, a not-too-subtle aroma which enveloped the area around him. After the longest minute, he handed a half-spilled glass to the man, snorted loudly, and accepted the crumpled notes without another word.
"Rocks, huh? These are fucking pebbles," the man thought to himself, staring down at his dusty glass before taking a sip. He choked, nearly inhaling the warm, watered-down liquid, but managing to get it to slither its way down the right hole at the last second. The human body was rather good at the whole 'not drowning' thing, he'd noticed.
A deep breath. Testing... one, two -cut scene-, round three, you're in. Another day... shit, another day.
Exhaling, he opened his eyes -they always involuntarily closed whenever he decided to take a breath- and found himself face to face with the strangest corpse he had ever seen.
Her eyes were shrouded in an unstable concoction of far too much eye-shadow, mascara, eye-liner, and whatever-the-hell else girls decided to smother their faces with these days. The majority of which had run down in thin, black streaks, over the top of her cheeks, no doubt a stained reminder of some tear-filled incident that the man was not aware of.
In stark contrast to this was her skin. It wasn't just 'regular' pale. No, it was 'trapped-inside-somebody's-basement-for-a-century' pale.
"Snow White would be jealous," the voice inside the man's head quipped. He dared not say it out loud, (he lacked the griffin's courage) but he wanted to say something, anything. Unfortunately, the hamster in his head had long since starved to death, and the wheel was rusted beyond repair. He stared.
Noticing the man's sudden stillness, she flashed a half-smile, her papery teeth peeking out for just a moment.
"Hello, scrumptious kitten, welcome to my little playpen, have you come to splash in the essence of me?"
"Err, what? I'm just here for a drink," he swirled the urine-like liquid in his glass around a bit, "I-it isn't very good," he finished.
"Awww, is someone having a rough day?" she purred, "Has my suede kitten not lapped up enough milk to satisfy his mighty thirst?" Her head bobbed carelessly to the side as she said this, sending her white-blond pigtails bouncing playfully.
"What the hell is going on?" the man pondered silently. Overhead, the speakers blasted out some distorted punk song. An enraged singer was shouting something about fire and prisons. He liked it, he decided. It was passionate. Raw. Everything that he was not.
The drum beat gave him a slight kick as he wondered how long he'd been silent for; it was always so difficult to tell, after you've spaced-out for a while.
"Speak," his brain commanded.
"You-You're like, snow...Uhh, Snow White? Because of your skin, it's very... white." he delivered. Smooth. He was so smooth he could slide up-hill.
She grinned, her dagger-like canines digging into the top of her lower lip.
"You like my skin, do you, duckling? When you think about it, does your belly go all a-flutter? Does it make you want to cut me into a little suit and wear me on special occasions?" She let out a giggle, clearly enjoying the awkward scene that had so marvelously unraveled itself in front of her.
The man's face flushed scarlet, a bodily reaction that is, as the same time, both frustratingly awkward and terribly eager to present itself.
"I haven't got your name, who are you?" The man quickly said, trying desperately to change the subject in the hopes that it would take the attention off of him. Her eyes perked up, landing excitedly on his face.
"I'm the finger down your spine when all the lights are out,
And name on all the men's-room walls."
She skipped closer, and swiftly shrunk behind him, her bare arms wrapping tightly around his waist, piercing red lips transferring tiny blood-drops of lipstick to the back of his ear as they made slight contact.
"I'm the sound at the edge of your tongue when you're getting freaky in bed,
And I'm the last thing you'll hear before you slide that blade across your neck".
She let out an eerie, unearthly, giggle that seemed to drift through the air with a calming, luring, yet irresistibly powerful essence that tickled the man's skin. The sound of it was such that it created feeling. So deep was the power of this note that sound alone could not contain it.
And with that, she was gone. The man spun around, searching through the condensed group of people in an attempt to catch a
glimpse of where she had skipped off to. The attempt was futile; he could barely see over the first cluster of the maggot-like crowd, and anything further than that was obscured by a thick smoke that lingered over the bar.
"Shit, I need some air," he said aloud, knowing that the bar was too noisy for anyone to hear him and at the same time being unable to keep the words trapped inside his head. He slid his way through the horde of faceless non-entities, arriving at the solid, metal-clad gateway to the street outside.
A freezing draft greeted him the second his faded-black, dirt-covered sneakers crunched onto the concrete sidewalk. It caught him off-guard, instantly numbing the end of his nose. He walked a couple steps away from the entrance, then leaned back wearily, the brick wall behind him magnetizing his dirty-brown hair, resulting in tufts of it pointing out at gravity-defying angles.
He inhaled. Frosty air rushed into his mouth and down towards his lungs, like an overzealous porn-star, eager for the chance to fill them. A few forgettable minutes passed by before his eyes glanced down the narrow street.
"NO, YOU STOP!" shouted a furious, shirtless man to a nearby Stop-Sign at the edge of the road.
"Filthy drunks," he cursed under his breath. He turned to head back inside, but something stopped him. A girlish laugh echoed through the back of his head, sounding both immeasurably distant and immediately near.
"Go home, duckling, you have an appointment with death tonight, and I can't be responsible for you missing it, now can I?"
"Jeanette?" The name formed its syllables on his lips. Was this her's? It couldn't be, he couldn't remember being told it at all. His feet turned around, and began to make their way back to his apartment as he tossed the question over in his mind. "She hadn't given it to me, had she?" More footsteps. "No, she just said something about a cat, I think." He crossed the road, his eyes fixated on the loose stones beneath his feet. "Or was it milk? Something to do with milk?"
The key in his hand turned inside the lock, coaxing out the all-too-satisfying 'click' that lets you know you're finally home. The sound snapped in his brain.
"I'm...home?" he asked, unsure if anyone was listening or not. His stomach, which gave a long lurch of disapproval, was his only reply. "Food. I need...food, yes." He stumbled towards the kitchen and opened his top drawer. A vast array of shimmering knives, forks and spoons smiled up at him, and one of the sharper persuasion felt his sweaty hand coil around its black hilt.
His legs gave way as he collapsed into a conveniently-placed wooden chair. Carefully, he pressed the flat side of the knife against his forearm, the icy object expelling every ounce of its cold, calming presence into him. He inhaled deeply, closing his eyes and basking in the serene darkness.
A brief pause. A moment of silence as the laws of time seemed to crumble and break under the weight of his grip.
Quickly, and without warning, he flipped the steel blade vertically and jerked it to the right in one fluid motion.
Time was still frozen. He gazed into the slit curiously, his eyes examining the fleshy inside of his skin, and delighting in the sponginess of it all. This wouldn't last, of course, and whoever controls time must have become bored at this point, because the hourglass seemed to shift back into play, the seconds flooding back just as rapidly as the blood flowed from the cut. It curved around the side of his arm and fell down onto the floor in a steady stream; a crimson waterfall of regret, except not this time. He was not done, this time. Not yet.
He grinned at his kneecaps, and they grinned back. Laughing, he plunged the bloodied blade downwards, sinking it deeply into his left thigh. More of the thick, red liquid gushed out of the place where the dagger had just entered. It was darker this time, and the already-forming pool beneath him indicated that it was leaving his body a great deal more rapidly than it had been before.
He gazed downwards. White, bony knuckles gripped the object as he examined it closely. The curve of the blade formed into a half-smile. He pulled it up towards his face so that it could hear him better, stopping only centimeters away.
"Did you just wink at me?" he whispered to it with love. "That's rude, you know. I'm spoken for." It didn't respond. He continued on regardless, "She's just magical, my speaker is," he gleefully exclaimed, "The mere mention of her name births a flurry of buzzing dragonflies in my belly. Do you want to see them?"
The blade didn't have time to answer, as with that it was thrust towards the man's abdomen. It slid in smoothly; like a finger into ice-cream. He could feel it deep inside of him, moving, writhing, wriggling. It made a strange squishing sound whenever he lurched his stomach, and this amused him to no end.
Memories swarmed his brain as the blade was pulled, slowly, out of its hidey-hole. "I tripped in front of all those people." He pushed it back in, then pried it out, again. "I couldn't overcome my shyness" In, out. "I didn't say any of the things I wanted to." In, out. "I didn't make a move when I should have." In, out, in, out; he bathed in his red therapy. It comforted him.
The wound-filled body collapsed to the floor, effortously sucking in stuttered gulps of oxygen.
"Hello, my adorable, squirming fire hose," said a voice from behind the man's head.
"H-hey, you're here, you came!" he exclaimed, "W-While you were gone I tapped my foot five thousand, two hundred and ninety-five times. I-I don't know why I counted..." the blood-drained body explained.
Jeanette smiled, "Now we know how many foot taps it takes to make me appear. Wonderful."
The body grimaced, weak from the blood loss.
"Are you not happy, kitten?" she sighed, "You're not going to mope around all night are you? Put on a smile for your guest". The man's face strained in an attempt to contort his mouth into anything that even showed his teeth, let alone resembled a smile.
"No, not there, I want you to smile here, silly."
Her void-black fingernails drew a sharp, horizontal line across the man's neck, leaving a slender, yet warm scratch as every vessel in his blood scrambled to reach her fingertips.
The carpet cushioned his head while his knife-clasped hand reached up towards his throat. Carefully, he pressed the flat side of the knife against his skin; a movement that had been learned to perfection. It was routine now, he flipped the blade vertically once more, hesitated for just a heartbeat, and repeated the swift motion from earlier.
Jeanette's face broke into a wide, unrestrained grin. It seemed to radiate life into the dusty darkness of the apartment. The punctured corpse lay at her feet, its pale complexion dancing with the vivid crimson that covered it. It gave the place a delightful Christmas feel, she thought. It could stay. She bent down on all fours and trotted towards the corpse, her lips once again stopping to caress its fleshy ear.
"I've been trapped inside my mind for so long, it felt good to step into yours for a while, kitten." She whispered gleefully, "Until next time."