My stomach—so full.

Crammed with twigs and sediment.

Crammed with the things of the earth tangled up and bumping.

It growls at me, the aching, stuffed bowl I am now.

Asking nature why I mindlessly ate her. 

She was Gin and Polka Dots—a heady pink cloud of laughter and grinning promises. She'd spin her rings around her fingers, letting her tongue peek between her teeth. Feminine. Here she'd hide and be whole while the room orbited around her in sparkly, boozy circles.

He caught her eye with a wink and a raised glass. In little time, she was tickling his ear with breaths that made him shiver.

“Beautiful,” he crowed over and over, the adoration strung between each bitter drink. A finger played along her spine through her thin dress, dipping in the vertebrae, shuffling her close to him. She drank it in like a prayer, devouring the reassurances, letting validations coat her thick, like sap.

She swam deep in the wild, free moment, where she was a thing of want, his face flushed with heat and desire.

“Come,” he whispered, fingers twined and pulling her up stairs and elevators as he mouthed her collarbone with muted sentiments and tangy breaths.

The Hall. The door. The Key. The room.

Dim lights—hands fisted into the blue of her dress. She huffed in weighty breaths, watching every dilation of his eyes as fabric crawled up her thighs, her fingers starting to shake. The languid movements were madness, because the watery wall of reality built high, fat and heavy, looming overhead, eager to shatter. Another inch of skin. Another breath.

Eager to shatter. And she must be, to be here, baring herself like Eve as he ripped her final clothes from her, the fragile mask that they were.

He stepped back, hands slipping away, eyes roaming, wide and renegade, the dream undone.

She closed her eyes, tight:

Take me. Hold me. Love me.

She gulped down time in the fragile moments, watching as the warm touches of earlier disintegrated, adoration melting away from him.

Hate me. Leave me. Hurt me.

“Fuck you.” He shoved her dress against her chest, her legs unsteady as she was pushed into the empty hallway. Away from the warmth of compliments and gentle touch.

The door closed with finality and she looked down at the body that betrayed her, yet again. Took in the hard, sharp lines of hipbones, and smooth flat planes across her chest. Took in the traitorous bits of skin and groin.

Beautiful. Feminine. Woman, she thought.

But, the mirror at the end of the hall reflected her bare skin mockingly, whispering back:

“Forgotten. Broken. Man.”

“God will eat your tears,” I say. To me. To them.

I know this because the world is insatiable, so its dieties must be, too.

But the walls here are thick and hungry, like the mobs. They devour every sound, caging my words inside my stony tomb 'till I have nothing left in this forsaken space but the drip of the sink and the shuffle of the guard's boots outside my door.

And I look in the little mirror tacked to the wall and escape to the projection of my id, now bony and all corners. I wonder when my chubby cheeked innocence abandoned my body in favor of this face, with its empty eyes and sharp, pale lines.

The buzz of the florescent lights drones inside my eardrums like a plague, and I know. I know I don't belong here in this fated hospice—a final kicking place for the miserable and damned.

And yet, I am.

I exist, here, I remind myself, because somewhere I forgot. Forgot who I am and that I'm real. Forgot I wasn't the one who pierced the woman's lungs with silver hooks like meat and hung her from the rafters. But her blood adorned me, anyway, sticky and warm, as she dripped like candle wax from the heavens. And I knew then that death was indiscriminate, laying its mantle on anyone close enough to touch it.

It chose me, and soon enough I'll be dressed in red, too, a secret martyr for our sex. I'll die for her. Like her, my body exposed and raw. Forsaken. Souring meat up on display, while the blinding flash of cameras immortalize my empty shell.

It will all happen soon, I know. But the concept of time has broken inside these chambers making minutes feel like days and months and years. I read that once in a science magazine. That space and time are codependent creatures of each other. That spin and force keep the clocks in motion while our watery planet wraps around the sun. So I sit as still as I can. Maybe I can slow time like a Sunday afternoon and breathe a little longer. Even if the air tastes stale.

Maybe I'll eat that for my final meal. Breathing in the bits of dust like caviar while I close my eyes and tip my head back in the sensation. Would I be able to resist the urge to count them? Every rise and fall a bitter reminder that death will open up her mouth for me, too, jaw yawning wide to suck me in.

Five. Six. Seven. I'm already counting. But that's the point of it, isn't it? To help you understand what will be gone. It's delicate. Polite even, in its brutality, but it will be gone. The air. The drip. The boots. My face.

My eyes, like the desert stormy and dry. I will them to give up their briny reservoirs—a sacrifice to God.

“Eat them,” I whisper, eyes addressing the unseen moon as liquid snakes across my skin. “Eat them and spare my life.”

But no one sees my offering. Not God. Not the guard outside my cell. And even if I can't hear it, I know the clock ticks on as I taste the wet salt on my tongue.  

#1:

He's here too. Always.

Eyes like the underbelly

of the moon. Inside

my fleshy walls, the demon.

Grinding teeth. My words eaten.

Find me in the cracks. Scratching.

#2:

It's not so soft when he grabs in the dark.

To beg me for control—to eat me up.

Enjoy the bitter taste, so bright, so stark.

Leave me, an unholy, barren burnup.

Please don't judge when I want to be taken.

The way he wants it. The way I let him.

He'll bite and I'll watch him partake in

Fill him up until he's full—to the brim.

I'll thrash and scream, like I'm supposed to do.

And push away advances, though it's need—

by now to breathe in my addiction, too.

Like air, for him. For me, and we proceed.

Brutal gods now fused, confused. Demons, two.

Or one. Too late now to ask: “Who are you?”

People are braver in the dark, I think to myself, as I watch my fiance smooth his hands across his lover's exposed back in calming strokes. I breathe and the air curls around her skin, too. The woman I died for. Who watched as he bled me out like a calf, red flooding the cracks of her naked toes.

But now I'm crawling on all fours, a buoyant, bright light, floating over tangled limbs inside the bed. It's freeing, really, and part of me wonders if I've transcended to a jellyfish as I reach out flour-white hands, my translucent stingers.

It's more than they deserve, I think, as I coil their throats, one in each hand, feeling generous that their deaths are so much prettier than mine. Their eyes flutter open with the pressure of my weight. I'm stronger now. My power broken open like the yolk of an egg. Spilling out like the blood on the floor of the basement.

They thrash beneath my hold as the lights flicker and the windows shatter under my breath.

“Did you know?” I ask, with the voice of a sphinx, “Did you know I would shed my flesh like a mask when you cut it free?”

I'm more now, I think to myself again, the way I did when I first discovered my spectral powers. When I planned my grandiose exploits into the realms of murder and revenge.

It's here now. My justice. Godlike. Permeated in broken glass and vicious winds as my problems fade, fade, fade into limp limbs and blueing lips.

And then their bodies still, the grandeur draining away as I levitate between the two empty, fleshy shells. Pale. Dead. Vacant.

The lights perish. The winds die too, and it's quiet.

And finally, brokenly, I whisper, the sounds echoing inside the hollow space of the hotel room:

“I'm more now.”