Dark

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.”