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November 8th
Day 63
This morning, her intestines were burning bright. Vengeful eyes, scorching soul, dripping wounds, painted lips, misshapen nails, all adorned the same family of blinding reds. It was a power color. She stuck a gold star underneath the gash scarring beautifully upon her fuji apple cheek. A printed finger still wet from its coat of carmine polish brushed the wound’s curvature and picked at the scab. Scars always left her, just like everyone else.
The first step to any confident face was to wash, preferably with a pristine towel dripping hot, purified water. Once any sign of blame, anger, or guilt had been wrung down the drain, the artist could paint the canvas. She filled her sharp, unthreaded eyebrows with gunpowder. She contoured her button nose rounded and cute. Her brushes cut into her flesh-like scalpels, no hesitation in deciding what to keep and what to throw in the compost bin. In her opinion, it could call go; each spidery eyelash, unruly eyebrow, the layers of lip her yellow teeth had declared war upon when she was just a toddler. She wouldn’t care if one day she decided during her morning ritual that her face was only worthy of incineration, that no amount of mica pigment could cover the cracks in her brown, hollow bones.
He said he loved her without the makeup, but could she bear to look in the mirror if she wasn’t at least a little protected by her glossy mask? Concealer was all the girl knew; even in a place where she needn’t lie, she still found herself molding mounds of fact into false truths like clay.
But though she loved to hide, she never used foundation. No base coat to cover the skin’s proof of her stress; she preferred to be rugged over unblemished, leaving the quality of smoothness to the feminine, honey-pot liters laced inside her. Maybe hiding wasn’t the correct word. She was simply… enhancing herself. Putting the inside on the outside.
Authenticating.
She began to line her eyes black, but her hand was too shaky from anxiety. A bundle of moving fur rubbed against her leg, and she picked it up.
“How should I pop the question, Lucy?” The cat blinked, watching her argue with herself.
“I mean, Eve, you don’t have to do this.”
“But I do! It’s been way too fucking long.”
“I mean, I’m sure he’ll bring it up eventually. We could just wait.”
Lucy didn’t know what she was talking about. She just wanted attention.
“I NEED to ask him. I have to. Now, just calm down, Eve!! Do your fucking eyeliner and calm down!” She glanced at the alternate her in the vintage handheld mirror propped against a milk jug. She thought she looked good, but not good enough.
Never good enough.
She sat Lucy down on her lap and returned to drawing determined black lines on her skin.
Her words were a loose, silent thought, as it took the focus of a surgeon to paint her face. And besides, he knew this day was coming.
Eve pushed away from the table and pulled up the flouncy dress much too long for her legs, walking to the counter to cut a thick slice of the fresh pastry. She’d broken out the good china plates instead of the showboxes, cutting boards, and old vinyl sleeves they usually ate off of. A glass of brown liquor with a bowl of ice leaning against it. A fresh blunt lie on the patterned porcelain plate. A bouquet of purple wildflowers from the forest they were in the center of smiled carefully from the bare, far-end of the rickety wooden table.
She took her coffee, seasoned with 4 packs of Splenda, and shuffled to the bedroom to wake her lover. Red lip stains burned his eyes wide open. She doubted he was asleep at all.
“I made breakfast,” she kissed his neck, blood boiling already. “If you don’t get up, you’ll be late.”
The alarm beside him was set to 8:30 PM, but Eve was the one kissing him awake every day. Their mornings were from sunset to dusk; working the graveyard shift and being naturally nocturnal switched dawn into “goodnight” and twilight into “wake up, sleepyhead.” Time was too relative to judge how it was labeled.
Eve had gotten through 3 pages of her latest novel of choice, American Psycho (but absorbed none of the words’ meanings thanks to her anticipation), by the time Marquise’s footsteps trailed on the mahogany floors. A more immediate wave of divine fear crashed into her, and she lost her page from dropping the book closed on the floor. She hoped he couldn’t tell how anxious she was, but knew her nervousness was a thick funk clouding the room. He could likely tell something was wrong by the 3 morning kisses she gave in replacement to the usual dozen.
A tall, slim beast with a domineering smirk stared at Eve while smoothing out a grey t-shirt over his skin. She wondered if he emerged from the womb smelling like oak & bourbon, because the aroma was always around him but she never once saw him spray cologne. It was as if his magnificence came from his very core, filtered through open pores.
Eve grinned warmly.
“Good morning, beautiful.”
He blushed, a sensitive ferocity tinting his cheeks. “Good morning, baby.” Eve still remembered when all his morning salutations were only texts in a thin, fruitless font. It seemed they were confined to the digital world only a week ago, and now here they were, making out on a full-size mattress that smelled like mold, caressing each other against thick air forming walls for him to slam her into. Progress. Things felt so fast-paced, despite the 6 month hiatus they took from each other that summer. Young, heart throbbing love that fell faster than golf-ball-sized hail.
“Aw, you made my favorite.” Marquise took a bite of the apple pie on his plate.
“Yeah. Is it good? I haven’t had any… yet.”
“Nothing you bake isn’t good, shut up.” He took a forkful and held it in front of her mouth. Eve’s mental calculator had no chance to figure out how many calories she’d be consuming before she opened, chewed, swallowed. A confectionary smile.
“How’d you sleep?” she asked, curled catlike in her seat.
“Shit. You?”
“Good. No, great! I slept great, mhm!” She took a long sip from her coffee and silently cursed herself. She was youthful, naturally hyperactive, but she knew he knew something was up. Eve was not the premium liar she once was.
Materializing a lighter from under a napkin, she lit his medicine for him. She took a hit herself for her nerves. Be serious, she told herself as she exhaled. Eve stifled a cough.
Serious was hard when she’d proved everyone in her prior life wrong, succumbed to the ironic reverie now standing in front of her, and figured out how to have her cake and eat it too without gaining a single pound. How could she possibly be disciplined when she held the secret elixir of everlasting joy in her very veins, the entire red fountain all for her and her lover to bathe in? She giggled like a schoolgirl with a secret to tell, a dropout with directionless bliss.
Marquise pushed his dreadlocks over his face. “What’s so funny?”
“Nothing. “ She nearly spat her coffee in his face from holding back her laughter.
“Bullshit.”
That was the tone of a man who knew all. She could never hide anything from him.
But she loved to try.
“I’m serious! I’m fine!!”
“You’re so cute when you lie, Flesh.”
His nickname for her. She resisted the drug addict’s urge to relapse into the void his words had opened right in front of her, to get lost in a cosmic jungle of dopamine, pain, pleasure… but shook it off. She had to be serious.
“Two hours of sleep really isn’t doing you any good, honey.” She deflected.
“Says the girl who was up all night.” Smoke in her face.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about, babe.”
“You only make coffee when you need caffeine. You hate coffee, as you should, really.”
Eve got up and eye-rolled her way to the window. Her red fabric swished in a ripple with her gyrations. Long, vine-like braids snaked down to her thighs, following her movements a half-beat behind. Her head jerked back, a crazed look in her eyes.
“Sometimes, I think you’re just like… a big ball of energy.” It was too early for him to sound so stoned.
“Did you know I’m actually… a shooting star!?”
Childish jazz-hands quietly softened to limp bags of bone as she involuntarily remembered the handwritten note titled ’last words of a shooting star.’ Mitski, her favorite muse, had a song of the same title. Eve smiled woefully at the knowingly sad tension.
He didn’t know yet.
“I love when you’re all happy like this,” he leered. She smiled back but felt the guilt of the bomb she was about to detonate bounce in her chest, unopened, unread. Soon, he’d get up from the table and Eve would smother him in wet, dog-like kisses, beg him to call in sick so they could spend the day together. He’d promise to be back and give her one last embrace before slamming the door in her face. The 3 deadbolts would click, clack, click. Time was unjudging, but running away on its treadmill.
In a single gust of breath, she sat on the uneven tabletop. Now or never.
“When are you gonna do it??”
The words came out rushed, like a gun was pressed to her head. Barely conceivable, but they lingered in the stratosphere long enough for Marquise to comprehend. Surely, he knew what she meant. He had to. Her infectious laugh couldn’t fill his soul forever; a force—a dozen different ones were searching for them now, and all for the same jagged reason—would soon pull them away from each other with the strength of an industrial magnet. All of those forces, total finalities to their unorthodox love story, scared her, angered her, but one of them filled her with a riveting, scorching curiosity, too. This last ending was her obsession, her everything. This had gone on for long enough, she’d decided, and now Eve wanted her fairy-tale ending.
“What are you talking about?”
Eve saw herself a makeshift gangster beating the money out of a broke man. Pushing him down to the table, knife to his neck, her seething spit all over his face. ‘Don’t play dumb with me, you bitch,’ she’d snarl. But even in her fantasies, he could never be scared of a little girl like her.
The vision cleared. Her tone was leashed, but all the vivacious viciousness in her sharpened each syllable like a blade. “You know exactly what I’m talking about.” Now, she was serious.
Marquise stood, hands on either sanded side of the kitchen table, opponents on reciprocal ends of a round boxing ring. Neither the coffee nor the blunt steamed; only smoke from Eve’s pit of fire wisped into the air. It seemed forever before he spoke.
“Soon.”
Wrong answer. The word cracked her heart. Tears building in her eyes, she slid the vase of flowers to the side and crawled closer to him. Maybe if she were close enough to bite, he would understand. It hurt, having to ask such a thing to the man she wanted to spend the rest of her life with. She knew it hurt him too; it made him feel like he wasn’t enough for her.
Never good enough.
But she’d waited far long enough, and he knew this day was coming. She didn’t really have a choice. Her desire was unending, even in paradise. It had to be done, or else she’d lose her mind.
“When???” Eve tried to sound strong, determined, but her voice broke and she was shaking too hard to feel like anything but uselessly weak. She wasn’t expecting so much desperation to translate in her questions, at least not this quick. Next thing she knew, she’d start screaming, puncturing holes in the paranoia that any of the twelve forces were hiding in the walls, listening. She’d escaped the hospital, the silver Camry, the mint-walled corners of her old bedroom, but the odor would always follow her. In the dark, she knew at least one of the twelve were always open eyes, horrified, notepads in hand. They were watching right now, likely already knowing how the conversation would place out.
Eve bit her tongue and laid out on the table, gaze locked on her Marquise, awaiting him to give her an answer she wanted.
“Wait and you shall see.”
Wrong again. Eve had an intrusive thought that she should take the kitchen knife and stab him to death. She wasn’t getting anywhere like this, was she? He had the audacity to smile knowingly in her face while she shamelessly begged for a single bone to gnaw on like a neglected dog. Her cheeks felt hot.
“This can’t go on forever. And if you don’t end it…” She didn’t need to finish.
If he didn’t end it, one of the twelve would. Either the police would raid their home in the middle of an October sunrise, her mother would roll up their gravel driveway, or… She saw the gleam in his eye that she fell in love with get sucked into a murky vacuum. He had the audacity, yes, but he also had the knowledge. No one knew her like him.
She swallowed before she spoke, lowering her head.
“When are you going to kill me?”
Eve loved Marquise, and Marquise loved Eve, but they both knew they couldn’t live together forever. Her suicidality and his bloodthirst were yin and yang, the ratio that made each other whole. Both of them had signed a contract in her clotted blood, nothing but a bunch of pixelated words typed in repetitive lines like a cult’s chant, of what would happen: he would risk his life for hers, and then she would receive her long awaited death in a velvet, engagement ring box. He had replaced the azurite on her short finger with an extravagant black diamond, but she didn’t want a stone to marvel at. All she was asking for was for him to chop the finger off in one swift cut; a premeditated, ravishing death.
Was it too much to ask for?
It had been almost 2 months since he carried his callow wife into the cabin off of Interstate 75, and onto the cow rug yet to be stained with her blood. Those weeks went by as the sun set on the Mississippi river: beautifully. They didn’t curb their ideations, but for a little while, they were normal.
As normal as a man’s love for a teenage girl could ever be.
There was no moment when she wasn’t sure she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him. The sentiment never wavered, even as she moaned to be destroyed like the pure-bred submissive she was. Eve still wanted to spend forever with him, and she knew that she would…. alive, or not.
Time was ticking its wristwatch in their faces. It was only a matter of time before the fantasy turned to horror, and Eve needed to escape it. Cynthia and Cain had a missing daughter, afterall. Eve had embarked on a journey somewhere in the dictionary between ’abduction’ and ‘elopement.’ She & Marquise were on the run from the laws of a sprinkle of states. A couple of fugitives.
Eve was happy now, but her depression could make a spreadsheet of reasons to die. Some of them struck matches in her soul of agreement. The nightmares that left her heaving; her vindictive eating disorder spiraling her in a never-ending mania that expired to the same result; the shame-and-disgust crossbred emotion she felt leaking from her joy; the shadows around every corner that watched, judged; the constant cloud over her head that told her she would always be theirs. Now that purgatory, her treatment, had ended, she didn’t have any reason to hide a single diagnosis. It wasn’t until the facade of normalcy was thrown away and she started free-falling through the crisp Montana air that she understood how her lies had anchored her to sanity. They were gone now.
Crying on the kitchen table, Eve knew the question was tearing her love apart. She wondered what could sting worse than the love of your life asking you to murder them, defile them, tie them to train tracks and walk away and enjoy the sound of her bones crunching. Her position wasn’t much better; she loved the life she’d become bound to. And when the hatchet came slashing down on her head, all of it would disappear.
She looked down at the plate of half-eaten pie, vigor gone. “You promised… you promised you’d do it.” A child pleading with her father.
“Listen… listen, okay?” He took her hand, and latched his pinky finger onto it. “I pinky promise.”
“Really…?”
“Really.”
She wasn’t satisfied. Paranoia made him a liar, even though he’d proved to her otherwise so many times. She nodded. He walked back to the bedroom and when he was back, Eve pounced off the table, stumbled him into a wall, pressed herself into him deliriously. Maybe if he tasted her, he’d remember the full extent of her hunger. The need he promised to fill.
But he had to go to work. He said goodbye, locked the 3 deadbolts, and left her caged in her diamond prison. She didn’t wait for the car to drive off before she started wailing.
