By Ouanessa Nana
I barely flinch when he mops up the blood. There’s a shuddering jolt, an evident tremor in how his fingers grasp the wood, a slight quaking brushing the edge of his skin. He still hasn’t spoken a word to me, humming as he cleans the mess that I have made. My chest was a throbbing and snarled clutter, the remnants of my heart in shambles. Even as I clutched the tattered pieces of what was left of my shirt you could still see the stains, the tainted bleeding that leaked from my soul.
I held my breath, my brain flashing red, still trying to figure out what to say. My first instinct is to apologize but this isn’t my fault. It’s his.
His diamond-green eyes glitter as he holds my gaze. I bristled when I saw a flash of a slightly scathed smidge of remorse. Then it disappeared as quickly as I saw it. That must have been a miscalculation on his part. He rarely ever revealed his true intentions.
I trusted him, yearned for him, loved him and all that got me was ridden with heartache and stuck with the body of a decaying corpse on my doorstep. This never would have happened if he hadn’t cut and run, just kept his word, and told the truth. If he hadn’t waited until I backed him into a corner with his vicious lies. I swallowed, my mouth dry, my throat blistering. “What do we do with her?” I whispered slowly. I watched as he wiped blood on his battered blue jeans. “Get rid of it,” he says.
I wince. His words are sharp and swift. He doesn’t even acknowledge that she used to be a breathing living thing attached to someone. A girl with a fierce heart and rapid tongue. So sure of everything and so young.
“Eli, Why didn’t you call me back?” I asked, rubbing my wounds raw with the last of the disinfectant. My breath staggered and I tried to hold his gaze but failed, buckling and shaking as I turned away to catch my breath. The silence between us stilled and I wondered when my heart would move on and remove him from his place between my ribs like he did so many months ago. He lips, holding his tongue as he studied me. He was choosing his words carefully.
He always did this. It’s how he convinced himself that he hadn’t sliced through my insides and carved me out. We both knew the truth. That he used me, took everything out of me, and then tossed me aside when he was done. It always left me achingly bruised and shattered but somehow I kept my anger at bay and stopped myself from exploding, picking up the pieces of me, leaving him a tender kiss, and then hoping that he would love me in the way that I dreamed of if I just hoped enough.
“I told you what you were getting yourself into, the minute we met,” he answers, kicking the inner back of the body with a sigh. Did you? My thoughts shifted to the old wounds, the ones that still thrummed slightly with a stinging rawness. It was better than this, the reality that would soon come to fruition. I knew what was coming next, his silent exit, yet it still always caught me by surprise. I’d wake up thinking that he would be there, on his place on the left slide of the bed his arms wrapped around me.
But it was always empty and his crumpled-up black Calvin Klein boxers from months ago would sit there, a spilled memory on the floor, haunting me like a ghost. I could never muster up the courage to completely get rid of it, to wipe another memory of him. Last week when I threw them away in the trash, a few minutes later, I ran back, quickly rummaging through the garbage and stashing it into a trash bag that sits at the front door blemish that refuses to heal.
I halted, willing myself to falter. This new wound clipped the fringes of my skin, stitching and peeling the crevices of my gut as my raw nerves short-circuited, the splattered flesh of my heart trickling, the inflamed pain tender enough to burst. It was taking everything in me to keep it together and I didn’t even hate him for it.
I hated myself.
Hated that I kept him tucked under my arm for so long when he was never mine. “That doesn’t explain the silence,” I retorted back. I found myself facing him, my lips inches from his face. My fingers twitched wanting to grasp him, touch him to see if he was real. His skin prickled, shifting into a soft deep swarm of black peppered scales. I stepped away from him mortified.
He shrugs. The silence between us wearing thin, hanging like a weight in between my bones. I find myself stumbling and holding on to him for support. His scales are sharp against my skin. I hold on to him tighter as my palms bleed. I slip, falling onto the plush carpet. My skin finds comfort in the softness and before I shudder. I was staring at a dead body, trying to reach the person that I loved while I was splintering and he was just standing there, doing nothing but waiting for me to give in and brush it under my bed along with all my other skeletons that I kept there.
“I don’t want to talk about this,” he finally says. “Let’s just get this over with and get to the good stuff,”
“You never want to talk,” I snapped, my breath, snagging up my throat that it catches and I’m almost certain that I will pass out from trying to figure out how to breathe. He wasn’t trying to connect with me. Only trying to devour me and there came a time when the taste of him wasn’t enough. I just wanted him to hold me and for that to be enough for him.
I don’t scream when his razor-sharp claws sink into my skin. Instead, I embrace the pain, blinking back tears, drinking him in. Would it always be like this? I thought. Would he always take all of me?
“Ivy, we have to go,” he rushes me to stand releasing his grip on my heart and I gasp. The motion is dizzying and I feel his dark sludge poison me from the inside. It doesn’t burn like it used to.
It’s just ice-cold.
I think about using his old neon orange hoodie to cover her up. I reach for the carpet instead. The one his mother got me for my birthday. It’s red and black, just like the crumpled disarrangement of flesh and blood in my living room.
He let me do all the heavy lifting as I threw her over my shoulder and opened the door with my sweaty hands. The weight of her is excruciating, her limbs crunching my shoulders and I cry out as I collapse into the stairs. When I look up at him he is towering over me, a glint of a smile evident on his face. He reached over to pat my head, pulling me into an embrace as I sobbed into his chest. When I pull away he slashes at the body with his talons.
The action shifts her head to the side and I freeze. She is identical to me in every way, from the cuts on her lips to the mole on her right cheek. Her mouth curves upwards as the same dark-flecked brown eyes stare up at me. A cold chill raced down my spine as I backed into the corner of the stairway and screamed.