Would that I could make you feel a shred of the contempt that I do. Would that I could cast you in bronze to immortalize the fear on your face. Would that the pain sinks into your eyes and curved mouth. Would that every wrinkle becomes an angry scar. Would that I curse you every day until the end of time. Would that you die alone and unloved.
Shards of falling mirrors reflect the face back a thousand times, a shredded imitation of your identity. You look in surprise, even as the blood starts to fall from the cuts, as it coats your body, as it pools on the floor. Weep child, weep. You will never again know your own beauty. I take your innocence and I cast you into the vast world of cruelty.
I mar you. I drag my talons down your arms and back, feeling your skin with my probing nails. I trace every bump and facet, your perfect outline. Your curves embrace my touch, your skin as soft and delicate as anything. Oh, my beautiful thing. Oh, how I'm going to ruin you.
Talk to me. Tell me the compliments they throw at you casually. Aren't you gorgeous? Perfect? A little wonder-thing. Detached, broken, separate from them. You're too pretty to be real, more of a doll than a person. I caught glimpses of you through glass storefront windows. I watched you for years, crawling in your shadows, dodging gazes and jabbed whispers. I clutched your ankles to trip you, stole your breath from those luscious lips, grasped that flowing hair. Did you feel me? You must've, if only in the fear when you're alone in the shower.
Art is the process of sacrifice, or perhaps reformation. Or perhaps it is simply the madness of a struggle for self expression. Artistic merit seeks to capture an emotion, the feelings of a single moment, however complex. A crystallized component of human memory. You will be my masterpiece. My greatest work yet. I'll call it Desecration. Or perhaps Corruption. Or maybe Failure. Or perhaps something else. You will be known by no other name. I will achieve worldwide acclaim at the low cost of you.
The beauty of the meat clever is how easily it carves the flesh from your bones. Don't you think you're overweight? What if we got rid of all this, made you more size appropriate? The hacking of chunks, the arterial spray of blood. Let me kiss your heart. Let me sink my teeth into your lungs, your defective lungs. Your persistent hacking cough, the one blemish betraying your inferiority.
Scars, I think. Scars are called for. Neat ones, with the precision of knives and the loving aftercare of stitches? Rough ones by my claws, left to bleed until you're dry and gross, paler and pathetic? Why not both? We can layer, hiding those sharp cheeks behind the perfect strokes of my art. I'll mark you so everyone knows you're of me. I'll sign my name on you in a thousand ways.
I can chunk your stomach fat, your legs, your back. All gross and massive, achingly toxic. Watch as the muscles flex. I can see them now that I have you open and perhaps if I were to bind you shut like this, they would stay visible, forcing abdominal muscles by the reduction of anything else. The minimum possible person, bones and muscles. Do you need a liver for the drinks you shouldn't have, for the blood I'm taking? Are your lungs a necessity? Ribs guard them but they already fell to the poison within.
Your perfect teeth crack and splinter as I pound, hammering your face with my fists, feeling your nose crack and burst, your ears crumpling torn and damaged, your eyes bursting. Blood drips from my white hot knuckles, lashing your tongue with the bitter iron flavour of defeat. I'll make you beautiful. I'll make you whole.
I can count the deficiencies of your body if it would help. I can show you what I see when I look upon you. I'll make you see, in fact. I'll break you until that is all you are, all you will ever be. You will agree with me once I'm finished. You will be less a person and more a warning, a thing, a gross and toxic and warped approximation of a person. You will tell that to all who bear you and don't scream with the horror. You will warn them off, that you are to be seen and not touched, hated and never appreciated. There is no artistry to you.
You might think it's physical. You might feel the way I take your misshapen feet and correct them by force and mistake that as affection or attraction. I want you to be perfect, you might think. Perhaps it is even love or care. But I think it's hate. I think I despise you, despise what you represent, what you are. And maybe it's jealousy, maybe I wish I could be you, and maybe I'd rather make you more like me than permit you that faint joy.
Look at these fingers, long and flexible and dextrous. Nails lovingly painted, adorned with the thousand shimmering colours of the rainbow. I would pry that unbecoming art off you, leaving your fingertips loose and exposed, the soft flesh ripe for the chewing. I'll crunch down to the bone, gore dripping from my mouth as I leave you unable to move, to touch, to write. How can you express your love without fingers or tongue? What purpose would you serve then?
Are you subservient? Or do you stand for yourself? Let me break your mind too, sloughing off pieces of what makes you you. Let me dig through your treasured memories. In fact, recount them to me. You may think it would aid to humanize yourself, to present yourself as a complete living person, to inspire mercy or pity. But it does not. No person looks the way you do. No person is as flawed, as broken. Look, I'm helping though. Yes, you'll be disgusting by the time I'm finished. But at least everyone else will see it. Your flaws were invisible, but they were always there. My touch merely makes them simmer to the surface.
Skin flows like water, drifting around whatever is in its path. It consumes and devours, growing constantly, surrounding and taking in whatever it can. I press things to you and lose them in the roiling masses. I boil you to watch the bubbles shift and turn. I wrap you up and drink you and spit you back out again. You taste like gasoline, staining my teeth and flaying the skin from my tongue. Your blemishes, birthmarked and freckled, ripple and shift. No way to eradicate them apart from driving the skin away entirely. To let the human out of the bag, so to speak.
My touch is loving. It is with love that I spit on your cheeks, that I rub your blood on my face. I mark myself with you so that you know that we are the same. I am not making something new. I am designing an incarnation of myself, and what does that say about me? If such ugliness can spring from my brow, then it must be inside me somewhere. You were perfect, were you not? You were perfect and I broke you.
It is with disgust that I carve the penis from your body, under-utilized and pathetic. It is with horror that I rend the fat from your breasts, stunted and fake. It is with pity that I dissect your ass, a failing imitation of a desired object. Did anyone ever want you? What on earth for? I'll make sure they see the red flags for what they are, that no one will ever want you that way again. Not even me. You never should have sex. It would be a crime to inflict such torture upon anyone else, would it not?
My poor little exhausted work, barely able to move anymore, gasping for air that will not come, struggling to even think. Aren't you weak? Shouldn't you be big and strong and powerful? Shouldn't you be? Why aren't you? What do you do with your days? How do you while away the hours, the days? What works did you wrought? Anything as important as you will be?
Your massive nose, your misshapen chin, your discoloured teeth. Who carved you from stone? Did they set out to make a monster? Did they make you for the same purpose that I do now? Form follows function, so surely your function was to be hated and alone. The hammer shatters bones, bursts of black and blue marking each kiss I leave you with. Why are you so tall, towering over everything? What gave you the right?
I'm almost finished. The damage has been done. It is merely time for reassembly, for your heart to beat again, for your bones to split, to rejoin, for the blood to rush down your corridors. You are cavernous and gaping, full of holes and wounds. It is time to stitch you back up, the roughness of the needle through, red hot and angry, darning through torn skin. The thread binds you together with incredible pain. Why start being gentle now?
Stand with me on your shaking legs. Twitch a little as unfamiliar nerves struggle and buck the unfamiliar sensations. It will be okay. The vomit that stains us is part of the tableau, an intentional garnish. I'll hold you tightly, so tightly it hurts, and I'll guide you to the mirror. That's it. Run your hands along my work. Show me your disapproval. Your look of horror as you study your flesh is what completes the work, the final perfect touch. Oh, how I warped you. Do you recognize yourself? You should. I changed nothing. You were always like this. Disgusting, aren't you?