I wonder what she's screaming about now. It could be the blood again. Sure, I left a mess. Sure, I always leave a mess. You'd think she'd be used to it by now. You'd think it would be normal. You'd think that eventually it would merely grind to routine, the stains soaking into wood as a permanent feature. The dull scent hangs heavy iron over the apartment as though it was merely a part of our natural musk. It is, in a way, part of us. Part of our very being.
But no. The bodies have to stay in my room, in their little corners. The fridge is for food and the definition of food isn't flexible. I'll look up from my meal and show her the gristle between my teeth. Doesn't matter. Still isn't food. Not that it matters. Not like it ever matters. Sure, another one screamed and left. Sure, they all do. But maybe if she wanted to get laid so bad, she should do what the rest of us do and weave her own from flesh long discarded?
Salt circles and chalk rings. Chopped fingers clutching small things. Dead grass by new roads. Scorch marks on old stones. Candles burnt down low. Young leaves on deep bough. Cast the spell to open your mind. Reach not for what's outside. Embrace the madness. Let it out. The flesh is hungry, don't you know?
The need is primal, the way that all needs are. It's oxygen in blood and food in stomachs and fire in hearts. It's consuming. We are but our worst hungers and we all content with our worst selves. Each and every day I have to study myself in the mirror. At least, I would if I hadn't smashed them all, leaving glass fragments over the bathroom. She'll cut her feet and complain, telling me off. But she doesn't see what I see, see the dark shapes in the corners of her eyes. She doesn't know what it's like to look into my eyes and see nothing at all, no evidence that I ever was alive to begin with.
We glorify and romanticize life. Death is so final, so permanent. So permanent that they chase me from the graveyards, their little toys peppering my skin with little steel kisses. My shovel had barely even tasted the dirt, barely even broken the wood to find that sweet treasure within. The bones blockade the precious marrow, that delectable crunch, the way muscles still flex years after death if you know what to pull.
Perhaps I'm an expert. Perhaps I'm special. Perhaps no one else can do this.
She kicks my door open and throws the racoon in, the carcass making a wet thump on my floor. I catch wind of a curse, a cut-off exclamation of anger before it gives way to gagging at the rotting stench of the dozens of others. I'm living in a mound of maggots now, sleeping curled up in a blanket I wove from dead hearts. It keeps my heart safe, see. It's a ward and a charm against heartbreak. I wonder how she's doing. I wonder what the sun is like on her dappled skin, if it makes her cute little freckles glow and lights up her wrinkled nose.
I want to study her, really. I think bringing her under my knife would be most illuminating. The patterns of her bones, how skin stretches over them to fill out that delicious frame. She's curvy, round, soft, full of fat and meat. She would make a delicious corpse. She would complain the whole time, I bet. She'd tell me to stop leaving fingers on counters and blood in the shower. I don't really see the difference. We all live in squalor. She doesn't do the dishes, but she sure hates when my pets do them. Ridiculous.
Passive aggressive notes on the fridge used to multiply. At least, I was told they were passive aggressive. I had merely responded in kind, careful calligraphy written and signed in my own dark blood, a lengthy scrawl apologizing for my failings on the chore chart. But she looked so upset that I took it back, burned the note and hid the evidence. And I scrubbed the bathroom myself, feeling the ache in the bottoms of my limbs. Why was I stitching corpses together if not for this sort of thing? But she said that zombies had to stay in my room.
She added ghouls to the list of things that had to stay in my room a few days later. Then skeletons. Then anything that could be considered dead. Then she got mad that I took my kilos of raw meat from the fridge and left it in my room too, letting the stench flow out the window so passers-by coughing and gagged. But that was dead, surely?
I don't think I'll ever understand all her rules and etiquette. It's all so confusing. Everyone dies someday, but I shouldn't remind people of that fact. People like to be complimented, but not on the efficiency of their organs, or their bone structure, or how good they'd look as the core of my next project. Artists show off their sketches and people applaud, but my rough drafts merely induce vomiting. It's all so dizzying and confusing.
But she's so full of life in a way I wish I could emulate. It comes so natural to her, so easily. She laughs and people laugh too. Her words are quick and birdlike and I almost wish I could pluck them from the air, just a single sentence, and dissect it slowly. I could spend hours trying to understand the methods of a single anecdote, the myriad riddles that pass for dialogue around her. I love the way she smiles. No matter how I try, none of my pets smile that way. My careful fingers work the muscle thread, the tightness of the skin, the careful shape of the lips with such delicate passion. But it's never quite there, a spark of something unknown and unknowable.
My room collects shadows and spiders. It is a dark place full of dark things, my dark eyes peeping outwards from the cracked door, staring onwards at the wandering crowd. They muscle past each other, dancing in complex circles. The social dynamics are fascinating and bizarre. They drink as though to forget, as though to live. They smile and laugh and all are secretly thinking about how much they want to be the centre. They form circles and break circles, all jockeying to have the most interesting conversation, to be witness to the best conversation. Their hungry lips taste each other with a desperation I oft see but rarely understand. I've tried kissing before, mashing my cold lips into any of the spares I keep in jars around my workbench. It never satisfies the way it seems to with them. And perhaps that's part of the point, because the goal is not merely to kiss, but to kiss the most, to kiss the best.
I exited my room once and slipped into the crowd. I wasn't supposed to. She told me to stay away when she had guests, to stay hidden. But I wanted to try once. I saw her kissing someone. He was tall and strong and would've made good soup. But his arms wrapped around her and she looked so small and delicate and powerful and for just one moment I wondered what it would be like to lock my lips with hers. I think she'd taste like fire and life. I think she'd taste just like blood when I bit down on her tongue. She saw me then and chased me back, the hollow stares soaking into me from afar. I was different and all could tell. My arm still had holes in it from the muscles I was replacing.
It didn't hurt, really. Isolation was for people who couldn't make their own friends. I clap and applaud as my pets dance around my room on crooked legs, long dead pets once again brought to a facsimile of life. It's an approximation, I think. It's not like I would know. It's not like I see the real thing anymore.
I'm sneaking out of the apartment at midnight again. Can't let her see me, can't let her see the way my cheeks droop off my face threatening to tear free entirely. It's been too long, far too long since I've last replenished myself. I can feel the rot bubbling up. Flesh craves flesh, craves freshness, craves life. All imitations must be fed on original material.
It's impossible to plagiarize god if I'm part of his design too. At least, that's what I want to believe late at night when it isn't working. When the brainmeat is dying and the electrons are boiling. When I want to sink my fist into the dry wall as though an impact of sufficient force would reawaken long dead nerves and send painful shocks up my arm, long unfamiliar sensations awakening long dormant instincts. And yet, piece by piece and day by day. The sheer mockery of the works almost makes me weep. I'm a desolate wreck and my works are a feeble stab in the dark at creation. Call me an artist? No, I think not. I'm an abomination and we all know it.
She smokes on the balcony late at night. After she comes in, I sit there in the small hours and breathe the smoke and imagine that she stayed out with me. I imagine that it's her air I'm breathing in, her life swirling in my lungs and mixing with my own. I imagine that she can see past the wounds that mar my body, the traces of the corpses I consume. I am a work in progress. I am temporary. I am self improvement made incarnate.
If that's so, why am I stagnating?
Why do the days only get longer and the ways I while them away only get smaller? Why does time itself wrap around me, binding me deep into my own head? Why do the days seem to flit by as they crawl, as though several years from now, it'll be a mere blink of an eye? What's wrong with me?
We passed each other in the kitchen, her cooking something small and soft and delicious and me digging through the fridge for a pack of sausages. She looked at me and smiled a little and said she hadn't seen me for a while and I hissed and ran because it was too bright and her smile was too perfect. Maybe she asked if I was okay. Maybe she told me that she hated how disgusting I was. It didn't matter. I took my meal and fled.
My heart beat last night for the first time in years. I don't know what that means. I don't know why. I was lying in bed and it started again and my muscles tingled and glowed, warm heat radiating from them as they drank the rare oxygen desperately. I felt like singing and I felt like dancing. I studied myself in the mirror, the way my skin blossoms in blues and purples, the same shades as a desolate sunset. Red sparkled from within, blushes dancing across my cheeks as the beating heat drove through my body as purifying fire. My heart beat and my pulse held steady and I laughed and laughed and laughed. The air was thick and soupy and I threw open the window and pressed my lips against the mesh to inhale the air, to taste the leaves on the trees.
It stopped again as quickly as it started. I was due to replace it today, but I chose not to. Maybe it would beat yet again. Maybe like all things it needs time.
Nothing seems to work. The spark has gone from my hands. The corpses stay dead, no matter how much lightning flows into them. I kiss my sore hands and try again, shaking fingers dropping the needles. I can't work the thread into the crack because there are too many tears in my eyes. I carve a heart up just to see what it looks like. Call it art, photograph it to celebrate. Broken hearts are metaphorical except when they're not. The failures stack up higher. My sobbing grows more desolate until I'm curled up on the floor, pressed against the wall. Does time mean anything? Let it slip on by. I'll stay here for weeks if I have to, if it'll give me what I want.
I built a bonfire and built it high, in the carpack out back. Logs go on one by one, a bag of old wounds to burn waiting by my side. As I inhaled the smoke, enjoying the way the taste curled over decaying taste buds and pooled in broken lungs, she came to join me. Without a word, she sat next to me, the two of us watching the fire. It licked at the sky, a great tower of glowing flame. It was hungry. It was like staring in a mirror for my soul.
We sat together for a long time, neither speaking. The fire cast her face in orange, a burnished polish on already perfect features. The way her eyes trapped the light was divine. I wanted to tell her that I loved her. I wanted to tell her that I'd do anything for her.
Instead, I bent to open the bag. First out came an arm. I tossed it onto the fire as I had the logs. She said nothing. She just watched as I pulled piece after piece, failure after failure from my sack of pathetic reality. All my works, beautiful and not went onto the fire. Most of them lay there limply as they burned. Some screamed a little in their primitive way. All beauty screams as it is destroyed. That's what makes the destruction meaningful.
When I was done, I turned to face her. I couldn't say anything. I didn't know what to say.
She asked, "Why?"
"It wasn't working," I said. "They don't move right."
She laughed once. "Well, I thought they were cute."
She patted my shoulder once and then got up and went back inside. I stood there, motionless. I wasn't sure what to think. I could still feel the weight of her fingers on my shoulder, the way they sent warmth cascading through my body on a tide of red blood. Gently, I raised my hand until my fingers overlapped where hers had lain, feeling the ghosts of our motions connecting.
And after a few minutes had gone by and the fire had cooled from a mountain to a hill, she came back out clutching a huge stack of papers in both arms. She smiled at me and began to toss them in one by one.
I snagged one from the air. It was a sketch of a bird in flight. It was anatomical, precise, delicate. It was a masterpiece.
I glanced at her. She laughed at me. "The wings are all wrong."
I looked down at it. I'd seen a hundred birds in flight. The wings were perfect.
I threw the bird into the fire. For a moment, the paper bent in the heat as though the bird was trying to flap once more, as though the drawing within was about to burst free and take to the air. It glowed, resplendent, as it faded it from reality, a shadow of reality made temporary.
Laughing and hollering, we tossed all of the drawings in one by one. We whooped and screamed and put our hands on each other's shoulders and span in circles. By the dying embers of that fire, we kissed and my heart started beating. It would never stop again.