Till' Death Do Us Part

“It was love at first sight, at last sight, at ever and ever sight.” This story was censored by my school literary magazine, so I would really appreciate any comments on it.

I still remember the taste of his lips. It is a flavor that will forever linger upon my own. The soft skin that sheathed his slender fingers, the sun-kissed skin that stretched over his toned muscles.

I first met my love in a bar where the intoxicating scent of a most favored poison masked the pheromones that would soon become so very adhered to my own. He flashed his first smile as a fisherman casts his line, and from that moment I was hooked. His crooked teeth leaned against each other like crumbling tombstones, his grey eyes were cool as dry ice. He towered above me like a god does a mortal and I truly believed that he was the most perfect being to ever be conceived on this Earth. The subtle tang of his accent swelled like an orchestra to produce the two melodious words,

“Hey cutie.”

My own voice became a scratched record to my ears as I struggled to stammer out a single pathetic syllable:

“Hi.”

And he practiced that most ancient skill of seduction which easily snared me in all my malleable naivety. The rustic charm I’m sure he was all too aware of enticed me to follow him home and the next morning when the sun’s fingers reached through the window shutters to pry open my eyelids and brush the sands of sleep from my face, his dismissively casual tone made me want more than the all I had already received.

Addiction is a slow decline: an unraveling of the tissues of the mind, and just as one suffering from Alzheimer’s forgets every memory, every person, every aspect of one’s life, I found myself forgetting all save for his face, his scent, his voice. I sealed myself off within the walls of my home; his memory consumed me. I would sit with my eyes closed for hours at a time envisioning the cold stare of his slate grey eyes, recalling the rough touch of his hands. Because love; real, crazed, desperate love, is a full-time job.

I closed my eyes every night, and the vision of his body was so vivid beside me that I tried to reach out to him, at which my crystal ball into paradise shattered. I clung to the scrap of paper upon which he had hurriedly written his phone number; it had become the most precious thing in the universe, a holy relic left by my God. Long after I had memorized it, I lay in bed reciting the comforting numbers aloud and caressing the paper as if it were his own skin, remembering the flick of his wrist as he inked the scrap, the spark of adrenaline I had felt when, upon handing it back to me, his fingers grazed my own. Everytime I gathered enough courage to put it to use and call him, my heart would race, and blood would pump through my veins so hard I felt that my arteries would burst. But my enthusiasm was far from equally matched. On the rare occasion when my desperate and hopeful calls were actually answered, it was by a bored and often annoyed voice that I had grown all too fond of.

Every several weeks there would be a break in my desperate frustration, an oasis amid the desert of unrequited love. He’d tell me to meet him alone and in secrecy and for a brief two hours whatever grotty, obscure motel room or bathroom stall we were crammed into would be transformed into the most sacred of temples where I could once again worship my divine.

While he raked his sharp nails down my back, and bruised me with his hands, I lightly traced hearts into his skin. He always drove me home and dropped me off two blocks from my house, like a true gentleman. One night as I sat next to him in the passengers seat I felt the words press against my sealed lips, and the pressure of my need to speak became all too much.

“I love you.” I said, looking straight ahead, not daring to meet his gaze.

“I know.” He said. And with that I opened the door and walked out. He never mentioned my confession, he never changed how he interacted with me. I ached to know about him, to understand how he felt, to hear about his life. But I could only ever collect the fragments of information he was willing to give me, it was never enough. So I turned to the internet for what I craved. I spent inumerous hours rifling through pictures of him nonchalantly posing with his friends and family. He was totally oblivious to the fact that to some inconsequential girl, they were holy icons. I was content in my distant, concealed adoration until I happened upon a picture of him cradling a young blonde about five years older than myself in his arms, and I wouldn’t have been so deeply affected by it had his hands not been resting upon the

fullness of her pregnant belly.

There is a horrible sinking feeling when one’s heart is broken. Everything around you becomes irrelevant and the colour drains from the surroundings for that moment, you sit there with this sink pit of despair lodged deep in your stomach. You feel injured; physically pained. You're in an isolated cube, trapped by shock and pain. I knew he had no real attachment to me. I knew his life was filled with others for whom he actually cared. But seeing this woman, seeing his unborn child, seeing the protective, caring hold he had round her that he never used for me was excruciating. This was permanent, indisputable evidence that he would never be mine, and yet I would always be his. I was nothing more than a toy he played with when he had nothing better to do. I could not bear this thought.

I kept my newfound knowledge a secret, never once let slip that I knew anything more than what he had told me about himself. I bided my time, waiting with bated breath for him to seek my company once more. When in two weeks time he finally summoned me, I suggested my house as the location. He walked through the door and pushed me onto the bed as he had done so many times before. I flipped over on top of him and cradled his head in my hands.

“Before anything happens I have to tell you something.”

“What?” he asked, more interested in removing the shirt he was tugging at than listening to me.

“I love you, I want to be part of you, and you need to be a part of me. I never want you to leave me, I could never handle that.”

He looked confused as I bent down and kissed his unyielding lips. He lay stiff beneath me, not reciprocating the adoration I poured into him. He did not see me reach under the pillow. I caressed his face lovingly and rose up. His gaze did not catch the silver glint of the knife. I plunged the blade into his chest as hard as I could. A strangled gurgling sound poured forth from his lips to flood the room, and his hands flew up to try and stop me, but I was already bringing it down a second, then a third, then a fourth time. His hands fell limply, his eyes widened. Blood spurted from his body, staining me, staining the sheets and obliterating my vision until all I could see was a haze of red. I finally pulled out the knife one last time and dropped it to the floor. Breathing heavily, I allowed myself to collapse limply onto his mutilated chest. I brought his arms around me, and cuddled with him, falling asleep, feeling peaceful and fulfilled.

I awoke several hours later; it was still dark outside, still night. The blood had begun to coagulate and a sickly, sweet coppery smell filled the air. I had to peel our clothes apart because the sticky liquid that had once filled my beloved now acted as the glue that sealed us together. I used the knife to cut away his clothes and sat back to admire him. He was gorgeous as always, but now he was all mine, now I knew he wasn’t leaving me. I allowed my hands to caress the broken skin of his chest and the contorted features of his face. It was with a great deal of struggling that I managed to drag him to the bathroom. He was much larger than me, and his full deadweight posed a huge strain on my back. The bath water was cold by the time I managed to drop his body into it, not that he minded. Blood blossomed into the water like a delicate flower, tainting it a rose pink, then a light red, then a deep crimson. I scrubbed him with a bar of soap and a soft washcloth, making sure he was clean before I let out the water, pushed him onto the floor and dried him off. I cleaned out his wounds with hydrogen peroxide and stitched the deep gashes shut with a sewing needle and thread. His clothes were too damaged and stained to put them back on him so I had to be content with wrapping his body in an oversized robe.

Propping up his body in the chair at the table was difficult but by the time I had finished he looked almost alive despite his head lolling to the side. His phone was still in his jean pocket, it did not take long to find her name in his contacts. I sat at the table across from him and texted her the address, telling her to meet me there alone as soon as she could. While I was awaiting her arrival I changed out of my stained clothes and scrubbed the dried blood from my face and arms.

Twenty minutes later the doorbell rang. I plastered a fake smile on my lips that did not reach my eyes and opened the door.

“Oh, um, hello, who are you?” My eyes immediately fell to her stretched stomach, she was obviously quite far along in her third trimester.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I’m a friend of your boyfriend. I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you.” I extended my hand in a friendly shake and gestured beyond the door into the house.

“Wish I could say the same thing.” She seemed confused, and she had every reason to be; receiving a text from her boyfriend at midnight telling her to meet him at some unknown location and being greeted by a stranger. She walked ahead of me into the house. The arrogance that laced her voice with every word, the way her hand rested protectively upon her belly as she walked as if guarding some precious gem, the way her hair lightly fell as she flipped it behind her shoulder; everything about her made white, hot, anger bubble up in my veins. Most of all the ring that encircled her second finger. It was silver, with a single large diamond as it’s only distinction. A highly generic and cliched object, yet the fact that it was from him made it the most unique token in existence. The fact that he had gone into a store with the express intention of buying a marker of his adoration for her made me ill with jealousy. I knew once she turned the corner into the kitchen she’d be able to see him sitting in the chair. I grabbed a blue ceramic vase off the table next to me and gripped it behind my back.

“Where did you say he was?”

“Kitchen.”

“Oh hey, babe, what’s going on?” She entered the room but could only see him from the back, not his mutilated chest nor his twisted facial features. I waited, watching as she walked around him, wanting her to see him, wanting her to know that she could no longer claim him as her own. I needed her to know that he was mine now. Her banshee scream echoed off the walls and pierced my ears. I wiped the false smile from my face like cheap lipstick and lunged forward with the vase.

One swing to her head and she was on the ground, a second and it broke into shards, lacerating her face. I jumped to my feet and stomped on her head again, and again, and again. I kept going long after I knew she was dead. Bringing my foot down as hard as I possibly could, putting every bit of strength I had into destroying her. This was for every time I had shed tears over him, for every time I had called and he hadn’t answered because he was too busy with her. This was destroying the future she had pictured with him, this was for the baby girl she had thought she would give him, this was for every time she had said ‘I love you’ and he had said ‘I love you too’. Blood was pouring from her eyes, which had popped like smashed grapes, and tears were pouring from mine. Her head was a misshapen mass of flesh and broken bone. There was a loud crunching sound, my foot broke through the broken eggshell that had been her skull, and into the spongy, oatmeal mass that was her brain. I bent to slide the ring off her finger and onto mine; where it truly belonged. It was too large for me, it slide all the way down my digit to the last knuckle, and if I did not focus on keeping it on my finger, I was certain it would slide off. She was not the one I wanted, she was now useless. I pressed the knife against her stomach. It went into the soft flesh far easier than it had gone into its first victim. Liquid poured from her body and pooled on the floor. I wanted each and every part of him. I gagged at the smell, the fetus was coated in a thin film of amniotic fluid and blood, in which I was drenched as well. I severed the umbilical cord and kicked her body away from me. I was done with her now. I laid the fetus on the table in front of its father so that my hands were free to drag her body to the bathroom. The flaps of skin peeled back from her deflated stomach. She was a gaping, empty purse, missing the precious coin for which she had been meant to hold. I needed to dispose of it, I didn’t ever want to have to think of her again.

I filled the tub with bleach and pushed her body into it. I resolved that that should take care of any DNA evidence, all I had left to do was to drop her off in some remote location where it would be months before she was discovered.

“Lake, side of a highway, forest, gutter.....” I mused as I walked back to the kitchen, knife in hand.

I sat in his lap and kissed him with a passion I had never been able to show him when he was alive. Rigor mortis had begun to set in and his face had stiffened, making his lips hard and unyielding to my own. I realized that it wouldn’t be long before the natural process of decomposition would begin to take hold.

“No, no, no, no, no....” I whispered as I panically grabbed onto him, as if I could keep him forever in my arms if only I held him close enough. I had thrown away every moral I had, risked my life, and mortgaged my future for him, and yet he would still always find a way to elude me. These thoughts all fell upon me at once with a weight that compressed me from the inside out. I was shaking and grasping desperately at his skin; kissing every inch of him hard through my tears. I was roughly pressing my lips to his flesh, numb to the pain of my teeth scraping against my gums, and all at once I was no longer kissing but biting, gently, then, harder. I was leaving deep imprints of my teeth in his skin; a love bite, a hickey far more urgent and honest than any I’m sure she had ever given him.

A single drop of his blood trickled down his chest from the bite I had left on his neck. I slowly brought my lips closer; allowing myself to sample the red fluid of his of which I had become so very familiar in such a short span of time. I lightly traced the red line with the tip of my tongue, closing my eyes and savoring the rich, copper flavour of him. For a moment I sat enveloped by him entirely, wrapped in his arms, seated atop him, and now with the hot fluid of his life flowing down my throat. His blood entering my body in a way for more intimate than our secret trysts had ever been. I relished the image of this single drop of him melding to my being. He was becoming a part of me, everytime I moved, he would supply to energy behind it.

I sank my teeth deeper into the bite on his shoulder.

He would never leave me.

I bit down deep into him, sawing through tender skin, and soft flesh, feeling his now lukewarm blood spill over me once again until my teeth met together.

He would never leave me.

I pulled my lips away from him; taking a chunk of his pink flesh with me. My tongue rolled it about in my mouth; testing it, tasting it. I closed my eyes as I chewed, allowing every memory I had of him within the arsenal of my mind to come flooding back to me with full force as I did so.

His crooked teeth peeping out from behind the parted lips of his grin.

The feeling of his hands tracing the topography of my body.

The deep, fluid bass swell that had been his voice.

I brought his limp hands to my face, maneuvering them down my cheeks, over my neck, across the swell of my breasts. I smiled. This could happen to me everyday, anytime I wanted.

But he wouldn’t last forever. This thought lingered in the back of my mind even as I tried to savour this moment of bliss, this perfect climax of all my work. It festered inside me like a parasite, each second burrowing deeper, forcing me to acknowledge it.

Time would come for him as it would for me , as it would for everyone, and eat us away forever. I am not one to accept defeat even in the face of the all powerful force of nature. But to take on such an adversary as Time, to challenge that who is essentially Master of the universe and puppeteer of all easily manipulated beings who roam throughout the haze of existence, requires careful planning and a somewhat heightened level of insanity.

My one fatal flaw, my most destructive design feature is that I unwillingly allow my emotions to entwine themselves with other people. My heart strings become a tangled ball, a pestering Gordian's Knot that others hack away at in an attempt to free themselves from my embrace. I reach out to try and fix the contorted web, but my fingers are thick and cumbersome and human relationships are delicate gossamer tightropes that are easy to fall from, and easy to break.

It took me one hour to divide him into two groups: parts to keep and parts to assimilate.

It took me two hours of painstaking sawing and cutting to divide the latter group into manageable bits.

Ten seconds to plug the blender into an outlet.

Two seconds to drop in his daughter.

One second to press “puree”

It took me forty-five minutes to change into clean clothes, drive to the nearest store and purchase three large, glass bottles.

Two minutes to fill them with formaldehyde.

One minute to place his head in one

Another for hands

And a final for the appendage that had created both his child and hours of his pleasure.

And seven minutes for me to fall asleep in my bed; content with the knowledge that his grey eyes were watching me from my bedside table whilst I slept.

The next morning I woke up hungry. I hadn’t eaten since before he had come over the night before. I wondered when he had last eaten, what he had eaten. There hadn’t been anything in his stomach; nothing identifiable at least. The stairs creaked as I walked down them to my kitchen. With each step farther down the pungent smell of blood became ever more apparent. I had scrubbed the table and the floors with bleach the night before, and had sprayed an entire can of air freshener. But apparently no amount of synthetic lavender was enough to mask the smell.

Normally I would have marked the start of my day by scalding the roof of my mouth with the bitter heat of black coffee. However today I forwent this daily ritual and instead went straight to making breakfast for myself. I rested a metal pan upon the stovetop and poured in just enough oil to coat the surface. When I pulled open the refrigerator door the fruits of my previous night's labor greeted me. Plastic tupperware containers crowded every surface and sat piled atop each other. They were each stuffed full of small, red chunks of marbled meat. Large round slabs of his arms and legs, still impaled on his bones sat wrapped carefully in paper.

Blood had begun to seep out of some and drip down the refrigerator door. In the pantry nearby thin strips of his sun-blushed skin hung; drying into curled rolls like peeling wall paper. Before long the thick aroma of cooking meat was billowing into the air. The bright red cubes had turned a dull brown- grey, the refrigerator contained one more ingredient, a true testament to the depravity that had been last nights’ lust. A large beige pitcher. I poured the thick, red, contents into a small pot and moved it atop the stove next to the pan, where it would heat up.

It was a cold morning. I was craving the warm comfort of some hot soup.

Two weeks after the path of my life had taken a very twisted and contorted turn everything had returned to normal. It is an astonishingly human trait, the ability to settle amidst the greatest turmoil and unrest. To find stability where there is only chaos. Perhaps this is the secret to success, the strength to adapt. Because within two weeks; fourteen short days, I had established a routine, a disturbed and confused one, but a routine all the same. Upon looking in my kitchen any random third-party would merely assume that I merely had an unusual disposition to meats. Which I suppose had become true. The unsuspecting young woman who had previously been a strict vegetarian was now obsessed with a prime choice cut that looked like beef, had the flavour of pork, and despite the fact that it legally classified as murder, it tasted right to me. And despite the fact that it legally classified as murder, it tasted right to me.

The most incredible fact to arise from all this was that I was happy. For the first time I was seized by pure and unadulterated joy. And why shouldn’t I have been? I was a young woman in the prime of life, in a satisfying relationship with a young man. So long as I lived he would too. It would be him filling my stomach. Him, driving through the highway of my veins. His memory forever cemented in my mind. Because as long as I was alive, I would still remembered the touch of his skin, the rough caress of his hands, and the flavor of his lips. We would grow old together. We would die together, never for a moment separated. How cliché, and yet, how intrinsically beautiful.

It was these thoughts that flitted and twirled about my mind like snowflakes; dusting me with a layer of sincere tranquility as I lay in bed. Built into this new routine I had created was hours of time per day spent cradling him in my arms. I had quickly discovered that a simple water rinse would cleanse the pungent chemical smell of formaldehyde from his remains. His lips were cold; mucid, but still as soft and comforting as ever. And despite the fact that long exposure to liquid had left his previously calloused hands soft; they still fit into mine perfectly.

I was caught in a trance; a beautiful stained glass mosaic that had been pieced together to form some twisted image of love in my mind. But the image was shattered by the high scream of the doorbell. My heart began to race and my body stiffened; it would not do well to be found in a such a compromising situation. The screech was repeated. I ran to my closet where I carefully hid him with as much speed as I could muster. I donned the same smiling mask that I had worn the night I’d killed her. I opened the door expecting to see any number of unremarkable, unimportant faces belonging to people who were of the same brand to me. However upon wresting open the door my mask fell to reveal true genuine joy.

“I missed you so much!” It was one of my closest and dearest friends, whom I hadn’t seen since before falling in love. I wrapped my arms around her torso in an overjoyed embrace. It felt strange to be touching someone so warm; someone whose blood still pumped within their body; someone whose chest you could feel rising and falling with breath through a hug.

I felt hyper aware of my surroundings as led her inside. I could almost feel every place where I’d hidden evidence of my downfall. The closet where his jars sat, the pantry where his skin was neatly folded, the refrigerator containing several leftover dishes and uncooked jars of meat; all seemed to radiate energy and fear that was unbeknownst to her and terribly obvious to me. She was an intruder in my lair, a threat. I felt like a spider, carefully sensing every move that a fly made on my delicate trip wires of my web. I was almost too anxious to stand. I excused myself to the bathroom, leaving my friend sitting at my dining room table, leafing through some arbitrary magazine as she awaited my return. The sink I sat on was cold and hard, my breathing was shallow and quick. I made a mental note that in the the future I would only associate with people outside of my house, this would be exclusively my place to relax my guard and live privately with him. I steadied my breathing and collected my thoughts: She’d be gone soon, thirty minutes at the most. I just had to fabricate some excuse; an extra shift at work, a doctor’s appointment. Anything. Then later I could be with my friends somewhere else, somewhere more relaxed, somewhere more free.

I left the bathroom, my excuse sitting on the edge of my tongue ready to tumble out into open air. But when I turned the corner back into the dining room I was taken aback. My mouth fell open, but I swallowed my words. She was sitting there reading an article concerning some topic I’d forgotten, turning the pages with one hand and eating leftover soup with the other.

What happened to him did not happen to her. Because when I’d killed him it had been out of pure blind emotion. And as I approached her, as I gripped her head in my hands, as sharply twisted my torso, as I listened to the loud crack of her neck I felt nothing. I was completely empty, I didn’t even fully register the gravity of what I was doing until after it was done. And as I’ve come to realize what’s done cannot be undone It had become an automatic, ingrained response within myself, to protect what was mine at all costs; to protect him. Her body fell to the ground with a loud, dull thud. I stood above her, breathing heavily for several minutes before I too fell. I dropped to my knees and I screamed. The sound echoed off the walls louder than the screams from he and his fiancee had. It was a sound that filled the house to capacity and beyond, it flooded my mind and strained my throat with the effort. I screamed until my vocal chords rattled and until the capillaries of my lungs turned violet and begged desperately for air.

It is a common misconception that the spectrum of emotion ranges from love to hate, and that sandwiched in between are infinite varying degrees of the two. However what I have come to realize is that love and hate, the two most dangerous emotions of all, are intertwined, if you fall deep enough into one you will find yourself coming out of the other. It is so easy to confuse actions of hate as those of love and the actions of love as those of hatred. And it is equally as easy to project hate onto one you dearly love.

In the two seconds after you ruin everything, your identity, your freedom, your dignity; all will be lost to the fires of your own creation. What does one do after a devastating fire? One rebuilds. One salvages what one can and must re-create what was lost. However there comes a point where you must realize that the fires start too often and burn too strong for there to ever be hope of reconstruction. This was the point I had come to. Sometimes it is better to let the fire burn, to make no attempt to stop it. To let the flames slowly extinguish each other and leave nothing but charred earth behind. Sometimes it is better to merely hope that where you were unable to live, someone else will flourish.

It was very strange and somewhat humbling to see what he was physically reduced to. Four folded sheets of leathery skin, sitting next to seven plastic bowls of crimson flesh, to the left of which was a large beige pitcher and completing the circle were three large glass jars. In the middle of the ring I had meticulously arranged his crisp white of his bones back into the form of a human body. I suppose this really is all we are. Meaningless bags of flesh, aimlessly wandering the world, trying to convince ourselves that there must be some reason for our suffering, and some reason for our joy. We all lie to ourselves to think our emotions are valid merely because we are feeling them. What right have we to say that these random impulses powered by some chemical imbalance, or dire insanity should hold any sway over the world. Most of us spend our entire lives struggling to repress our feelings. Desire is the true devil of all our lives. We have painted lust as sinful, and hunger as gluttony. Yet love has always been seen as the ultimate elusive goal in life. Billions of dollars are spent every year on carbon copy romantic movies and on chocolate hearts and paper cards in some attempt to provoke one desire with another. And still billions of people every year are destroyed when what they thought was gold turns out to be lead.

This all made what I was now doing seem so trivial. What is one life worth in the grand scheme of things? What is one life worth that has taken the lives of four others? Emotional pain never goes away, you simply become accustomed to it. It was with an odd sense of relief that I stepped onto the chair. And the weight of the coarse rope around my neck was balanced by the sudden disappearance of weight on my mind. I lifted my right hand and gazed at the ring that encircled my finger. For what seemed like eternity I stood motionless, as if waiting for some sign. For some lone voice to call out to me. But none did. So I stepped off the chair. There was a swift drop; a single rush of adrenaline. It didn’t matter that after I was gone, the rest of the world would enter my fortress to gaze upon us with macabre interest and disgusted fascination, we’d be gone, we’d be together, we’d be beyond them.

And all of a sudden there were five bodies within the house. Five lost lives, five closed books, five stories that would never be known. Five victims who had been ensnared by the snapping jaws of the heart. I had built an impenetrable cocoon and sealed it shut with both our lives. There would be no entering and no exits.