Rituals in the Dark
First published in Storgy Flash Fiction 2019 Competition chapbook
There is another girl beneath my skin.
The bar was stocked up with new faces, square shoulders hunched over pints, teeth bearing laughter, shirts strained over broad chests. As I moved deeper inside the room, their gaze crashed against the jut of my hips, the curves of my breasts. For the occasion I wore my best smile, the one that curled into hooks. Skin bristling, I waded through their attention until I carved myself a space at the bar.
One who stirs every time they are near, under their touch or the warmth of their breath.
As the familiar ache rose inside so did their smell, the sugary scent of lies flavouring skins, the tanginess of back alley fights trapped between knuckles, one of them even pickled with the ginger bitterness of murder.
I found him tucked in a corner of the room where the thick berry scent of entitlement had summoned me. He greeted me with a stare. He didn’t care what I said just watched my lips move while his fingers peeled the label from a beer bottle, biding their time until they could roam on an expanse of skin, knot in hair, shackle wrists. Condemning thoughts flickered in his eyes, every time I smiled at him.
Do you want to get out of here? He nodded, hungry and knocked his chair down as he grabbed his jacket, forgetting that I’d go with him without having to slip something in my drink, that I wouldn’t be one of his Sleeping Beauties.
Tip me back, split me open and there will be another one of me, tucked inside like a Babushka doll, ready to take over.
Outside the cold slapped our faces and prickled our skins. We quickened the pace his arm anchored around my waist, pulling me into his body as our progress echoed off stone walls. Anticipation tingled at the end of my fingers, amplified once we stopped at the Cerberus of my front door. Unable to contain himself any longer, his mouth dived in my neck as my key scraped around the lock. Up close, the stench of his past sharpened like rotting blackcurrant.
I locked the door behind him. In the darkened space of the hallway, I licked his cheek and tasted how many he had taken without asking. The number grew in the pit of my stomach into a hole that demanded to be filled. As we kissed, tongues sparring, the narrow void between us withered, and I stirred him deeper inside, towards the kitchen.
Under my touch he came away in strips, dripping red ribbons to reveal the white architecture of his ribcage. Hands deep into his chest, I lifted and showed him his heart, dark and gleaming red under the sulphur light. It spasmed in the cup of my hands — one last time — before the warm taste of metal flooded my mouth.
Ready to pull them close and pull them in, until they swim the underground rivers beneath my skin.
