A car light flared through the gauzy curtain of the motel room, he started. Heart thumping, he dragged in a shaky breath and lit another cigarette.
Colour was leeching from the sky towards dusk.
They’d destroyed the room together the day before, stripping clothes and breathless. When they had burst back into the room at dawn, she was oh god she was destroyed.
Her shoes discarded one after the other on the floor. There was red on one of them.
There was red on the twisted sheets on the bed
There was dainty, dirty foot hanging over the edge of the mattress
The memory flashed in his mind
The dry summer winds rushed in the wound down windows and we sped along the highway, her head resting on the door watching her hand weave through the air as it streamed past the car. Dirty blonde hair whipped around her face as she laughed at him
Say you love me
I love you.
He paced and paced, sucking on a cigarette when he remembered that it burned in his hand. Tapping the dirty red heel of his hand against his forehead, as if it could shake him loose from this reality, he smeared the red and dirt that covered his face.
Don’t look at it
Don’t look at it
Don’t look at her
If he just had the guts to do it, she wanted him to do it, he shuddered at the last thing she said
Why did no one come? How did people not know, not break down the door? The cops, the hospital, her parents. Oh god her parents Would it matter? There was nothing to be done. There was one thing. His head fizzed as his eyes skittered over sheets and skin and … and?
He had the gun, all he had to do was squeeze the metal but it was her head.
Dirty blonde hair, darker now in patches and spots, covered one of her eyes. He couldn’t tuck the hair away from her face. He couldn’t squeeze the metal that would stop her from blankly staring with that one eye.
In those last seconds she shuddered and gasped for air, for him.
Looking at her stained eyes he was desperate for it to end, guilt ridden for wishing it were over; clutching her, trying to keep pressure on her neck.
The last thing she said
Head and heart love
dying twice
Think it’ll hurt?
He couldn’t do it with her eyes open
Please make it stop
I thought we could hide in the daylight.
It was simple right, just the one; it was supposed to be just the one.
She saw it, had put the first bullet through it, taking the heart, called for him to take the head but there was something moving in shadows at the back of the garage, it took a second, just a second to look away.
He couldn’t sit, couldn’t fit in his skin, couldn’t breathe in this hell. He pulled at his hair as he sobbed. He stumbled towards the table, strewn with bottles and a used ashtray. Dropping the gun, he scrabbled for a liquor bottle he hadn’t emptied, sloshing whisky into a glass, spilling on the already sticky table.
His stomach churned already on too much whiskey and too little rest.
He needed the gun, the dark was on the outside now, not just in his nightmares, and the clock ticked closer to midnight. Maybe he was wrong. It was one bite, not even a bite really, it was so fast, they were on them so fast and all he could do was haul her out and run. He lied and lied to himself but she had known, she told him, she needed him to.
His stomach clenched and he jerked back to the bed, every footstep agony as he tried to touch the barrel to that dirty blonde hair. He spoke, his voice rusty from disuse
Depart, then, transgressor. Depart, seducer, full of lies and cunning, foe of virtue, persecutor of the innocent… For he has already stripped you of your powers and laid waste your kingdom, bound you prisoner and plundered your weapons. He has cast you forth into the outer darkness, where everlasting ruin awaits you and your abettors.
The thing on the bed wasn’t ridged, wasn’t pallid anymore.
The gunshot rang more easily through his own head.
The corpse on the bed opened its eyes
post: quick short story inspired by a song
Kitty Powers 