John dances, graceful as a rhinoceros. Boys circle him like flames. Illuminated by the candles in their hands, writhing to the repeated track, their flickering faces wear every expression from certified indifference to the green hustler's triumphant smirk.
Jaded or gleeful, it all depends on where they fall in their journey as prostitutes. Falling is the mutual journey ending in our semi-sacred circle tonight, though I don't know this until after the tragic end. John has the stupidest accident of his stupid wasted life that night. Stupid John, with his fear of freedom, fear of heights. Falling and fawning, all of us prostitute imposters, mimicking the enslavement we crave to spin us senselessly around the one elusive thing we want.
No one warns you there's nothing in the center of the storm except vacant, still air. This is the work of death: love under will, burying what you've unmade. Here: take my hand and I'll show you the full process when we get to the part with the lost footage.
That's what you came here to see, isn't it?
Meanwhile, enjoy the dancing boys, topless, of course. The tallest and oldest of them, the one I'll be spending all my money on at the bar later tonight, can barely be bothered to make eye contact with the camera. He's aging out of his profession and later tonight I will use him in a way that will cut his career short. I like pushing boys who've seen too much to open up a little bit wider. That's the reason they go looking in the first place. I respond to what people want. I care about the boys I fuck. The oldest and tallest one's instinctive aversion to my penetrating lens is the opposite of John, who I have protected from the things he fears.
John can't peel his obsequious eyes away from the camera long enough to enact a seductive tease. He's not my ideal body type, overweight and overdressed in the middle of the sacrificial circle, surrounded by beautiful dancing boys bearing candlelight. John gapes like an amazed infant. If eyes could drool, his would.
“Canter about and do a little spin for me, love. There you go.” I demonstrate the desired motion with my wrist. John puzzles out the idea after a lingering gawk of incomprehension. His ignorance is my fault. I've been free-handing out hallucinogenic treats.
His awkwardness, too. John's clumsy twirl endangers the hired help. Shirtless boys back off to accommodate his width and then pulse inward to buoy him aloft, flames a safe distance away. Consummate professionals, they keep John on his mark despite the wavering ineptitude of his turn. Ever an intrusion, I embrace and I smile. John's so pleased with himself it's contagious.
Candlelight illuminates the cave, or so it appears on film. The contrast is dramatic. Edits after the fact will erase what isn't ethereal and sinister in John's fumbling dance. Slender torsos flicker in and out of the liquid darkness around him. Mingling elements of water and fire, wax drips on a flat abdomen. The slathered boy telegraphs his pain tolerance as an aperitif to sex. Raising his flame with calm, he reveals ancient handprints and primeval renditions of horn-headed god-things gathered on the cave walls. Filming here is utterly illegal, of course.
John's face bloats forward, bleached by the beam of the spotlight trained to his head. Framed by a halo he can't shake off. His generous-sized top catches duplicate glimmers on the sequins. The unfortunate effect highlights the pasty insecurity of his looming middle age, the shifting undertones of worry in his dilated green eyes, and the fearful padding of luxury's waste like innocence advertising the wrong kind of childishness to claim good taste.
“No, no,” I correct the boys closest to John. Two of the youngest—the cagey ones who agreed to be our guides in finding the caves—reach, grinning, for John's privates and pop open his top buttons.
“That's enough, loves,” I repeat with more force.
The boys laugh. John joins in the mirth. A vague understanding they want to pleasure him and an impulsive desire to indulge the professionals in exercising their skill sends his eyes to his crotch as if he's found a new toy to share. Their fondling awakes something playful and missing in John.
Until he remembers me.
His gaze shoots up into my spotlight. He stares, blinded by my approach.
I hate to say he's a deer in the headlights. I like to think I'm more creative and it's such a tired old cliché, but honestly darling. Look at him. Look .
John knows what happens when boys misbehave.
When I'm finished with the two cagey twinks and seek to appease John's panic, I'm revolted to realize I've left the camera running. The spotlight rests on the rocky sediment veneer clearly aimed at the surreal carnage. John glares, shaking from an anguished protest launched moments ago, lips still quivering with the sweet spittle that showered me when he screamed to fucking stop it . I didn't.
Here's where you can make a clever joke about things on the cutting room floor.
In the face of death and its unreliable permutations, as in the face of rampant desire, one must try to preserve a semblance of humor. To be blunt, and I am nothing if not honest, recording the emotional evisceration appalls me more than capturing the images of physical disruption. You'll understand my position better once you remember where you've seen John before. Yes, he's no stranger, I assure you. What a wonderful surprise you're in for, my darling boy.
Cutting this beast into a coherent narrative was already going to prove a monumental chore given John's lackadaisical performance and poor coordination, and now the film's challenges are further compounded by the need to delete evidence. What a terrible waste of perfectly good body parts.
Add in film stock and all too precious time, and it occurs to me no one in the audience will believe it's real. The most efficient solution is to use the scene as so-called special effects. Thus the footage survived until it was seized by customs. You're the first to view it other than me, the border patrol, and whoever they sell to on the black market when they happen upon a choice piece of violent pornography.
“My god,” John says. “What even are you anymore?”
Disgust ruins his good looks. I lecture; a terrible choice. A compulsion I can't quit.
“Cryptids and monsters in film have been queer-coded for decades. Certainly we queers can claim the rights to our own fantastic version of were-coding, by myth or magic or any means necessary. We deserve our own branch of occult evolution. God knows we've taken enough shit from society to earn it.”
Surrounded by bare feet except for John's atrocious snakeskin cowboy boots—yes, of course, he just had to have them when we drove through Texas, didn't he?—I rise from the cave floor to reconfigure in an acceptable form without incurring any chemical errors. Cave geology is not my field of study. I've no idea what kind of endemic viruses or fecal deposits might nest invisibly on the ancient sediment. The very thought of fundamentally altering my biology along accidental parameters makes me cringe with dysphoria.
John's guiding enzymes from his outburst help reorganize my shape in a way he tolerates, prefers, and determines, although sweet boy that he is, John's never understood the power he has over me.
I know, I know; too many conundrums. All shall be clear soon enough. Indulge me a little longer, as an elder.
You see, for every transformation, there's a price. I watch the cost deducted from John's eyes this very minute. Dread closes the doors to his soul, locking the child inside.
I learn in retrospect that our reenacted ritual disaster is my fault, every bit of it an intentional mistake based on the false eye in the center of the swirling storm. Everything from feeding John's paunch to inelucticating the damaged boys has sped our leap towards a future that is ending too soon for both of us to reconcile.
A boy like you might call me foolish for finishing a lost film at the end of my life that no one else will ever watch, but what else do you do when you're being swallowed by the clock? What does one do when you're a slimy white swimmer sliding down the throat of time?
Right or wrong, you do what you've always done.
You grab history by the cock and pump every drop of life out of it.
And you do it with vengeance. You do it with love.
* * *
The nightmares start again after I lose John. Not when I lose him on the way back from the caves due to the unfortunate state of the two boys, and not later at the club where he drinks to excess despite the plentiful drugs I most graciously supply. Not even later that night or the next morning when the world as I know it ends, for there is no world for me without John, none at all. I lose him long before then, when he's right in front of me and smiling.
What's that they say? One may smile and smile and be a villain. But that's not fair to my darling John, is it? I'm the villain, obviously. The monster in the bathroom conservatives keep warning you about. I'm the one who corrupts him as a young lad.
“You're of no use to me sober,” I'll say, feeding him some new concoction, much to his hedonistic adolescent delight. His Pentecostal father binges and recovers on a regular basis. Always remorseful, he vows to protect John from the demon rum. A beginner's move against a beginner demon.
Under the shadow of the bullying patriarch, John runs wild. How thrilling to see him then, all blondish tangles and uncontrolled urges. Bartering a fistful of mundane tablets in exchange for a bottle, he stalks strangers outside the corner store. He swerves out of the alley, almost crashing into me. The gentle voice accosts with more power than his crass physicality. My scalp tingles.
“Hey, mister, do you need something?”
His eyes hit me at close range. “Oh, I'm sorry, ma—”
“No, no,” I rush to interrupt. “Don't apologize. You were right the first time.”
John wipes his nose with the back of his free hand. He uses the same hand to push the hair out of his eyes before wiping it off on his jeans. He proffers his questionable wares. “Do you, um?”
I wave off his palm. “Put that silly trash away. Not that I'm opposed to decongestants and baby aspirin. What have you got there, expired Percocet? No thank you, love. Now look, what can I get for you? My treat.”
“I'm, uh, not into, you know.”
He nods at my abdominal area. My chest. Shrugs and looks hopeful. “Okay?”
I stretch my arms wide. The tails of my embroidered frock coat spread wide and flap in the steely wind, making a pleasant, watery sound. Winter nears, when the veils fall away and the snow blindness of mental cessation lulls our most secret longings out into the open to wander.
In the dead of winter, how we wander and pine. I say, “Behold a great mystery. Herein lie bones made of impermanent stuff, matter most fluid, a formless form capable of intertwining the many scattered puzzle pieces which compose the formulas of your desire. Does the sand rattle in the hourglass, or is the hourglass made of boiled and blown sand? We too are boiled and blown, and our hidden bones rattle corporeal in this dark alley on this dark night. What if the answer is not one or the other, but both, depending upon factors of heat, pressure, and resistance? Tell me, what do you desire?”
His eyes dart as if he seeks a spy. As if he's meant for me. “Hey, look. I'm cool. I'll just—”
“There's no need for resistance. You can have anything you want. Where's the harm? My answer is yes.”
He scoffs. Then he speaks a wish and I grant it.
Swigging from the overpriced bottle, John fails to suppress a crafty and satisfied smile. “Thanks, fairy godmother.”
“Call me Daddy . Would you like to come home with me?”
John coughs. “Whoa, hold on.”
“I apologize.” I hold up both hands and back up.
His arm stretches toward me with the bottle in his grip. “You said it wasn't like that. Here.”
I don't take it. Poor dear, I've spooked him. I say, “Where are my manners? Keep what's yours, please. As you see, I've been inhabiting an all too private niche for an excessive length of time.”
“You're a what?”
“Let's just say my last relationship ended badly.”
John looks down the empty street as he tips back the bottle. His hair blows in the opposite direction of his gaze. Scars circle the edge of his left brow. The green tint of healing bruises blooms on his cheek. Sour apples have always been my favorite.
“Is it nice, or some sort of dungeon?” John says, still looking away.
The cool wind encircles us, mingling our animal odors and mystical fates. The rest of the city aches with jealousy and emptiness.
I nudge the dull cardboard layered beneath the open lid of the liquor store dumpster with the shiny tip of my boot. “Well, what do you call this?”
When I rise later to leave him where we've sat on the curb adjacent to the alley, John also rises, emptying the bottle. Golden hair like the sun transgressing into forbidden night. Territory of the moon inverted, I lead him with gifts, but it is John's will we follow from that moment and ever after to the end. John's will is an autonomous angel, a living relic he forgets.
I want you to understand something. It's important. I never had anything but his best interests at heart.
Because what if your body was a lie you believed for more than half a century? When you started taking it apart, you'd undo the structures of every part of the world that was once familiar and reliable. You'd unravel the strings cementing reality and expose the very cement as strings; the strings as phantoms; the phantoms as the blank stillness of dead air inside a whirlwind of external deceptions. You'd know nothing.
Making love to John is less about pleasure than about learning to exit margins.
In time, despite his petty thefts and moody defections from my care, my chemical synthesis erodes the previous form and realigns. John begins to trust me when the tips of encrusted wings sprout from my shoulder blades, when my skin tone deepens to match the pigments of stone he admires in the museum. Never certain how a lover's expectations will morph me, intimate seclusion with John induces tourmaline seizures and the surprise retention of breasts.
I'm careful not to complain about the excruciating pain. I endure ongoing and contradictory physiological transformations. After all, I don't want to scare him off. I'm not sure John knows what he wants or how his mercurial desires fluctuate dangerously. Again and again he flees from me and returns. I wait in patient self-isolation, a monk mutating to fit his inmost desires.
Crashing into the bedroom drunk and angry, John leaps on my back as I sleep. He smells like his father. I know because by now I interweave with his memory. Fearful self-loathing shakes his long-fingered hands. One claims a grip around my throat and the other tears at my lavishly spiked wings. He ravages the slick feathers and pumps my windpipe with a grossly masturbatory thumb.
His hand crawls to my mouth. Five fingers pass through the hole between my lips and fist my palate, testing my gag reflex. John pants as if he's finishing a sprint. He hardens against my back.
Abruptly, his fist pulls out. He cups his palm under my mouth. “Spit.”
For the first time between us, John takes control.
In the midst of an ecstasy of fullness, I'm bereft. John is gone. Absolution is lost to me. I'm alone even while gripping him and bleeding for him, even as these violent transformations respond and recalibrate my structure to meet his uncertain needs. I grow a beak: long, sharp, curved, and metallic. It falls off. My feathers turn to tongues. He bites them, and they blink into ash. John sets fire to the many-headed corkscrew of skeletal genitalia I've grown for him. He screams as the milky flames lick his eyes like acid. The ceiling drips. I dissolve into a worm of muscle made only to suck.
I'll survive. I'll grow back. I'll take him when it's my turn and spin John-the-very-bad-dancer around and around, whirling like the cosmological pattern of a nearby galaxy or the spiraled layers of muscle constructing the Mobius strip of the human heart. This is our mutual dance, even though I know I've lost him in that moment. I won't let go.
Take my hand again and I'll show you what it feels like.
Is it worth it? All that effort for one brief spin?
Once John's had his way, I cradle him in the shreds of my mangled wings. Armless, I enfold his sweat and tear-stained face to suckle at my stone-carved breast. There's nothing there for him. I'm a statue, after all. John's warm quivering cheek cools against my polished surface. Smooth rock resists intimacy.
The nightmares start again that night, drifting as we embrace into dawn. Dreams hold me immobile in a dress made of concrete poured by my father. I don't remember the man. John sleeps in peace now that he's channeled his inner patriarch through my core and out the other side like liquid coal. I dream for both of us, jealous of John's erotic monster.
Kill all kings, kiss all kings. We won't evade sacrifice once we claim sovereignty over the deadly spiral of biological time.
* * *
It's nothing but an accident. That's the ruling, though it's hard for me to accept. I revisit the night it happens every time I watch this footage. Notice how he's crippled me slowly in anticipation, plucked my feathers down to corroded nubs. After all these years with John, a tail hangs thick between my legs, anchoring me to the immobile club floor. Thwarting a crowd of boys in the post-cave party, a sparkling demiurge in the disco, John dives over a ledge, usurper of true kings.
We all wish to be thus canonized in our pristine moment of truth. What the mind reveals as one careens downward to the end must be like a wild trick of the light. Get close enough to death and the lies should be blown away in a flash, don't you think?
Don't you think it must be like that?
John knew what he wanted for once. He lived in that flame.
Who am I to change his course? Nothing but the old creep who keeps him in his cups, distracted in the moment of crisis by the tall jaded dancer from the caves going down on me in a crowded stall. The walls shake. John's desire is like blood. It burns as it flows in an imitation of a disease through my system, a consequence of our long union, a hot curse bursting from every sore in my augmented organ.
The boy spits me out in disgust. Thick crimson smears his face. It's too much for him. The taste of true love dying in his mouth.
The crash, the shrieks from the dance floor, the boys above, gawking at the failed railing and darting away from the scene of the crime with the feral instinct of a dog pack. I see it from every angle as I come in the jaded boy's gagging mouth. The pain of each physical thrust that roots me deeper in a stranger's affronted trench matches the flashing pictures of John's clumsy plunge.
A medical anomaly, they say later. He didn't fall very far. Quite an unusual way to die, the medical examiner tells me with an admiring sort of pride in his tone.
I stare at him, struggling to connect this assessment to any reality in which I can willingly participate. “Yes,” I say with a stammer. “He's a most unusual boy.”
In the examiner's surprise and disdain I read his unspoken corrections: was , and hardly a boy .
His attentive hesitation unnerves me. “I'm sorry,” I say. “I've never…” He turns, and I wonder later if I was supposed to give him a tip.
I awake in a bed that smells of John's living body. When they asked if I wanted more time alone with the corpse I said no. That limp carcass laid out on the table wasn't John. Its uncanny similarity made John's absence too palpable. I felt rage. I wanted to kick the giant puppet and beat its lies back into the nonexistence it represented. I wanted to scream at John to come back and stop his fucking childish games. I couldn't touch the awful thing, couldn't look at it.
Turning away in an empty bed, wrongness in the faint light of dawn darkens, drawing down the veil of the unreal. My racing heart surges into my throat where it stops beating. I'm glad of it, glad to be dead. Or perhaps it beats so hard it's exploding: pounding, fluttering with torn wings like a moth turning into powder mid-flight. I choke on the dust.
I'm falling. I can't see.
My body plummets as my heart skips and stops like excitement, like death. I'm tied down by silky wet tendrils strapping me to the bed erotically, and yet somehow I'm also plunging down an endless gulch. I'm pleading with John from a dark compass point inside my blacked-out unspun head.
I didn't mean those things.
What more can I do to please you? Haven't I given you everything?
Oh, the boys. You know they don't matter to me.
If death is all there is, take me with you.
Take me down with you. Make it hurt.
I can't cry. Grief is a black hood cinched over my head. I lift the clay weight of my limbs like a kidnap victim immobilized for days.
This isn't what we planned. This isn't the magic we worked toward. This body is a failed organism.
This film is a question that cuts my throat.
Cloven through the paper trachea, a spot most vulnerable, artifact of my love made incontinent. Opened arteries soak the thin tissue lining of my layered and aging skin, stains splitting into halves, tearing a blood infused seam in the shape of a child's Valentine's card heart.
Paper is all I'm made of. See how easily I fold into an origami simulation of a mythical winged beast? See how I spin on a transparent thread and flutter helpless upon invisible currents when it is cut?
See me now for what I am, John: folded together, a dance of intersecting paper angles and duplicating planes. Tuck me into your center. Cross your heart with false hope. Press my sections in place with bone and tweezers. Flex flat the seams of both mountain and valley tessellations, for I agree to fall with you. The reverse and inverse exacting a pattern; perplexing until we unfold like blooming crystals, like the thick substance of the beloved, like the antithesis of all that is lost.
Here is my hand, John. Reach out, grab hold, and come back to me.
* * *
Anyway.
The lost footage. That's what you really want to see, isn't it? It's your only possible motive for letting me carry on so.
You're too sweet. More than sweet, in fact. Past the point of ripe to rottenness.
No, don't let go. Hold my hand firm, darling. Feel the pressure of my flesh against what's left of yours while we finish our screening. Let me fondle your exposed glove of bone. If I hold you long enough the film won't be a story anymore. It will become part of you. Flesh and blood.
The thing you can't foresee about shape-shifting and taking apart other people's bodies is the absolute compliance of temporal flesh. The way it bends to strong intention. Killing isn't an act of violence. No more than being born. You'll forgive me for being a novice at both.
When I was born, I had to chew my way out into this world or die suffocated by a prolapsing uterus and its strangling tentacle cord of umbilicus. No one helped me. I survived by devouring my own death. Do you believe I can resurrect you by devouring yours? Do you feel new movement yet in your desiccated flesh?
Your hard on says yes. Though your bulge may be a bloated sac of corpse flies ready to hatch, I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt as long as I can stomach your rank odor. Does some glimmer of recognition infuse beneath the shredded fabric of your burial suit? Do your blonde wisps curl with invigorated growth? Do you remember me yet? Do you remember yourself?
Yes is always the right answer. I understand, though, if you're not quite ready to speak, darling John. I do hope you appreciate the expense and risk I've incurred bringing you here to share the final cut.
As you'd see if your sockets held more than the slick, papery remnants of your putrefied green eyes, the lost footage isn't grainy or difficult to view. Every frame is clear. I'm a professional, not a hack. Every action takes place in good light, photographed from accessible angles, without disruptive jumpy edits or glitches in the stock. Nevertheless, what we see on the infamous lost footage remains inexplicable.
The boys become like twelve-year-old children. They may be bullies, but they are afraid. Their souls corrupt before the tip of my tongue touches their invisible anxiety. Love kills everything. It's all one big fuck, man. That's what the king said. Nothing ever needs to make sense again.
The sound of a church makes the boys shiver. Off camera, the eyes of an exorcist peel apart layers of anatomy like diagrams from an old encyclopedia. I look to the left and a nuclear reaction asks silver of their skin. Glowing, the boys untangle like the woven reams beneath the hard shell of a golf ball or like the strings of snot streaming from the nostrils of infected swine. I gesture, and the boys spin in a carousel of altered grime.
On camera they appear striated, as if run through an industrial peeler and pinned into thin strips prepped by bloodless miscreants licking sticky fingers. The boys are shiny with desire. Deconstructed, they sizzle on the tongues of the reprobate workers, stinging the many paper cuts in the diligent fetishist's moist fervent mouths.
A bloodless vivisection and weaving of venous matter decorates the screen. What substance the boys possessed as autonomous beings has mutated into a food for me, a plum toned gel that I vomit onto their torsos after eating between the spaces where the threads of flayed and intertwined flesh suggest extraterrestrial original forms. Odors of unknown worlds pollute the static frames of the film, and we viewers of the lost footage remain haunted by the sickly rising smell of an alien's massacred cunt. The boys and their assailants are forgotten tampons in her maw.
Heaving together, for they are twined into a long fleshy cord, the boys resemble saplings twisted into a single trunk, striving for light. Their bark is skin and their limbs quiver in pain. Without woody resilience they sag most pink and pathetically.
I have done all I can to give them new life. Life is foolish. It seeks death no matter what one offers. No matter how hard one tries.
In one previous life, I worked on a farm. I labored in the earth's rich humus and thought only of the next dig, the next harvest, and the coming fall. I followed seasons as they changed. I slept heavily and well.
One day I dug too deep and met a strange animal that entered my navel and asked how many deaths I wanted to eat.
All of them, I said.
Since then, my answer is always yes.
So the boys on film crawl out of their confines as if each separate organ and anatomical system despises the rest. Nerve endings whip and curl into knots. Muscle pulses against crackling silver skin as lungs blast open to fracture ribs. Hearts spurt lush streams of blood upward, aimed to blind. The strange cone of coagulate created by the boys, cleaned by the miscreants, and discarded by goddesses intent on flowery foolish concourse with eternity slumps down to the pit we reside in. Slumps down before me like a last meal, where all matter ends.
This is my purpose, I suppose, in the vast toilet of the cosmos. To love what whirls away unloved. To embrace the waste of careless demiurges cast out by life and death and the lunacy of terrible kings. To love what is lost.
And in the famous lost footage, the piles of meat that were once the misbehaving boys quake, grow wings, and take flight. Their owl-like voices resound throughout the forest, leading us astray. We wander agape as we seek the familiarity of the city and the disco where you will fall to your death later that night.
* * *
Keep holding my hand, John. I promise this won't hurt.
Yes, darling, you're right. I'm lying. It's going to hurt a lot.
We're lost among the ruins, a consequence of damaging the dancing boys. I've never claimed to be subtle, have I?
Tricksters call from the depths of a directionless world. Voices hoot and echo. Perilous in the woods, cajoling unseen from afar, puzzling our sense of direction through descending darkness and the repetition of leaves, bark, and mosses, their comely voices call.
I pull back the sheet draped over your cold body in my wish-fulfilling memory. Here, do you see? The glow of shadow impassioned in a close crimp is evidence of your hidden life. Something in you still burns. You have to fold time quite intensely to see it, cut out all the bad parts. The love that lies here holds still in jest. My love is the love that whirls.
But I didn't pull back the sheet, did I?
I turned away.
* * *
Lost among the ruins, John has enacted the golden sacrifice. He danced badly in his role. He knows it. He needs a drink.
He yells. I'm so sick of the way he yells.
On and on, his complaints. “You stupid cunt, why did you have to kill them? We'll die out here for fuck's sake.”
His breathing isn't right. He sniffs violently as if I can be tricked into thinking he's a tough guy instead of a whining bore. My lovely boy has grown to be a great needy burden. Furthermore, we haven't fucked in ages.
“Don't be such a child,” I say.
He balks and gasps and then punches a tree trunk and swerves around on me. “Oh, I'm a child now? Well, fuck me. All this time I thought that's exactly what you were after.”
I have nothing to say in my defense. “This may come as a shock to you, darling, but yes, I do happen to prefer younger men.”
John flounders in panic. Spit flies from his lips. “You're a fucking pervert. You're a thing. I don't even know what you are. I want to go home. I don't need any of this.”
“You're right. You don't need me. Whatever was I thinking taking care of you all this time?
The hurt bleeds from his pupils.
“Fuck you,” John says, flinging tears. “Get someone else to wipe your ass and plough your dried up old twat.”
I pretend to laugh, looking through the treetops at the unwelcoming night sky. “Well. I see somebody's buzz is wearing off. Too bad baby's eaten up all the acid Daddy fed them and the nearest cocktail lounge is miles and miles away.”
His fist shocks me once and then shocks me again.
John curses as I hit the ground. I tumble and he keeps yelling. He barrels away into the woods. According to the star Polaris by which I can navigate in the night, he's going the wrong direction to reach the city. He'll be lost indefinitely. He won't make it to the club tonight. He keeps on cursing at me as he recedes, but I can't hear what he says any longer.
It's all going dark. Numb.
In this version, my final edit of the film, I don't call him back or get up and go after him.
I lie in the moss unfolding as John exits with my heart. All that's left is a paper cut.
Maybe he'll live and have a normal chance at love, at maturity and family, at the mundane pleasures of a less indulgent life. Maybe he'll be stronger if all his wishes aren't granted. He'll feel like he's missing out, but maybe he'll get back all the time I've taken from him. John will never understand how he called me forth and formed me, how his was the power to unmake the monster he wrought. Damn you , he'll say, and I'll take it. Whatever curse he offers. I'll fade into nothing but a bad dream, an unpleasant memory of an old creep who picked him up when he was foolish and young.
As the years pass, he'll wonder how much of it he made up.
“All of it,” I say to no one as a whirl of dislodged leaves cascades down to trade out corpses and bury my desiccated face.