cowboy up or stay in the truck

Scream, scream, a dismembered body in the middle of the street, "In the middle of the STREET, Mickey!" A VIP room at a club and too much perfume on the neck he's biting into, and he doesn’t know whose hand is in his pants, but it doesn't matter because he drinks. “Sweet boy,” Intestines strewn across a hotel bed. “STOP!” Scream. Blood in his mouth, hot and sweet. Muttering, a room full of voices talking like he’s not there. Blood pooling across the floor as vast as Purgatory in a room that goes on forever and he gets down on hands and knees to lap it up like an animal. Moans. A leash around his neck, pulling. A desert road rushing past in the night. A woman coming under his tongue. A coyote licking blood from his hand. Someone saying his name.

“Please no!” A quivering gasp, moaning. Back of an abandoned clothing store, mannequins three dozen deep in the dark. “Are you even listening?” Screams. Hands around his throat. An abandoned farmhold buried in snow, and the stark dark shape of the barn lurking in the white-blanketed fields, under a naked sky streaked with shooting stars. “Mickey harder, harder Mickey” SCREAMS. The hot gush of an artery opening and splashing the roof of his mouth. “Will he remember any of this?” “Bad puppy.” Screaming. Hot cum splashing the roof of his mouth.

The world sharpening into focus again and he takes a breath he doesn't need, Odette's hand is inside his chest, and stupidly he asks her “How long is this montage?"

A beach just after sunset. A woman riding him under the pier. A slap across the face, claws tearing his cheek. A theater, an old movie, his face healed, room full of heartbeats. Screams. “Are you having fun yet?” Six teenagers dead around his feet.

Moments of clarity fade in so suddenly and seamlessly that it takes minutes to notice his thoughts beginning and ending as the same complete thought, instead of mixing and matching disjointedly across time skips, time-traveling forward. By the time he realizes he is lucid he can register precious little, remember less, before he's sinking under the current again.

Sometimes he is fucking. Sometimes he is feeding. Sometimes he is both.

Sometimes he is restrained. Sometimes he is killing. Sometimes he is in a casket. Sometimes he is just standing, kneeling, groveling, curled, weeping, running, leaping, covered in blood and surrounded by bodies. Sometimes he's in the middle of a conversation with someone he doesn't recognize. His outfit changes - sometimes he is nude. Sometimes he is bleeding. Sometimes he's breaking bones in his hands with a laugh in his mouth that isn't his.

He never knows how he got from one scene to the next. He’s carried too wildly on a torrent of blood from cut to cut, too fast for his mind to keep up. Consciousness only seeps back in during the middles and endings of things.

Mickey’s hands are in a screaming man’s ribcage. He’s young and bottle-blond and beautiful, and the look on his face is of terror and betrayal when Mickey rips his heart out and bites into it. He thinks he might be in the man’s dorm room. He thinks they might have known each other before this moment.

He’s lying on a pale green silk duvet that smells of lilies, and staring up at an ornate fresco of witches frolicking nude across the ceiling. Odette commissioned that in 1603 she told him. Odette is telling him: “In some traditions they refer to this new Numen — ha ha — as ‘Razzul.’ Isn’t that lovely? Razzul. I have been attempting to trace the etymology, but the sticking point is in whether the language is—”

A human woman is petting his hair as he lays his head in her lap and listens to her blood pulsing through her lower body.

He doesn’t know what becomes of her — in a flash he’s gone again, digging in a cold room far under the earth. It’s dark dark dark, and he doesn’t understand what organ now tells him every shape in the room that even his inhuman eyes he can’t see. Empty crates and caskets, a pile of skulls, and a lot of not the thing he’s looking for. He doesn’t know what he’s looking for, only that he’ll know it when he finds it. Something skitters past him in the dark.