writing?

He had migrated from the taprooms downtown that had come to know him as belligerent to the bars of back alleyways and lowdown localities where the population was less made of people and more of nocturnal wraiths of ire who, having long since ceded their humanity, now only knew a lust for blood.  These vestiges of personhood fought ferociously and with the desperation of a man who in balled fists held his own life, though they hardly cared if they lived or died, for life means nothing to those who have already forsaken it.  

—

The bleeding slowed as if his body grew tired of the exertion.  He reflexively wiped at tender features with the back of his hand and felt more pain.  Slinking out of a back entrance unnoticed, unsure of whether he killed a man that night.  He stumbled off a concrete step into a torrent and had to brace himself on the wall opposite. The nocturne’s deluge—backstreet, flooded.  He shielded his eyes from an invisible sun and regarded the pitch swathed in a pall of rain.  The rainfall on metal and concrete and the detritus of litter and broken glass unseen created the rhythm to which he blindly walked forward, faltering every other step. Senses overwhelmed, as he did not hear the beat and splash of lumbering footfalls behind him and barely registered the bottle smashed against his head until he was face-down in wastewater and then spitting up fluid from nose and lung as he was lifted by the hair and thrown against the wall.  

The rain and the night so thick he could not see his attacker’s face, only the glint of a knife in streetlamp’s diffused illumination.  Vaulting sideways he felt the tip of this shining blade swipe his stomach.  He ducked to avoid a swung fist and on hands and knees blindly searched for some defense in the remnants of piled scrap which had not yet been swept away by the rushing current.  Unfathomable pain erupting in the side of his head as the kick of a steel-toed boot connected with his temple.  He laid prostrate and dazed and heard only the deafening surge of blood in his ears and the rhythmic pulsation of his struck skull, and as he kicked weakly and at nothing, he felt the hulking presence of his anonymous assailant above him and found he could do nothing except wonder whether this insensate being would choose to with that knife gorge his eyes or shred his chest or both.  By inborn instinct, he rolled clumsily to avoid coming under blade, swiping the man’s legs as he did.  The man fell, and with him the sound of bone cracked on concrete cut through the roaring downpour.  Levi found the knife dropped and gripped it and sliced the man’s hamstring behind his knee and at once cut up the back of his thigh and plunged the blade into it. The eldritch bellow of a beast now enervated—the man grabbed at Levi’s legs, but he simply sidestepped and avoided those desperate and grasping limbs.  

Levi tasted blood and spit and said, “Pick fights you can win,” before backing away from the man and exiting the alleyway.  

—

In his wake a bloody trail as he labored up the staircase of his building, heavy and slow and uneven steps echoing against concrete and cinderblock.  During this ascent, he passed a flaccid and crumpled human form splayed, drunk or sleeping or dead.  He did not stop but in passing softly kicked the body with his good leg, and upon its immediate stirring he continued.  

He pulled his shirt over his head in front of his bathroom mirror and could feel the evening’s history in every muscle.  His body, battered and contused, and flesh already discolored blue and yellow and inky black; hair matted by rain and gore and falling before visage’s distended and ashen features.  His chest was sliced cleanly between pectorals—the mark from that infernal blade—with the layers of skin peeling open like a lipless mouth, inside raw and resembling offal.  The grisly lesion coughed and sputtered and spat up blood, and he cried out as he balled up his sodden shirt and used it as a compress, and for a moment his vision reeled. He staggered through his apartment—past the things you had left behind and he could not throw away—and located the means to suture his wound, leaving bloodied handprints behind.  He screamed as he poured the alcohol over his chest.  His hands shook as he pierced flesh with threaded needle, darkness creeping into his periphery.  Upon cutting the final stitch he promptly collapsed to the floor.

—

In a restless sleep he dreamt of the creation of your body by divinity’s hand, of the holy sculptor who limned the corporeal form which housed your eternal soul.  At times, those divine hands were his own.  

—

With each drop of blood shed he purged himself of you, and he would continue until all his blood drained or from him you were exorcised entirely.    

—

He awoke to his body adhered to the floor in a pool of bloodied coagulate.  At first unable to move and then taking several minutes to find within him strength to roll to the side and sit up.  He thought for a moment of the job he had long abandoned, of friends who had likely forgotten him, and could not remember his last non-violent encounter nor the last time words spoken were anything but vitriolic remarks between hurled fists—he was no more than an object of execration in the aftermath of you.

—

With enough liquor—as if the spirits themselves some heady and greening elixir—previous nights were forgotten.  Bibulous and newly invigorated, he prowled the darkened streets, hands pocketed, lusting for the bloodshed he had come to desire in the way he for you once ached.  The pavement underfoot slick with mud and effluent like some backcountry swampland through which he waded and searched for violence to placate his id.  The night was clear and cloudless but smelled of sewerage and remnants of rainfall, and the stars hung suspended in the firmament’s pitch continuum, supplementing the moon’s light now absent per a new moon.  Distantly, a bell tower rung three.  

He continued on and watched as the street seemed to come undone—road dead-ending with unfinished pavement, fiercely jagged and potholed and undulating as if there to witness the very shifting of the earth many times over.  The roadway’s ceasing was before a collapsing chain-link fence, disfigured and clipped here and there, which separated the road from a lot piled with soil and scrap material.  Remnants of some edifice planned but long forgotten.  With a running start he jumped and climbed and vaulted himself over the fence with ease, the mesh bending and creaking beneath his weight and clattering after with the tremors of his movement.  

The site was one of earthen topography with eminent dirt mounds textured by way of erosion and manmade footmarks, the land entirely devoid of verdure and instead landscaped with metal scrap and waste discarded.  Shrubbery of twisted wire and cairns of glass from bottles shattered.  He walked through vales between mountainous dirt outcroppings and could not see but for that dim, supernal illumination.  Hearing breathing and a rustling near him, he turned around and looked and squinted in that pervasive darkness to make out any movement but could do nothing as the ragged beast who produced the sound descended onto him from above with such speed and force as to bring him to the ground and crumple his neck and knock the wind out of him.  He gasped for breath as this hellish face pocked and scarred and seemingly without body levitated above him, eyes wild and themselves luminescent, aglow with a crazed fervor unseen in beings diurnal.  How much longer, he wondered, until his eyes would resemble the ones now before him?

“Y’re gonna fuckin’ die here, boy.”

Spoken not as a threat but a gleesome proclamation.  He felt against his throat the massive blade of a Bowie knife, no doubt used to skin beings living and dead.  Between inhalations he kneed at the air, and his thrust connected with the man’s back, and it was enough to knock the man off balance and cause him to lose his footing in the slick mud underfoot—a falter which Levi exploits, throwing this monstrous aggressor from him.  Now free of that savage embrace, he erected himself—looking like some devil from the bogged and muddy earth both born and emerging—and crouched with arms bent for combat.  Relishing in his opposite’s struggle to regain footing.  Levi could see the man had lost his knife in the fall and smiled. The sounds of squelching and boot-sucking muck and slurred curses were all to be heard.  He dashed at the man and in one movement dropped him with a kick to the jaw, and the man landed face-first and unmoving in the mire and seemed to sink.  He kicked him again in the ribs and felt them give.

He thought of you and was suddenly suffused with rage and raised his leg to boot the man again but was surprised and let out a strangled yell when the man with uncanny swiftness raised up and caught Levi’s leg in an iron vise and with his other hand drove a broken bottle which he gripped by the neck into that leg he held steadfast.  Levi felt an unknowable pain erupt in his calf, and his vision crossed and blurred, and though through haziness, he saw the man’s face—features vague and inhuman beneath a swathe of sludge, save for the feral eyes, now looking even more savage and like those of a fiend from hell, and a bleached smile which shone in the dark—and Levi, with this infernal vision incised in mind’s eye, fell to the ground.  The man crawled backwards and looked on as if an artist admiring his magnum opus.  The bottle had not broken off in Levi’s leg and instead protruded like some glass tor, and from this wound spewed gore which turned earth red.

He was in and out of consciousness and felt the man approaching but awoke to car’s rumble and was numb.

Climbing stairs with weight supported.

Sprawled on cold tile. Blinded by overhead light.  Anonymous hands around his leg, their tender touch. He felt these hands caress his face as a massive umbra occluded the glaring light above.  Eyes adjusting.  He saw you.

He awoke to a softness beneath him.  In your shared bed, head against your chest.  He was swaddled in your warm embrace, luxuriating in the feeling of you wrapped around him. You whispered and murmured incoherent nothings but in them he felt your adoration, reassurance, love, unadulterated.

And in some way, he knew he had already died or was a least on death’s brink.  For he would never know the pleasure of you unless he was.  And with this thought your image dissolved away, and he was again mired in an earthen mess with leg enfeebled and that beastly man atop him.  His good limbs pinned to the ground and form incapacitated.  Adrenaline and cortisol and all other chemicals in his hormonal amalgam coalesced in his bloodstream, and he found the strength to once again push the man off him, though he could not yet stand.  And against his better judgment, he tore the bottle from his leg and plunged it instead into the man’s neck, the blood of one against jagged glass exchanged for another’s.  Though still laced with that otherworldly mania, he saw in the man’s eyes fear, and then in those eyes he saw nothing at all.  And then the man was dead.  

He had not cried since the day you left, but he now found himself wiping at tears which were mostly mud. He dragged himself away from the man as to not touch the soiled blood which from carotid erupted and hyperventilated as he did.  

He wished you would rescue him as he had imagined.  

But instead he dragged himself through mire and finally came upon that chain-link fence which acted as entrance to the hell from which he came, and even through his abject pain he felt his violent id satiated.  He found a rusted and discarded pole and in one hand held it and with the other grabbed the fence and struggled to pull himself to his feet but did.  

He would not make it far from the fence, only having crossed the threshold of where the road which once seemed to unwind reconstructed itself, before he collapsed in carnage’s aftermath from exhaustion and indiscriminate blood loss, and again, dumbly, perhaps on death’s precipice, only thought of you.  Your unwavering presence outliving him.

—

hi there again!  thank you so much for reading!!  i’m sorry this piece took so long, school is starting, and i’m adjusting to actually using my brain again.  will try my best to keep a consistent posting schedule + i SWEAR i will get to writing the numerous requests in my inbox.  much love xoxo <3

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