Gemini

I find I can move this body. I roll its shoulder back, open eyes with a scratch of dry lid to stare at the cracked plaster above. It is a near lightless place, and the ceiling does not come into focus. I open this mouth, stretching jaw, peeling lips back from teeth. I make the teeth meet, test their bite: clackclackclackclack... It feels good.

The effort to sit up is immense, spine curving, ribs contracting, but it is imperative: this body must move. I can taste the residue of rancid blood in my mouth; it clings sticky to my tongue, dead and limp. We did it again.

The telling stain is dark brown between my body and the Other's, which lays curled on its side. I roll the Other body onto its back, watch its mouth hang open revealing the blackened gums and tongue framed with doggish molars and crooked fangs. Syrupy-dry blood clings to that face as it must cling to this one too, with crusts of a dried wound at its wrist looking black and hideous even to our morbid sensibilities.

I find a matching one in this right wrist, which I lick now, tracing with my dry tongue the shape those teeth left while I stare at the taught skin of my Other's Dead face, at the blackish veins in his arms and neck, the hollow under his jaw, and the tiny shriveled nipples like scabs on the bones of his naked chest. What a marvel, what endurance, how awful to look at is he. 

I lick the face, lick it clean. The old stubble is delightfully rough on this tongue, and the little splits in those lips which do not bleed but remain open to zingy little tastes of rotten meat are exciting enough to suck, just a little bit. The Other is quite dead, and the blood does not taste good, but it is blood. Our blood.

Fucking hell. We did it again.

For how long did we drink each other before the Dead blood brought us down? It could have been hours. This dreaminess makes it feel as though it had been hours. The state of the Other corpse, this Other body, makes it feel as though it has been hours, and many nights of many hours, and possibly weeks of it this time. Eventually the blood becomes too thick even to suck from a vein, never mind for a heart to pump it...

Never drink your own blood...

These muscles obey me though it takes concentration: rolling the neck takes considerable coordination, stretching out just a little more feels futile, but necessary. Clackclackclackclack... I chew a little scab with these flat front teeth, grinding it with exploratory little nibbles. It will not nourish. Waking is slow, and it is not unusual for one body to wake first without the other: in fact, the Other may not wake at all this night, not without help.

It is almost easier this way.

This body knows where to go: it did not wake for nothing. It crawls at first, rolling itself to hands and knees on the uneven mattress, pulling itself up to feet. The room spins, what little blood in the brain falling toward black toes. The body does the dreaded thing, which is take air into itself: lungs crackle in protest, clotted blood clinging in the throat, curdled as it sat unswallowed in this wretched humidity for an entire day. This body breathes and it coughs up this foul grime, and finally gulps down with some difficulty our wasted blood in an otherwise dry throat.

With the air comes the smell of us, the real hideous reek of us, and the smell of damp wood and plaster, and of sour cloth and old blood. There is the smell of mold, and moss, and of the dusty bodies of mice and their piss and their little shits everywhere. There is the musty-sweet smell of insects: of bedbugs and roaches and lice. There is the smell of linoleum, of cigarette smoke, of fresh green grass, and concrete, and of hair. There is the smell of something warm and bloated with blood.

Go.

The mouth waters. The jaw aches, grinding teeth. Saliva blends with that sticky leftover blood which is sucked back greedily, ravenously.

The Other remains in oblivion.

This body moves of its own accord toward the living thing. It is found and caught, unceremoniously and with little struggle. The blood is warm on this face and these hands, and like half remembering a dream I recall the little chase unfold in a memory while my strong, jagged teeth are already crunching wonderfully through rib for marrow: a scattering of three or four other small bodies, this one not as fast as the others. Good.

Its soft red carcass rests open on the patterned kitchen floor with relatively little blood spilled: I drank what I could before the hands got to work at tearing, before the body was brought down and crushed. Good. My mouth still waters, licking teeth clean of this fresh warmth, face feeling refreshingly pliant, feeling good, wanting more, of course wanting more. I break bone with my molars and peel the pieces off with my front teeth, spitting them on the flowered floor. The young marrow is fatty and delicious, coating my tongue much more pleasantly than rancid blood.

The boy was young enough that his liver tasted fresh as milk, his kidneys clean, his brain fresh and soft. I fold over a bit of skull now, still attached to scalp, and thoughtfully pick through using one remaining fingernail to get a little bit of the cerebellum at the bottom of the bowl, and those very tender good little bits which can be pulled from the spinal column even without breaking the whole damned thing open.

This was good. This body must have sensed the intruders to our lair. No living thing on Earth knows what it needs as certainly as a starving corpse does. Sometimes we are grateful for the plain and sensible guidance of instinct. Sometimes the corpse is stupid as hell, and will drink the freshest blood around even if that blood is the rotten blood between us.k

The whole house feels newly still, and very quiet. I listen as I pick, fingers slipping between rows of lashes to dig out the wet, chewy morsels there. Mm. I lick one clean to check the colour, even though I don't really care. Pretty as a marble. The house is quiet.

This is the part where I realize just how long it has been, that the children of the neighborhood have come poking around in this old house which has probably been abandoned since before they were born. We really have done it again, haven't we? And there will be adults here in the day before there will be more children at night but if we can hide well enough from the men and from their dogs...maybe there will be more children tomorrow with their flashlights and backpacks and milk-fresh livers and healthy eyes. Is it worth the risk?

A new nausea rolls over me, a fresh aching hell. At first I think the meat is already on its way back up: digested like how we digest, sucked by our dry organs of all blood and liquid nutrient, puked back up in a white pulp of desiccated, belly-bleached tissue. But no, not yet: have a little while yet with this full-belly sensation. The Other is beginning to wake, that's all; its hunger building on mine, roused by the scent of spilled blood, its fuzziness of mind adding a delicious haze to the pleasure of my solo feast, not a thought in its brain yet, not a sense except hunger. Greedy fucker: you'll get yours soon enough. And then we will go.

Oh, but how good would it be to just sink back down into the never ending hunger? To the bitten mouth which fits perfectly on mine, or to the wrist which curves so delicately under my teeth? To the thirst; the taste of our blood a continuous fount from which no real satisfaction can ever be had, such sweet torture now replenished from the fresh hot blood of this boy?

How long could he last us? Another night, two? How long until the blood the Other drinks from this body, which is the blood I will drink from his, is putrid cold and clotting, until it makes us sick even as it refuses to release us from the draw of drinking? There is nothing better in this world than to feed and be fed from. I don't know what we did to deserve a Hell like this, but I am grateful for that too. 

How good this will taste again, to relive the memory, fresh again, of the kill, and to taste him...

Back up the stairs, I ignore the dusty photos of a family which was gone long before we showed up, ignore the spray-paint and the sharpie left by kids chasing their deaths as fervently as we do. The stairs creak under even my slight weight, mice scurrying in the walls though they should not fear us. Now that I stop to think of it, I did not hear children hiding close by, hoping that their fallen one is really actually ok, or waiting for their chance to dart back in and drag his mutilated corpse away for safe keeping. They are all long gone, scattered: selfish in their fear, and brotherless. I do not understand these modern children.

We have long overstayed our welcome in this place. No, as sweet as the pull is, back to that place where nothing but hunger exists, we should go: maybe just to some place close or even actually to the soft spring-time ground outside, and return at dusk to collect one or more of the others before making our way to the next spot. And there we might...what? Get healthy enough to look into each other's eyes and smile? To speak? Whatever for? Why not stay then, if--

No... we should go. We must. The child will bring attention. We cannot survive like this. Not in this modern world. The men and the dogs will be here, sooner than we think. These children ran right to them, no doubt.

With the blood still working in this body of which I have taken a certain amount of ownership now that it is fed, meat still digesting, I crack my knuckles, roll my neck, and stretch my toes, as if stretching my inner self everywhere that the fresh blood is travelling. I can move, I can think a little, though it is frustrating to think of anything other than blood. The Other is waking, senseless, its hunger pulling me as it always pulls me, as one or the Other of us has always pulled the one which woke first and found fresh meat. It wakes to its own muzzy haze, turning my stomach, numbing my dreamy thoughts with the delicious pain of its first breath, the disgusting taste of our blood in its mouth, and the sudden, all-consuming desire to devour as soon as we smell again the blood of the boy on this face. It is like smelling it for the first time.

In the familiar but ever bizarre tilt-shift, this body begins to feel the mattress under my Other hands, and the confusion of recognition: Body! Blood! MY blood! I feel lukewarm flesh under my own hands, feel the stubble of my own head under its fingers and at the same time feel the dry of the cold body make the flesh of the healthier one crawl--a nightmare confusion of circular senses: have we fed already? How can we have fed when the hunger is so insistent? How can I taste fresh blood when I only just woke, but--

A mouth finds flesh, teeth in a vein, flirting with the pain of a bite of jagged fangs, there is no distinguishing, no point in refraining from making the connection immediately--it is the only thing which will soothe this confusion. There is a dream-awareness of the flower pattern on the kitchen floor, and the sight of a green eye which has already been eaten even though this blood is just being tasted for the first time by that Other mouth…my mouth, my Other’s…

There is a memory of a scab, a nipple, of a body, my body, lurid, laying dead on a filthy mattress in this bug-infested hovel. There are thoughts of earth and dogs and the smell of mice, and then there is only blood.

One body kneels to the Other which needs to be fed and feeds it. We know we must leave this place soon, but not before we finish this.