Vulture

She is as you’ve never seen her, which is mostly through the filter of a TV screen, a thin, pixelated presence, an existence carried through cables to your peripherals; then again, a glint in her eyes, a hungry thing you barely catch a glimpse of the first time, though it calls to the depth inside you, a recognition you hardly understand. 

Tonight, in the darkness, it is another side; a prism that shifts as it turns. A side unseen, a curious gem that catches your eye. Hardly there, she is a wisp that touches you with the weight of something alive, clutching to it as it flees. The feeling pulls you from your thoughts, catching you by the arm before your better senses kick in.

(That is always how it happens, isn’t it? No urgency, a sleeping dog lies until it wakes, ravenous.) 

Can a person like you be solid ground for another? You have never been anything like this—always moving, a storm of locusts, devouring as you pass through.

“Look at it now—decades of prayer and it still ended up like this,” you don’t even gesture, nothing before you. You other hand closes around hers as it rests on your arm. You hadn’t expected anything coming here; all that you thought would welcome you was the darkness, the cool wind against your cheeks, an absence that wears you thin, “I’ve done it a lot over the years and no dice but maybe mine aren’t worth much in the grand scheme of things.” 

What is it to like to stand there in the presence of another, together despite the wreckage? Whole while everything around you is damaged, completely gutted? In truth, the difference is negligible, a hollowness rings through you both, a beautiful empty sound. 

For a few moments, you continue to look at the remains before you look at her, tears slip down her cheek and you contemplate reaching for them, taking what doesn’t belong to you, “long time no see.” Hands quicker than your mind pulls you back, you are already halfway there. 

You have hardly seen anything.

“Maybe they were praying to the wrong God.” 

There’s a weight to her words that is almost ancient, some primal urge warning her that the structure of her nightmares wasn’t made for a forgiving God. She finds herself straddling the line between awe and quivering despair, closed-mouth agony that closes the human mind in on itself. 

She tries to qualify her words with a shrug, shoulders vibrating with a strange fluid role that almost devolves into a shudder. Her words are spat out like broken glass, her teeth digging into her lip until blood coats the end of her cigarette, the dirtied end accusing her like the lipstick stains of a mistress.

“Better to not damn yourself with One if you can pray to another, y’know?”

Only two things seem to exist; an ocean of flames and his hand on hers, warm, dangerous things for a woman who can’t remember a time where she wasn’t cold. She wonders which will claim her first, which she wants to be claimed by. 

She wonders if she would have time to scream before her lungs turned to ashes. She wonders if there’s an afterlife and if her brother is there. Wonders if she wants to see him, if the guilt wouldn’t lick under her skin like flames and each breath wouldn’t draw more smoke into lungs choked with disease.

Her hand catches his in the space between them, an anchor to a world that has already revealed its horrors. Almost-believers from opposite ends of the earth holding each other in a place that looked a lot like Hell. 

She turns her attention to him for a moment, half-expecting to see a twinkle of malice in his eyes, but finds nothing but earnestness. In this moment she is Eve, naked, exposed, and looked upon by God and Adam with lust and pity in equal measure. 

“I tend to keep my personal and professional life separate.” A hollow excuse for her discomfort, leaning into him but trying to ignore his presence, his pulse, his warmth, eyes focused on the blaze once more, unblinking. A twisted tug-of-war between a woman who burns easily and one who has been freezing since birth. She musters a laugh, corrupted by smoke that devolves into a cough. “Guess it didn’t last long.” 

A pause, breath hitching slightly, letting his hand drop out of her grasp as if she is made of porcelain and the weight of his flesh threatens to shatter her. 

Instead of white, she is draped in black, ash covered skin, red and raw where she is fire-touched. It is a different sensation from the snap of bone, of blood pooled beneath skin. It is sharp before it lingers, jealous, marking you as if you will never be without it. 

By now, there is no one left in the church though it burns behind her, coughing up what remains of its insides into the early morning sky. The scene transitioning from hectic to somber. She is tired and her eyes red with strain; it is not what she had imagined would happen on her excursion out of the Under. She leaves one scene or horror to enter another through a door unseen. 

(When does the night end? Does the morning stay hidden knowing there is more to come? How she wishes for sunlight, softer and more gentle than the harsh heat of the burning building behind her.)

Still wound, an ache just barely creeping into her muscles, a camcorder emerges before her, the red light too sharp. 

“What the fuck, Odessa—” exhaustion seeps through her, a slow leak growing larger each day. Her hand goes to shield her face, instinctual with so many delicate bones just beneath the skin. “Cut the bullshit,” she is already half-turned, one leg extended forward looking for an exit. 

“Do you have to do this every time? One, I’m not answering your questions and two, I told you last time to stay out of my face otherwise you’ll be swallowing your own teeth.” She hates the look on her face—expectant, ravenous, the faces she sees every night, to them, pain is nothing; secondhand.  

What can you expect but flies on rotting meat?

For a moment, she is so captivated by the figure in front of her, a coiled spring already twisted to breaking point, that reality blurs at the edges. The network of pale scars and marks, the body of a woman who didn’t want to die, who was damaged until she started damaging. 

In another existence, Odessa would have hardly paid credence to her, indifferent to survivors who tried to fight against a world made to be random and cruel. No matter how much blood Clementine had spilled, there was no profitability in blackened eyes and broken bones, not in a world where audiences longed for images of hapless victims torn to pieces by clawing fingers and gnashing teeth, where there was no interest in the living staying living.

Perhaps in this world, boredom had a way of amplifying novelty, or perhaps, she had seen potential. Hadn’t the crack of the girl’s knuckles against her flesh sounded like a guillotine? Hadn’t the blood that had filled her mouth tasted like a promise unfulfilled? Didn’t she look into Clementine’s eyes and see something sharp, something marketable?

She’s smiling now, an unrepentant disciple in the face of a would-be God, front teeth jutting out. A challenge; punishment is my mother tongue, you’ll have to sharpen your teeth to get rid of me.

“My, my, Clementine. Awfully defensive for an ‘innocent’ bystander.” All teeth, lips stretched wide across her features, camera steady in her hands. “I’m just doing my job, hardly my fault any time there’s chum in the water you come swimming along.”

In Odessa’s world the consumer is the product, her words of caustic venom said with a saccharine grin script that eternally ends up on the cutting room floor. Her world, for how raw and bloody it is, is at its core a product, as polished and hollow as any. 

She moves closer to Clementine, the wounds from her previous encounter with the woman - and others in some half-obscured past that questioned her commitment - highlighted by the flashing lights, the oldest faded to nothing, the newest raw and red. 

the memory is nothing but a murmur now, the warble of a voice underwater, last breaths wasted on his name. his mother exists only in memory and it’s a shame her poor son’s mind is a deteriorating thing. 

( red-sticky hands, the wet slide of a knife, butterflies flocking to bodies torn open from the seams, curious. hungry. sometimes he sees the moment in first-person, sometimes in third. sometimes he is the body. ) 

if he was starving from the moment he was born, then he has never known the taste of hunger. less of an emotion and more of a state of being, teeth growing inside bellies, tongues for fingers, ever-greedy. 

her hands around his wrist is a deer trap and he is an animal aching to be touched by anything, even if it’s metal jaws around pulses. 

“my  —  ?” 

confusion, not in how this stranger knows his name, not in how she knows his mother, but rather, what his mother must have looked like for him to resemble her. 

all he recalls is a rotting corpse. he supposes he is quite bloodied, supposes he has been decaying for some time now. still, he looks at odessa, eyes blank and mind turning too fast for a single thought to be plucked out of the fray. 

“what do ya mean? ‘m not  —  well, i dunno if i look like her, though i mean, i guess i should. what’s she gotta do with anythin’? she’s not here no more, ‘nd  —  how do ya know her? what’s it matter? whatever it is, i didn’t do it  —  !”  

(She recalls her dreams about him. The way he moved the knife up and down over her body in slow, methodical movements, each time adorning the blade with fresh blood. In that moment, she found murder to be quite a mundane word to describe such a sacred task.)

She moves his hand to rest around her neck, a prayer to purge her wicked flesh of sin, eyes rapt and focused on him, head tilting almost imperceptibly in the breeze, begging. I am not afraid of death, for I have witnessed it in its last dying spasms of neuronal flickering. Empty me of the cold and the hunger and the pain in my chest. Free me of a dulled existence. 

(In her dream blood pours out of her mouth like a broken gutter, like sins at a confessional, like her brother’s had. Realizes there is a language for anything in this world, even death, but that they can never be spoken alone. Hears her brother’s laughter as she becomes nothing more than breath and calls it revelation.)

And yet he applies no pressure, an archangel reduced to nothing more than a creature grown too frail to be a harbinger or death. Pathetic. A heavy sigh, exhaling every word that hadn’t been said, his hand flicked off her form as if she was swatting away a pest, laugh as low and empty as a death rattle. 

“Well, according to Rutledge asylum, you did.” Her tone verges on indifference, attention turning to the manila envelope at her side, flicking through his existence almost absentmindedly, if not for the brief pauses to reveal flashes of text on the page; SON ... MURDER ... ESCAPE. Her eyes flicker up to meet his, smiling, all canines. “They certainly miss you, Theodore. They’ve known you longer than your poor mother ever did.”

A click of her tongue, eyes turning to an old photo of the man, a snapshot of a boy unhoned. “And my, what a pretty penny they would pay to have you back.”

LOCATION: Houndstitch Church (or what’s left of it)

STATUS: closed with @lily-grl

TW: Fire, gore, death

The first thing one notices is the smell. Alarmingly sweet at first, with undertones of sweat and unwashed skin, burning bones and fetid coals. As she traverses amongst the still burning remnants of sacristy, it follows her, lunging forward to swallow her again and again, a fantasy made real in the form of burning flesh. 

She’s seen enough burnt out remains to know the difference between a burn victim and a charred ghost is a few twitches, her movements from afar almost those of indifference; side-stepping around moaning near-corpses who had yet to bask in the flashing lights of the paramedics, toeing through ash with the dispassionate glee of a child trying to find an anthill to destroy. 

(There’s a nun wailing in front of her, and from afar, it looks as though Odessa kneels down to pray with her. Are you paying attention? The camcorder in her right hand flashes red, and she mouths words of damnation as easily as thumbing through a rosary 

“Don’t stop screaming, you have to let the fire out.”)

She rises from the woman’s side, sunglasses balanced on the bridge of her nose, fingers absent-minded and reaching for the pack of cigarettes in her pocket, more reflexive than deliberate, equally as cruel. 

She’s disinterested in the scene, despite its promise of gore. Well, almost. 

She’s used to seeing the girl’s arms covered in blood, instead of ash. Wonders if they’ve ever truly been clean, if she’s ever been clean. For a moment Odessa watches the Wishbone fighter turned medic with fists un-clenched into open palms like a fallen angel receiving communion. A beautiful scene in the way unsullied humanity tends to be; until disrupted by pestilence. 

“Odd, I didn’t think you frequented this part of town, Clementine.” A chuckle, misplaced in the inferno, it almost sounds like a match sparking. The camcorder light flicks on, and from Odessa’s words, she sounds as perturbed as the chorus of screams surrounding her. Look closer. Her words are hollow and reek of iron and red, her features distorted by the flames lapping the extremities of the church, crooked smile and eyes melting down her cheeks.

LOCATION: Black Hallows, some blocks away from the remnants of Houndstitch Church

STATUS: Closed for @killtherabbits

TW: Fire, Blood, Murder

The world twitches like a broken record, butane bleeding into red as it stretches skyward, before surrendering to night, the sun strangled in a haze of ash above. She’s a silent member of a chorus of extinction, dispassionate eyes in service of an unforgiving god, baptized in pestilential embers, reborn from the ashes of petulant children. 

(When he culled his mother, emptied the woman of the blood that had once nourished him, shattered the bones he had grown from, did he feel reborn? Did it feel biblical? Did the blood burn his palms? Did the get hunger get worse when he fed it, or was he starving from the moment he was born, like her?)

Her skin glows porcelain under the layer of ash that coats her features, hair black as an oil spill, cigarette glowing between her teeth as though Houndstitch is not the only temple that could burn, she, an offering of flesh and bone, just as flammable, just as hollow. 

How easy it had been, to find him. The way he moved, strange loping strides, running from a reality he thought had had abandoned the last vestiges of, neatly tucked under her arm. A wayward son, once thought abandoned, returns to a woman who could be a temple, or who could burn.

He passes her by once more, flitting about as any animal without predators does, careless, with their teeth out. This time she grabs him with soft and tender hands, smiles under the haze of ash like rain clouds parting a forest fire and pulls him into her, speaking softly and quietly into his neck, lips almost grazing his collarbones. 

“You’re quite the spitting image of your mother, Mathis.”

(Silly rabbit, you’ve caught your leg in a trap!

 Odessa & general aesthetics: 1/?

Perhaps, when Lot’s wife turned back, her eyes shone like a beast ready for slaughter, as the Lord cut asunder the rope that bound Sodom to earth. Perhaps as angels sowed the crimson glory of revelation into the rib cages of men stiff-necked and ill-grown of sin, she laughed, for the promise of prophets was always freedom from death.

Perhaps the penultimate act of faith was to bear witness.

Perhaps it started with small incisions in her palms, salt falling at her feet as if her flesh was a cage and salvation writhing beneath it. Perhaps, she smiles, for she knows one day a man more holy will feel the same pain between his fingers. Perhaps in another era, she would have lit a cigarette, white crystals pouring from her mouth as if it was an open wound being purged of sin, watching the veil of the temple crack from top to bottom. 

Perhaps she didn’t turn back because she defiled God. Perhaps the Lord called upon her, whispered that she did not have to live like this, and she could be so much more, if she just opened her eyes and kept watch.