Grotesque

The moon peaked through the thin curtains. Playfully breathing it's light onto them, flirting gaily from the sky. They were coiled like ivy climbing a branch. Equally as poisonous, equally as lethal. The air was cool. The death of a summer day. The birth of a new one yet to rise with the glorious August sun. Her skin sprouted goosebumps and her fragile body shook quietly. He wrapped his arms around her tighter - shielding her from the newly spawned sinister chill. The moon continued to watch, happily assessing the lovers as they lay stagnant as corpses - melting into one another in the low heat of the night. He coiled his finger across her skin, spelling out silent declarations of love he was too proud to allow past his chewn up lips. She pretended she couldn't feel the letters as they lightly proclaimed themselves on her flesh. She wished his soft touch was a knife; carving the words into her so she could never forget them. A harsh bloody reminder of her alliance, one that couldn't be locked away in the company of another. She wished he would throw her. Beat her. Kill her. All befitting punishments for her infidelity. But his cautious touch was a greater penance. His devotion tortured her more effectively than a million whips across her back. He knew what he was doing. He smiled as his caress scathed her flesh. The moon hid behind a cloud. Its eyes swam with pain. Unable to deal with the duplicitous longings of the damaged girl as she lay happily in his arms; so afraid of letting him go that sometimes she caught herself breaking the skin of his back with her nails, as she clung on to him so desperately. His touch a necessary distraction. It muffled the screaming in her mind. But somewhere beneath the voices she loved him as was expected. In the honest way a girl loves her boy. That tiny rush of feeling injected her with a slither of hope, lead her to believe she was functional. How little he knew how he kept her alive. The moon swam in the empty black sky. The clouds ran from it in a vindictive feat to make the moon watch. It wept as it saw them. Their tryst a pyrrhic battle by which neither would survive un-wounded, and no clear victor would ever be crowned. Only victims. Two bodies, but years of blood shed between them. Their hearts having been ripped apart too many times. The moon couldn't bare the horror. It had once been so fond of the lovers, so proud. Now it feared them. Their dependency and their deceit. The moon moved its eyes. It would rather see eternal darkness than have to observe humanity, and withstand the cruelty of jealous love.

Did he hear the sound her shoelaces made, as they dragged across his floor? Her feet wouldn't let her stay in his embrace. They crept to the door before he could even comprehend the sun. They flew so quickly. Their silent ghostly float zooming her away from him. The sun itself couldn't move as fast. With the moon gone their protective night had ended, their sadistic games concluded with it. Instead they were forced to show their real longing, their vulnerable devotion. Without their conscious minds to protect them they slipped into a loving embrace. Unable to spite each other with a stiffened arm or a turned back. In the empty bland hint of dusk, with no sky to watch them through the grey, they moved to each others like poles of a magnet. Slowly, strongly - inevitably. 

In the few hours before the appearance of sun - the hours that few knew; just the guilty and the broken, the milk men and the whores - they were able to show who they were, before they became grotesque.

The sun was afraid to rise. It wanted to keep them in the dark, allow them a few stolen minutes of unconscious perfection before the truth eroded their ignorance and her feet ran from its newly born reality. Her unfaithful nature was burning letters into her heart, but no scarlet 'A' appeared in a bloody crest. Instead; his name seeped slowly - like a gash on a shaven face it oozed, then ran seemingly forever. She lost so much blood from that wound she could barely stand. She would continue that way until it stopped flowing to her carved organ. 

But she never wanted it to stop. She never wanted to forget his name. To stop feeling his pain. So in the true spirit of masochism she looked back at his peaceful form. Breathed in his innocence as she tried to keep up the illusion of hers. She ran from the sun to keep him in the dark. But he heard her shoelaces against his floor. He heard it every morning.

He kept his eyes shut tight though, in protest to the sun. For he never wanted to hate her. But he couldn't feign naivety away from their delicate senseless night. The part of him that loved her despised the sun. That part wished to glue his eyes shut, dose them in chemicals or carve them with knives. Then he could never allow the glow of the star to illuminate his daybreak. The sun blazed that day, to apologize for the truth it had shown them. Not knowing that its kind gesture was frying the skin from their bones.