I couldn't get him off me. Not the smell of his cologne as it clung to my clothes. It's showy odor choking my senses and leaving them cloudy. I was lost in it, my clarity an apparition amongst it's smog. I felt hazed by it, like it was surrounding me. Engulfing me. A fog in which we both hid.

I couldn't get him off me. Not the taste of his kiss as it monopolized the space of my lips. Their desperate haste leaving raw marks where his stubble coated chin ground feverishly against my silently screaming mouth. His taste was acrid, an acrimonious cocktail of cheap beer and dead cigarettes. I held a funeral for them on my tongue, wishing each one of them peace in their ashy graves.

I couldn't get him off me. Not the ghost of his touch as it raced across my body, claiming king to whichever section it found. My skin burning at the checkpoints he established, each place where caress turned awry. Bile churned in the depths of my stomach as I received his attention and withstood his devotion. Desiring nothing more myself than to wash him away, to cleanse myself of his invasive existence.

But I couldn't get him off me. No matter how much I tried. I was stained and I was soiled. He tainted every inch of me with his thuggish embrace. I struggled and I screamed, my protests oozing from my mouth and covering me in frothed spittle. Consuming me like playful soap. But the water never ran clear. Tarnished I was cast aside. My senses drenched in all he did, they'd never return immaculate. I, a flattened animal at the side of a lonely road, maggots rotting through my besmirched flesh, unable to escape the confines of my dirty heinous reality.

I couldn't get him off me. But however I am now; abandoned and grotesque with my once virginal skin a road map of unrequited selfish lust - I know he will never wash my blood from his hands. I will stain through his membrane and color his bones. I will seep in to the very marrow and dye it sanguine. I will mingle and run alongside his blood then take home in his heart. I will poison his mind. I will lace every thought. I'll be the microscopic glass to his batch of cocaine. I will never leave him. I will eat him alive. And in time I will kill him.
Then we'll be even.

Star

'I was on top of the world for a while you know. I know you may not believe me, given the way you find me today - but it's not your validation i'm looking for. You're just as pathetic as I am.

It started with a step ladder - a glimpse of the elite - and it never stopped, I carried on climbing higher and higher. Past the clouds my ego soared, as praise and commendation flew my way. Every tongue golden with glorious praise, every lip puckered at my rear. My hairline skimmed the stratosphere and I was gasping for air as angry balls of fire flew past my eyes and burned eternally before me. It seemed I could do no wrong. I knew my time was limited as I was running out of oxygen, but with every desperate and fruitless intake of breath I grew giddier still. My vision blurred and I was high on my own narcissistic and self-righteous delusions. Within success is birthed a feeling of security. It imbues within you a false sense of being untouchable, of obtaining indemnity against frailty. You see, I wanted to enjoy my moment in the sun. To bask in it's warmth so selfishly that it burned my skin to the fourth degree, cooked me ready for a feast, allowed my blood to boil within my heart until it evaporated, becoming nothing and leaving me a hollow shell, an empty glove of a person. I wanted to indulge so absolutely that I could never return to the concrete reality of my prior inferior being. I wanted to be consumed by accomplishment, wrecked by it, to have my essence, my entity, my entire existence, molested and deformed by the hands of adoration.

Because inside I was unrecognizable. I didn't even know my own thoughts any more. They began to sound like someone else ranting inside my skull, someone I admired, someone far removed from me. Someone with a wider vocabulary than mine, a more positive outlook than mine, and even a silkier drawl than mine. That person was all I coveted, so I kept quiet. I hid in the corners watching - admiring. But the stars were charring harder now, the burns began to itch. I couldn't avoid the ache of my lungs even in my asinine stupor, it stabbed through and I gasped and I gasped. The charismatic self smirking through my eyes grew tired of me, first sighing at my endless glee, then shooting me gunshot glances full of disdain and eventually hissing venomously at me as i cowered in my corner.

So I never left. Waste piled up from my fear to migrate and I bathed daily in my own shit, piss and tears. But even my optimal character couldn't anticipate what was about to occur. As it savored the shine that should of belonged to me, we both prepared to die by it. Me; emaciated, vacuous and terminal. It; complete, prosperous and eternal. We flew together, so close to the stars, our skin began melting from our bones, trickling down their structure like desperate droplets expressing pure ecstasy disguised as tragedy. And as we flew ever higher - our lungs collapsing, straining too finally in their quest for relief - we were blinded by the glow of complete achievement. Our skeletal being was almost absorbed by the torridity of immortality, of preservation in time through unequivocal fortune and respect. I could taste the finality of it on my tongue - and it tasted sweet.

Then we began to fall. The ego I had become a prisoner to was shattered in a matter of seconds. It's smirk only a memory that caused me distress and elation in one orgasmic rush. With it destroyed so effortlessly by a string of inimical newspaper articles and noxious whispers behind important hands - I was left alone. I crawled from my corner to the front seat once more but there was no light there, just a crushing black through which I couldn't even see. I don't know how long I fell for, every time I thought I could see the ground approaching  I was presented with further dismal sky through which to drop. I was continuously teased by the alluring certitude of collision, of death. The death of a career, the death of a reputation and the birth of a life of anonymity and mortality.The thought was repulsive to me.

I hope you understand that. You with your eyes brimming with condescending judgement. When you look at me here you don't see a person. You see an addiction, you see a disgrace. I just needed something to numb the pain of falling. Just to take it away for a little while, so I could float again above the clouds. Transcendentally swim in the ghost of perfection. I don't know when I stopped needing the release and started needing the drug. It's all a glittery fog to me. I think the stars have fried my brain. People see me now and pretend they never worshiped me, they turn their gaze away in disgust - because I scare them. I remind them of the fragility of happiness. The delicate nature of status. I had everything. I was the epitome of humanity, and now i'm a sewer rat. A disease ridden stain on the g-string of existence. But jump down from your high horse darling. What have you ever had? Just remember who I was before you scorn me for who I am. I was on top of the world. I was on top of the world.'

Meds

You'd become a simulacrum of your former self. You knew it. People whispered it as you passed them on the street, your past colleagues and lovers all harmonious on the idea that you were a ghost. A phantom in a three piece suit. But their hissing was redundant. You didn't need their vindictive warnings. You'd noticed it the day you left the hospital. Things in the world once so beauteous to you, so stunning  in form and manner - well now they lacked edge, they faded into one another like watery hues dripping down an easel. They merged into blobs of mundane necessity and there was nothing left that thrilled you anymore. The foibles of the world irrelevant, those happy little quirks more impertinent still. Standing in a queue to collect your medication you would pick at the fresh scars delicately thrashing through your thin skin. You'd flick at them until they opened, until they cried tears of crimson down your shaking hand. Trying desperately to feel it - to be hurt by it. But you'd become numb. You'd swallow down the designated cocktail of happy capsules to induce such a perfectly vegetative state, never questioning it's exigency in your life. Only remembering vaguely the horror of the alternative. So as the days blurred by, the memory grew foggier. The colors less vibrant, the screaming less emphatic. Until eventually you couldn't remember at all why you were living your life in such a monochromatic haze. So you missed a dose here, and took a night off there - until you were so clean you could practically hear your blood squeaking. And that's when the voices came back. Old friends collecting in the darker corners of your frantic mind, asking you to do them favors, then commanding your service. The voices took you over and you became an imitation once more. Only this time everything was emphasized. Every little defect the universe suffered made to seem like it was swarming towards you, down a hill, in a car with no brakes, driven by a man you'd wronged. Every nicety so tantalizing and unreachable that it tormented you as you lay sodden between your bed sheet, longing for hallowed slumber. Until one day  after sleep had evaded you for nights on end, and you could barely remember your name - you were reminded of a time not long ago when medication subdued your deranged insanity, calmed it to the point of non-existence. You wondered softly to yourself, among the screams of a thousand stern voices, whether the same situation could occur anon. So as the companions you kept inside your temples urged you to desist, begged you to abstain - you drank down the bottle of abandoned tablets, and celestially closed your eyes.

Lamb

There was a doleful serenity to the spaces within her eyelids. She gazed at the world like it was a gift. Startled and awed by all that presented itself to her. Flitting and fawning between each obstacle, gingerly charmed by all that existed. She was a lamb. Soft and innocent, carefree and curious. Trotting through hardships as if she was lightly skipping through a blossoming meadow. That was before the shepherd arrived. Riding on an ethereal cloud, mighty and undeniable in his superiority. He was a beacon of hopes beyond her means and he exploited that trust, that enamoured delusion. He offered to her a hand, filled with nourishments she could barely comprehend. All the evils and wonders of the hidden world, sinister and tantalizing in their splendor. She gorged on their plenty, her mouth desperate and hungry. She ate and ate, never thinking about where the subsistence descended to after the explosion of taste consumed her. She got high on it. Ravaged by the frenzied euphoria that the treats imbued within her. But they began to take their toll. Her organs churned and her mind depleted. She began to notice the darkness in the world, she grew weary of it round the corners of her flouncing walks. Warped manifestations stemmed from her naivety and she lost her way, straying from the path of daffodils and purity and stumbling further into debauchery. It consumed her, plucked her like a bag of meat and slaughtered her. It sprayed her sinew on the sidewalk, the concrete prison that had sprung from her delicate gardens and it humiliated her. It carved her into prime segments and sold her to the hands of demons, the impish guards of evil. It ravaged her simple mind and deflowered her virgin heart.  It left her dirty and abandoned. Lost and confused. Her bright white fluffy coat of innocence besmirched and her beliefs shattered all around her, she hardened. She formed an exterior of doubt and ridicule, one she exercised readily. The only soft spot that remained, that foible beneath her heart - that belonged to the shepherd. And he would poke at it, molest it until it bled raw, deform her insides beyond repair, strike her from the earth itself - before he would let happiness sprout from her valleys once more.

Fall

His eyes fell upon the descending leaf as it fluttered to it's grave beneath his feet. Fall was here. He could smell it on the air, crisp and heavy. He could feel it's hands lightly touching his shoulders, the places where skin was exposed from his light clothing choices. He could sense it clutching at the caress of summer that had gripped his body these past few months. He could feel it's grip being loosened from around him, and he was afraid. His foot grazed the leaf, he heard it crunch under his stride. He took to a seat on a bench facing the play park. The mellifluous cries of the joyful children warmed his heart. He saw fathers and mothers standing watch, their protective gaze scanning the unknown faces around them. Like lions guarding a herd they waited, patience etched into every wizened line of their troubled faces. He stayed to the shadow of the mighty oak, being sure to remain half hidden in plain sight. He watched the golden curls of a passing girl reflect the light from the mid-afternoon sun. They shone orange where the sun kissed them, and blazed yellow where they hid from it's glow. Ever changing, the shimmer and flash of a liquid sunset mirrored within each lowly strand. He smiled as he was bathed in the luminosity. He saw to his right a young woman sat silently crying, staring with unfixed eyes at him. He knew she couldn't really see him, she was too engrossed in her own torturous thought. She wore dark lipstick, the race tracks from her shadowed eyes mingled in with her lip's lurid hue at the corners creating a tenebrous pool of black. He wondered, if not a little condescendingly, if perhaps when her outside began to match her standoffish appearance - she felt a little bit proud, as if she finally deserved the medals of  misery she wore on her wrists. He returned his gaze to the playing children, marveling in their delicate purity. He longed to be a child again, to be blessed with such virtue - to revel in his own naivety. To battle only the giants of the playground, to know no troubles but grazed knees and broken pinky-swears. But here he sat instead, a man. Whoever he was didn't matter. Only the location, the motive, and the time mattered now - exactly to the second. The lives of every person around him all intertwined in this poignant moment and they would never untangle. His past was of no relevance and his future did not exist. All that lay before him were open chest cavities, marrow freezing screams and slack-jawed mouths that would never smile again. And as the nameless man sighed and envied the innocence, he pushed the detonator that would destroy it.

Petal

I've been cursing a rose. Every morning, incessantly, it brushes against my murky window. Squeak, squeak, squeak. I lie and I dream of it's destruction as I roll in torment contained to the space between my sweat sodden sheets. I can not move to stop it, I can only dream of it's halt. I did not know the nature of what I was condemning until today, until Tanya moved the curtain too far and it finally came into my view. As she propped me up to feed me my eyes fell on the rose's tragic beauty and I lost my breath. I'd imagined it to be a twig, a lowly and feeble thing, something so ordinary and dead - reflecting my existence. But there it was, it's pink flourish mocking me, reminding me of the life once in me, now so irrevocably depleted. Tanya left me to my own thoughts, exiting through the only door, one i will never have the pleasure to walk through. I exhaled shakily, my own decrepit version of a sigh. I sat, slumped against the crackling sheet of the mattress, and tried to feel my body. I wiggled my fingers strenuously, surprised by how much such a simple act pained me. I wondered existentially if i'd ever really been able to feel my body, to sense the organs I could not locate now - enjoy them pumping in their desperate way, futilely rushing the blood around my ungrateful body. Maybe I never could. Maybe I'm mourning for a feeling i am a virgin to, coveting something that does not, can not, physically remain. Or maybe I just never noticed the activity, as I was too busy living.
    I felt a line of drool extending from my lax mouth and down my freshly shaven chin. I attempted to wipe it away, to be rid of it's embarrassment - but my arm did not complete the motion it was so instructed to. Instead it shook in protest, still confined to it's grave above my sheets. The more I tried to ruse it, the more it disobeyed until eventually a second moisture, one cascading from my bulging eyes, mingled in with drool and both fell to their deaths just above my chest. I thought in that moment of every cigarette i'd ever refused in the fear of cancer, every occasion i'd ever worn a rubber in wake of the fear of infection, ever girl i'd ever not kissed to avoid rejection, to feign off regret. I thought of these things, of the intricate and undeniable components of a dreadfully wasted life. What did it all mean now? Now my body was no longer my vessel of vigor, but one for disease and decay. They were ripe within me and I couldn't stand it. I moved my leg, struggling against the condition in my mind screaming at me to stop. I dragged it over the edge of the bed and the other followed, a dutiful pal - and I fell to the floor like a haunted rag doll. I lay in a crumpled heap, my chest heaving in panic. I turned onto my back and gazed through the somber window. My voice could not produce words, it simply rasped in an ethereal manner - it would take them hours to find me. I felt a light warmth spread from my crotch and as I heard the drip of liquid I knew my final civilized ability had left me. Humanity stripped from me I lay stagnant. Out of the corner of my eye I could make out the rose, it's hue soft and comforting - a petal fell from it as I watched it, swaying carefree in the spring breeze. Squeak, squeak, squeak.

Escape Artist

Six counts, the arrest report said, six counts of theft, fraud and eventually murder. Six counts of a sixty is all it should take me to tell you this story. 
      We drove up to that prison entirely sure of what we were going to find there, Jamie Saint. We'd be forewarned that Jamie was a sadistic psychopath, a keen manipulator and a tricky escape artist. No one warned us that Jamie was a woman. I placed her at about twenty-five, tall, brunette, beautiful. A life devoid of cosmetics suited her, as did the color orange. 
'Look after this one' the officer growled at us as he walked her to our transport vehicle. He placed her in the back of the van and shut the doors showily, I heard Jamie sigh. 
  We began the journey, six hours, mostly straight road and desert. We were scheduled to stop somewhere just outside Oregon for rest room use and nourishment. This was the time I was most weary of. It was always like that though, being a prisoner transport unit driver had it's dangers and they mostly manifested in this half hour pit stop. Aside from the possibility of being strangled through the seating divide that is, but that almost never happened. Me and Horner drove in relative silence, after months of doing this weekly we'd almost run out of things to say. He instead turned on the radio and let the gentle lament  of the Turnpike Troubadours seep out of the dodgy speakers. I thought I heard Saint tapping her foot along to the melancholy beat but I couldn't be sure. Her humming to James Taylor was undeniable however. I felt her presence to be a calming and likable one, despite what i'd been cautioned. By the time we reached Oregon I didn't have a single apprehensive bone in my body about the woman in the back of the van, the woman who'd sang along to Bonnie Tyler, the woman who'd stabbed a man to death. 
  When we drove into the service station Horner told me he was starving. This of course meant that he'd be getting food and I wouldn't, as one of us had to stay in the van with the detainee. Normally I would have argued, but I didn't mind being alone with Jamie Saint. The thought didn't terrify me at least, how it usually did. Horner exited the vehicle once we'd pulled in at the front of the customary IHOP, a chain I was repulsed by after one too many sticky toffee waffles. After he left the silence was crushing, I felt awkwardly charged - like the air before a tropical storm. 
'Hey freckles, can we get some air?' a raspy voice spoke from behind me. In my heightened state the sound breaking through the lull startled me. I assumed she meant me because of my paradoxically boyish freckles, and I was the only other person present. 
'Ugh.. yeah, sure.' I stuttered and began to clamber out of the seat. I took my gun with me. I opened up the double doors at the back of the van and she winced as they swung open. The day was torrid and bright and the dark windowless space behind our caddy was fairly dim so i'm sure the sun blinded her. She adjusted and shuffled forward, chains binding her feet. 'Sorry, we can't take those off' I blushed. 
'I'm not asking you to.' she smiled. I couldn't understand how someone so delicate could be such a monster. She was akin to a wounded bird of prey, fallen from something so mighty and tainted with the mark of her past. I could see past it, but I could understand how others weren't so open minded. We walked, or shuffled in her case, over to a picnic bench just next to where the van was parked. The sun bathed us in a glorious and intrusive warmth, she tilted her head back - absorbing it. 
'I'm going to miss this' her voice was an adult lullaby, soft and hard in one sweeping tone. She opened an eye to squint at me. 'Go on, ask.' I stared back at her in embarrassment. 'I know what you're thinking and it's okay, just ask.' I lent forward, excitement on my lips.
'I just want to know what happened, why it happened.' She sighed again and once more tipped her head to bathe in the glow of the summer heat. 
    'It happened because of love. It's ridiculous to say it was with love that I killed him, because it wasn't, it was rage and hate and revenge but there was passion alright.' She looked me in the eyes from the corners of hers, possibly to gauge my reaction, and then she continued. 'I was enamored, completely consumed by the existence of another person. My first love, my first passion. Her entity engulfed my mind and I became something other than myself, I became a component in a mechanism, I became a 'we'. The more time I spent with her the more utterly and irreversibly in love I fell. I craved her, every hour of every day. She became a physical necessity like food, water - air. She was the most uniquely brilliant person I'd ever met and I couldn't understand how i'd ever managed to be without her, or who I was before I met her.' I flinched at the word 'her', confused by it, but nothing surprising stayed that way for long that day, after a while it just became evident fact. 'Then she fell ill.' She breathed a long jagged breath and picked up an empty water bottle that was lying on the bench. It was difficult to maneuver through her handcuffs, but she did it gracefully. 
    'They'll never understand, the judicial system, I know that now. Five sessions in court, seventeen statements and they still can't see that I did it for her. She was the north pole to my south, my one absolute attraction. She was the center of my universe and she was dying. It felt like everything I'd ever known to be reality was melting around me and I had no way to stop it. Like my world was liquidizing and falling through a crack beneath my feet. I tried to clutch it, to hold on to my stability, but the liquid just dripped through. Even though I could feel it, even though I could touch it - I couldn't catch it.' She picked at the label of the water bottle, ripping it slowly with her fingernail.
    'And then, one day, someone told me there was a way. A way to freeze her, to solidify her. It was like for one magnificant moment everything was perfect again, I could breathe again. I clutched at her, grabbed every part of her I could in those hours of hope. Savored every kiss, letting the taste tingle my desperate lips for hours after we disconnected. I watched her chest, watched the rise and fall of life, knowing for certain that it would stay there. But then, they told me the cost.' She ripped the label off entirely in one swift moment, screwed it up into an angry ball and then discarded it like it was nothing. 'I was a student and I had nothing more than a pile of debt. I had no family, no one to help me and neither did she. We had each other and that was all. So of course I did what I could, of course I stole to pay for the operation. I did whatever I could to stabilize my shaken world. To keep the plates spinning. But it didn't matter, they all crashed around me in the end. I went home, do you know what that feels like freckles, huh? They told me the operation was a success so after twenty-nine hours of sitting in that waiting room for a verdict, to know whether the heart mine belonged to was still viable - I went home. When I arrived the next day they told me she'd died in her sleep. "Peacefully" they said "didn't feel a thing.", apparently her heart had just stopped beating. But what about my heart? Why was that still going? Why, when my entire world had disappeared was I still standing? What was I even standing on?' She turned her back to me for a moment and when she turned again to face me she was holding a slightly disheveled cigarette between two of her long fingers, I didn't question where she got it - I was too absorbed. I reached towards her extending a lighter and she stared into my eyes as she inhaled. It mesmerized me. 
   'They say,' She continued, her eyes still burning through mine. I dropped my hand and she exhaled. 'That when a magnet is shattered, each tiny piece, each surviving fragment, forms another two poles. I was so broken, but I still yearned for her, I still magnetized towards her but she was no where on this mortal earth for me to find. So I got trapped. Trapped in delusions of her and how we were together, trapped in a place in my mind where she still existed and this world became all that I could think about. Everything else became irrelevant because, in some form, I had her. Then when after I stopped eating, I became physically ill myself and I had to be healed. After I was nourished my mind started to work again and I could see that she was gone, I could see that I was alone. And I was traumatized. I became obsessed, consumed by the inexorable thirst for revenge. That's when I looked him up, the surgeon.' There was a soft burning to the depths of her irises, they held in them the hatred she'd felt, I did not find regret beside it. 'I could not stop myself, I was engrossed by the idea of equivalent exchange, he'd stolen her life - so now his belonged to me. My magnetism was redirected, it honed onto him. I haunted him, I tracked him down and I stabbed him straight through the heart - because I felt that was only fair, because that's what his shoddy work, his shaky hand, his inattentive nature - had done to me. I watched the life drain from him and I thought of her, how I had never got the chance to be there, that I'd never seen that flawless light leave her. So I held him, his blood drenching my body, and I wept. I fell apart completely, screaming into his hairline - demanding her. She never came. But the police did, and they took me away. That was the first time I escaped, just slipped out the handcuffs, six weeks longer to freely wander the state, lost and damaged. It made sense to keep stealing, I had nothing to lose anymore. It felt like I was being punished by the Gods, all I wanted was to be alone, to find the time to end my own life so that my soul could once again be entwined with hers. But every time I came close I was detained. I just want that freedom freckles, to leave this earth on my own terms, not rot in a jail merely dreaming of her.' I stared at Jamie, this injured beauty. This tragic eagle. I reached into my pocket for the small metal key, the key to her death - her salvation. I unlocked her ankle and wrist binds. I then handed her my gun. 
'There.' I said. 'Be with her.' The smile that spread over Jamie's face melted my heart, the joy at being able to be reunited with her soul mate. She put her finger to the trigger, inverted the snout and reached the gun in front of her. 
'Thank you.' She breathed, then she flipped, pointed the snout at me - and fired. It didn't confuse me for long though, the pain - nothing did that day.