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Your car breaks down on the outskirts of Opaskwayak—somewhere north of the long stretch of road between Root Lake and Wanless.
She sputters over an uneven patch of pavement—with you weakly, desperately, encouraging her along—before her breath tapers off into a guttural, ratting choke, dying in the middle of nowhere. Far from help, and utterly unsalvageable—leaving you stranded without even her warm corpse to protect you from the elements after you were forced to abandon her in a shallow ditch before grabbing out your suitcase—and everything you own packed inside of it—from the back before the hacking plumes of black smoke she spat into the aether erupted into flames.
(Fitting, you think, considering it was the smoke that made you run in the first place.)
But running is the furthest thing from your mind as you lean your luggage against a broken fence post on the side of the road. In fact, running seems incredibly stupid in hindsight when you're forced to wander out into the middle of the pavement, hand cupped over your brow, as you glare, desperately, down the empty road.
A pointless thing, really.
With the town you fled from being colloquially known as the gateway to the north, you give up, quite quickly, on expecting someone to happen down this lonely stretch of highway between the sprawling, dark green depths of the lakes and the jagged tops of black spruce and jack pine. Not when it just leads further north to sparsely populated lands mauled with rivers and lakes.
There's only so much of the road left before it curves sharply into Flin Flon and then cuts into Saskatchewan, leaving the rest of the province untouched and sparsely occupied. Everything beyond this point meanders into small towns, unorganized hamlets, and communities only accessible through boat or airplane. A rugged, untamed sort of wilderness.
And that's the thing about Manitoba, you suppose. So much of it is tucked away, hidden and inaccessible, that the beauty lay in its belly—
(but you've never found Winnipeg to be very pretty at all.)
Despite the futility of it, you still stand guard in the middle of the pavement, glaring at the unmarked branch of the road as if expecting a lone hunter or fisherman to come up from the lake and save you. But it’s a pipedream. Everyone is back in town, the Pas. Waiting for the evacuation notices to trickle in, or bunkering down for another humid, smoke-clogged summer in the north that burns itself to the ground every year. The other intersection—Provincial Road, if you're guessing correctly—is just as barren, but that's to be expected. All it leads to is a bible camp and other campgrounds.
Between the unrelenting heat of a mid-June swelter, and the stench of fires scorching the earth somewhere in the sprawling cluster of gnarled pine and dry spruce a little too close for comfort, the air is choking. Dense with tendrils of smoke that clot into a thickened paste of trapped heat from the pale, hazy sun, and smog.
You're not sure it's even safe to breathe when it's this thick, but the only alternative is to go back to your car, potentially getting trapped inside as it burns. Death by fire or smoke. It's a little more ironic than you want it to be, edging like a knife across your sternum as it viciously reminds you of your stupidity.
And it really is just that because despite what the shadows on your wall at night, and the heavy thump of boots pacing down your hallway wanted you to believe, ghosts are not real. They can't hurt you.
not anymore—
(but something has been leaving snuffed out cigarettes littering the ground outside your window, and the muck, the sour pinch of stale smoke on your sheets when you're at work—)
Running, up until three hours ago, made sense.
Somewhere in the slurried recess of your mind, still dripping with the thawing puddle of heavy, draping depression, clarity needles through the gap, leaving you almost breathless at your own stupidity. Nauseous, too. And it's mostly the ache of hindsight that feels like a battering ram to your gut, reminding you cruelly of what listening to voiceless shadows and submitting to paranoia has left you with.
But you can't blame the entirety of this mess on panic and delusions alone—not when there was something almost instinctual about the urge to flee. An atavistic fear taking root in the last three weeks leading up to this sudden escape, making you look over your shoulder more and more each day. Checking your lock thrice in one night. Peering out of the curtains. Mistaking shadows for men in the dark.
But really, it all began to blur together into a hazy, humid smear at the start of spring.
It was the faint scent of old cigarettes haunting you whenever you went, lingering like a bad memory outside of your work, your house, until it ended up inside your home, on your sheets. That sickening smell of stale smoke and mouldering nicotine that left a sticky, greasy film across everything you touched. Smoke congealing in the hollow of your throat, rotting between that slip of skin where air breathed in from your nose pools on the back of your tongue. Thick, clogging. Unearthing bad dreams and memories buried under a scab. Things you kept locked tight inside of a flooding box.
But something had disturbed the ghosts—the heat, maybe.
It had been an unusually warm spring, one that slipped, syrupy and thick, into an unbearable summer. A scorching, oppressive thing that burned the pavement and singed the grass. Dredged up heat mirages, and made puddles of sweat drip down your back, slickening the skin on the crook of your elbow and the backs of your knees whenever you were outside for more than a minute.
An inescapable, miserable heat.
One that makes your skin grow slick, damp. Itchy. It made you scratch at the scab on your chest, the place where you keep your ghosts locked up tight, until your nail slipped under a small crack, and a piece flaked off. It's where the smell of cigarettes leaks from, you’re sure. The unease of being watched. Shapes in the dark. Spectres that haunt you in the balmy drape of another sleepless night—
It—this numbness—settled in the crack. Sealed it over so the ghosts had no way to back inside. A restlessness that hums under your skin—the urge to fight, maybe; to live—but it's overwhelmed by the anchor around your ankle, pulling you deeper into the depths. Drip, drip.
Like rainwater filling a bucket, a box, while you just stand in the middle and let it soak you to the bone as it rises up to lick at your chin.
It was the same slough. The same march. A familiar dance that no one tries to escape. Stigmergy, you thought in a moment of keen awareness that lasted as long as the whispers in the hall, clocking out amid the idle chatter, vague, broken whispers—shitty weather, can't believe they let that monster out in April, wildfires in Flin; think we'll get the Evac notice, printers jammed, use the one upstairs—as you make the familiar trudge up the street and back home.
It made you dream at night about slipping quietly into the lake just a little ways away from your house. All the lakes, really. The rivers. The ponds. Your home is mostly scar tissue: muskeg, infertile soil, and wetlands. Swamp-like. Cradled in the basin where the lowlands of the shield meet the gaping maw of the bay.
At first, most of it was half-formed images drenched in the haze of a confusing dreamscape; wisps of colour splashed across a sepia background. Shapeless and distorted; inkblots that disappear into a gaping emptiness when you wake the next morning, unsettled by something you can't remember. But each night, the picture grew clearer, more vivid, until you could make out the muddied shores of the lake. See your bare feet sink into the mudflat, toes squishing against the dry algal mat covering the rugged shoreline.
The waves came after. Playfully licking between your toes before growing bolder, coyer, and curling around your ankles, every ebb and flow pulling on you lightly. But it's neither urgent nor forceful. It just is. A gentle lull. A soft come.
You give in. Always. Ankles. Knees. Hips. Chest. Neck. Until your toes can't touch the bottom anymore, feet padding into a murky abyss opening up beneath you like a great, wide maw.
Birds-eye-view: ink puddles under you. Black and unfathomable. You sit in the centre of this black hole ready to eat you alive and tread water obliviously. Kicking, kicking—struggling to keep your head above water.
You're always wearing white. A long, flowing nightgown that spills around you in the dark water. A buoy at first, it keeps you up in a plume of soft satin, but the deeper you go, the more it drags. It pulls. Your own anchor of spun silk.
Every night, you slip below the waves and into that maw. Swallowed whole. The fading white of your nightgown is all you can see billowing in the murky depths until it, too, disappears into the abyss. Down, down, down—
Waking with a gasp, choking, choking—water in your throat, in your lungs—but it's just the leaking ceiling dripping over your face. Drip, drip.
You heave over the side of the bed, and spend the rest of the night staring at the shadows that dance across your walls until sunbreaks and they scatter. Your alarm goes. It takes every ounce of willpower to peel yourself off of the starchy sheets, eyes burning.
And then the haunting began.
The sound of your door handle ratting. Footsteps down the hall. The stench of cigarettes that reminded you of your childhood. Nicotine, the acrid stench of smoke, shouldn't be a nostalgic comfort in the same way people look back on Sunday morning cartoons, halcyon days. But it does. Reminds you of mid-mornings when you were a child, dunking your spoon into generic brand cereal (cheap knockoffs of the real thing, all we have the money for, don't be selfish, it's the same damn thing—) and watching reruns of old 90s shows on the big, black television in the living room.
Your mom wouldn't leave her room until noon, but you could still smell the smoke from your spot on the living room floor, hear her sigh in bed, groaning from a narcotic hangover. From a real hangover.
Unfamiliar boots tipped over on the worn mat in front of the door. Mud smeared on the sides. You eat your cereal, absently wondering if you'll have to call another strange man dad for a week until the police show up again—domestic disturbance, they'll say, and one will bend down to ask if you saw anything bad happen. You'll shrug like you're not standing in the eye of a storm, expertly weaving around broken dishes and upturned furniture. Feet covered in drywall from the fist-sized hole in the wall. No, you'll say. I was watching cartoons.
With mascara smeared down her wet, tear-stained cheeks, your mother will light a cigarette with shaky hands—uncuffed, don't do that to the kid, don't let ‘em see that, Christ’s sake—and hoarsely spit, leave my baby alone.
It was hard to ignore how everything had a fine, greasy film of nicotine dusting across it, itching at your skin. Choking you. Smoke clogging your throat. Walls yellowed, jaundiced. The air is a little misty, hazy, from the two packs inhaled everyday.
You think it would have gotten better. That you might have adjusted to it, but it still trickles down your throat like tar whenever you smell it. A piece of broken nostalgia from your childhood.
Until it became too much.
Until the ghosts started leaving cigarette butts outside your window, and you woke up to the sharp snick of a lighter in the dark.
You packed your things into the scuffed up suitcase leaning against the post last night.
Maybe that, too, was a delusion. Some grandiose dream dredged up from madness and sleepless nights, spinning all these terrible, wonderful fantasies of escaping and leaving the scab behind for someone else to find. A snuffed out cigarette in an ashtray in an empty home. Freedom from the echoes that lingered in your head like smoke, whispering terrible things to you in the dark.
But it left you little in the way of a plan, and as the fog that slunk into your gyri like the fires devouring the prairies begins to dissipate into ash and char sinking to the depths of your grey matter, you think it probably would have been better to just go to the police even it went against everything you were taught as a child.
Or to your landlord to complain about the other tenants leaving their litter outside your bedroom window.
(that's the thing about hindsight, though—it always comes much too late.)
Light pouring down from the sun stands little chance to pierce through the swath of smog clotting along the skyline like a thick, gauzy sheet, and an artificial night takes shape amid the haze of smoke as it swaddles the landscape in a draping, beige fog.
There's some comfort in knowing that it isn't that bad—not yet, anyway—when the cicadas, tricked by the artifice of a misty night, are lured out, filling the stagnant, smokey air with their lulling trills. Signs of life are a good thing, you remind yourself despite the curdle of fear edging in because it really shouldn't be this hazy outside if the fires are outside of the worriable zone.
But the air still smells of smouldering turpentine and charring sap—almost almost sickly sweet, like burning paper—and there's another solace in that.
People from the city often whine about the stench of damp bonfires that swallow up the nostalgic summer notes of chlorine, cut grass, and baking pavement whenever your home baptises itself in fire, but it's a distant fallacy. The smell that reaches them is diluted. Sweetly metallic.
But that's only when it's restrained to a forest. The reality of a wildfire is acrid.
Chemical, metallic. Pungent. You can tell when it reaches a structure it can devour by the way it taints the wind. Vanished wood. Copper wires. Rubber. Insulation. Plastic. It's a bitter scent—one potent enough to make your eyes water, and your throat burn.
There's no roar. A telltale woosh. The heat usually comes first, and though it's a balmy, sticky night, it isn't the same warmth from a raging fire.
Still.
You glance at the tops of the forest, as if waiting for them to turn bright orange. Crownfires. Out of control and burning up everything in its path faster than you could ever hope to run. The closest to hell on earth you'll ever come. Iskotêw, you remember the word well, having grown up alongside it.
But all you find when you look is a dark forest drenched in a fine mist.
And here is where you find yourself at an impasse.
The closest place to you is probably Cranberry Portage, but that's a daunting six hour walk. Wanless should be about seven or eight. The campground on the right is roughly the same distance.
All you have on you is hastily packed granola bars, and two bottles of water that were supposed to get you through until Flin Flon, or Baker's Narrow, when you'd change your car in for an airplane ticket to Regina, then—
California, maybe.
Dreams carved not idealism but desperation.
And look at where it led you. Hours away from help in the wetlands of rural Manitoba; surrounded by pastelike smog and heat and—
It sinks in. A slow trickle, a gradual drip. By the time anyone comes down this lonely stretch of highway, the meagre, warm water in your bottles will be empty. Walking is a bad idea in the heat. There's the lakes, of course, but—
don't drink from ‘em. don't know what's in there, eh. all the shit from the mines. no one cares if we die so you're better off drinking from a puddle.
You have no matches. No lighter—you don't smoke. You couldn't even boil it if you needed to.
You think of hindsight again. Of delusions, ghosts. The scab that sometimes itches when you smell nicotine. And then you think of shitty neighbours who wouldn't stop dropping their snuffed out cigarettes outside your bedroom window, the one that wouldn't close all the way and the landlord refused to fix.
Like a child mistaking a coat thrown over a chair as a man in the dark.
And that's what you are: a child. Scrubbing your hands over the worn blanket covered in holes from dropped cigarettes, the sharp, melted edges scratching at your skin as you pull the sheets over your head to hide from the monsters waiting in your hallway. The rattle of a door.
One of things you found most appealing about the cold swamps of Manitoba was the night sky, and you're a little more upset that you won't see it tonight than at the prospect of succumbing to the elements before anyone even knows you're missing.
But as the claws of an ugly, pitiable desperation snake across your jugular a noise cuts through the orange-brown haze.
A rusted, orange truck rolls down the road with a deep, guttural rumble.
You spring to your feet as it nears.
This is how he finds you. Alone on the side of the road with nothing but your suitcase and the loud screams of the cicadas tricked into an early start by the smoke.
He slows to a stop, the truck heaving and shaking as it idles. You can feel the heat from the engine when you step up to the window, half-expecting to find an old man from Opas, staring at you disapprovingly and asking how d’hell you end up all the way out here? but what meets you through the window is a mask.
A black knit balaclava with a grey skull splashed across.
Slowly, and with a scraping whine that cuts through the unnatural silence of a mid-July evening, the passenger's side window rolls down. First—motor oil. Exhaust fumes. Spilled gasoline. The stench of an old truck. Leather. Sun-warmed rust.
Then—
Nicotine. Ash. Stale smoke.
It smells like home,
(like summer days wandering the town until the streetlights came on. The clink of glass against the coffee table. A soft snick of a light. Ammonia. Stale piss. Some pizza on the stove, baby. Muted cartoons and hacking, delirious laughter spilling in through the thin walls. A shake of a door handle. Dogs barking in the distance. The rattle of a chain link fence. Rusty hinges squeaking in the breeze)
and beneath that, an old wound. Lifting the scab and smelling wet pennies and sticky serous. Pus and sweat and dead flesh.
The urge to recoil brims like a bad habit, muscle memory, but you shove it down because he's the first person you've seen in an hour, and likely will be the last tonight if you turn him down. So, you swallow it. Offer a shaky smile that dances across your mouth like a grimace, and greet him.
As you try to get around the strangeness of a balaclava in July—in his own car, no less—something plucks along the edges of your awareness, gluing in your periphery. An odd sort of familiarity.
But he doesn't say anything at all for a long stretch of time. Just stares and stares and stares as you shiver against the unease until he jerks his head to the side, and with a tone as sharp as a boxcutter say:
“Get in.”
And you do.
You tell him your name in the first three minutes of climbing into his truck.
It's rattled off between how you got here, and where you'd like to be, and sits, nestled, in the heart wrenching travesty of where you ended up.
He doesn't say anything. Not even a grunt of acknowledgement. Just leans back in the seat, wrist bent with his bone resting on the steering wheel. A balaclava covering his face. You take a moment to study him—to piece together the dread slowly coiling in your stomach the longer he drives, quiet but not—
Not silent.
He moves. Makes noise. Sniffs at the air when the back of your head bumps against the headrest as the truck—loud, jarring—rolls over uneven pavement.
It feels almost surreal. Dreamlike.
The hush of the cab, the only sound cutting through us the crunch of gravel and dirt under his tires. The noises his engine makes—and, god, it makes a lot. It sputters. Sickly. Hacks through corroded lungs, spitting up plumes of thick, black smoke into the air. You grip the worn, threadbare seats until your nails ache, feeling each jerk and dip of the road acutely in your chest. Thump, thump, thump.
This might have been a mistake, you think, eyes staring firmly ahead now, unable to look at the size of him. That mask. Through the streaks on the windshield, the horizon smears a pale pink beneath the heavy tomb of smoke. It makes you itch to say something. To fill the air with whatever might shake the unease you feel about him away even if you don't think you like this man too much.
But you don't.
You bite your tongue because every thought races by like a silverfish, too quick to catch. To sink your teeth into. Wrap your tongue around. You think about jumping out of the truck. Scream—
But as he turns off the highway, leading the truck down a stretch of dirt between the rural maze of a boreal forest and the sloping valley between two small lakes, he speaks. His voice is rough. Gritty. It grazes over your neck like a sharpened blade, tip pressing against your jugular.
"Don't care what your name is," he grunts, rummaging through the console for a pack of cigarettes—Pall Malls, he snorts; ain't even go’ Marlboros in this shithole.
Shithole. You thought the same for the longest time, but hearing it slip out of his teeth makes you defensive of the shithole that raised you. Protective.
(No, you think. You really don't like him much.)
When you finally bite into a thought, asking him why he doesn't care to know your name, he snorts in a way that rankles down your spine. Like it's obvious. Like you know the answer. But—derisively, droll—his eyes slant in your direction over the console of the old truck that sputters down the barren dirt road, drenched in something you can't name. Shouldn't name, maybe. Shouldn't think about. Shouldn't acknowledge.
"Dogs don't get to name themselves, do they?"
No, you think again, settling back into the seat, mind reeling. Spinning in circles as he tosses the pack into your lap, grunting at you again to get ‘im one. Make yourself useful.
As he drags you further and further out to the middle of the valley where thick tussocks of grass sway in the breeze like waves lapping over the surface of the rugged sea, you think of your mother and what she used to say about men.
(do you really think any of them want anything good with a girl like you?—)
Your fingers dig into the seat as your mind sputters like the old truck, spinning uncatchable thoughts of dogs and men.
Don't get to name themselves.
You suppose they don't.
And as he bites down on the spongy filter of the cigarette you light for him—make yourself useful—you think, suddenly, of your mother.
(You're not sure what that says about you.)
He doesn't say thank you. Not even patronisingly like some of the men around here do whenever you show a half-hearted kindness. Thanks, honey. ‘preciate it, sweetheart. He just rolls the butt between his crooked teeth, trying to get it centred as he keeps one hand curled over the top of the wheel, and the other tucked into his mask to hold it up from his mouth as he smokes—an ugly, black balaclava; a skull tacked on in hideous, full grey.
He's unusual. The word rolls around your head for a moment, its weight not quite capturing the oddity of the man—this hulking behemoth sitting across from you, thick thighs wider than the seat, knees digging into the panel of the truck, jeans barely able to hold his flesh inside; arms flexing under the black shirt he wears, the gunmetal camo jacket. The mask. His accent. His eyes.
Everything about him is odd. Not quite right.
But unlike you, he does have a name.
Simon. Simon Riley.
It rolls off of your tongue, tarlike; slithering out between bruised lips where it's swallowed by the hacking of the engine.
Simon. Simon. It glues itself to the inside of your throat, there with each swallow. Every inhale, exhale. You feel it digging in, barbs clinging to the soft tissue. Growing roots that snake down your hollow, smoke stained esophagus, stretching all the way down to your lower belly. Tangled in your organs. Leaking into your bloodstream.
Must be because you can't remember a time when someone's name held so much power over you. Captivated your attention so much. It prickles in the back of your head, an unreachable itch. Familiar somehow.
Who are you sits on the tip of your tongue, but he beats you to it.
“What's the plan?”
You blink, stupefied. “Plan?”
It's the wrong answer. He doesn't move his head away from the road, still rolling the cigarette between scarred—mauled—lips, but he cuts a glance at you from the corner of his eye. Barks out a scoff around the butt.
“Ain't go’ one, do you?”
All you can offer is an uneasy shrug. “I'll—I’ll figure it out.”
Again—the wrong answer.
He draws in a deep breath through his nose. “Gonna get eaten alive out there, pup.”
Pup. “I'll be fine.”
It comes out shakier than you wish it did. A tremulous, nervous little thing. The urge to pick it out of the air and shove it back down your throat with the tips of your fingers rears. Stupid. Stupid girl—
Another scoff. “Know what bad men do to little mutts like you?”
It sounds like something your mother would say. And maybe that's why you stutter furiously over little mutts, head reeling from the stench of nicotine that trickles down your nose. Tar crawling along your esophagus. Choking.
You can't breathe—
Black clots splatter across your vision. Bleeding in like wet ink on paper. Through the haze, a memory sticks out, tearing through the fog—
Simon Riley, he said—
glancing at you in askance as he did, something forming in the dark, glacial underbelly of his eyes; surprise, maybe, but the mordant sort. The kind that seemed to drawl out, almost contemptuously, really? you don't know? Amid the roaring in your ears, it was easily swallowed up. Too busy stuttering over dogs and names and—
“Bad men?” You eke out, fingers curling into the worn fabric of the seat. “Like—like who?”
He gives a lofty shrug in response, one of that puckish sort of humour the boys in your class used to have. Amusement hidden behind snickers. Tucked away inside clandestine I don't know’s and it doesn't matter’s while they laughed at you, not with. Boyish smirks. Always riding the edge of malicious and playful—childish cruelty.
It's flatter, though. The snide mockery of an adult expertly hidden behind feigned nonchalance.
“Who's to say?” He settles for, offering a grim pull of his mouth around the cigarette. A smile, maybe. A smirk. “Muggers. Bad apples. The sort that'd stop for a little runt on the side of the road—”
You think you might have known from the beginning. When he stopped and just stared, saying nothing at all outside of a grunt, get in. Doors locking the moment you closed it. Not even bothering to know where you were going.
Get in. Dogs don't get to name themselves. Runt. Mutt. Pup.
The shape of him from his angle is different, but the slow, steady curl of his hands on the wheel reminds you of those deft fingers wrapped around the hilt of a blade. A knife.
“‘ow many pounds?”
“Which kind?”
You think of the morning newspaper on your doorstep. Bending down to pick it up. The headline catching loose threads of your waning attention:
TWENTY-THREE YEARS SINCE RILEY FAMILY MASSACRE; KILLER RELEASED FROM JAIL
Town shaken to the core — grisly triple homicide — local man, run-ins with the law — released for good behaviour — coming home — tried as adult, eighteen at the time, convicted and sentenced to prison — the man,
Simon riley.
You remember it in halves. Pieces. A story you were told growing up—your town's version of the boogeyman. Whispers. Secrets. Shows of courage—I dare you to spend one whole hour in the Riley house!—and childish whimsy.
But it's this shapeless, ephemeral thing in the back of your head. More myth than reality. More rumours than fact.
Hisses in the streets, at work—releasin’ that monster, can you imagine? Coming back to town, too. Heard he was workin’ for someone, a butcher! Imagine that—a mass murderer gettin’ outta jail and workin’ as a butcher! Bet he's havin’ fuckin’ laugh—
Buried under the deluge, the slow trickle of malaise, you hadn't noticed much outside of the numbed crawl to work and then back home. And even now, he's different. Broader.
The butcher shop you stopped at to grab sandwiches from the deli seemed to make him smaller. His bulk camouflaged under the slabs of meat. The burnt red trim stealing your attention as you scanned the rows of fresh cuts, tapping your nail against the glass as a man looked down on you. Half of his face was covered under a stained medical mask. Hands tucked inside black surgical gloves.
The dirty apron with spots of blood.
“Same as usual?” He'd grunt, already reaching for the limp lettuce in the tin. Drip, drip—
“Are you—are you running, too?”
It seems childish. Comes out on the dull edges of a whimper. Why isn't he at work? Why is he here? Why, why, why—
He's eyeing you again. Mangled lips curled up in a molting smirk. “No. Ain't runnin’, pup.”
“Then why—?”
“m’chasin’.”
Chasing.
“Imagine my surprise when the sad little runt that kept wanderin’ into my shop, orderin’ the same thing everyday an’ gettin’ bossed around suddenly grows teeth. Tries to run. Saw you packin’ everythin’ up. Thought I might'a scared you—”
“I'm—I’ll—”
You need to get out. There's an itch under your skin that burns. Blistering. You need to run—
“But then you go’ into my truck like you didn't even know who I was.”
He reaches down, swiping the pack of cigarettes from the cupholder. Shakes it once. Hums. Then tosses it into your lap, barking out a gravelly get me o’nother as you swipe clumsily on the door, searching for the lock—
“Ain't gonna find it, pup. Took tha’ out o’long time ago.”
Your fingers swipe over an indent in the metal just as he draws the words out. A small hole near the opening where a little nub would have protruded from.
The lock is gone.
Your hand slips from the hole, falling to your lap as you twist back into your seat, numbly facing forward as the world outside you darkens into a fresh bruise under the drape of smog.
“Can you—can you drop me off in Wanless? Or—or Flin Flon,” you add hastily when he snorts. “I can probably bus back, or—”
“Didn't hear, did you?” He mocks, rolling a big shoulder into the back of his seat. “Wan go’ the evac notice when you were too busy throwing your shit into your car. Highway's closed. Got a fire just to the east of Egg. Big one. All the way up to Flin.”
“The Pas?” You rasp, swallowing down the nausea when it buoys up. “Can't you take me there instead?”
“Thought you were goin’ anywhere I'd take you, pup.”
The moon is a flaxen smear beneath thick, craggy clouds. Outside the truck, the towering tussocks sway under the rolling breeze. Waves in a vast ocean. It boxes you in from all sides.
How and maybe why blisters between your teeth. The urge to ask clawing up your throat. But like you, it has nowhere to go. Not when your lips are soldered into a tight, tense line as your sluggish, muted mind struggles to catch up. To shape the horror into something small enough for you to chew on. Digestible. Thought trickling in through molasses—
Drip
Drip
Drip
Then: “now, chitchat's over, and m’not askin’ again.”
He's quick. You barely notice him move. In seconds, the scruff of your neck is snatched up in his warm, dry palm, fingers digging into the muscle, the nerves. It's a wet, greasy sort of pain. Napalm trembling down your spine, igniting the delicate nebula of receptors lining the membrane of your skull. He gives a little jerk as you gasp, more from shock than anything else. Surprise a hair faster than the ache in your neck.
“Get me ‘nother smoke, pup.”
He doesn't let go. Not until your quivering hands clumsily paw at the pack sitting in your lap, shaking fingers trying again, and again, and again to peel pack the flap as he hums to himself about obedience and spoiled dogs.
Holding it delicately in your trembling hand, you reach for the lighter in the holder without him having to ask. Be good, you think. The slurry of your mind morphing, moulding, changing into a familiar shape—prey. Docile. It hurts less when you behave. And as if feeding into this hideous, childish sense of self-preservation, the vice he has on your flesh slackens, pleased when you light it without being told. The way mamma taught you—
stick it between your teeth, baby, and just suck a little bit, just enough for it to catch. There, that's a—
“good girl.”
Proffering it between the trembling pinch of your index finger and thumb, you try not to think about anything at all as the familiar sting of nicotine rots inside of your mouth. Blissfully numb. Holding it out even as he tugs you closer to the thick spread of his thigh, forcing your knees to come onto the bench. One hand clinging to the headrest as the other balances the cigarette away from him.
You know better than to let it burn him.
But he doesn't take it. Just opens his mouth a crack, crooked teeth catching on the jaundiced smear of moonrise spilling in from the windshield, and waits. A squeeze. Encouraging. You shuffle into place, tucking your knees beneath you in the bench as you slowly feed the butt into his maw, attention funnelled into a needlepoint:
don't burn him and don't get bit
Slowly, his scarred lips come down around the filter. The tip crackles with his deep inhale, flaring into a bright ochre that illuminates the darkened can as the flames burn through nicotine and paper. You make to pull away, but his fist tightens. A warning. Stay.
And you do. Settling into an awkward crouch beside him as you cling to the headrest with one hand and keep your trembling fingers cinched around the stem as you hold his cigarette.
He draws in lazy puffs of smoke, just enough for half a mouthful before he's finished. Nudges you slightly to peel back, and pull it out of his mouth so he can exhale.
It only takes one nudge before you learn his patterns. Inhale. Hold. Peel back. Exhale. Repeat. It's rhythmic. Easy.
His hand loosens. The shackle coming undone. He keeps his palm against your nape, warm, damp skin soothing the ache in your muscles. Long fingers loop over the sides of your throat, his thumb stroking your chin absently with the tips of his index and middle finger press slightly into your thundering pulse.
In the lull—and with your head a hinterland, thick blankets of snowfall muting all sound into a distant echo—you take a moment to study him.
Long, blond lashes. Eyelids half-mast over his eyes. It's hard to discern the colour outside of black in the gloom of the truck. His sclera is more yellow than white with braids of thin, red rivers crossing through. Sleepless nights, nicotine. It bleeds smears of charcoal under his eyes, darkening in the corners.
His nose is long and hooked. Artificially crooked from too many breaks in the cartilage. Each ridge sits a few centimetres over his skin. Scar tissue. Nasty breaks, you know. The sort that rips skin, exposes bone.
It doesn't fill you with any particular sense of pity. Just another waypoint along the brutal asymmetry of his face.
And it is just that:
Brutal.
With the fabric bunched up on the bridge of his nose, the map of his lower face is a network of crisscrossing scar tissue. Scorch marks. Pocks along his boxy, thick jaw that look exactly like the burning end of the cigarette you keep clenched tight between your fingers.
A travesty of a face.
In the back of your head, in the faded grey of your memories underwater, in the box, you wade through the murk to remember what he looked like. More background noise than reality—the ding of the bell, the scent of meat, the soft chatter that snakes through the fog, usual? and yeah, please and ‘ere and thanks, have a good night—because the problem with being lost inside of yourself is that nothing feels real even when it should. Everything is matte. Flat. Colourless. Unremarkable.
Rainwater falling into a pail. Drip, drip, drip.
It comes in patches as you stare, unbridled, at the side of his face. Unable to look away in case you miss the repetitive inhale, hold, exhale, pull, and really, where else are you supposed to look?
The headlights bulldoze a bright yellow light through thick swatches of corn on the sides of a bare, dirt road. With the moon tucked behind a dense cloud, the dark, cast sky offers little natural light. You'd see someone coming from miles away on the virtue of being in one the flattest places on earth. All you get is mockery from the clock on the dashboard as it ticks away the meagre seconds of your life. Down—
No.
You keep your gaze straight. Fixed. Let the pieces fall all you think through the murk, honing on things like oh, he's so tall. And he is. Was. Even in the thickening nebulous of acedia, weighed down by the heavy realisation of personal, mental inertia, the sheer width of his shoulders jarred your consciousness.
Under the stained, straining white of his shirt and the black, leather straps of his rubber apron hooked over his shoulders, not even torpor could stop eyes from following that sloping path from the crook of his neck down to the balled knot of his fingers loosely hung by his sides. Oh and he's big surfaced.
And that's all he was. A quick comparison to a mountain. The stirring of fear in your belly—a man too big to comprehend. The passing thought that he must have to duck to avoid hitting the doorframe.
Impassive. Dispassionate. Flat, leonine eyes—lidded, lifeless, and heavy—lazily flicking around the counter as you jabbed an equally sluggish finger at the things you wanted. Black. Stagnant waters. His skin was pale. White. Waxen. Broken up by smears of glossy pink and iridescent silver where the flesh was raised, molted by scars all in various states of maturation. Eyes ringed, bruised. Light, ashy brows. The left only a small thatch as a scar drove a jagged line clean through. Patchy—
Like the hair on his head, shorn tight to the grain. More mangled cuts on the sides of his head, the top of his scalp. Clumps where hair—however short—couldn’t regrow.
Lines on the bridge of his nose. One right above the seam of the surgical mask.
You take these half-formed images and suture them together. Dots on a tattered canvas. Pointillism drenched in the grain of an old film—ennui in faded blue. Peeling back leaves you with a thickening sense of dread as the full picture of inchoate pins blend together in a seamless tragedy.
He's more scar tissue than man.
More monster, maybe, if the whispers you heard growing up mean much.
It brings a fresh sense of unease to the mouldering pit inside of your belly when the stem of the cigarette bleeds down to nothing. Two inches, then one. Your fingers against his lips. The flash of heat as the flames burn through the dwindling tobacco.
You don't want to think about what happens when he's done, but with nothing except the filter in the tight squeeze of your index and thumb, there's nowhere left to run. With his hand on your nape, thumb rubbing a line up and down your trapezius, you stay where he placed you. Unsure what to do—something he seems to realise, huffing through his nose in a thick funnel of white smoke.
“Snuff it out f’me,” he rasps. “M’done.”
He doesn't let go as you twist back, ashing the nub in the overfilled ashtray. A smudge of it gets on your finger when you hit the edge of the tray, and you brush it off over the spill of your pants, resisting the urge to ask what now?
But he beats you to it. The grip on your nape tightens, and you look at him again. Subservient under the threat of pain. It makes his lids lower, lashes fluttering in a brief paroxysm of pleasure. Satiety. The heady rush of being in absolute control.
(good girl—)
The pinch is guiding. He pulls you forward until your hands lash out, palm planted between the bend of your knees and the lax stretch of his leg. Catching yourself just in time—a little spill that makes his gnarled lips twitch. The bare hint of amusement; a thread of a grin.
You're glad he catches it in time because the viciousness of those crooked teeth bared at you, with your vulnerable neck still in his clutch, might have made you weep—
not yet.
You can smell the musk on him—tobacco, stale sweat—and bite back a whimper when he peels his hand off of your nape, sliding the rough, dry skin of his palm over your jaw, your cheek. Cradling the side of your neck in his grip, the tips of his fingers sinking in—just a bit—against the bruised, tender flesh of your nape. Nestled over your stem. The jut of your spine.
His thumb sweeps over the curve of your chin, inching higher with every pass—back and forth. Up. Back and forth. Up—until it sits against the seam of your mouth, pressing into the corner.
Brief pressure—open up.
His nails dig in, sudden and sharp—you’ve pleased him. You think about preening, but the urge dies quick when his thumb glides over the ledge of your bottom lip, pressing the tip in until it’s wedged between your teeth.
You know what this is even if you have no name for it. No measure of experience. Just—
Instincts: fawnlike and unsure. They trickle in—drip, drip, drip—until a puddle forms on the floor of your belly. Brinepool. Sharp and bitter. All salt. Nausea on your tongue when you taste his skin, the grime under his nails. Congealed blood. Something sour. Meaty.
It tugs at something inside your stomach. Makes you feel like you're going to be sick—
This feeling worsens, churning in your guts when he spears his thumb into your mouth, grazing against your tongue and pulls it out just to push it back in again. A repetitive motion. In out, in out. Hooks the crook of his first knuckle over your bottom teeth, scraping the tip between the gap of your tongue, running it over the ridges of your gums. Saliva fills your mouth. The puddle quickly polluted with the briny, rotten beef tang of his skin.
He hums. His eyes are drawn, shuddered. Lids falling to a flat, even curtain at half-mast as he gazes at you with an impenetrable expression. Almost impassive. Cold. But the artificial deadpan in his mien is broken by the shift of his throat when he swallows. The plumes of black smoke that fill the gaps in his bloodshot eyes.
In, out.
It thickens. Becomes a dense, caliginous cloud. Nimbostratus. The sight of it sours in your guts, rankles sharp talons of unease, fear, down your spine.
“Go’ such a pretty mouth, don't you, pup?”
In, out. In, out. In—“gonna catch flies if you keep it open like tha’;”—in, out, in—“yeah, tha’s a good girl—nice and tight now; go’ such soft lips, huh?”—in out in out—
on a pop that fills the cab, spears you with the brutal sting of embarrassment; his echoing groan suturing around the trepidation that shivers over your nape
—his thumb is wet when he presses it to your lips. A secret. A garish kiss. Shush shush, pup, ain't go’ nothin’ to cry ‘bout—
Yet.
“Nothin’ in life comes free,” he drawls, arched and mean. His damp, sticky thumb smearing over your mouth before stamping into the corner; eyes shading, procellous, in the low gloam as he wets your skin with your own saliva. “‘pect you know tha’, though. Don't you?”
You want to ask what do you mean—if only to angle for time; delaying what comes next until you can figure out how to get out of this—but his finger peels away, swiping over the swell of your cheek as his hand reclaims the grip it had on your nape. Bruising and painful. What was once just a hold quickly becomes a guide, pushing your head down, down—
And there's really no dancing around the inevitable.
“C’mon, pup,” he mutters, still pushing, pushing. His hand forcing you low, belly on your thighs, head inches from his lap where a thick, dark bulge pulls taut against the jeans spilling over his thighs. Intimidatingly thick. Long. It's enough to make you dizzy.
So dizzy that you think you might get sick.
But you can't.
It's all happening so fast. Not fast enough. You could wriggle free, maybe. Run.
He pried the lock out of the door. Stay. Just do what he wants, just—
His thighs are thick. Stretched lax over the seat. The wobble of the truck down the empty stretch of gravel road bumps your chin into his firm, corded flesh before coming to an abrupt stop.
—an escape;
His fingers tighten over the scruff of your neck. Your chest presses tight into the tops of your thighs. It feels like you can't breathe—
“Give us a taste, huh?”
He's not asking. Your hands shake. The other flashes in your periphery, snaking between the steering wheel and his belly, fumbling over the button keeping his trousers fastened. There's no pretending when the button pops out, splits his jeans down the middle.
The scent of him—thick musk, sweat; humus—is potent. Overwhelming. All salt. Stale piss. It's gross. You feel it glueing in your nostrils, leaking down your throat. Something you could taste—
In your panic, you tense. Body coiling, head trying to spring back, away from the heavy, olid smell that makes your belly churn, nauseated by the idea alone.
He doesn't let you get far. His hold is ferric. A shackle. The paroxysm, all panic and fear and instincts, just makes him huff, amused by the attempt to get away, and—
The fat bulge in his pants twitches against his thigh. His hand slides inside the gap, gripping the thick length in his fist, and pulling it free.
The noise that spills out at the sight of it—a pathetic whimper clawing up your throat—makes him groan, twitching in his hand.
“C’mon,” he rasps, tugging so hard against your nape that your vision swims from the pain of having your skull rattled so viciously. The ink that bleeds in congeals over the hideous thing in his grip—impossibly thick, molted like a bruise; angry looking with straining veins looking primed to burst—and doubles your vision for a moment.
Whitenoise rings in your ears. You blink through the pain, and nearly choke on a sob when the fog dissipates and unveils his fist squeezing tight, pulling upward as a thick glob of sour milk white bubbles from the mushroomed head, the thin slit oozing it out over the red, engorged flesh of his—
his—
“—fuckin’ hell. Ain't you sight? Lookin’ all scared of my cock. Come on, don’t be shy, pup. Give ‘er a kiss—”
Your stomach churns again when he pulls you forward, your nose pressing against the molten length of him, smearing your skin against the hot, sticky spill leaking down the sides and over his fist.
Use that pretty little mouth o' yours to earn your keep.
Your mouth tastes sour.
Lips bruised. Jaw tender to the touch.
It's hard to think around the ache deep in your throat. The steady throb of pain that brims whenever you swallow—
another thing you don't want to think about;
his hand: an anvil on the back of your head. no longer guiding, leading, but holding down. taking. claiming. the urge to cry snuffed out by the mocking coo echoing from above, uttering things like fuck, use your tongue more, pup and go on an’ gag, wanna hear you chokin’ on my cock.
Choking is a rather succinct summarization of what occured. But you're not thinking about it. The pounding in your head. The twinge in your neck. The swell of your lips. How dry, gross, your mouth is.
No, ain't go’ water, pup. Jus’ gonna have t’get used t’ the way my cock tastes, ain't you?
Another swallow. The flicker of pain. Fuck, such a good little slut, ain't you? Gaggin’ f’me—
He pulled off to the side, jerking the stick into park before wrenching his seat back—givin’ you more room to work with—and taught you how to please him with your mouth. A harsh instructor. Your nape aches from the bruising pinches he doled out whenever you did something wrong.
Too much teeth. Bite me, pup, and it might be the last thing you ever do. No finesse. Slobberin’ all over me, ain't you? You better clean me up when you're done. No technique. ‘pected better, pup. If you don't suck my cock like you mean it, I'll just ‘ave to fuck your pretty face, won't I? And believe me, you won't like that.
But he liked the tears. The look in your eyes when he gripped your head, and made you look up at him. Prettiest fuckin’ eyes I ever saw. Yeah, keep lookin’ at me like tha’. Keep cryin’—gonna make me cum—
You swallow again. The salt of him lingers on your tongue—you hadn't expected cock to taste so much like skin; sweat; a briny wash between your teeth you can't seem to get rid of. Thick, milky strains of seawater glueing to the roof of your mouth, pooling in the basin beneath your tongue when he pinched your nose and barked out don't swallow, open your fuckin’ mouth. Lemme see my cum, pup, and you better no’ spill a goddamn drop—
You can't stop thinking about it. All of your thoughts skirting around the edge of what happened—his voice in your head, the shift of his hips under your jaw. The feel of thick, molten muscle against your damp palm when you braced yourself on your knees like he asked, torso folded over your thighs so he could see your ass poking up in the air. The repetitive motion—up down up down—that thrums your body now, a ship on the sea, rocking with the waves. The phantom slide of his thick, fat cock gliding over your tongue, down your throat—
No.
It's an inescapable cosm. One where the man who held you down by the nape of your neck—go on an’ suck it, pup, tha’s it—has you bundled up in his jacket. Swaddled like a babe on his lap as he reclines back in the truck. The steady rise and fall of his head under your temple, the stretch of your legs pulled taut to sit on either side of his thighs. The shift of his belly under your chest when he breathes, swallows.
Asleep, you think, with you splayed over him like a blanket. Unable to stop the thoughts from oozing out of the cracks wrought in your desperate attempt to feign ignorance.
To pretend.
It's quiet in the cab. Just the sound of his snores from under the fabric of the balaclava. The soft hiccups popping from your sore throat, smothered in the thick pelt of his chest—a knifelike juxtaposition where you curl up in the lap of your kidnapper like a child and silence the cries he wrought in the warmth of his chest.
Comfort in a razorblade.
Kissing the boxcutter after it slit your throat. Tender lips to blood-warmed metal.
Shakings on his chest as night spills around in a swath of northern black, the taste of him still thick on your tongue. Salting your lips. Bitter and awful and—
(mama was right all along—)
You want to go home.
Back to the small living room with the coffee table your stepdad grabbed from the side of the road. Garbage picking, he called it with a sharp grin. His arm dangling off the ledge of the rolled down window, the warm, golden glow of the sun glinting against the silver watch on his wrist. Dumpster diving in some parts, baby girl.
That's what he called you then. Baby girl. My girl. Pretty girl.
You'd ride in the front seat with him on these little adventures. Picking up things off the street. Money from people who owed him. He'd boast about it, handing you a stack of cash to marvel at as he peeled away from the pawnshop, promising you McDonald's for dinner. Ice cream for dessert. You like that, don't you? Sweet vanilla for my sweet baby girl.
Chubby-cheeked, wide-eyed—cherublike, grandma would say—and you'd nod, grinning around the candy he gave you earlier as his work-warmed hand would squeeze your thigh, grinning wide at you.
He was a good man.
The house was always clean since he moved in. The dishes that piled in the sink were washed and put away. The overflowing ashtrays emptied in the garbage that didn't spill over anymore. There was food in the fridge—real food and not whatever mom could find to fill the cupboards when the lady you had to talk to every week would come over and check. Child services, she would snap. And you best be good for ‘em or they'll take you away and you'll have to live in a pigpen. No toys. No food. Nothin’. Surrounded by other bad kids who got taken away.
Dinner was always on the table at three. It had to be, though, or he, dad, would get mad. Throw things. Make a big mess out of everything he bought, and then yell until it was cleaned up.
You had toys, too. Blocks and dolls and colouring books.
You'd bring them out into the living room because dad didn't like to be alone—come, c’mon, keep me company, baby girl—and you'd colour while he laughed at the television, chuckling over some show he said you were too young to watch with a wink, and a little smile. So just do your colourin’, sweet thing.
The living room with its chipped wood floor (cheap vinyl, dad said; that's why you always get slivers), and smoked-stained walls—jaundice yellow and molting brown over dirty, faded white—was a comforting place. Laughter spilling, tinny and artificial, from the big, box-shaped television. Colourful VHS tapes tucked into the stand below. The VCR in the middle.
Light spilling in from the crack in the sheet thumb-tacked over the window. Everything was dusted in a hazy smear from when they would light a cigarette, leaning back on the couch together as they watched movies.
Broken laughter. Clipped conversation. You'd curl up on the old, lumpy brown couch under the thin throw dotted with burn-holes from when mom would fall asleep on the couch with a lit cigarette in her hand. Everything drenched in a thick, greasy film.
It was bad. You know that now. Kicking doors. Fist-sized holes in the wall. Throwing plates and cups and ashtrays and appliances and whatever else was within reach. The screaming. Yelling. The threats. Scorch marks in the vinyl when the cigarette in her hand would drop, rolling over the floor. Nights without food because she was too tired to cook anything for you, baby, can't you get somethin’ yourself? Learning how to pour milk in your bowl. How to check and see if it expired. Making grilled cheese sandwiches. Surviving on your own. Living on scraps.
Smoke so thick, it was choking. Suffocating. Going over to friends for a sleepover and coming home wishing the ground would swallow you whole. The bubble bursting each time because you know life is not supposed to be like this, but it was.
And in Simon's arms, wrapped around your waist like a boa, a python, squeezing tight, you think about it. Home. Miss it a little more when he shifts in his sleep, snoring. This hacking, growling thing that sounds more animal than man. Beastly. The rip of a chainsaw that cuts through you, ripping flesh and chewing up bone.
At least it was predictable in its chaos.
With him, you don't know if he's going to eat you whole or wear you like a trophy. It's all fear, teetering on the edge of a razor blade, the knives you can feel trapped against the thickness of his thighs.
Danger tucked inside comfort.
And that's what this is, you think, laying there with your head on his chest. Your jaw is still sore. Your throat is tender and bruised and swollen. The taste of him is thick on your tongue.
He smells a little bit like a wildfire—or the aftermath of one. A snuffed bonfire. Char. The burned husk of a scorched forest after a heavy rainfall: damp earth and wet charcoal, ash. Something bitter, metallic. Wet rust. An old wound.
Like burning. Like stale smoke.
Nicotine.
And a little bit like home.
It's a loose, uneven knot you wake up to.
Limbs locked. Rat-kinged together. His breath ghosting over your crown. A grunt, sleep-thick. Get up, pup. Time t’go.
Rolling over into the cold, empty seat beside him. Still caught between lands—dream and reality: the blur of sleep, thickened cobwebs over your eyes. The dull rumble of the engine coming to wake on a brutal, savage snarl that cuts through the eerie silence. Bushes brushing against the side of the truck as they sway in the soft breeze of an early dawn. Scratch, scratch.
The squeal of the window when he rolls it down. Mid-summer heavy in the air—wet grass burning in the sun; damp earth; dying leaves—and you breathe it all in on a deep inhale that rattles the webs.
Your body hums with sleep. Dreams dancing over your skin, half-formed in the pale-pink flutter of a sprawling, dizzying hypnopompic world. Blinking through the mist, the drip, drip, drip of a nightmare where things grasped and clawed at you. Where a man cut you open, belly button to chin, scooped out your insides until they were hollow and pretty pink, and then slipped into you like a coat, a second skin.
There's a chill that carries on the breeze. Gathers condensation on the windows, and clings to the tops of the towering trees, making them droop with the weight. But the shiver that crawls up your spine has little to do with the cold.
You blink, muscles tensing. Coming to life on a heated roll of panic—
“‘bout time you woke up.”
Chaos, you think, gathering yourself into the corner of the truck as he peels away from this stretch of mowed down grass, and turning back to the road. That's what he is. All refined chaos. Unknowable. Immutable.
You keep your eyes on him—the shape of his jaw as it ticks, the corner of his mouth quirking up. A shallow, malformed smile. Amusement. He knows you're watching. Must scent the panic in your veins, the fear curdling inside your belly along with—
swallow it, pup. an’ you better not spill a drop.
It makes you sick.
He makes you sick.
“Now, ‘bout this plan o’yours,” he starts, apropos of nothing. “Been thinkin’ ‘bout it.”
“It's not really a plan,” you hedge, shifting. Uncomfortable, suddenly, by the low, brassy drawl of his voice. “It's just—”
He continues like you hadn't spoken: “wouldn't survive out there on your own, would you? Nah, thing like you—” he glances away from the road, raking over your form. Eyes dark. Flat. Calculative. Whatever he finds makes him huff—a short, mocking exhale through his nose. “You'd be eaten alive.”
“I'll go home. You can drop me off. I won't—I won't say anything. Tell anyone—”
“‘bout what?” He glances at you again. Eyes sharp. Glinting like a blade in the rising swelter of dawn. Taunting. Threatening. A cruel play at nonchalance that settles like a pantomime. Faux-naïf. Tell anyone what, huh? What happened to you?
Nothing, you stammer out in a breath. The air is thin in your lungs. Tainted. You heave, gasping shallowly through the spill of panic curling around your neck, the clawing urge to supplicate brimming up. Sorry, I'm sorry—
As if you'd spoken the words out loud, he hums. Lifts his hand from the wheel, and brings it to your head. Clucks his teeth when you flinch at the first brush of his fingertips over your crown, but settles into a low purr when you quiet. Stilling instantly. Learning. Like with the cigarette. With your mouth on his cock—
“Good girl,” he drawls, fingers scratching along your scalp. A soft pet. “Now ‘ow ‘bout gettin’ me a cigarette, huh?”
Your hands don't shake when you reach for the carton. Fingers steady, sure, as you flip the lid open, giving the box a slight rattle to break the sticks up. Reach inside, grasping the tip of one. Pulling it out. Bringing it to your lips, cradling the tip. Genting it between the seam as you peel away, grabbing the lighter in the other tray. Strangely routine. The dance of habit. A pattern. Muscle memory.
A soft snick fills the cab, humming along the hacking groan of the engine, the slide of his jeans over worn leather. A breath wrapped in laughter—mockery. Dipped in cruelty. Edged in it. A knife that scrapes over your jugular.
You light the end of the cigarette with a shallow pull that helps the dried tobacco catch, igniting with the sharp, acrid scent of burning paper, nicotine. Chemicals. Smoke. You huff, exhaling heavily through your nose and pull the stem out of your mouth, offering it to him.
He doesn't take it.
His eyes glide, liquid, over to you. Expectant.
What he wants from you isn't surprising, but you'd hoped, damnably, that he wouldn't make you do it this time. Not after last night. Not when he—
The hope is snuffed quickly, quietly, when he tilts his chin, left hand lazily curled around the wheel, and lifts the right, bringing it closer to you until the tips of his fingers bump into your lip. His own quirks up when you flinch under his touch, tensing as the rough pads of his scarred, calloused tips as they graze the slope of your mouth, the corner, the softness of your cheek. A slow, measured slide until they crest at your ear, trailing downwards over the fall of your neck, around—
Nape in his palm. The rap of his index and middle finger drumming in the air just above your skin—hackles rising. A ticklish shiver running down your spine. Instincts that make you shudder with it, body spasming as you roll your shoulders, squirming unconsciously to get away from the threat thrumming in the air, scant centimetres away from the vulnerable knob of your spine. The soft, fleshy five of your stem.
The neck from all angles is a vulnerable place, and your body frissons, recoiling away from the predatory whisper of his touch. Even in jest, even when the logical side of you knows he's doing this because it's amusing, it still puts you at war with yourself. Primalism—atavistic fear, urges—versus learned sensibility, the human aspect of yourself grounded in reality, watching the keen draw of mockery drench his dark eyes in a thick film of amusement. It's a joke. And yet—
Your nape prickles. Hair standing on end. Erupting into goosebumps. A quiver strums through your belly. Fear. Heart lodges itself in your throat, choking you on each erratic pulse. You can't breathe. Are breathing too much.
You hate how easily he can manipulate the animal inside of you.
When he finally touches you, palm to prickled nape, dotted with goosebumps, you bite your tongue to keep from flinching again. Hiding weakness. Tucking it between the clench of your teeth knocking hard together. Throbbing. The pain is grounding. Stabilising.
The breath you take is a little too measured, controlled. He wants weakness and fear. Supplication. Seems to get a sick thrill in scaring you. Controlling you. The loss of it ripples in the slant of his eyes. A child on the verge of losing its favourite toy.
His palm closes. Gives a painful squeeze, a teeth-ratting, head scrambling, shake until you're dazed. Dizzy from the sloshing of grey matter as he pulls you around like a misbehaving pet. Bad girl, it says, and it's playful despite the burn, the pain. Forgiving.
But the edge in his eyes, the ink bleeding along his lashline, is a blade. The undercurrent of a threat. Try it again, and see what happens.
“Thought you knew better than to keep me waitin’, pup.”
You shuffle forward, blinking against the ache in your neck, and bring the burning cigarette to his mouth. He's as pliable as you think you'll ever have him, mockingly opening up when you tap the end of the filter against his bottom lip. Eyes heavy on you as you slip it in, holding it steady as he closes, inhales. Holding it until tendrils of smoke whisper out of his nostrils. Pulling away. Letting him breathe. Bringing it back.
It's easy. Repetitive.
But he stares at you more often than before. Every inch you seem to put between you, he just closes up with his fist. The gleam in his eyes is much darker, calculative, than before.
You think, staring back at those deep, Stygian depths, that this must be the way a gazelle feels when it meets the gaze of a prowling tiger hidden in the grass. No escape. No way out.
His lids fall, cresting into a devilish slant over liquid black. Something ripples. Cracks. It's there. You can see it. But you can't make sense of it. Can't understand it. And then—
All at once, it's swallowed down. Gone. He peels his eyes away from you, staring out at the road. His knuckles lax around the wheel. Eyes lidded, relaxed. Lazy. He doesn't look at you again for the rest of the drive—just smokes two more cigarettes before he stops the truck in a rolling boscage at high noon, cutting the engine with a grunt, then turns to you and says:
“Let's go, pup,” jerking his chin towards the empty field, eyes brimming with mirth. “‘bout time we see if you got what it takes to take care o’ yourself.”
You don't get it. Not really. Not until he slides out of the truck, and leads you back. Keeps you standing beside him, eyes darting around the barren field as he unlocks the tailgate.
It opens with a whine. Rust flakes off the hinge, falling over the metal over when it drops, laying flat as he reaches in for a long black box near the curve of the boot. Next to it is a bag. Waterproof. He snatches it up in his other hand, and slides it over to you with a grunt, and a ‘old it for me as he picks at the lock on the case.
The backpack is heavy. You look up, a question already forming on your lips, until you realise he's distracted. Busy with the hatch that seems stuck.
Run. It's a whisper. A soft breath in the back of your head. Move. Go. He's busy. Run, run, run—
You make it to the front of the truck before a bullet pierces the ground only inches to the left of you. The sound it makes is a booming, echoing thing that rattles your bones harder than the playful shakes he gave you earlier. An ear-splitting, deafening sound.
Like thunder, you think. Like an avalanche. Lightning inches away.
It throws you to your knees. Fright, maybe. Instincts. The ground right above your hand is torn, dirt kicked up. Rocks scattered. It smells like something is burning. Metal. Smoke. It's acrid, bitter. Ammonia, maybe. You stare at the small hole, blinking. Struggling to make sense of everything—
There's a weight on your nape. Pressure against your spine.
“What'd I tell you, pup? Never last more’in a second out ‘ere. Woulda got your ‘ead blown off and wouldn't ‘ave known what’ was ‘appenin’ ‘til you were starin’ up your own skirt.”
Your fingers claw into the dirt, spearing the cold ground as you struggle to catch up. You were running. An explosion. Falling. Pressure—
It changes. Morphs. He's kneeling down beside you, but the hilt of something—brown, like wood, but too glossy, too varnished; boxy with a flared base that tapers into a narrow triangular shape—touches down first. His knees come into view next, lapsing over the thing—
The gun—
—as he crouches down, left hand still curls over your nape, keeping you against the broken dirt. Held down.
Your cheek grazes the mess, catching on gravel, as you turn your head—as much as he allows—to peer up at him from the glinting, tear-filled corner of your eye. The sight that meets you is—
Horrifying.
The old balaclava he wore—all black—has been switched out for a new one. A mockery of a skull sewn into the fabric. White baleen lines run down the length of his neck until it hits the thick, black kevlar of his vest, covered under a dirty, tattered camo jacket. His jeans stretch taut over his thick, wide thighs. The cap of his knee only inches smaller than your own head.
He's intimidating. Bigger than you remember—almost comically, hysterically, so. It feels insidious, illusory, when you think about the heft of him shoved into the too-small confines of the truck, stuck behind the glass counter with slabs of marbled red meat stacked inside. And maybe it was your mind trying to contextualise the absurd length, the width, of him, and skewed your perception until he fit inside the box of normality along with the rest of the world—mindless ants, notches in a cog.
In the wild, he's nearly incomprehensible.
As you gape at the sheer, indomitable height of him, he tips the gun forward, bringing it back into focus.
“C’mon, pup. ‘bout time we put you to the test. Run y’through the ranks.” The look in his eyes turns heated, a feverish, sickening delight as he hums around some garish nostalgia. “Almost brings me back. Was meant to enlist, but well—” his massive shoulder rolls. There's a crueler edge to his gaze, an implacable sense of distance. Cold, unyielding. “Shit ‘appens.”
His grip on your nape tightens, urging. “Gotta move if you want dinner, pup. Let's go.”
With the rifle still lax in his grip, cradled against the crevasse of his arm and side—a comfortable, easy hold that reeks of intimate familiarity—you know there's no choice beyond acquiescence when your attempt to run still rings in your ear, stings in the scuff of your palms. Your cheek.
Still—
It brims. The idea of it is a waning, nebulous spill of clumsy, dull instincts (ones left to moulder in a life spent tripping one day into the next: stagnant), panic, and fear. This vicious, roaring deluge of dread bubbles in the pit of your belly, urging you to run from the man leaning over you in a viperous squat, hand cradling a rifle like it was an extension of himself, a limb made of metal and plastic, gunpowder.
Hollow, muted screams sharpen in the ringing of your ear. A brittle bellow that you hold back, tenuously, by the ladenness of your limbs, the crushing of brittle, dry soil between your burning palms.
You want to run. Every synapse inside of you is howling to get up, up, go, get away from this man—
But your joints sublux. Slip. Paralysing you in a moment of indescribable terror as he grips harder on the scruff of your neck, staring down at you with eyes blacker than nightfall, than anything you've ever seen before, as motes shift in liquid obsidian, flexing with an unmistakable sense of satisfaction, something primal and archaic. Older than the dirt you breathe into your lungs, taste in the back of your throat. Ugly and wanting—
Devouring.
You couldn't make sense of it in the butcher shop because it didn't fit.
Shoved behind a deli counter, the ravenous edge to bleak, unflinching obsidian was dulled under the jaundiced flood of cheap light bulbs. Clouded behind a waxy smear of nicotine yellow streaking across your vision as the steep, unbearable malaise turned this intimidating man into a patchwork of faded, pinched memories and vague, illusory thoughts. Rendered harmless. Background noise. As inconsequential, as mundane, as your choice in deli meat.
The truck, too—the place that gave you just a mere glimpse of this.
It emanates a sense of wrongness from its pores.
But deeper, deadlier than a sickly, contaminated ooze—
Pastelike, it glues to the fibrils of your mind—this evolving maelstrom of instinct and rationality—and screams at you from the dredges where both converge, sinking like silt to the bottom, that he is going to kill you.
Fact. Truism. An undeniable notion that burns in the languid spill of cool, impassive black.
And devouring you whole will be as easy as breathing.
Under the heavy, firm flex of his fingers knotted along the bruised, aching layer of skin, muscle and tendon, that wraps around the sensitive, vulnerable peak of your spine, your pulse beats like a drum. A shiver of resignation thickens in your cold, quivering guts as he slides his molten gaze from your cheek still buried in the muskeg, down the upturned spill of your hips in the air, and purrs.
A crocodilian sound that seems to shake the pebbles under your nose; a bone-deep rumble of primal satisfaction as he finds your supplication edging pitifully against the surge of self-preservation, knifing it down as you breathe in deep plumes of soot and soil, heaving around the dagger of fatalism he buries in the knob of your spine.
A quiet, silken good girl spills like hot, tarry oil from his lips as he nudges the dirt with the boxy butt of his rifle for no other reason than to hum in deadly amusement at the frisson that splits over you; the electric flutter of fear he kicks like a stone down the slope of your spine. Preening under the wake it leaves—the flood of hot, searing tears on your lashline, the quiver of your jaw. And—
The slow, careful flex of your muscles as you move, clumsy and unsure, under the grip he keeps around your neck.
“Got some dinner to catch, you an’ me.”
It takes you much too long to realise that shit happens is a brutally nonchalant summary of his life after his attempt to enlist. Murder. Prison. The boogeyman.
Shit happens.
The broad line of his shoulders tucked under cheap, tattered cotton seems to blot out the horizon as he tugs you along loosely behind him, head tilting sometimes like a feline crouched in the grass, ears perking at the scattered sound of hooves trotting in the seamless web netted out that you—mutt, dog, pup—aren’t privileged to see.
It's an intimidating sight.
At full height, you barely reach the hard, thick plane of his breast pocket where he keeps a stash of loose tobacco leaves rolled into a napkin, and a zippo he used to burn a rubble of dirt from your hair. The harsh, acrid scent of burning keratin singes your nose still, even under the harsh fill of smoke rolling down the hills he meanders through.
Or cuts, really.
Thick body parting the tussock with ease. Thighs flexing under the stained, worn stretch of jeans that warp at the unravelling seam just above his knee. Big black boots kicking over furze and crushing grass under his heel to carve an effortless path for you to follow along after him, stumbling behind like a dutiful, loyal dog—
And you suppose that's what you are.
Unleashed. Uncollared. The jut of his long, thin rifle angled over his shoulder is enough of a deterrent to try and run again. Heeled to its master. At the mercy of a gun in a valley where there's nothing to hide behind in the flat, unbroken land that yawns out in sun bleached yellow and rotted brown as far as the horizon.
The only escape is a cluster of dense trees gathered across the jagged cut of a stream feeding into the mouth of the river, but you know better than to hide in the forest during wildfire season.
You'd have better luck outrunning his bullets than you would wading through the water that slices through the flat earth with ease, sharpened to a deadly point as it cleaves into the granite shelf. The currents below the lax, swirling surface are an untamable beast most stay away from.
You jerk away from the brown puddle of the river belly in the distance and keep your gaze affixed to the middle of his back as he grunts, kicking his boot into a tangle of furze that catches around his ankle.
A mistake, maybe, because all you can focus on is the raw, restrained power of him as he rolls a shoulder that juts out from the hidden curve of his spine like an oxen. Branching butterfly wings that pull the material of his jacket around his skin so tightly parts fade, losing colour, from the strain.
He's big.
Bigger than you thought.
Crammed behind a deli counter wearing a dirty jacket that might have been virginal white at some point but was now smeared with rusting brown stains and rubber apron with a cloth shoved into the pocket, he looked—
Not small. No. But maybe—
Constrained.
Leashed. The deli counter warped the edges, dulling the sheer brutality of him under the guise of compliance. Contractually complaisant. As lax as a pet panther on the arm of a beast master who clipped its nails and filed its fangs. Decoration.
A ferocious tiger lying splayed out in front of the fire. Predator to foot-warmer. Reduced to a pretty rug.
Mundane. Scary in theory.
In the way taxidermy sometimes can be. Eerie.
But—
Harmless.
And that's what he was when he reached into the glass dome, and grabbed a handful of honeyed ham as he drilled a flat, impassive gaze into the cut of your face. Grunting out the same sequence of words in the washed out flood of yellow light flickering overhead. Everything was artificial there. Manmade.
But he's shed that skin. Stands straighter, taller, without the threat of clunking his head on the low hanging lights or the frame of a door—a constant in that too small space that reeked of meat and cleaner. Death dressed up in chunks of marbled cuts: a platter of savoury beef, pinked chicken. Lamb on the bone. Sprigs of basil, rosemary, sage, and fennel clustered around to make it less garish than what it was:
price tags thumb-tacked into painted foam chunks.
Advertised slaughter.
(—get in.)
He doesn't flourish, but he prowls. Walks through sun-beaten grass with a leisure, a laxity that speaks of untethered delight. And it takes everything inside of you not to weep at the sight of him now, unhindered by morals, by the stifling confines of a shop or a truck. Yawning his bulk to the heavens in a slow unfurl that makes you acutely, devastatingly, aware of the chasm that cracks before you.
If the rifle is a leash, then his size is the collar around your neck.
You swallow around the panic that surges like a fist tearing up your esophagus, punching firm, hard knuckles against your tender larynx until it oozes with fresh blood. The fear rippling through your guts is a harrowing thing, a vicious beast that claws and cracks its fangled teeth into cartilage, chiselling needlepoints deep into marrow. Feeding on the instinctual surge of adrenaline that crackles like a dry fire inside the deep ravines, the porous crevasses, of your bones.
Running is a terrible idea. There's nowhere to hide. You've been through this before—over and over again; quelling these horrifying thoughts when they buoy through smoke, howling like demons in the pit of your chest when he moves—and this time is no different. It's stamped down, pushed back into charred marrow.
It'll get you killed.
But the thoughts won't stop. An endless cacophony in the back of your head. Hisses and malformed plans, and—
(Is it really so terrible?
You'll die anyway, won't you? What could he mean to drag you this deep into the prairies, this empty wasteland of dying grass and moss covered stone, if he wasn't going to bury you in the muskeg when he had his fill of you.
Is running now really so bad? A bullet to the back of the head—)
“Keep up, pup.”
It's a thoughtless command thrown archly over his shoulder, head barely tipping back to make sure you're huddled in his vast shadow, but in it you find the sudden will to swallow down the blood in your torn throat as the thoughts recede in fear, hushed under the flat, easy glide of his gaze rolling the corner of his eye. It's three words rolled like stones in a damp palm, but you know—somehow—that it won't be an easy death. Running, fear. The sudden, echoing gunshot booming over the flattened lands, and then oblivion.
No.
Last night buoys like a bad dream in the back of your head. A stranger with flat, impassive eyes. Deadeyes. Hands on the back of your skull, pushing. Cradling. Demanding. Demeaning. Taking from you with a firm hold and guttural, rasping words—
More, pup, c’mon, swallow my cock
—eching in the truck, ringing in your ears. The scent of sweat and musk and man in the back of your throat glueing against the dizzying gasoline stains on the front of his jeans. Blood under his nails. Rot.
C’mon, pup.
Whatever his plans are for you, it won't be quick. Running now might get you a bullet in the leg instead of in the back of the head. He took his pleasure from you last night, but only shot the ground near your feet when you tried to run.
He's not done with you yet. This isn't a death march, but something else entirely. Seclusion, maybe.
Or both.
Take you deeper into the valley so he can slake himself on your flesh, and then roll you into a shallow pit. No one knows you're here. No one is looking for you.
It's a jarring thought.
You'd been careless in your desperation to escape the box. Tearing through cardboard only to end up in metal gyves, a firm hand on the scruff of your neck.
And now—
In your sleepless, midnight dysthymia, you'd lay awake at night watching old documentaries that flickered past. Broadcasts and investigations into disappearances and murders. Never go to a second location, the stout police officer murmured. If you find yourself trapped, humanise yourself to them. Make them see you as a person—
Clumsily, it trudges to the forefront of your mind, echoing in the hollow crevasses until your hands stop shaking and your mouth doesn't taste as sour as it did seconds ago.
But endearing yourself to him feels like a monumental task when he's already decided which bracket, which box, you belong to. Dog. Mutt. Pup. Is a mind really that malleable? Is his?
Boogeyman. Murderer.
Your mouth flattens into a tense, trembling line as you scrape bloodied nails against the concrete ground, gathering the surfeit of your confidence between shaking hands.
“Where are you taking me?”
It comes out in a breath. Whispered into the preternatural silence of midmorning; rustling against the tussock beneath your heavy feet. The heat that seeps between the loose, worn threads of the jacket he threw at you earlier. Clumsy. Childish. A whimper in the pale pink yawn of summer’s sleepy-eyed blink.
He doesn't slow. Doesn't stop. But his head tips back again, eying you from over his shoulder with that rippling look that makes you think of an arsonist’s mirth from outside the bars of a burning cage.
“Told you already, didn't I?”
There's a lightness to his tone that rankles down your spine. Drenched in mordant humour. Firestarters delight. You shiver against the mockery in his gaze as he hums into the stale, smoke-filled air. Amusement dancing, sparking, like a flame on the open ocean at midnight: a blazing oil spill in the middle of the moonless Pacific.
It irritates you. Irrationally. Stupidly. The feeling blooming in the pit of your chest as he slides his eyes away from you, dropping them down to the weather-beaten grass below.
“I couldn't really hear you over the ringing in my ears, so—”
The petulant lit to your tone is swallowed by the sickly, rotten snort that rumbles up the barrelled swell of his chest.
There's no ounce of sorrow or regret in his voice when he plainly says, in that lightened drawal: “told you before I took the shot, pup. Shoulda been listenin’.”
“I don't—” you swallow around the bloodied knuckles still lodged in your throat. “Are you going to kill me?”
It's quiet. Meek. A thin thread of fear tangling along the false bravado in the words echoed out in a whisper. Resonating like a gunshot.
In the shrill ring of their wake, a sudden, eerie hush falls, dampening the ambient noise under the stifling swell of tension that leaks like noxious, smothering gas into the aether. Stress prickles along your nape, beading under the heavy cotton the borrowed jacket that smells of gasoline and old sweat.
He continues as if he hadn't heard the question at all. Prowling forward without a hitch to his gait, head tipping to the left and then right as he listens to the horrible, choking nothing that presses in like damp palms over your ears. The hushed, hollow roar of blood pounding through your body. A hard, heavy gallop of your heart pulsing, pushing it through the corridors of your veins.
And for a terrible moment, you think that maybe he really hadn't heard you. That you'll have to scrape your bloodied stumps back over the gravel of your trodden confidence, gathering the muck at the bottom until it fills your palm. But it lasts only seconds. Barely enough time to grind your teeth against the idea, flexing your jaw until opens wide enough to push the words through—
A smothered crack rebounds, shattering the fragile quiet when your heel crushes through a stick tangled in the furze.
He angles his head over his shoulder in a quick, smooth jerk, coming to a stop as the thread of it hisses across the open valley, scattering the birds in the trees. He tenses for a moment, a brief shift of his shoulders as he glances sideways, and then sucks his teeth as a sudden thump of hard feet against dew softened grass spills out behind the hurried flap of wings.
To the left of you, emerging from the emaciated forest is a large, heaving buck that rockets down the hill, fleeing from the noise.
When he slowly turns around to face you after the buck slips over the green hill, you feel your heart break loose from the folds of its arterial prison and leap up to the fist crushing your windpipe.
It's not anger that dances in the blackened plumes of his devastating eyes, but an oozing sense of condensation that drips down your spine.
“Well, pup,” he drawls, mangled lips quirking in a mockery of a smirk. Crooked teeth gleaming in the hazy smear of mornings sleepy-eyed light, jagged and deadly. Razor-edged. Enough to make you shiver. “You ran our dinner off.”
The hunt—as he calls it—begins again.
Eyes slanting to the soil, tracking some indivisible markings between grass and muskeg—track marks, he grunts, seemingly less inclined for silence now than you ran dinner off—before he glances down to the thicket where the buck disappeared into, expression calculative.
There's no punishment after your misstep. Nothing outside of that cruel-edged smirk, the mocking retort, but you tense all the same, waiting for that scarred, heavy hand to fall back onto your aching, tender nape. Gripping tight. Cowing you for disobedience. Negative reinforcement—
The parallel, despite coming from the depth of your own misery and not his mangled maw, cracks against something vulnerable inside of you. Splits the seams. Tugs on the threads. The scab.
Your hand notches against the hollow of your neck where a spasm of pain throbs in tandem with your heartbeat. Phantom agony, maybe; a tender ghost in the back of your throat. You taste salt. Smell damp skin. Sweat. Animalic. Vivid memories surface of him pushing your nose into his groin, cock thick and heavy and whitehot against your cheek—
You shiver. Everything inside of you is torn to pieces, ripped up. Uprooted. Fragile glass shattered into infinitesimal pieces on concrete. Beyond repair.
And as he turns his back to you, thick, broad shoulders flexing under the softened cotton of his jacket, you realise with a brutal clarity that the ache in your throat is a deep, keen yearning. A clamouring for comfort. To be assured that everything is fine, that you're not going to be punished again. That he isn't mad at you.
It's such a senseless, devastating thing that you go numb, dizzy, with the furious churning in your guts, blinking at the scorching flood of tears in your lashline. You know how to attune yourself to mercurial moods, how to navigate around chaotic tempers and slink into the shadows before ire sparks, itching to hit, to break. But this—
This leaves you little space to run. No bedroom to hide inside with a creaking chair shoved under the handle. Hands against your ears to stop the pounding, the vicious screams from outside, demanding retribution for some indivisible sin you committed in the hazy stupor of an alcohol-induced rage.
It cracks inside of your chest, splitting over scarred flesh. You should be used to the pain of it—of shame, blame, the brutal lash of self-flagellation slicing into thin skin—but he's not your mother and her wild moods. Or some man you can outrun because he doesn't know the layout of your home yet. He's—
(good girl—)
Fear is a derecho that chews up rationality until it's upturned mulch buried under an unfathomable weight.
It's senseless to feel this way. You know this with a startling clarity that makes you feel like a reluctant voyeur trying to survive an oncoming maelstrom inside of a body that refuses to move out of the way. Forced to endure the agony of these nonsensical feelings, this urge to keel to this brutal, awful man who kidnapped you, who hurt you, who forced you to swallow him down, and then sleep on his chest. Cuddle him. Wrapped up so tight in his embrace, your thighs still smart with the strain of being stretched so wide apart over his waist.
You shouldn't feel the crushing sense of fatalism when he refuses to acknowledge you, to coddle the bruises smattered along your crumbling pride as it breaks into pieces in a field you don't belong in, with a man you don't know. But it's there. A wound in your chest. Tears in your eyes. The tremble of your limbs as you try to moor yourself back to reality, to the acute fear and dread you felt when he marched you through the tussock, and not this simpering submission that subluxes hatred from need. Disgust from want.
(a traumatised child waiting for the hand to fall and being unable to cope when it doesn't—)
The absence of punishment leaves you quivering in the pale pink sun. Half hating yourself for needing the reassurance that you're fine, that he's not mad at you, from a man who made you bruise your lips on the hard, firm press of his groin into your face; and knowing deep down that this is wrong.
Your sense of self, an acute understanding of the world around you, starts sloughing off like necrosed flesh from a putrefying corpse, leaving nothing behind but slabs of raw, bloodied tissue.
You don't want to be punished again, but you know you should be. Ran off dinner. And that's what he said this was, didn't he? Survival training. Something that you ruined—
The idea, then, that you're not even worth the breath to yell at twists inside your writhing guts. Insignificant thing. Stupid girl.
(bad dog—)
You choke, sputtering against the spill of your fear, your humiliation as it shreds your throat with iron claws, ripping you into pieces you can't make sense of—
He turns back to you at the noise—an ugly, shameful whimper that splits across the boscage—and maybe it's the keenness of your mutinous emotions raging inside of you that makes you almost hyper aware of every flicker that crosses his expression, but you catch something in the gloom of his blank stare. A ripple over stagnant water. A tremble.
Vicious delight.
You tremble, and pretend it's from the dizzying spill of this sudden emotional break—an accumulation of everything tumbling out of you at the same time—than the burning thought in the back of your head that, somehow, this was exactly what he was hoping for.
A silly notion, of course. How would he know when the levee would give? If it would have at all?
An opportunist, perhaps, but—
Why?
He's in front of you in a single step before you can think much more about it, palm scorching as it grazes the nape of your neck. Pulling you into the broad catch of his chest.
“Oh, pup—” he murmurs into your crown, body a solid, heavy mass against your front. Encompassing. A protective embrace that makes you want to wretch and sink deeper into. “Look’it you, huh? Weepin’ all over me ‘cause you thought you were gonna get in trouble. S’part o’trainin’, ain't it? Accidents ‘apppen. So you ain't go’ nothin’ t’cry about.”
In the aftermath, you feel bruised.
Dazed. All tender inside as you follow dutifully along behind him like a lost child, fingers curled into the hem of his jacket as he trudges through the field, unable to let go. He spares several glances over his shoulder when he feels your fist tighten around the cloth, breath ragged as you pull yourself closer to the broad expanse of his back, each one filled with a potent, heady gleam of an arsonist's delight. Locked inside of a box as he douses you gasoline and lights a match just to watch you squirm.
It should horrify you. And maybe it does. Somewhere inside of you, the voyeur is screaming about the flames that lick too close to your drenched skin, raging over this tinderbox he shoves you into just to watch you burn for his amusement, but their voice is a mere whisper that's easily swallowed whole by the soft, mocking coo he makes when you shiver against his spine, clinging to him so tightly, your knuckles pop out from beneath your skin.
Needy, he drawls, and it's not draped in disapproval or disgust, but rather relish. An obscene delight that scrapes along your nerves.
Why, you want to ask, but you don't.
Blame it on the ache in your throat. The fatigue draping over your shoulders after having your insides ripped to pieces, and being forced to put everything back together again on your own.
And maybe you don't need to ask because you already know—
He stops suddenly, body coiling into a tight knot. Still as a jaguar hunkered down into tangled grass; eyes locked on a basking caiman in the muddied waters of the Pantanal.
Slowly, your gaze follows the invisible tether ensnaring his attention
The breath catching in your throat as a lone buck stands in the tangled tussock. He bends his long, sloping neck down, nosing into the sun-bleached grass, mulling on feed.
“C’mere,” he urges, tone a low, growling whisper. A command that brokers no room for argument as he slowly, carefully, disentangles the strap of the rifle from his shoulder, letting it slide down to his wrist. The gun follows, the bottom sat flush with the jut of his thigh as he kicks his heel up against a rock.
You're not sure where you're meant to stand, but you edge closer to him until his right hand snakes around your waist, tugging you in front of him. Back against his chest.
He keeps you trapped there as he swings the rifle up, barking out a shallow command to grab on to it. ‘old it, he grunts, tipping the wooden body in your direction. Jus’ like tha’.
Your hands shake. The rifle is heavier than you thought it would be when he sinks its weight against your palm. “I don't want—”
He doesn't let you finish. “Ain't go’ much time t’teach you ‘ow to shoot,” he mutters, bending down to notch his chin on your shoulder. “Keep it ‘ere—”
He closes his arms around you. One hand curls over the back of yours as he pushes your finger into the gap near the trigger, the other holds the body of the rifle up, keeping it steady as he tells you to look into the scope.
“Keep an eye on ‘im,” he instructs, sliding his chin over the taut line of your shoulder to catch your gaze. You can barely see him out of the corner of your eye, but you nod.
Slowly, he lifts the rifle, dragging it closer to your face. In the small, round hole of the scope, the buck comes into view. An ear twitches when he reaches over, clicking something on the lens, but he doesn't move. He stays, chewing on grass.
“You're gonna shoot ‘is lungs—”
You startle, jerking back into his chest. Shoot. You're not—
You can't.
“S–Simon—” it's the first time you've ever said his name, and you feel the groan he lets out in response—a low, gritty thing—against your spine. “I can't—I—”
“Chased off dinner the first time, didn't you? Gotta make it up t’me.”
“I can pay for a—”
“Want deer, birdie. Now—” he drags the rifle back in place, and with big, heavy palm tightening over yours, there's no chance of slipping away. “Line th’ shot up—yeah, jus’ like tha’—”
Blood roars in your ears as the image of the buck in the viewfinder becomes clearer. More pronounced. Alive. You can see each breath it takes, a soft, flurried funnel of condensation pushed out of its snout. Every twitch of its ears. Flick of its foot against the ground. “I can't do this, I can't—”
“Gonna be hell t’pay if you run this one off, pup. ‘sides, ain't you the one who said you could take care o’yourself out ‘ere—”
“That's—” not the same as killing an animal—
But he’s not listening. Through the roaring in your ears, the heavy, agonised pulse of your heart, you hear him muttering about where to hit the buck. Ain't gonna hit ‘im in the ‘ead. See that spot, jus’ behind ‘is shoulder? Gotta aim there. Slightly higher than you want the bullet to go. Yeah—right there. Steady now. Don't wanna scare ‘im away—
You can't see through the flood of tears in your eyes, but when you open your mouth to tell him you don't have the shot, you realise it doesn't matter. It never did—
Run, you think, staring at the buck. Run, run—
His chest expands as he inhales. A deep, full breath. A pause. Then:
His finger presses down against yours, forcing you to take the shot.
It echoes out like before. A loud, horrible boom that screams across the valley, and drills into your head. The rifle rocks in your hands from the force, but his grip is tight. Unflinching. It steadies, humming with the aftershocks.
In the viewfinder, the buck jerks its head up. A red spot appears behind its elbow that grows. And grows—
No, no—
It takes a step forward. Sways. Again. Then—
“Good shot, birdie. Might make a sniper outta you yet—”
—it lists to the side before crumpling against the ground in a graceless heap.
It doesn't move again after that.
The rough squeeze of his hand on your nape is the only warning you get before he drags you over to the prone animal, softly clicking his tongue at the bullet wound on its side when you approach.
A clean hit, he comments, like he wasn't the one who took it. Who took the choice from your hands—
The panic is muted. Hidden beneath a dense, thick layer of disbelief as he shoves you to your knees onto the grass, wordlessly passing you a rolled up tool bag from inside his jacket before crouching down on the opposite side of you.
His rifle slides off his shoulder, and he tucks it near his feet before turning back. Assessing the—your, he chides softly—kill.
Big, he grunts appreciatively. “Now we gotta get the meat ready.”
Field dressing, he calls in, and adds, in a condescending drawl when you flinch back from the buck’s feet after he roughly rolls it over onto its back: that this is something you ought to know if you're going to be surviving on your own out here.
“Right?” He prompts, and raises a brow, expectant, at you until you nod, a slow, tremulous thing. “Get the tools out for us, birdie. Good pup—”
You place the bag on top of your thighs, unclasping the catch with shaking hands before slowly unfurling it over your lap, unveiling an array of knives and tongs and and strange tools sit tucked inside the individual pouches.
“Gotta make a cut,” he grunts, jabbing his finger into the stomach of the still-warm buck. “Roll it over first,” he adds, eyes listing lazily towards you. “So the stomach doesn't get in the way. Don't want acid all over the meat. Contaminates it.”
And that's what he does. Rolls it onto its back, legs jutting awkwardly into the air, akimbo, as he situates it in the grass. The head lulls with the motion, snout tilting towards you before the jutting antlers sink into the soft ground below, keeping it suspended in the air.
Big, glossy eyes stare over your shoulder.
Only—
No. Not stare.
It can't, you remember, clenching your hands into tight fists, knuckles digging into the ground. It's dead. Lifeless. It looks like the big, beady eyes of a teddy bear; reflective but unseening. The smooth, still-wet surface catching the quiver of your shoulders as you brace yourself against the guilt.
“S’matter?” He grunts, reaching over to fish a long, thin knife from the satchel. The handle is an odd white—almost waxen. Smooth. Yellowed in some spots, near marbled divots and grooves. “Never seen a dead animal before?”
You shake your head slowly. You've seen death. Of course you have. Birds. Squirrels. Rodents. But you've—
You've never been the perpetrator of it before.
“S’only meat, pup,” he murmurs, and it's that same silken drawl from before. Low, brassy. A gritty rasp in your ears. Quiet. Just meant for you.
You glance at him, trembling, as he shrugs one massive shoulder, indifferent to death lying against his knees.
But you suppose he's used to this, after all—
You suck in a sharp breath when he looks back down at the broad, soft chest of the buck. “How'd you do it?”
“Do what, pup?”
“Kill,” you swallow down the nausea as he levels the blade against the chest of the deer. “So easily, too. How do you—”
“Practice.”
“How?”
He digs the blade in. Blood beads to the surface, staining the soft, downy fur. You should look away. You want to look away. But you can’t. “‘S’life, ain't it?”
“Life?” You echo hollowly, nails biting into the skin of your palm as he drags it down. A seamless cut. “Was it life or practice when you killed your whole family, too?”
You never realised how loud silence could be until you met him. How untenable it could become with a few words. A quick exchange. It falls now—that uncomfortable, stifling blanket of quiet—and you try to keep from flinching back from it as it grazes your neck, flattens around your shoulders.
He doesn't answer. Not right away. He keeps his gaze on the cut he made, but you can feel his attention like it was a physical thing. Like hands around your neck. Against your nape.
“Tha’ attitude o’ yours,” he says finally, teeth gnashing against the words. Calm, implacable, but the heavy tension that bleeds between the lines belies the lightness of his tone. “Ain't gonna get you any favours, pup. Better fix it before I take you over my knee. Don't reckon you'll like my punishment much.”
The threat sinks in like a stone, dropping to the pit of your belly as he wedges his fingers inside the hole. Each motion, every movement, is a mallet against the shaky, unfloundering confidence that reared to spit those words, that question, out at him. The anger, one that once felt so vicious, so encompassing, snuffed between the pinch of his finger. The unbothered flick of his wrist.
It puts you right back there. To the headspace you had when his careless disregard cut you down the middle; a battering ram to the walls keeping you together.
You heave into it with a shallow whimper. The urge to apologise a clawing, scared animal in the back of your throat—
“It was life,” he mutters at length, hand sliding further into the soft, bloody gap of the bucks chest, peeling the hide up as he widens the cut, dragging it down towards the groin.
There's a thin current of anger there. A thread that loops over the deadpan drawl of his words, itching under his skin as he suddenly reaches inside the split with both hands, opening the chasm to let organs and entrails spill out in a steaming, bloody pile.
“But I don't ‘pect you to understand tha’, pup. Too young to, ain't you?”
Gutted, the deer lay limp against the ground as he rinses his hands off in the shallow pond a few steps away from where you sit, still on your knees, fisting the damp grass below. Desperately clinging to something, to stability.
The organs were pushed into a clear, plastic bag—spare parts, he grunted; but good feed for his dogs—and you stare down at it now, taking in the cooling mess of bloodied tissue as his words run through your mind over and over again. A looping stitch. An echo.
You want to scream, but if you know that if you unclench your jaw now, you'll just be sick all over yourself.
An impasse, then.
A crooked, miserable stalemate.
You'd do it, you think, if you knew this wasn't the ending. Not over yet, he'd grunted as he stood, slinging the rifle back over his shoulder. Still gotta let it dry. Gotta ‘ang it. Can't do that ‘ere. Sit tight—
He snatched up the knife and the toolbag as he passed, Leaving only the hollowed deer and the cloudy, steam-filled of its harvested organs behind. Defenseless. But—
You can feel his eyes on you. Drilling into the back of your head.
S’alright, pup, he murmured before he walked away. Ain't mad. S’only natural to be curious.
You don't think it's curiosity. Not really. A false sense of security, perhaps. Your mind slowly down, equating him with companionship and authority over the hulking, deadly predator that he is. A softening, a laxity, in the back of your mind from the danger he posed. Luring you into a sense of ease that loosened your tongue. Unleashed your anger. Your disgust—
But the phrasing makes you pause. Catches on some part of yourself that's still counting each step you take, remembering every twist and turn, despite having lost your place hours ago. Self-preservation. Animal instinct.
The same futile buzz in the back of your head that made the deer’s ear twitch.
Some good it did.
It's empty, black eyes gaze at you. Accusatory. Angry. Mouth lax, open. A purple tongue lulls out between the uneven jut of yellowed teeth.
You're next, it doesn't say, it's nonexistent voice a prickle against your nape. It'll be your turn soon. Gored. Hollowed out. Your heart, your stomach, your intestines shoved into a garbage bag. For the dogs. Feed. That's what you are.
Meat.
Your stomach churns. You clamp your teeth around the tick in your jaw. The vicious roils in your belly that froths as a lone, black spider crawls out from the grass, lured in by the scent of death.
Overhead, a crow caws, curling around the thicket.
Scavengers, waiting to pick off the bones.
You hadn't realised how opportunistic life really was. How fleeting—
Footfalls in the soft grass catch your attention. You glance up when he comes to a stop near your shoulder, knee level with your nose.
He's staring down at you, wiping his hands on an old, stained cloth. The look—utterly stagnant; a matte impassivity in charcoal—makes your breath catch; a small, shuddering hiccup that has him tilting his head to the side, cocking it like a curious animal as he takes in the measure of your fear. The way it blooms in the hollow pits of your eyes.
It feeds something, you realise, taking measure of the way his breath quickens. Broad chest expanding with each harried inhale. Your fear incites him.
You're not sure what to make of it, and maybe—with the sensitive lining of your insides still shredded and raw, with the back of your throat still aching—you don't think you should. Not when it pulls on this thing inside of you—a loose, fraying thread dangling on the end of a hurried suture keeping something sewn up. A sharp tug and it'll begin to unravel.
Your hand moves, curling protectively against your sternum as that gleam in his eye grows, evolves. Changes shape in front of you. A slow, methodical metamorphosis—
You don't want to see it emerge in full bloom.
“What—what now?” You rasp, gaze darting back to the deer. The spider inches closer to the gaping hole in its belly—
“Gotta ‘ang it to dry,” he drawls, stepping around you. “Keep it clean.”
He reaches down, taking hold of the buck by its antlers. The motion shakes the spider off. It falls to the grass, legs kicking in the air before it's swallowed quickly by the thick, browned tussock.
“How?”
He grunts, straightening out. The deer's head drops forward, maw falling open. Bloodied drool rains down from its slack jaw.
“Come on, pup. I'll show you.”
Black, flat eyes stare back at you as he drags it across the field.
Quietly, you follow along and pretend you can't feel the accusatory stare of the deer gazing sightlessly out at you from glossy black eyes.
Breaking through the sloping valley is an old, red barn.
It towers above the fields of wheat, cutting an imposing spectacle of rotting, weather-worn wood shaded in a fading vermillion. The sight of it is so cliche, so drenched in an acute sense of nostalgia and beloved cultural iconography, that the sudden appearance of it doesn't prickle at first. Unease dampened by the swell of the unexpected.
Pieces of elation colouring over fear.
It's there, of course. Tucked inside of your bosom like a scarlet letter, but hidden behind a wall of laxity that makes your breath rush from between your cold lips.
A barn means shelter. A bed, perhaps.
You're tired. Exhausted. The sort of sleepless fatigue that makes your eyes ache when they have to stay open for too long. A bone-deep weariness that blots everything beyond tired-tinged irritation out. The urge to sleep a heady, unignorable thing—
“Come on, pup. Gonna hang it in the cooler.”
He leads you to the large, sliding barn doors, and kicks it open wider with the tip of his boot, unveiling a dense bed of hay inside an empty room.
It looks like every barn you've ever been in.
Dusty bales of hay stacked against the walls. Feed spread loosely over the dirt floor. Large, wooden posts cutting four pillars to hold the structure up. A loft above, accessible by a ladder tucked behind one of the posts. An odd assortment of rusting farm equipment strewn about—archaic handmills, a tilted wheelbarrow; shovels and pitchforks hung on rusted nails jutting from the walls. Hooks. Lengths of rope that lead nowhere. A hoist in the centre, anchored to a chain and hook clinging to one of the rafters cutting across the roof.
Despite the normality of the room—an indistinguishable visage from every Hollywood spectacle of farmers and barns—it feels wrong.
The debris laying around is too crooked to be a forgotten relic. Almost like it was placed there intentionally instead of discarded organically.
And you suppose that's the crux of it.
Nothing feels organic here.
It's all—
Shallow. Artificial mundanity. An artist's rendition of clutter inside an abandoned house. Condemned in the style of Hollywood homes, where everything is tucked under pristine, white cloths despite the dense layer of dust glued on the floors.
But it breathes like it's supposed to. Creaks ominously when you follow him inside, the rotten floorboards softened under your foot, worn down by termites and poor irrigation. The hook dangling in the centre of the room whines loudly with each motion.
It smells of old hay. Rotting wheat. Waterlogged wood. Animal. An undercurrent of something pungent. Sickening. Sweet, too, though—like a tangle of flowers caught up under fresh cut grass, mowed gardenia. Ripped petals.
He moves around the space like it's an extension of himself. Familiar with every crevasse, each crack. You entertain the thought that this might be his home, but it's shoved back into the box when you remember what the whispers said.
He bought his old home.
It's three blocks away from yours.
You wonder if you've ever glossed over him before. Missing each other by scant seconds as you turned down different roads.
It doesn't matter. Not really. But the knowledge that he could have been there rankles down your spine, something sickly (and sweetly divine). Your head is still full of those strange spores that made you cling to his jacket like a child. Sobbing when he didn't hit you—
You're dragged back to the buck. To its sightless, accusing eyes. Don't be stupid, it won't say. Can't. It just stares. Watches. You're next.
“Where are we?”
So wound into your thoughts, it surprises you to know you're the one that asked. A shock. You can't remember opening your mouth, shaping the words. Shake it off—
“Old ranch,” he grunts, knocking his shoulder into a large, metal door, and—
Ah.
This is why it's so strange. The door.
Sleek. New. It stands against the backdrop, hidden behind the balanced symmetry of the building. Seamlessly blending in, but a prickle of unease in the back of your head because something doesn't belong—
It's a fridge.
He pushes it open, and it swings with the force exposing a dark, gunmetal room to your ravenous view.
It's dim inside. Unlit. Windowless. He slaps his hand against the wall, and a light hums to life, flickering in a pale, faded yellow as the bulbs above pop and crackle, blinking sluggishly before flooding the room in a jaundiced glow.
You peer into it, unnerved, and the sight does little to quell the unease.
Strips of thick, rubbery plastic hang down from the walls between every large, old hook anchored to the ceiling by a dangling chain. Between the two of them is a sink. Plastic basin on metal pegs. A hose coils behind it. It's dirty. Mildew and scum drip down the side.
At the centre of the room is a drain. Rust—
No.
You're not a needy child. Don't kid yourself anymore.
Blood coagulates on the grime-covered tiles. Spilling down from the hooks in a smeared streak of oxblood that runs, little rivers of decay, down to the drain where it pools, thick and brown, in the centre.
He tosses the bag into the sink, and it shakes under the weight. Creaking. He gives little attention as he pulls the buck inside.
“Ain’t go’ much, ‘ave you?” He asks, yanking hard on the deer's antlers as he hoists it up, catching it on the hook.
“Much of what?” You murmur, wary. The buck sways on the rack, head bowed. Eyes angled downward.
He doesn't look at you as he rearranges the buck to his satisfaction, but he grunts. “Jacket. Boots. Gloves. All o’ those pretty things a lil’ pup like you needs.”
Pretty things. “Well. No. I was—I am going to California so I don't need—”
The look he gives you is paralysing. “California, huh?”
You square your shoulders. “Yes.”
He scoffs, glances away. “Tha' so, pup? Well. Ain't in California now, are you? An’ it's about to get cold soon.” He rasps his knuckles over the buck's skin. “Could make a nice jacket outta this.”
“For what?”
“Gonna freeze over the winter without it.”
The words I don't plan to be here over the winter dissolve on your tongue when he swings the rifle over his shoulder, wedging it against the wall. The motion is so fluid for a man so large that it catches your breath, makes it stutter in your lungs. A hiccup. The way he moves is so—
Liquid.
He doesn't pay you any mind as you gape, struggling to reconcile intimidatingly massive with deadly agility and find balance between the two when he ought to be lumbering. Oafish. But the way he peels back the gap of the buck's skin, knife so cleanly held in his grip, you almost miss the flash of silver in the flushed light, tells you otherwise.
There's a carefulness about him. Good with his hands—
Better with a knife.
It slips, deft and practiced, into the gap, and he slowly begins to peel skin from muscle.
You shouldn't watch this. Don't want to see this animal get taken apart. Not by his hands. Not when it assured you that you were next. But you can't look away. Can't tear your eyes away from the swift cuts he makes to the legs, to the head—
The knife is placed on the sink. His fingers wedge into the deep, red line against the bucks spine.
There's a flicker in your direction. A low hum. “Better not get sick on me, pup—”
You don't know what he means until he starts pulling.
The skin separates from the muscle, exposing the raw, purplish flesh below. Smears of white glue to the hide, peppered over the meat like thick, silky cobwebs. Tendons, you think, clamping your teeth down against the urge to throw up.
It's somehow less bloody than you were expecting it to be, but it still drips down the buck's leg, falling onto the tile with a sickly plat, plat that echoes through the small room.
His knife follows, flicking against the sticker parts as he slowly tugs the skin off, shedding it like a coat—
Your hand lashes out, catching the door frame as your head spins, jaws flooding with saliva. Churning. You're going to be sick—
“Ain't bad as all o’tha’, pup.” He coos over the slick sound of skin flensing off meat (plat, plat—), and the derision in his tone rankles down your spine, blooms hot under your bosom. A wave of helpless, burning indignation. “‘old it. You're a big girl, ain't you? Seen you buy beef all the time. S’jus’ like tha’.”
There's a fundamental difference between buying butchered meat and watching him tug the skin off of a dangling deer—
“Oh, pup,” he tuts at the sight of your uneasy pallor. “‘pected better o’you. S’jus’ a lil’ bit o’ meat. Ain't nothin’ t’cry about.”
Little bit of meat. The dismissive words are a dagger against your throat, cutting into your pulse.
“It's not,” you rasp, swallowing down the bitter taste on your tongue as he kneels, gliding the knife around the hindlegs to peel the rest of the skin off. Dangling from the hook is—
Meat.
With a head.
Just a tuft of red stained fur divorce animal from food.
Above, the head is still attached, listing forward as the hook digs into the base of its skull. Bloodied shed sways with the sawing motions of his knife. Real nice, he'd said about the antlers. Might mount it f’you, pup. Y’first kill.
(You're not sure how he'll accomplish that, and—cruelly—you don't want the eyes to stay. Don't want to look at those milky bulbs anymore and unearth the accusations in glossy black.)
But below is a swath of marbled meat. Bones stick out from the thinner muscle, protruding through smears of white tissue. It really isn't much different from a raw rack of ribs, but the head, the legs still covered in fur, shatter the fantasy. The shape is too much.
Another surge of nausea churns in your belly when he hangs the striped skin on the neighbouring hook. It drapes over it, dangling. A coat, he'd said. Need jacket and gloves.
Your head swims.
“S’alright, pup.”
It comes out in a rasp, tightened as he bends down again, grabbing the buck's leg in his hand. In the other is a knife—
You moan. “Please don't—”
Your forehead taps against the frame when you lean forward, sucking in shallow breaths as he snorts in response, amused. You ignore it. Ignore him. The unease in your belly. The nausea.
With your eyes squeezed shut, it doesn't sound like much—just sawing. Like sliding a knife through chicken breast, you think. Chopping stewing beef. Snick, snick—
His words loom in the back of your head—s’only meat—and you callously breathe into that idea. Relaxing against it.
The buck is dead. There's no changing that.
(but he still glares at you from the corner of his flat, button-like eyes; accusatory, as if this was your fault.
you didn't pull the trigger—)
Your finger throbs, each pulse calling you a liar.
But that's wrong. It should know that you were robbed of choice.
It was kill—
thunk
—or be killed.
Vindictiveness needles in every thud, and you think you might be a terrible person. Selfish, ugly—just like those glassy, button eyes—
Another thunk shudders through the room, but in place of metal on muscle, the wet, sticky squelch of subluxing joints, bone grazing bone, fills the gap. Then a grunt. Silence.
Your mind viciously fills in the blanks, conjuring the image of meaty, heavy tissue and bone falling into a metal bucket. Thunk, thunk. You think of hooves protruding from the top. Blood dripping down the rim—
You shouldn't look. Don't want to. At all. Ever. But your gaze is lured from the peeling paint on the trim, the cracks in the old, worn wood, and dragged to the centre of the room.
What you find in the middle is fairly similar to your imagination. Legs, stiffened from rigor mortis, jut out from the top of the tin bucket. Black hooves angled against the side. There's no blood dripping down the sides, flooding the floor. It's a clean cut. Neat. Rather tidy, considering—
Except the puddle near the hook where the armless, legless buck dangles (drip, drip), slowly draining in the cool, stale air of the room.
“Saw you,” he begins, tone a slow, lazy roll that rumbles through the room. Drip, drip. You peel your eyes away from the stain, blinking out of a stupor as he finishes up with the carcass, cleaning it up.
“Saw me…?” You echo, tongue thick in your mouth. Hard to swallow, to speak, around. “When?”
“In town. Wanderin’ ‘round with your head down. Meek li’l thing. Was surprised when you decided to run. Didn't think you ‘ad it in you.”
In the back of your head, words take shape. Little echoes of his voice, sounding frayed and scattered. Windswept. Things like thought I might’a scared you and saw you packin’.
You remind yourself that you're not a child anymore when the urge to paw at the incessant itch in the back of your head brims, swatting away the whisper that follows, begging you to ask just how long he's been watching you for.
Why he's been watching you—
“But you surprised me, pup.” It's eked out between a grunt and the wet, messy splat of discarded tissue slapping down onto tile. The buck drips, draining beneath the dusty boots he squats above, soles squeaking when he twists, reaching up to grab hold of the long chain dangling beside the dressed deer. “Didn't take you for a runner.”
It's all been said before—needled between fear and adrenaline; buried under the swelling instinct to stay alive—but this is the first time it's been doused with such anger. Some strange, off-putting disappointment that nudges against your sternum like an errant elbow, a grinding fist.
It hurts. A whole body ache that starts at the centre of your chest and spreads as he pins you with that flat, implacable stare—eyes lidded pools of ink. Unfathomably black. Endless. And burning with something you can't—won't—name.
“Weren't even gonna say goodbye.”
The thought of running buzzes in the back of your head, a little gnat floating near your ear, but as he stands from his lax crouch over the sawed limbs of the buck—rising with such effortless fluidity, his body a perfectly honed weapon; utterly synchronous—you realise just how futile the idea of escape really is.
The seamlessness of his design leaves little room for error (a habit you're much too acquainted with to even begin to hope for a chance to gain the upperhand), and as you marvel over the apexity of his makeup, the genetic sutures holding thick limbs to a broad, unfathomable centrepiece, you're reminded, quite suddenly, of architecture parlante.
The romance, the poetry, of structures. Designs that feed themselves in a loop; hidden alcoves, secret light fixtures, things meant to draw the eye in (and away) from something else. The way it speaks to each other. Every nook, every cranny. Pillars whispering to ceilings, floors to corridors. An endless chatter of echoing through marble.
But thinking of poetry and this man—romance—levy a harsh surge of reality against you. A sudden clarity. It forces your gaze away from him again, focusing on the cracks in the wood once more. But it's an ineffective escape.
Muddy boots fill the hazy edges of your periphery. There's a spot of blood on the lace—
The whine of the old taps cuts through the room when he twists them. After a gurgle, water surges from the faucet, hitting the bag he'd thrown inside the basin.
Against your better judgement, you twist your chin, watching from the corner of your eye as he scrubs the blood off his hands. Each movement is methodical. Practised. There's a strange discordance with the way he moves and the size of him. A dexterity to his hands that misshape the image you have of him as a cruel-handed brute. Distorting the edges. Softening them.
He's scarier, you realise, when he's domestic.
When he wears the guise of normality—wolf in sheep's clothing—and conducts himself just so. Banal. Mundane. It strums a sense of discordance inside of you. An itchy, uncomfortable feeling like a coat hung inside of a closet that slowly takes the shape of a man watching you from the gap in the doorway at night. Uncanny. Not quite right—
Suds bubble against his fingers, turning into foamy pink that clot along the tattoos wrapping around each digit. It's almost garish how pretty the colour is against his scabrous skin. The ink. And with his jacket wrenched halfway up his forearm, the veins of black sharpen against your hazy memory. Barbed wire looped around dog tags. A bomb with shark-like teeth. Skulls. A knight with skeletal hands. A militaristic shrine—tanks, helicopters, a soldier. A rifle stuffed inside combat boots with an army helmet on top. Flames peppering the background like hell itself.
They're mostly faded. A softened charcoal threaded over scars and skin damage—acid burns, pockmarks. Bullet holes. Slashes. A mosaic of injury with the ink an almost macabre vitrage—and a body nothing but a scarred reliquary—to his past.
One you're familiar with in faded newspaper clippings: nicotine-yellow paper softened by time rendering a terrible tragedy into a block of black text; digestible with morning coffee.
An evolutionary calamity—mystery (who killed the Riley's?) to horror (it was their own son) to infamy (youngest killer in the town to go to prison) to legend (if you don't eat your broccoli, Simon Riley is gonna get ya!)—that happened when you were too young to remember much outside of a grainy television surrounded by smoke. Your mother scoffing as she ashed her cigarette, throwing her fist at the screen. No way! That ol’ bastard Riley wasn't no goddamn saint! He had it comin’! Fuckin’ weirdo; a drag, then; the pop of her lips around the butt, smoke held tight in the back of her throat as she said, shame about the kid, though. Tommy was a good boy.
That was the extent of your memory regarding the crime as it happened.
A lifetime between the two of you, and yet—
You met him when he was working at the butcher shop, standing behind the counter like a bull—all broad shouldered with a darkened brow. Huffing beneath his mask as he asked the same questions over and over again; mundanity cradled in the meaty palm of muscle memory. Necessity.
Something that only became a habit when the fog dissipated enough for you to decide to buy a sandwich at the shop to feed yourself something more than boxed dinners from the freezer aisle of the grocery store.
Pure happenstance.
But he seems to see it differently. Chiselling more meaning than what lays beyond the pale. A lifetime, almost, hidden in the cracks between societal niceties and the mechanised slough from one noon into the next. Tired-eyes, red-rimmed with despair, swivelling laden, gritty glances between the rows of prime cuts—idealistic fantasy—before settling on the cheaper castoffs at the bottom.
a pound of each, please. thick-cut.
(something you'd feed to a stray dog that grew on you)
Where, in that scant microcosm of charcoal-lined desolation, did this nightmarish kinship bloom for him, you wonder, and think of rotting meat. A flower pollinated by flies instead of bees, butterflies.
(or—a child clinging to the back of his jacket, hiding sniffles inside your collar.)
“I don't know you,” you mumble, and it sounds hollow even to your ears. A small, germinating seed of doubt honeyed by a buzzing fly. Pretty corpse flower reeking of meat. “I never—”
He turns slowly, flicking the water off of his hands, and you watch the stray droplets fall on the tops of your boots, splashing against the blood you hadn't seen. Hadn't noticed—
lifeless, glassy eyes drilling into the back of your head, calling you a liar
—until it becomes a patchwork smear of ruddy brown and bubbling vermillion that dribble down the sides.
One-arm lifts, careless. A shrug, maybe. You don't really know. You're too busy staring at your boots. At the blood re-drying on cured leather.
“But I know you, pup, an’ that's all’at matters, ain't it?”
And then he moves. Devours the tiles separating your bloody boots and his with a single step, and as he nears, you have to stare up. Up. Head tilting back as far as it can go, teetering on a steep axis until your nape aches, and it gets harder to swallow. To breathe. Windpipe stretched. Pulled taut as he looms like a mountain before you. This unfathomable thing. Uncanny.
The ripple in your gut is raw instinct. That atavistic feeling of fear, dread, you sometimes get when looking at a megastructure; a thing of such unquantifiable depth that it strums discordance inside your mind as the defined, known world is suddenly tossed into scale. Earth to Jupiter. Jupiter to the sun. The sun to Andromeda. Andromeda to galactic superclusters—
Finding your infinitesimal existence within the cosmic web spooling around on a size so massive, it threatens to unravel you at the seams.
Staring up at him feels like that. Nearly as potent as the envisioned structures of Étienne-Louis Boullée. A moment where your mind struggles to fit such a thing inside the quantifiable horizon of your line of vision. Twisting the dimensions until they fit nicely inside of the box only to realise the dot at the bottom is not a blemish, but a man.
His voice, then, booms out around you. “C’mon, pup. m’dyin’ t’eat.”
At the back of the barn is a door.
He pushes it open with his shoulder, and ushers you into the small space with a grunt and a tap against the back of your thigh with the nozzle of his rifle. Pitches his chin low when you jerk towards him, and offers a condescending bow and a droll after you, pup.
And you go.
Lamb to the slaughter.
(It's what he gives you later, too. Lamb. Cooked over an open fire in the sprawling valley of a graveyard where emaciated sheep and cows lumber around the rotting corpses of their kin. Where he paws at the blood-red meat roasting over the fire with a whittled femur—the only thing that remains of the pigs, he says.
But this isn't his fault. It's not his land. He found it, he says, when he was hunting buck. Stumbled across an old man prodding the sleek, skinny horses with a stick, barking orders at them they couldn't obey when the hay laid out was invested with weevils.
Didn't know ‘ow to raise cattle, he spits. Spoiled brat.
You don't ask where the man went because maybe you can understand that a little more than you want to admit. The sheep are overgrown, wool too thick and matted. The protruding bones of the cows look sharp enough to cut when they jut out from the thin skin wrapped tight around their hips.
You think about that man. Try to imagine the shape of him, the colouring. What he looked like standing on the opposite side of the fence—a warden, a discounted king—as he prodded thinning skin with a stick. Then: Simon (his name is still taboo even in the form of a whisper inside of your head) watching it all, seeing it from the sidelines. Hidden in the thicket. Voyeur to cruelty.
The blood on his boots isn't fresh. Neither are the claw marks in his skin that you can see better in the orange glow of the crackling fire. The upturned dirt in the corner of the stable. Drying mud on the shovel. It doesn't take much to piece together the last moments of the man's life, and even though you'll try to forget him, his ghost will linger in the corner of your eyes, like all the rest, as the sheep bay and the goats bleat when Simon tosses them scraps of stale bread to sate the gnawing in their bellies until the bails of hay come the next morning—)
The house he brings you to is old, and shows its wear in peeling white paint along the trim and the rusting iron rails on the creaking porch.
A prairie house. A ranch house. Single-storey. Utilitarian. The kitchen is bigger than the rest of the rooms and filled with dusty pots and jars lining the walls. Jams. Pickled vegetables. A bag of rice filled with weevils.
When you step inside the mud-covered foyer, a skinny rat scurries out from under the kitchen table, its nails raking across worn wood. It darts toward the old couch with sunken cushions and a moth-eaten throw tossed over the armrest, but before it can make the final leap, his boot lifts and comes back down in a snap. There's a sickening crunch and a pain-filled, shrill squeak.
It's needless, you think, but the words are trapped in the bubbling gasp lodged in your throat. Scraping along soft, sensitive tissue as he grinds his heel into the poor mouse until it gives one last whimper, one final twitch, and goes still. Limp.
Foamy blood leaks out of its small muzzle, and you think you make a noise—a soft cry, a whimper—because he turns suddenly, eyes flatlining into deadly slits, and those big, scarred hands are on you in an instant. Too fast to keep up with. Just a heavy, inescapable pressure as he forces you back. Spine gluing to the wall. The bulk of his thick, too-big body filling every inch of space in front of you. Head slammed against the chipped panel hard enough that you see stars swim across the lapels of his jacket before he bends down, just a little, and blows out a puff of air marbled with anger.
Crowded. Cornered. Like an animal—
“Got a problem, pup?”
You can't make a sound. Not with his forearm pressed lengthwise down your chest, your throat held tight in his palm. And it's scary now. More than before. The echo of a shot that brought you to your knees. The bullet thudding into muskeg. His hand on the back of your head, pushing. Pushing.
C’mon, pup, give ‘er a kiss—
With his eyes flat and black, it makes those times feel like a game. Flirting with death rather than being in the maw of the predator. Watching him surface beneath the stagnant, murky waters of the lake—safe on the ledge, unaware that he was moments away from making the leap, snapping at your flesh. A cold-blooded killer. And this is what he’s always been, hasn’t he?
Should it shock you when he turns his maw on you? Hand squeezing the air from your throat, holding your life in his palm as he cocks his head to the side and stares down at you like the gaping mouth of a black hole, its only purpose in life is to consume. To Eat. It's what he's always been, after all—a predator.
There's a shift in him. A ripple. Something fleeting passing through the sloping valleys and jutting canyons of his face; a small frisson that sends a tremor down your spine. Fear curdling in your guts like a stone as he leans in, eyes shuddered in the waning sunlight spilling through the broken window, dark like a moonless night, and huffs out something that sounds like being a bad pup.
won't ever learn your lesson without a firm hand, will you?
You quickly learn that the firm hand he speaks of isn't the one choking you, but rather the one he sneaks behind his back, pulling out the same knife he used to carve into the buck. Knuckles blanching along the bloodied hilt as he grips it tight—too tight; like he's holding himself back—and draws it up to your trembling chin. Tapping the blunt side of the blade on your flesh, he says you need discipline.
“Been too soft with you, ‘aven’t I?”
The softness he speaks of still makes your jaw ache and the grazes on your knees sting, but you know better than to say anything.
And really—
What could you say?
Despite knowing there isn't much to help you—another lesson learned with the heavy, firm press of his hand on the scruff of your head, guiding and taking—pleas rear in the back of your head. Echos of please and don't all shaded under the thick coat of desperation itching to tumble out from between your chattering teeth—and they almost do. Almost. But he slides the knife up until the tip blunts against your bottom lip, keeping them prisoner in the back of your throat where they claw at the soft, bruised flesh until you taste blood—
—and choke on it, too, when he presses the tip up, digging it into soft flesh.
It doesn't hurt. Not really. Not yet. But it's a sharp, unignorable pressure. The blade is cold against your skin. His hands steady, decisive. It hurts to swallow. To breathe.
His lidded gaze lowers. The flat, impassive black sparking in the waning sunset—a star shower of amusement. In the heavy swath of midnight, the lines of fear etched into your face swim to the surface—a murky reflection he pockets like a lucky coin.
There's a brief squeeze. Tight pressure on your neck. Then:
“open up.”
Disobedience isn't an option when the doll-like eyes of the buck are glaring at you from over his shoulder, but you wish it was, that it could have been, when he wedges the skin-warmed tip of the blade between the shallow gap of your teeth, and pries your jaw open.
The drag of metal against enamel, bone, is somehow more uncomfortable than the glide of the knife prodding over your tongue, and you wonder, dazedly, if you're just used to the brutality of him, to the pain that inevitably follows behind every touch, by now. It's something to be expected each time he puts his hands on you like he just can't help himself. Like it's in his nature to hurt things smaller than he is—
“Good girl,” he says, and it's a mean, twisted thing that snakes around your neck as he toys with the knife he shoved inside your mouth, scraping the blunt side over your gums. Your teeth. Tongue. Pressing it in deep—don’t choke, pup, or you might cut yourself—before dragging it back to your lips. In again. Out. In.
As it continues on, drool dribbling down your chin that he lifts his brow at, you're almost viciously reminded of what he did to you last night.
A knife instead of a—
Go on, suck it. Suck my—
Cock.
It's miserable. Dehumanizing. Somehow even more so than when he pushed your head into his lap and told you to earn your keep. This, using you as a receptacle to clean his dirty knife, is drenched in so many layers of wrong that it nearly rents you in two. Splits you down the middle; divorced between anger and shame. A hollowness settling in the space he wrenched apart: this potent sense of abject horror, misery, that fills you to the brim as he grunts, towering over you with his eyes flat, empty black puddles. Grunting about how you're being so good for him—like disobedience was ever a choice when he's blunting the full edge of a blade against the roof of your mouth, hunger curling around you like thick, inescapable smoke as he shoves his hips into your quivering belly, cock hard enough to bruise skin, to hurt.
Bad dog is uttered out from between clenched teeth. The hand raises—a single, steady breath—despite the way you cower under the shadow of that palm. Negative reinforcement.
how's the stupid fuckin’ mutt ever gonna learn if i don't beat the disrespect outta it—?
You're used to that, you think. Heavy hands. A firm grip. Nails digging into your skin despite the too wide, too sweet smile; venom slinking out of the cracks in the facade. A pinch under the table no one can see. A promise for more—
Just wait until we get home.
The threat of him is as real, as unignorable, as the ache in your jaw. A palpable, simmering heat burning inside of him; this hungering, wanting thing that demands retribution. Submission. You find it in the slickness of his coarse palm, the smears of sweat left behind when he moves his hand. The lingering stench of fresh blood and ruptured intestines. It smells, mutedly, like the bag of spare parts. Dog feed.
You go limp. Joints subluxating, knees shifting out of place. Cowering in his paw, caught and cornered, as ghosts, memories, seethe inside of you. A dog chained to a fence. Cigarette smoke. Ash and nicotine; the whine of a thirsty, hungry animal outside—stupud fuckin' mutt—and the rattle of a door handle.
Maybe it's muscle memory. A blueprint etched in scarred bones. Something rearing through the fog that descended like a sudden squall, cutting into the haze until you shrink into yourself, and wait. Ride out the storm because you know, deep down inside, that this isn't about punishment and no amount of i’m sorry, i'm sorry, please don't hurt me’s will stop what's coming next.
What you've learned—huddled under blankets, cowering in corners, arms folded over your head—is that this isn't about you. Not really. It's about their anger and how long—how many hits, how many ugly words aimed at you—it takes until it's quelled.
“Go’ somethin’ t’say, pup,” he's asking, low and brassy and cold, but all you hear is the hollow echo of a gunshot in his voice. Words like bluff charge of a bear daring you to run from it. To trigger that predatory response to chase down and devour fleeting prey. Something scary lurking in the dark hallway, waiting for all the lights in the house to go out. “Why are you so quiet all’o sudden?”
Huh, pup? The knife goes in deeper, catching the soft lining in the back of your throat, cutting skin. And it's really just a shallow gouge. A small nick, but it stings. A throbbing ache you can't swallow down, can't soothe, not with the blade resting on your tongue, and so you sit there, pink-tinged drool dripping down your chin and onto his thick wrist as your blood tickles the back of your throat. Being good for him. Taking this sick humiliation wrapped up as a punishment, a lesson, like a good girl until whatever ire inside of him is satisfied.
But as it leaks over your tongue, you can help shivering. It tastes like a rusted pipe—like stillwater from a hose. And despite yourself, you think of those long, hot summer days with the nozzle pressed against your lips, gulping down iron-tinged water because you learned quickly at a young age that being outside with the buzzing carpenter bees bumping into your chest, and the dirty, stagnant water from your neighbours hose saved you from the unbearable stench of cigarette smoke that seemed to thicken into a paste in the humidity.
And really—its just common sense, isn't it? Tempers flare quicker in the heat, burning hotter, longer, after being baked under the sun all day. Being outside with the unwanted dogs chained to broken fences, trying to stay alive under the glare of the sun, was better. It was a place where grabbing hands and misplaced anger and the stench of cigarettes and stale piss on the carpets in the hallway couldn't reach you.
drip, drip—
(what your blood really tastes like is playing pretend. like dried grass in the back of your throat as you woke to the early mist of a mid-August morning. the house silent as you crept around, eyes swollen and sore, trying to make as little noise as possible as the man your mom dragged home with her, a friend from school—the snick of a lighter; the hiss of flames on glass: a crooked, awful grin nice to meet you worming out between jagged teeth—snoring on the couch. packing your meagre belongings inside a second-hand bag the disinterested lady from child services dropped off from a donation bin, stuffed full of moth-eaten shorts and Walmart shirts. broken toys. a bottle of water. stale bread. leftover pizza. pretending to run away with a pack of stray dogs, each one just as bruised as you felt. just as wary. evenings spent roaming the streets, covered in dust and sweat, and humming along with the screams of the cicadas as mothers in the distance called their children in after dark—)
He leans in, cock pressing heavy and thick against your ribs, and huffs out a breath tinged with the ghost of nicotine and the dulled snick of a lighter; the softened, muted howl of flames against glass. The stench of ammonia. Dried piss baking on hot pavement.
(baby? is that you? wanna grab me a beer from the fridge? i got some friends over tonight so why don't you ask the neighbours if you can sleep over or somethin’—)
But instead of being glazed, glossy, his eyes are flat in the gloom of this stolen house. Empty and endless, like a summer storm brewing on the horizon. Electric, though. Captivating, despite how terrifying it looks.
Something you can't look away from even though you know when it lands, it's going to hurt.
He looks at you, too. Black eyes boring into yours until you can see yourself in the pits: mouth wide open, stuffed full of metal. A scarred, pale hand pressed tight against your chin. The other curled over your throat, half hidden by the bulk of his arm. The flex of his muscles. Squeezing. Tightening. Because he sees it, too. The way you look so much like the buck in the scope. Eyes wide. Maw open—a blade sticking out instead of a strand of grass. Prey in his hand. In a black circle.
His expression shudders. Flexing just a little around the edges. Tightening as he stares down at you, the black of his eyes full of that awful sort of hunger you've seen more times than you can count—
(hey, baby, come sit next to me for a minute—your momma home, sweet thing?—well, ain't you a cutie—and look at you; all grown now, huh?—open up, pretty girl, i just wanna come in and say ‘hi’—open up, you stupid bitch, before i break this goddamn door down—)
—but it's different somehow. Sharper. Undiluted. Eyes free of that uncanny film, the slight gloss, that the men your mom brought home had—dealers disguised as friends; wolves in sheep's clothing—or the ones your stepdad knew. The cashier at the gas station when your mom bought her smokes. Hi, honey, he'd say, all smiles. All film. Glassy eyes eating up the loose threads on the hem of your shorts as he reached down and handed you a sucker you knew better than popping into your mouth until you were in the privacy of your bedroom. Cherry, he'd whisper with a coy little wink, fingers lingering a little too long on the stick as your mom shoved the unscanned box in her purse like she couldn't hear him. Didn't see the same ugly tint to his eyes as you did.
Gazes always inward, flipping through ideas and wants and daydreams as you stood there, a sad little thing from a sad little home. Stealing handfuls that they knew they could get away with. Bolder in the dark. Away from prying eyes. Desire wrapped in clingfilm, tucked away behind plexiglass. Distorting the image until it was smeared and hazy, drenched in plausible deniability just in case anyone bothered to look a little harder at why a grown man was handing a child a cherry flavoured sucker and calling her honey.
But his—
His is just this heavy, inescapable sort of hunger. Like a stalking tiger crouched low in the grass, waiting to pounce on the oblivious little doe who wandered too far from the herd.
Predatory.
It isn't opportunistic. A scavenger picking at scraps. Carrion nipping at rotten meat. It's full, thick with intent and purpose. A promise lurking in the shadowed valleys of cobalt and ash.
And that's the difference, isn't it?
They look at you like they want to take a bite—have just a taste (it's cherry flavoured, honey—oh, i bet you taste so sweet, doncha?)—like it's a fix. A hit. Just to take the edge off. A nibble. Something they can get away with. But he looks at you like he wants to eat you whole, down to the marrow. Skin and bones and soft, fleshy insides.
This isn't a kill. It's a carcass dangling over the branch of a tree; a jaguar coming home to feast. His voice, when it comes out, is a rumble. Slow and deep—so deep, it trembles through your chest like a small quake, a thunderclap—and a little hungry, a little mean:
“Get it now, pup?” He prods at the wound until it leaks over his fingertips. Blood staining his marbled, mauled skin a pretty red, glinting in the ochreous smear of a blurry sunlight when it spills through the window. A voyeur to your unmaking. “Finally learned your lesson?”
Grizzled down to ash. Scattered bones in a firepit. The crunch of a fist sliding through the hollowed, blackened husk of a charred log. When he speaks, you think of nights huddled under the blankets as your handle rattles between the shrill screams of the cicadas just outside your window.
(Palms scrubbing against the blankets. Bunching them up until a handful sits in your fists—a tight, white-knuckled squeeze. Pulling them over your head just to feel safe—)
Clinging to his jacket like a child. Hand tangling up in the fabric, squeezing tight. Sobbing into his chest as he cradled you without a second thought. Things like been watchin’ you, pup and thought you knew; thought you were runnin’ from me slink out of the cracks that have been there since the beginning, maybe; since you first learned what affection really was. They tangle themselves around your neck like a noose. A collar—
You remember asking, in the summer equinox when the sun was so hot, it turned the grass brown and scorched the pavement until it burned the soles of your feet, why the dogs in your neighbourhood had to wear such big, clunky chains around their neck that seemed to make their heads droop, drool dribbling down their maw and into the empty, sun-blistered bowls. Your mother shrugged, lifting her hand—still reeking of acrylic and ground plastic; look at my nails, baby? your daddy paid for ‘em, ain't they cute?—and tucked her cigarette into the corner of her mouth, yellow teeth flashing under the shade of the awning.
‘cause they like it, she'd said, pawing at the stairs for her bottle of hard lemonade. The scent of vodka sharp, astringent, in your nose. Another staple of childhood. The gleaming red nail on her index finger catching a bead of condescension that soaked the stone step leading up to the porch where daddy rolls a joint—just a different kinda smoke; it just stinks more, don't worry about it—and laughs at something your uncle says.
Halcyon days shaded in the yellow-grey smear of water damaged ceilings. Barefoot on the blistering pavement. Outside from dawn until dusk, picking at scraps left out on the grease-covered stovetop. Bottles clinking all night, caught in the constant echo of laughter and the snick of a lighter. A blueprint that makes you duck your head, aching nape exposed, and cling to the thing that hurts you the most. That keeps hurting you.
(won't ever stop until you leave—)
And they wouldn't know which way was up if they didn't have that on ‘em. Lost without it, baby. They need it—
You reach for him now. Needing to feel that same sense of comfort you had in the field even though you know it isn't real. Stockholm syndrome, you think, but grab at him anyway. Fingers scraping over his jacket. The hardened marble of his skin-warmed hips bleeding through the layers of clothes until they soak into your knuckles. Stolen comfort. The edge of wrong eking through the tight curl of your fingers; the unavoidable, palpable weight of it permeating the air, choking the scant breath from your lungs. Hypoxia, maybe. Or some land-fed, prey-insinct amalgamation of oxygen narcosis.
Endear yourself to the predator. Humanize yourself to him so he doesn't eat you alive.
His cock throbs when you nod, still stiff and thick against your belly. Gives a little jerk, a twitch, when your gaze lowers to the blood-stains on his collar. Meek and malleable with your throat clenched in his big, powerful paw. Skin rough even as he softens his hold around your neck. Relenting in increments. Trust building back up again in even smaller pieces.
But a warning hangs in the air. Under his heel, the wet, sticky squelch of crushed tissue and fractured bones echoes through the foyer. You think, suddenly, of calling for your mother—
“Gonna be good from now on?” He mocks with a painful squeeze of his palm. Gives a little jerk like a disgruntled mother cat shaking the kitten in her maw. You just need to listen, baby. You make me hurt you because you don't fuckin’ listen.
It's not a question. Not really. And the knife digs painfully into your tongue when you swallow, offering a little nod, but cutting your flesh on sharp metal hurts less than the bruising ache of him twitching against your ribs. Awful, disgusting. Your first tightens. A child clinging to the blankets dragged over their head. Monsters can't hurt you beneath the covers—
Or the satisfaction that brims in stagnant puddles of ink when you let his nails sink deeper into your skin, claimed and owned—your submission blooming as a quiet, tenable thing, something he nips at with crooked, yellow-stained teeth. The stroke of a hand against stinging skin.
(what you learned that summer—what you learned every summer—is that no matter how hard you kick a dog, it will always come crawling back.)
“Good girl.”
You curl into him when he peels the spit-soaked blade from your mouth as slowly as he can, a small kindness, forehead falling against the hard, warm expanse of his chest when it's finally out, leaving behind the taste of a split lip: salt and iron. A child seeking comfort the only way it knows how—slow and cautious; only after the anger leaves and the guilt trickles in.
He's still. Quiet. Lets you lean against him, into him, as he tucks the knife back into place; steady and solid and warm. A big, broad-chested furnace that burns you up like the summer sun when the heat of him leaks through the layers and into your shivering, gooseprickled skin. You don't worry about whether or not he's comfortable with this—he’s a man who takes, doesn't give, and you know if he wasn't, he'd push you away. Shove you to the side. And it's better, curled between the loose folds of his jacket, breathing in the old, wicker-basket scent of him, than staring down at the mouse.
More glassy, accusing eyes—
Something inside of you feels fractured and raw. Scraped out. Hollowed. Like a scab ripped off an unhealed wound. Oozing exudate that's a little pink with fresh blood. Sore and tight and hot to the touch. You feel it there, in your chest, as he grunts, the rumble echoing through your body.
You feel like this sometimes—usually after finding a piece of your childhood tucked in your belongings. An outlier that doesn't fit in this new box you live in. No smoking hanging outside the building of your apartment like a beacon, flickering in the gloom of another rainy afternoon. Catching the fading trail of cigarette smoke outside. A sudden knock on your door.
It's just—
Muscle memory, you think. Itching at the scab covering that wound until a piece of it flakes off. Another. Dredged up flotsam from the bottom of the ocean, crawling with crustaceans and thickened with barnacles. Reeking of the seafloor and rot. Itch, itch.
The malaise set in sometime later. Boxed-wine and takeout. An ant, doing its part. Another cog—
You wonder if that's what he saw when he looked at you. An uncollared dog roaming the streets without a place to call home. Lost.
The scab lifts, wound oozing with fresh blood. He lifts his head at the scent of it, eyes narrowing into slits. And then he moves.
It's a sudden, fluid thing—a flurry of black in your periphery—and you don't have time to brace yourself, to bite down on the instinctual urge to flinch back, to flee. Your head jerks, and you stumble back, almost knocking into the wall, but he's quicker than your panic. Faster than the fear that drives you, the silent, unswallowable no, no, please—
He catches you in an instant. Grip tight, hot, around your waist as he hauls you back into his chest, barely encumbered by the feeble, kitten-like scratches you leave over his shoulders, palm pushing into concrete as you try to wiggle out of the firm clutch of his hold.
“Easy, pup,” he's rasping out, words mangled in the thick of his throat. Calm down is a rumble in his chest as he pushes your back into the wall again, unbothered by the flakes of paint that rain down over your shoulders, his forearms. Crowding you in with an arm slung around your waist, the other curling across your nape to grip the scruff of your neck in his palm. Squeezing—
It brings him close to you—closer than he's ever been—and it jars you, just a little, to realise his lashes are blonde against pale, charcoal stained skin. Eyes dark, but not black. Not really. Like a cat, his pupils bloom midnight under the limned light spilling in from the moth-eaten curtain. A reedy, threadbare sunset spilling into the foyer like silk, a gossamer of warm, gauzy gold. He's harsher under it. Made up of deep canyons and shadows; more myth than man as he bends his knees to bring himself that much closer. Lids bruised with exhaustion: blue and black and streaked with thin red lines that twist and snake across the pale surface. A confluence of blood vessels pulsing under thin skin.
A blink. Slow and lazy, like a cat. Shaded eyes fixed, unwavering—and unnervingly so—on yours. Prising through the muck for something—
It's the little hitch he makes, the huff of his breath wheezing through the mask, that breaks the reverie. His eyes shudder, slipping down to half-mast as he drills that same, hungry look through the pinpricks of your pupils; staring, unblinkingly, fixated, as if will alone was enough to push through the wall of your skull until you leaked grey matter onto the dust covered floor. Until every groove, every dip, of your brain was a manual on your thoughts, and his fingers could slide over gyri like pads on braille.
They slip to the spit staining your swollen lips, a brief flicker, a pulse against your ribs, before he shakes his head. Shallow. Slow. An awakening. Something you've seen big cats and bears do—a recalibration. Head tilting, shaking the cobwebs loose. Narrowing in on a sound, a scent.
Nose in the air, scenting blood.
(and god, you're just letting it drip everywhere, aren't you?)
His thumb—pad thickened, rough from scars—strokes across the curve of your jawbone, and it feels like the prickly, abrasive lash of a cat's tongue. Sandpaper over sallow, sticky skin. Scratching at the dead skin around a sunburn or the inflamed, itchy lump of a mosquito bite until you draw blood. A good sort of hurt. One that satiates the urge to itch the irritation, but feeds the hurt. A little burn. A sting.
(You wonder if he's ever been able to touch something without making it hurt—)
Whatever he sees, whatever he finds as he rummages around the chaotic clutter of mal-formed memories and made-up daydreams drags a sharp breath out of him. A heavy, anger-drenched exhale. One reeking of smoke and ire, making you flinch again—reflex, mostly—but he's cooing, a low, rasping trill and a waspish command: enough.
You quieten. Go still. Limp. Waiting—
Like a dog.
(He catches it. Chews on your submission like a tender piece of meat, mangled between his molars; a sticky, gummy paste, unbothered by the rotten afterbirth of fear that slips out behind it: submissive as a survival instinct, a prey-response, and not a choice.)
“Hit a deer when I was sixteen,” he starts, tone dipped in nonchalance, boredom. The droll cadence of necessity over want—filler he has no choice but to indulge in to get to the point. You're not sure why he's even telling you this to begin with, but the hand around your waist slides up the snaking expanse of your spine when you open your mouth, the why crawling up your tongue: a curious orbweaver investigating a disturbance on its web. The shush now is a silent, unspoken thing, heard through action alone when that hand reaches the knob of your spine, delicate vertebrae cupped in a powerful hand. A subtle warning even your fraying instincts catch—a web strummed.
“Might’a been an accident,” he continues in the same easy, bored tone, listing a little at the end as his fingers play a tune against your nape you can't recognise. “Don't remember—” his head cocks, amusement trickling in despite the artifice of ignorance. “Been too long.” Then, mockingly, his hand lifts from your jaw, knuckles pressing into his temple, giving a little knock. “Ain't as sharp as I used to be.”
Y’know what it's like, he hums, sinking those long, thick fingers into the tensing muscles on your nape. “Those roads are hell, ain't they? Trick you into thinkin’ they're longer than they are. Go a lil’ crazy starin’ at all that nothin’. Starts to look the same, don't it? Just rivers. Fields. Went insane, I reckon.”
In this insanity, he finds a deer waiting for him in the bracket of a sharp bend on the road. Head lifting slowly at the sound of an approaching truck, eyes big and black and glossy in the midmorning smear of a hazy summer morning.
The odd thing is—you can picture this so clearly in your head that it feels like shared memory dredged out of the depths of your subconscious. Something you buried a long time ago unearthed by his hands. Palms up, caked in dirt, he shows you the rotted remains of what you buried in the backyard.
Like a guilty dog watching its owner dig up the carcass it tried to hide in the garden.
But this guilt—misplaced, borrowed—is all wrong. You weren't even a thought when he was thirteen.
“Reckon I could’a stopped,” he continues, still in that same, easy tone. And there's a creeping sense of dread that keeps building as he speaks. Low, brassy. A slow, steady drawl in the gloaming that looms beyond the pale, old curtains. Like he wasn't admitting to something terrible. A wrong, dirty secret whispered in the dark. “Might'a been able to avoid it. But I hit the gas instead. Hit ‘er ‘ead on—”
Don't know if it was an accident or not is said, cavalier, as you pitch forward, dizzy with this unasked for confession. Wishing you claw the words out of your ears, out of your head. The image of the buck morphing into the doe as he speaks—his eyes black and glassy, catching the headlights in a hazy, amber glow. The sound of metal meeting flesh and bone. Came through the windshield, he says, and you hiccup into his shirt, fighting against the urge to gag. Go’ blood all over the place. Glass. Lost control after that and crashed the car into a ditch. Woke up at sunrise with ‘er ‘ead slumped over the dashboard.
Shut up, you think, breath hitching. Shivering against the images your mind conjures up, and the steady, easy rhythm of his heart. Thump, thump-thump, thump. Unbothered by this tale—the tragedy of taking a life, and the horror of not knowing if he did it on purpose. Stop talking—
“Crazy thing is—”
No more—
“—she was jus’ as stunnin’ with ‘er neck bent all outta shape and her body twisted up and broken as she was standin’ in the road, like she wanted t’be hit.”
He throbs against your ribs. The press of him is this heavy, awful thing, and you almost forgot he was—excited. Hard. A fever, a heat, that started burning when he shoved the knife between your teeth, and still blazes inside his veins as he scrapes the rot—a slick, fetid ooze; adipocere—of this memory out, and watches as it drips down, a slow percolation, until it's subsumed into your skin. A pollutant that makes you quiver, trembling from pyretic chills; a borrowed fever—cooing in your ear as sweat gathers behind your knees, your elbows. A heavy, honeyed drip—
His hand under your chin, dragging your head up so he can stare, and stare—
Eyes black. Dark—like the approach of night clotting in the background just outside the window.
Like his voice, a brassy purr in your ear:
“Don't think I'll ever forget those eyes as long as I live.”
It's the most you've ever heard him speak before—even then, when it was just same as usual? or a grunt, what can i get you? lean cut or thick—and like a frayed thread being tugged on, pulled loose, it all seems to fall out of him as the stitches unravel. His voice, slightly hoarse (from disuse, maybe; from the onslaught of the horror he recounts of a battered doe with a broken neck twisted around at the wrong angle, staring at him like the buck stared at you), scratches out the words of a story still yet to end.
About how he was in bad shape after the crash, and had to crawl home—
“scared shitless more’n I was worried ‘bout my leg danglin’ like tha’.”
And then—a fissure, a split: oil oozes out of the crack, dark and ugly—
“See, my ol’ man—well. ‘e found out what I’d done the next mornin’ an’ beat the shit outta me for it, too. Broke my nose, my jaw—” his hand pulls away from you to rub at his chin absently, almost as if he's chasing away a phantom pain. Feeling the crook of bones beneath his skin. “Didn't find that out until I went to jail. See, it healed all wrong. Now my jaws a lil' crooked. Don't close right.”
And you can see it, too. The mismatch. The awkward jut of bone. His finger pets along the second band on his nose, and you know it's been broken more than once by the second, third, arches along the curved, roman slope of it.
You wonder how many of them were by his old man, and something cracks inside of you, too. It isn't pity. Not really. Just—
That ol’ bastard Riley wasn't no goddamn saint! He had it comin’! Fuckin’ weirdo.
—you get it.
The silhouette that presses into the corner of his eyes is a familiar shape; yours the stench of cigarettes. The scrape of nails on your skin. It hurts, sometimes, when someone touches your forearm even when it's as gentle as a kiss. This phantom ache that never seems to go away. A silent, haunting thing that lingers in loud noises—slamming doors, fallen objects. Screams. The electric buzz of anger looming like a storm. Things that make you turn into a contradiction—wanting to both crawl out of your skin and deeper into it at the same time. Hiding. Running. Unsure which one would protect you more.
You wonder if it's the same for him. The running. The hiding. The burning, molten heat of anger and anguish coalescing in your chest—
Is that why he did it? The convergence of those two things—sadness and sorrow and rage and humiliation—burning too hot to control, like a wildfire in the apex of summer; cauterizing the fear until all that was left was hatred and fury. Or was—
Might'a been able to avoid it. But I hit the gas instead
—was it there all along. This dark, tarlike shadow oozing hatred from inflamed pustules on the verge of popping. A burning match inside a tinderbox. An unsteady supernova. Spreading rage like a cancer, eating away morality until nothing was left when it finally burst—
RILEY FAMILY MASSACRE
The knowledge of it—or rather, the confirmation—unmoors you. Something shaking loose. Tectonic plates shifting beneath your feet, changing the topography of everything you know until it sits on the precipice of the unfamiliar. New and unexplored and unknown, but—
Known.
And it's a quiet thing, this knowing. Familiar in shadows, but so different in the softer, earthier light. Like mistaking a coat thrown over a chair for a man in the midnight spill of night.
You feel it—a rumble in your chest; an unmaking—when he draws his hand back to your neck, fingers spreading out wide until all the visible, soft skin is swallowed by his palm. An eclipse. Brief—ephemeral. Holding on, being held. A slight squeeze. Easing the chasm open just a little bit wider before he drags it around your throat, palm warm and solid and a little damp on your nape.
“Thought he'd never stop when he started. He was like tha’, though. When he go’ ‘is hands on you, sometimes it'd feel like he was fixin’ t’kill. Ma managed t’wake up for a while—stopped ‘im from catchin’ a charge. But it wasn't over. Woke up the next mornin’ snuggled up to the deer I hit.”
It's hard to see him as a little boy. And you're not—
You're not stupid.
You know, logically, that at some point he was just a child—vulnerable, fragile—like you, but it's difficult for these ideas, these worlds, to coincide. To merge into a storied life beyond what he's known for—murder, a butcher, warden. Something in between all three. Trimurti—manifold. Cerberus. Dattatreya. Chimera. Manticore. Frankenstein’s monster cobbled together from broken parts. Borrowed pieces. The hands of a murderer, the face of a butcher, the discipline of a warden.
But strip the sutured pieces away, and the core is the same. The shape is familiar. Known. Kin.
It makes sense, too: deep inside that part of yourself, just as cancerous, as morality devouring, as the one he collapsed into, rings shrill with the truth of it. This patchwork thing of anguish and anger. Betrayal. And maybe that alone, this notion of moral complexities, compounded and elasticated, is harder to swallow, to accept, than the multifaceted multitudes of a man with three faces.
Does he disgust you over what he's done, or is it because he had the strength to do what you couldn't?
As this creeping, slow realisation dawns on you, he keeps talking. Recounting the horrors of his childhood that aren't as horrific to him as they are to the rest of the world—a facet you live with everyday when you see the over-exaggerated pantomime of your childhood normality laid bare in abstract concepts like trauma and childhood post traumatic stress disorder and the quiet, ugly whisper of god, that's so fucked up when people see the ruins of your barefoot, smoke-scarred halcyon days; when they watch you scratch idly at the scab, unable to grasp that just because it itches, it doesn't mean it hurts.
And it doesn't. It doesn't hurt. It just stings sometimes, like a wound you don't want to forget. Can't let go of. But that's the crux of it, isn't it? This inability to let go.
Unlike him.
But there's a weight to him that wasn't there before. An edge of something you can't place, but it isn't implacable. It's just—
You don't want to know it. Not right now, not when he's more human to you than he ever was before. A thing with three faces. A body as warm as your own.
Familiar.
“Wouldn't let me move it or toss it out, either. S’one of his quirks, I guess. Might'a jus’ go’ off t’hearin’ me scream every mornin’, the twisted prick. Kept it there until he couldn't deal with the stench anymore an’ then he made me toss ‘er out. By that time, there wasn't much left o’er, though.”
The image is almost as vivid as the doe. A little boy crawling into bed beside a rotting, mangled corpse. Tucking his hurts beside bloating tissue and necrotising flesh. Organs—liquifying inside and dripping down between the gaps in its ribs, soaking into the mattress. A stench that would linger.
You shudder. “And—y–your mom—she didn't—?”
“Wha’? Try an’ stop ‘im?” he grunts when you nod, and rolls his eyes up towards the ceiling, lost in thought, maybe; but he's shaking his head with an ugly, bullish snort seconds later. “Nah, she wasn't gonna stick ‘er neck out like tha’ for a brat she didn't even like.”
It makes you think of your own mother, and there's a sharpness in your breastbone. A pain you haven't really thought much about, but you like to think sometimes that she did her best. Protected you (goan, baby, he's givin’ you a sucker for free, take it)—in her own way, and maybe it was the only way she'd ever known how. Batesian mimicry, maybe, because at the heart of it all, you've known—just like she must have—that girls like you rarely ever stand a chance.
But for all her failings, you can't imagine her just sitting back and watching. No. Your mother wasn't afraid of anyone, and would often say she gave it back twice as hard as she got it.
“What about Tommy?” You say, aching now for something to shatter the strange, testing sense of pity you feel for a little boy you'd never have known. “What about your brother—”
His hand tightens, snuffing the words out before they can crawl up your throat. There's a sliver of real malice slinking along the thin, red rivers of his eyes; a fleeting spark of pain drumming up before it all merges at the confluence and begins a slow drip into jagged slate.
The pinch in his fingers is clear. Don't tread where you're not welcome. But you don't think it's fair that he gets to unearth this aching, leaking wound of yours without giving something back in return.
“What did he say about it—?”
“Careful, pup,” he grunts, loosening his grip slowly before giving you a little shake. Bad dog. “You should know better than to be askin’ questions you ain't gonna like the answers to.”
“What did he do to you?”
His inhale sounds more like a hiss. A warning. But he pushes you back against the wall, and leans down slowly. His gaze pins you the whole time, staying locked, glued, onto yours as a feverish heat brims in the curl of his palm. His eyes are lidded, and you could almost mistake the expression as laziness if his jaw hadn't been clenched so tight, a vein in his temple started to throb. Pulsing with the furious thunder of his heartbeats.
“To me? Nothin’. But ‘e fell in wit’ the wrong crowd. Ugly sort. Thought they were just doin’ drugs. Junkies our ol’ man used to call ‘em, but nah. Worse ‘an tha’. Fancied ‘emselves a lil’ gang. Made sense too since most of ‘em came from Winnipeg. A few from Vancouver. Tommy an’ one of the guys were tight. But ‘e was the younger brother of a real bad man. Bigger ‘in all o’ ‘em. ‘ad ‘is fingers in everythin’—but I guess ‘e was worried ‘bout ‘is younger brother growin’ up in the North End, so ‘e sent ‘im up north to the Pas where ‘e met ‘is friends. Met Tommy.” He takes a breath, then, and shakes his head a little, scoffing. “‘e was a bad kid. Stupid as shite. An’ ‘e overdosed when ‘e was wit’ Tommy. Died in our basement.”
His thumb, skin rough and cracked and thickened with callouses, scrapes over your pulse in a quick brush before he curls it inward until the jaundiced, nicotine-tinged curve of his nail digs into your skin. A shallow bite. There isn't any pain—it’s mostly just pressure, and a little pinch when dry skin tugs on damp, tacky flesh—but he holds it there. Drills the tip on slightly until it just starts to ache before pulling away, smoothing the indent he left behind. More broken vessels. Another mark.
The intent isn't to hurt, though, and you really can't make sense of it until he does it again. And again. Rhythmic. Like when dad used to get so angry he'd clench his hands into fists—
“Was in the military at the time. Up in Saskatchewan trainin’. Told ‘im t’lay low. It'll blow over.” Dig, release. Dig, release. “An’ it did. Managed to get leave jus’ in time. Go’ Tommy clean—” a scoff. “Not tha’ it did much. Go’ sent back again, and I thought tha’ the end o’ it. But all it took was someone sayin’ they saw Tommy chattin’ wit’ the cops. Branded ‘im a snitch. An’ he night'a forgiven what ‘appened t’his brother, but tha’? Nah. Was a death sentence. Next time I came ‘ome, it was to a bloodbath.”
No. No.
That's not how the story goes. He killed them all with his bare hands, and was found the next day sitting in a bar—the same one his father frequented more than he did his own home; in his spot—and drinking bourbon with dried blood still on his boots. There were no drugs, no gangs, no violent retribution. It wasn't revenge and misplaced blame, it was a single man—and barely even that at all—who killed his family.
This tale is too inverting. Jarring. Everything you know, everything you feel, is all twisted up inside of you. Wrapped up inside each other. Twisted, torn asunder. Emotions spilling around inside a kaleidoscope, every turn changing it to something new—disbelief, and pity; horror, and confusion—until it's all muddled. A varicoloured smear. You can't tell blue from yellow or red from cyan anymore.
“They said you killed them,” you force out, and it wheezes from between your clenched teeth. “That you—”
He lifts his hand, curling it into a fist before it reaches his temple, and digs his knuckles into a scar that runs across his head like a meteor. “Might’a done tha’, too. S’been a long time. Memory ain't as good as it used to be—”
A lie. A lie, a lie; one after the other.
“—but I could’a done it. Killed ‘em all. Or maybe I came ‘ome an’ Tommy was already dead because the piece o’ shit me I call my ol’ man couldn't be bothered to make sure his son stayed outta trouble. Maybe I found him in that same basement—all stiff and blue and cold—and I could’a lost my mind. Might’a beat the piss outta tha’ bastard and finished her off as a mercy kill. Might’a—”
But who's to say?
His hand falls, quick like a whip, and those thick, scarred fingers are cinched tight around your nape before you can even think. The bulk of his body follows, crushing you against the wall, the weight of him against your chest snuffing out the gasp buried deep in your throat. His knee wedges between your legs, slicing through until his thigh bumps against your core. Pressing tight until the pressure, the intent, forces another gasp to bubble in your throat.
You feel suspended in motion. Teetering on the edge of something that keeps shifting between fear and vulnerability; stability and weightlessness. A odd, almost confounding, juxtaposition between the conversation you were having just moments ago.
Against your hip, his cock throbs. Pulses. He shifts, and it digs in deeper—an unrelenting press, pushing in hard enough to bruise.
His other hand slaps against the wall beside your head, the force of it shaking loose dust and plaster. In your periphery, you can catch the tremble of a cobweb spun high in the corner of the room. He’s heavy against you. Boxing you in until you're forced to tip your head back to look up at him. The curl of his fingers around your throat flex, squeezing tight.
“Tha’ make things better?” He hums, staring down at you with heavy, laden eyes. Black as midnight, but sparking with scorn. “Hm? Make it easier t’swallow, pup?”
It doesn't really matter. Not anymore. Whatever happened then doesn't change anything now. Not really. But—
Something is spreading inside of your chest. Growing like an evolving cancer, eating healthy tissue and necrotising the rest. It's—
Pity.
Or—
“An’ if I told you I went back?” He tilts his head, eyes drilling into yours, chiselling deep into the spinning kaleidoscope of your thoughts.. “Right after I go’ out in April. I went back ‘ome and I dug my little doe up.”
The knife he shoved between your teeth—the hilt was made of bone, wasn't it? You remember it in the clearing, too. The shape of it awful and ugly—
(And—oh.
Maybe you were wrong. Maybe, like you, he can't let go, either. Just two kids waiting for the streetlights to come on, for the call in the distance that never comes—)
You don't want it to change things, and maybe it won't come tomorrow morning when he's still the same brute who won't let you go, who twists that awful, ugly knife between your teeth, and fires shots into the ground near your feet, makes you suck his cock, and bruises your hip with it; but right now, it does. Shifts your perspective. Another turn of the kaleidoscope.
And you wonder if that's why he picked you. If could smell the scent of an open wound, and followed it back to you. Did he know the whole time, or did he put the pieces together—like a puzzle slowly being assembled, the finished picture a hideous shade of unpalatable violence. Like a bruise. An ache. Three, four crescents embedded into your skin.
But you're haunted by ghosts, not poltergeists. They don't leave marks. They just hide from you when you walk into a room, refusing to let you see them. Artificial emptiness. Neglect. The scent of smoke. Cigarettes under your window.
Neediness.
Like seeking comfort from the hand that shows you kindness just as often as it hurts you. Kicked dogs—
He does know, though. You can see it in the way his head cocks to the side, how his eyes list between the ghosts leaving smears, stains, in the back of your eyes, and how you react to him—the flinches he takes in with a slow, steady breath. The artifice in the way you mould around him, shrinking back like a thing that expects the hit to come first. But even with knowing, he doesn't stop himself from hurting you, doesn't even try—but he does hold himself back, and that, in itself, is a kindness.
His thumb strokes the side of your neck, running along your jugular vein, the action somehow both comfort and a threat. Another contradiction. Another head, a face. Two sides of a coin, but deeper than that. A muddled pool awash with subsets and totalities—things you can make sense of: the shape of him in the dark, the taste of his skin on your tongue, the sounds he makes, the weight of his hand on your neck. The pinch. The pain. The—
Accidents ‘apppen. So you ain't go’ nothin’ t’cry about.
—comfort.
And—in the same breath, the same shade—the things you can't. Irreflexive. Antisymmetrical. Like why he picked you up. Watched you. Wasted the effort to keep you fed when it would have been easier to just take what he wanted from the start.
You can't make sense of him. He's all—
Tangled up. Messed up. A man who wants to hurt you. Who does. And one who feeds you, teaches you how to hunt. To kill. To dress.
You don't get it. You don't—
(but in the back of your head, in that polluted pile of rot and anguish, you think you do. it's not implacable. it's just—
you don't want to know. but the problem is this: something things can't be kept in the dark too long—)
You flinch. Freeze. And he crushes. Kills. Hurts before it can hurt him. The mouse, then, was a reflex. A threat. You flinched. And he—
S’alright, pup, he says suddenly, like he knows, the words a rasp in the quiet dark. “I know you didn't mean t’do it.”
It feels like absolution even though you don't think there's a holy bone in his body. Sounds like a boxcutter, slicing through the worn, frayed sutures holding you together, keeping the cancer from spilling out. The split, this fissure, cuts the scab off, but his hand is there, blistering like a brand, and it cauterizes the wound before it leaks.
A flinch—his hand twitches,
head tilting to the side. In the messed up, rotten mush of your reeling mind, the knife he put in your mouth really was another lesson. A love tap, your mom used to call them, words dispersing into cigarette smoke.
(Oh, stop that whinin’ or I'll give you somethin’ to really cry about. It was just a lil love tap, baby.)
And that's what love is, isn't it? Little hurts. Big ones. Bruises and twisted arms. Nails sinking into skin. Just wait until we get home. Rattling door handles. Come on, honey, open up. Sleeping next to rot. Watching it degrade, decay.
Love tangled up in hurt. In ash and smoke and broken promises.
(But he kept all of his, hadn't he?)
You think about it, about what affection means to you, until the arm wrapped around your waist, the too-rough, too-harsh press of his scarred thumb feels less like a restraint and more like a caress. Chipped acrylics digging into soft skin. Just wait until we get home. A gunshot in your ear, the bullet missing you by mere inches. Pounding on your bedroom door.
And then you think—with a mewling, wretched whimper spilling from the back of your sore throat as he puts his sweat-slicked, skin-warmed hands back on your neck and squeezes until the world starts to blur around the edges—lost without it.
(It's just—
Things feel a little less real when you can't breathe. And sometimes, when it's hard enough, sharp enough, you can pretend the ringing in your ears is the sound of your name being called to come home for dinner when the streetlights come on after dark.)
His hands twist.
The kaleidoscope spins—
(and when you're dizzy enough, he'll take you outside. throw wood into the firepit, and roast lamb over the open flame. let it burn as the smoke from the wildfires spread deeper into the heart of Manitoba.
he'll light a cigarette in the choking, smoke-clogged gloam, and you'll pretend the disturbed pile of dirt doesn't change anything about this kaleidoscopic shift in your understanding of who he is and why it matters to you—
who’s to know, indeed.
when he's finished, he'll snuff the cigarette out on the log before dropping the butt by his feet. a careless sort of thing. practised. and you'll stare at that butt as he prowls towards you. something about it shakes loose the cobwebs from your head, slows the scope for you to glimpse a small sliver in the prism. it looks familiar.
but his hand will close over your nape, fingers nicotine-stained, grease-stained, and he'll force your head up to meet the predatory glint in his gaze.
“come on,” he'll rasp, and the heat from his hand, from his body, will melt the question into a soft, quiet acquiescence as his thumb scraps over your pulse. “been waitin' a long time f’my pretty lil’ doe.”
an’ it's ‘bout time she finally came home.
still. your eyes will linger on the cigarette as he leads you inside.)
Surrender smells like a hayloft.
Like dust. Like mildew. Woodrot. The ghost of cattle still lingering between the crumbling pillars, slit throats stinking of rotting blood and sticky, marbled meat steaming in the mid-summer air.
(drip, drip—)
Rain-soaked rust. Saltpetre. Ozone.
An open carton of cigarettes, sweat, when he leans down—tacky, bloodstained hands leaving marbled smears over your dusty skin—and presses the cold tip of his crooked nose into your jugular. Humid breath full of stale tobacco and charred meat, thickened with soured, infectious desire.
Spoiled milk. Rotted arum. Decayed fish tangled up inside sundried seaweed. Crabs suffocating in plastic bottles—polymer coffins, like manmade flytraps nestled in the sand. Pretty, glimmering coin-sized maws a lure promising one-sided sanctuary.
(Climb inside it says—he said, hands firm around your hips, urging—mouth wide open, shaped into a perfect circle. Squeeze in; don't worry, you'll fit—)
Surrender, resignation—like a sunken ship wasting away at the bottom of the ocean: a constant, inescapable midnight in the hadoopelagic where there's nothing to eat but each other and scraps. An endless pressure. A sluggish, ice-cold prison—
He is a flytrap, you think, breathing in stale, dusty hay as he shoves your thighs apart with damp, rough hands. Maw gaping wide—unveiling a row of crooked, nicotine-stained teeth gleaming in the waning, bloodless light of the wide-eyed moon—and whispers harsh lullabies into your ashen skin. Swansongs of so wet, pup (as he leans back and spits on your cunt), and gonna be a tight fit, and better open up f'me;
Gonna split you in ‘alf, ain't I? (but maybe you like it a li’l bit more when it ‘urts, huh, pup?)
You roll the idea of that around like a marble in the back of your head, fingers sliding over the smooth, curving surface as you think about it. Pain. Being hurt. The slap from the morning that still stings sometimes when you prod your tongue along your cheek, feeling the bite of prickled flesh where your teeth sliced through. Burning like an open ulcer when you rub against it. Or the ache in your shoulder from the recoil of the rifle.
Your jaw, when he stuck the sharp end of the blade he used to carve the buck up into your mouth and told you to suck—
Like last night. An itch in the back of your throat.
Or now—
His fingers shifting, rutting into the soft space between your thighs. A pinch. It stings—
Like something giving. Ripping. Tearing under his nails, the blunt, thick press of his fingers, as he coos above you (bleedin’ fer me, pup? Ain't you sweet—) and carves out a space barely wide enough for him to fit.
Little pains. Love taps.
And then—
Fractures.
And maybe that's the point of all this. A little piece of you is still mourning the little boy who woke up with a broken nose and a fractured jaw, splintered bones left to heal on their own, lopsided and wrong, laying next to the rotting mess of a deer he didn't mean to hit. The horror of that bleeds inside your chest, a raw wound—coloured in pity. Shaded in something that looks a little bit like kinship. Wrapped around each other. Known and unknown.
In that finite awareness comes supplication—but one with a caveat. An asterisk. You're giving in, but you know—a distant, sniveling thing—that he would have taken, anyway. Consent with a man like him, shaped and moulded by rot and decay, is like clammy lips clumsily pressing against the weeping, oozing maw of a doe—a sick father's kiss goodnight. Open up. Go on an’ give ‘er a kiss. It, too, comes with an asterisk.
A caveat.
Because consent here, in this dusty hayloft, is an abstract concept, isn't it? Can it even exist inside these parameters, this microcosm? Does a fly consent to be devoured by the flytrap after it grows weak from struggling against sticky sap, going limp on the tongue of its killer, unable to fight back.
Yours rest on the lapels of a quiet reluctance—an acquiescence drummed up against the understanding that this is happening whether you want it to or not. The maw will close and the sap will dissolve the fly into nutrients for the trap to spring anew again, waiting for another hapless bug to wander too close. And he will take you apart, unmaking you—undressing you—like the buck in the field until you're nothing but raw, bloodied flesh for him to consume.
And maybe you should be used to this by now. Being taken, used. Seen only as a receptacle for someone else to slake their hunger—be it desire or malice—on. They don't ask—they never do—but you suppose they don't have to.
The flytrap doesn't ask if it can devour the fly.
It's just—
(the buck in the scope. his voice in your ear. jus’ meat, s’all it is—)
Survival.
Everyone—everything—has to eat.
But you still nod. Let him guide you up into the loft. Say nothing when he grabs the knife he used on the buck, on you, and uses it to cut your clothes away before shoving you onto a makeshift bed of dried hay and stolen blankets, following you down with a deep, heavy groan when his knees crack against rotting wood.
Such a good lil' pup, ain't you?
And you nod, like a good lil’ pup, and welcome your master home.
s’where he belongs, he rasps in your ear before he consumes, presses his mauled mouth into your neck, sucking your flesh in between jagged teeth until blood vessels burst. an’ this is where you belong—
beneath him, on top of him. on your knees with your mouth wide open for him.
his to eat. to feed. to hurt. to soothe.
And it does hurt. He's too big, too broad. Fingers too thick when they split you apart, carving out a home in bruised, swollen flesh. His cock, too—that ugly looking thing he pulls out, sticky with sweat and burning to the touch, throbbing from where it falls, thick and fat, between his thighs. An angry looking thing that makes you want to recoil away from it, to curl into a ball and cry—
You think of the little boy again when he spits once more on your aching, burning cunt (stretched open on three fingers now, he tells you)—and try to ignore the mean, twisted way he coos about the blood turning such a pretty pink for him.
“My lil’ doe,” he rasps, his voice like ash. Eyes charred, cinder and soot, as he stares down at you.“Finally back in my bed—”
He doesn't give you a chance to turn the words over in your head. His hand grips your knee, and he tugs. Wrenches your thigh down, spreading you further apart as he settles in the gap with a huff, heaving like a bull. And it's an odd time to notice it, but as he slides between your thighs, one hand gripping your knee and the other squeezing the base of his cock, you're stuck by how big he is. Thick, too brawny. Body built in heavy layers of dense bone, slabs of muscle, and a thick pelt of fat and skin. You've never considered yourself to be small, but beneath him, splayed out like an offering, something to consume, you feel as tiny, as vulnerable, as a child.
You're not ready for this. Not prepared despite the three, pup fingers he shoved inside of you. The spit. The way he groaned into your neck when you'd clench tight around his knuckles adding more to the mess between your thighs. But you don't think it was enough. Not for him.
Not for this.
But like the hapless fly, there isn't much you can do to stop him when he shuffles forward, dragging the thick, impossibly thick, head of his cock between your folds, nudging them apart with blunt force and need. You think about asking for a condom, for a few minutes to gather your thoughts, anything at all to stall, but he's leaning down, spitting on skin where the fat, purpling head of his cock meets your hole, groaning at the sight of it because fuck, pup; this is what a man must see ‘fore he goes to hell, ain't it? Tha’ pretty lil’ cunt openin’ up for my fat fuckin’ cock—
He teases you there—an insistent pressure that pulls back before his thick glands can pop through—but all it does is feed into the growing knot in your belly, half of it fear, the rest trepidation. He's not a small man, and you're not even sure if you want something as hideous looking as his cock inside of you right now—ever, at all—but it's on the precipice of this dawning when the blunt, granite caress around your softened, sore flesh grows.
And you think it might be growing teeth and claws because it hurts. God, it hurts. More than you expected, than you prepared for. Anticipated. Aches like a broken bone. Like something inside of you ripping, changing shape. And that's exactly what's happening, you think, more than a touch delirious, when he pushes inside of you, sinking just the fat, leaking head of his cock between your folds, and into your swollen, tight—too fuckin’ tight, pup—hole.
You read stories about it. About a pinch. A squeeze. Then pleasure. Heat. A building crescendo.
But this—
It's more than a burn (a pinch, a squeeze). A stinging pain. Another shove—an inch, he say; jus’ one an’ you're already threatenin’ to strangle my cock—and something gives, breaking with a pop that you feel deep in your belly, like a fist to your navel, and he's in deeper, now. It's wetter, too, and feels like being torn in half. Like a wound with something inside of it. A sliver.
(A too big cock lodged inside of you. Sliding, stretching. Carving out a path in you that you're not even sure you want there anymore.)
Almost Half way there, he grunts, fingers digging into the sides of your knee. Palm slick, wet, and sliding over the drenched skin where the bend of your knee meets your calf and thigh; peeling away from the crease with a little noise: skin glueing to skin. It's hot. Too hot. You're aware of every inch of your body and how warm it is, and how everything—the rough, worn mattress; the pieces of dried hay—sticks to it. Touches it. Sensation dialed up too high until it edges sharply into overstimulation, into a prickling awareness of how vulnerable you are beneath him. Split apart around him.
His words too—almost half way there—echo in the room, in your head. Too loud in the wall of heat that presses down around you, reverberating through the sticky, slick humidity.
And when they sink through the thick molasses dripping inside your head, filling it up like rainwater in a pail, and needle in between the mantra of oh god it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, it hurts, you whimper. Catching on that one word like a stutter. A loop. Almost.
Almost half way there.
A whine bubbles up in the back of your throat, but it doesn't get very far because the blunt, stinging stretch thickens into a terrible, awful thing that makes you gasp—and it's this horrible sound: thready and high pitched, like a squeal. The air you sucked down trapping itself between your tongue and the whine still clawing at your flesh.
Your legs kick out against the thick, scarred muscles of his flexing thighs—an unconscious, uncontrollable thing, and he sinks his fingers deeper into the sides of your knee until it aches. A warning, maybe.
His voice is deeper. The cut of it is rounded, raw; a fist clenching tight around crushed asphalt and charcoal. Nearly deadly when he rasps come on, take it, pup.
You can't. Can't. Your eyes squeeze shut, tears bubbling in the corners. You'll never survive this, and god, you just want it to end. Want it to stop. It throbs like an infected tooth. The pain enough to make you sick—
But he groans, then, and your eyes slide open. Through the haze of tears, they fix on the face of the thing ripping you in half. Taking. Claiming, he'd said. Claimin’ what's mine. And that's what you are, aren't you? His. His little fly drowning in sap. A doe staring, wide-eyed, in the yellow glow of the headlights. His, but the way a dog belongs to man. Owned. Collared. His to eat, to feed. To fuck.
And he isn't a handsome man. Not even in the shadows, in the dark. But there's something about him when he sways above you, his hand slamming down onto the dirty floorboards beside your head, kicking up dust. Bathed in a fine mist of motes. Bowed over you with his pants pushed down his thighs, knees spread, bent. Hips working in quick, short jerks to sink deeper inside of you.
He's almost haunting to look at.
The hand above your head slides up until his elbow touches the wood. It brings him closer to you, his face only inches away. Sweats beads along his shorn hairline, and drips down his temple and the side of his face. Down his forehead, the bridge of his nose. His neck, too, when he pushes in deeper with a grunt, head tilting back slightly with a huff. Eyes dropping to his lashline like spilled ink across a page. Staring at you through heavy lids, gaze angled down the crooked arch of his nose.
No, you think; not handsome. Not even close. But—
Something.
Like looking at a painting of Goya’s in the gloom of a stormy evening. Everything darker, darker, and brutal.
Not pretty. Not nice, but—
Savage in the low light.
“Makin’ a mess o’me, pup,” he taunts, as if his sweat wasn't puddling on your face. Humid breath making your skin warm and sticky to the touch.
But before you can form any words, his mouth is on yours. Devouring. More of a feast than a kiss. All teeth and tongue; sharp nips. An eating—it feels like being eaten alive. Swallowed whole. Slurped up. His tongue pushes into all of the empty spaces in your mouth, curling and licking. Scooping up your taste in the cradle of his tongue, drawing it back into his mouth. Teeth clacking together when swallows you down. Throat shifting. Working.
And then he comes back more.
Your head spins, and spins, and he's huffing into the seam of your bruised, wet mouth. Gotta breathe, pup, and you reel back with a gasp, chest heaving. Dizzy.
“must’a never even been kissed before,” he growls into your chin, and it's not a question. Not really. But it doesn't matter, anyway. You don't have enough air in your lungs to answer him, and he's already distracting himself with the sweat dripping down your neck. It dissolves into ash when he ruts into you harder than before, more insistent. Eager. “Gotta open up f’me, pup. Come on.”
And you think impossible but he arches up, lifting off his forearm and back onto his palm. His hand bites the skin of your leg, bracing, gripping, and then he lifts it up until the top of your thigh is crushed against your chest. The other follows, and then so does he. Trapping your thighs between your bodies. Folding you nearly in half, ankles kicked over his shoulders.
It pushes him deeper than before, and it's too sudden. Too much. Your hands press against his chest, pushing. Shoving. A whine: get out, stop—
A snarl: “not pullin’ outta this cunt til I come, pup.”
His face twists with it. Painted with heavy, harsh lines of savagery and anger. It bleeds into his grip when he catches your wrists in his hand, both shackled by the clench of his knuckles, and pulls them over your head. Moving them up, up, until they're pressed hard against the floorboards.
It's reflective, muscle memory, when your fingers curl over his hand, squeezing tight. Leaching comfort from the man who hurts you, who is hurting you; sucking it up, drinking it down, like some rotten succor you can't make sense of until you realise that this must be why wound and wound are spelled exactly the same.
And you are, you think, wrapped around him; wound up like a ball beneath him. Clinging tight. Your ankles over his shoulder. The backs of your thighs pressed against the softness of his stomach and chest. The barely there tangle of patchy blond hair spilling out around heavy scars rubbing on your skin. And him, hunched over you, staring down at you. His hand closing tight over the crisscross of your wrists. Knees bent, spreading as he finds purchase in woodrot and dust. The flex of his hips as he finally, finally, sinks in as deep as he can go with a groan that sounds rougher around the edges than it did before.
The slap of skin on skin, of sticky thighs against a hairy, thick belly, when he peels away, pulls back, only to thrust harder, deeper. These little grunts he makes when he bottoms out. Your breath, reedy and thin, dampening the side of his face when he leans down again, and mouths along your neck. The sounds that spill out from between your aching thighs as he ruts into you, and the rumble of his voice in your ear, words accompanied by the hot, wet flick of a tongue slipping inside: hear tha’, pup? Your greedy lil’ pussy finally stuffed full, huh?
He sears sucking, biting kisses over your cheek, along your jaw, beneath your chin. Smearing sweat and spit over your skin, a little claim that you feel in the stutter of your pulse, in the throb of his cock lodged as deep as it can get inside of you.
It's a small distraction from the pain of being wrenched open, split apart, but nothing can really take away that overstuffed, too full feeling of having something so thick, so fat, bullying its way inside of you like a battering ram. Like fingers inside of an open wound. Raw and fractured and bruised. He says breathe, pup but that's impossible when you swear you can feel the width of his cock blunting against the hollow of your throat.
Breathe, and fuck, pup, lil’ pussy’s squeezin’ me so fuckin’ tight and ain't gonna last—been to fuckin’ long—
Eighteen years, he growls into your pulse, mad suddenly, like it's your fault. Like you did this to him. Gutted him, wounded him. Kept him away from such a sweet lil’ cunt, only ever letting him get a little taste when you'd walk by your window after a shower, or slip your fingers into the hem of your panties in the sticky heat of a mid-June night. Kept ‘em, he grunts; kept all the panties you tossed into the hamper after drenching them when you finally made yourself come. Pressed the damp gusset to his nose, and slipped under your sheets until the scent of you drove him to the brink.
O’madness, he says, and you try to make sense of his words, but it's hard to think, to breathe, when he keeps pistoning his hips into yours—or the white-hot burn he slides out until just the glands stretch you open, and then shoves his cock back inside, bottoming out in a way that felt like a slap. A slick, easy—so fuckin’ easy, pup—slide home.
This isn't—
It isn't pleasure, but it feels good the same way having your belly rubbed when you have a stomachache does. Soothing. A comfort.
Love taps.
The coarse, unruly hair around his groin, the jut of his cock, scrapes over your clit in a way that makes something hum under your skin, like pleasure wrapped in clingfilm; the ghost of it whispering across your nerves with each bone rattling, breath punching thrust. But it isn't the same as your fingers slipping under the hem of your panties at night. It's ecstasy as a function, like breathing after being winded, or blinking through tear-filled eyes.
Something forced and wrong and there, suddenly, despite the ache. A big, warm hand on your belly, soothing the hurt.
(and later, when he shoves your thighs apart and puts that wicked, mangled mouth on your sore, swollen cunt for the first time, you'll think back on this moment with envy, when the pleasure was slight and small; just this slowed, forced hush and not a deluge, a delight. a gift he gives you with ruined lips and a thick tongue.)
It isn't even really about you right now, and he tells you as much when he sinks his teeth into your cheek, huffing the muffled words out in a deep, brassy grunt. That it won't feel good for you—not until you get used to the heavy weight of his cock stretching you out. Can take it to the root without tearing, and staining his cock all pretty and pink. He'll make you bleed because he's just too big for you, too big and too thick, but you'll let him,
“won't you, pup?”
let him sink his big cock into your little cunt. Blood as lube, a pinky promise, as an oath:
“you’ll do it ‘cause y’er mine,” he says, and you feel the tickle of it—pretty pinked up slick—dripping from your stuffed, stretched hole and down the crease of your ass, pooling beneath you. A blood oath. “An’ I been waitin' too damn long to ‘ave you,”
he says your name, then. not pup, not mutt. not bird or doe. or the one you give to people who ask. but your name in your mother tongue. letters eliding under the thick push of an English palette, one unused to the slide of syllables in that order. the tonal shifts. the way it fits together and comes apart.
your name in a blood oath.
And then, in the soft eclipse of reluctant release, this small cataclysm that twists the kaleidoscope so hard, your vision turns back for a moment—an utter absence of light; a black hole eating away at the prism that houses everything you feel—before shuddering back into colour, into life, he buries his head into your neck with a groan, mouth wet with sweat and spit and the remains of your name, smearing it along your skin as he ruts into this sudden crisis of autonomy, one where your body yields first before your head follows.
Pleasure under a blanket. In clingfilm. Your cunt grips him tight in a sudden flurry; a paroxysm. He groans low and deep and ruinous into it, snarling at you about ‘ow good you milk his cock. Little cunt beggin’ for his come.
No, you think, and mean to shove him away despite the greedy flutter of your cunt thrumming with your release, refusing to let go, but your hands are still held tight in his grasp. Anchored to the floorboards. He lifts himself up as you whine, whimpering out a flurry of denials, pleads—please, pl-please don't; not inside, not-not inside—and swallows them down with a noise, one that sounds like anguish; like you've gutted him—
“What'd you think was gonna happen when you climbed into my truck?”
His hand is on your throat before another denial can fill the space he left behind. And it's—
Magic, maybe. The way everything dims around the edges, dulls into just the too fast thud-thump of your heart in your ears, the threadiness of your breath when it tumbles in a short huff. The weight of his palm on your jugular, the clench of his fingers curling around the arch.
They could meet in the middle, you think when his thumb and index finger settle beneath the curve of your skull, and it's a dizzying, heart-stopping thing to realise. The width of him. How much bigger he is compared to you—not just in size, not really, but in essence. A smouldering presence. A heavy weight anchored above you, around you. And that's what he is—just this big, warm body on top of you. Holding you down and taking—
Your body becomes this separate thing when he puts his hands on you. A familiar stranger, disjointed from your mind. Separated by fracture, a fissure, that splits you down the middle until your consciousness and flesh.
Until you're nothing but a bodily reaction to his whims; a fluttering, pulsing receptacle that takes what it's given, that comes undone again as he ruts you like a beast, fucking you harder and sloppier than before, chasing his own release inside of you.
A prisoner in flesh and bone, spread open beneath him even as the screams in your head get louder and louder—
“Fuck, m’gonna come, pup,” he's grunting, and it's awful, really, how eagerly this treacherous body tightens at the thought. “Gonna—”
The rest is swallowed down when he squeezes his hand around your neck, and dives down to slot his mangled maw across yours when you gape, gasping for air he won't let you have. More teeth, tongue. A sloppy, messy spill of mouths sliding across each other; wet, nipping flesh. He tastes sour. Bitter. Like milkweed and thistle. Tongue-dampened nicotine. It's gross, you think, but your tongue lolls out, and you swallow the taste of him down when he peels back until his crooked nose presses against the tip of your own, and spits.
You're just a body. Just a thing to be used. Consumed. Like the buck, the doe. The mouse under his heel.
A fly in a trap.
Just meat.
He drives into you harder, eyes narrowed into a pinprick as he works himself deeper, reaching places that make your belly churn. It hurts—this rough, too fast pace—but it's never really stopped hurting, has it? It just becomes something you learn to breathe around, like nails in your skin or a hand on your throat.
C’mon, he rumbles, and voice is just this frayed, brassy ball lodged in the thick of his throat. Torn. Fractured. A knot that unspools above you, inside of you. The shock of it, too, is electric. He's been so controlled, so contained, and seeing him unravel like this—steady, measured control knocked askew; asunder, all sharp edges and a clenching jaw, gripping hands—hums in your veins like victory, like pride.
The low roll of his voice over you. The harsh, hot breath against your cheek, the smear of his mouth, the press of his teeth through the torn cleft of his upper lip. Each hard, jerking thrust shoves you a little higher on the floor, elbows bending as the top of your head hits his thick wrist, hand still tangled around yours. The slow sink back down, into his lap; arms stretching taut above your head. Spearing you deeper into him, making you take just that much more of his cock.
Pain is a distant thing. Just a throbbing ache. Like a sore throat when you don't swallow. There, impossible to ignore, but bearable. Fucking him, taking his cock, is just this slow, steady acclimation into a tender bruise that only hurts when you think about it too much. Tender to the touch. A big stretch. A little sting.
And you're wet. Sticky and slick between your thighs, messy from spit, from blood, from the tearing, pulsing little releases that softened you up enough to where he slides inside of you easier than before, no longer that aching drag of skin on skin, but a smooth glide. A sick little shlick when he buries himself as deep as he can, knocking the air from your lungs.
“Gonna cum—” he snarls into your damp, sticky cheek, but sounds like stop me, a taunting thing in the nick of his teeth over your skin. “Gonna fill you up, pup, gonna—”
Everything feels liquid between your thighs. Molten. Toes numb. Fingers cold. More sensation than parts. Pieces. More an idea of a person than a tangible thing. Suspended between the bulk of his body and woodrot. A dusty hayloft.
Your feet dangle, swaying as he picks up speed. Losing control between your thighs as he snarls and grunts, uttering words of filth, promises, that make your heart stutter in your chest. Things like gonna keep you forever like this, pup and fuckin’ chain you to bed and gonna cum inside this pussy every-fuckin’-day—
Every muscle in his body seizes when he finally finds release, tensing up into a tight ball, a hard knot. His hands, too—around your wrists until your bones creak; your neck, vision blurring around the edges as black bleeds into the cracks. The gasp bubbles in your throat, but it's snuffed out by his palm. You try to move, but he's too big, too heavy.
The kaleidoscope dulls. Fear brims—
There's just ringing in your ears. The feeling of a body that can't do what you need it to. Your heart pulsing, echoing, inside your head.
You can feel him twitch. Feel his cock inside you, pulsing—
You think, sluggishly, of the body outside. The buck. The doe. That little fly in the trap, drowning in sap—
And then his breath comes out in a long, low hiss, and body melts, falling lax. You suck in a deep, wheezing gasp, air flooding your empty lungs so fast, it hurts.
He huffs, breath hot against your cheek. Voice low, a lazy, slurring rasp that trembles into a groan when his hips stutter along with his release.
“Don’t worry. I'm not gonna kill you yet, pup.”
Yet.
Something bubbles in the magellanic cloud misting across your consciousness—a prickle of unease, fear—brimming up, sparking through the dense spread of silt. A guidelight in the fog. But you don't reach for it, and instead watch it fall down into the abyss. Something to find later when your vision isn't as hazy, thoughts threadlike and loose, and hypoxia isn't teasing along your periphery.
He seems content to bask in the moment, breathing in the sweat gathered in the soft spot beneath your ear. Teeth grazing skin. Nose digging in hard enough to bruise.
Your head tilts, skull scraping against worn wood; gaze rolling towards the wide, open window of the loft where the night sky—a thing of beauty most nights: endless and wild—is shaded in a thick, heavy drape of a bruise; purple and smoke-tinged yellow. The moon is a needlepoint of colour in the sky, half-hidden behind swaths of smog.
You were expecting some sort of rebellion from the moon. That the golden-white glow would cut through the dense gloom and spill through the open window. Silken strands of light you could pretend to catch in your hands. An anchor. A guidelight. But something mournful lurches in your chest at the sight of her cloaked in smoke, hidden behind a veil.
And when he bites down on your neck, your eyes slip away, unwilling to watch the smoke billow beneath her; the flicker of orange from the wildfires in the distance brighter than she is tonight.
Tucked up against his chest on a thin, moth-eaten mattress, you doze.
And when you doze, you dream; and in your dream, there’s a lamb. She bleats through a deep, jagged cut slashed across her neck, hung up from the rafters to dry.
A tiny hole in her head weeps rivulets of brain matter and pretty pink blood, soaking into her dusty coat.
Her maw opens again, but instead of a cry, there’s a voice you barely recognize anymore spilling out of her wounded lips:
s’just a love tap, is all—
now, ‘ow ‘bout you get me a smoke?
"I should go."
The words are softer than the sharp snick that cuts through the room when he presses down on the ignition of the lighter, and for a moment, you wonder if he even heard you (and maybe a little hopeful that he hadn't), but they echo. Resounding around like a whimper. A hurt animal.
(And like the predator he is, he cocks his head towards the sound, eager for another meal.)
The apple of your ass aches when he digs his fingers in, sinking through dense layers of fat to push the tips cruelly into your tensing, aching muscles.
"Oh, pup," he's cooing against your whimpers, drowning them out with a soft, patronising tut as he peers down at you. Smoke leaks through the gaps in his teeth and pours out of the cleft in his lip. “I thought you knew—”
He snuffs the cigarette on the floor before dropping the butt next to the scorched ring of ash and burnt wood. Discarding it carelessly, unbothered as the scent of smoke and char fills the fills, simmering low beneath heady sweat and sex and him—wet pine and damp earth: soot and cinder. It’s hot inside the barn. The sticky, summer air clinging to your skin as the wildfires in the east loom—gotta leave soon, he murmured when you woke, hands reaching for the carton: gettin’ close—but your eyes are fixed on the crumpled cigarette.
And you knew, you think, despite the nausea that bubbles up, stomach churning, twisting over itself. The unease that cracks inside of you like a whip, all of the shattered pieces falling to the ground in a mocking flurry of hindsight. Of course, you knew.
You're not goin’ anywhere.
(in the morning, the mouse will be gone. nothing will remain except a disturbed smear of dust in an empty, crumbling house, and in the quiet hush of a pale, bruised dawn, you'll wonder if you made it all up inside your head.
he’ll stand in the living room, hands clenched around a sledgehammer, and tell you that he'll gut it. the barn, too. and he'll use the old bones of the rotting ranch to turn it into a little cottage in the pulsing pericardium of Manitoba. a place no one would ever bother to visit, bracketed by the smouldering ruins of a boreal forest that sets itself alight every spring: a baptism of fire; and the jagged trenches of rivers and lakes that mar the infertile soil.
he'll call it home, but it’ll sound like the dissolving carcass of the fly as its body is broken down into nutrients for the trap.
it’ll be a quiet surrender in the tangled thick of smoke. his fingers, nicotine-tinged and smeared with ash, will stroke along the collar around your neck, and you'll think about how quiet it really is when you can't hear the echoes of your ghosts.
you'll eat the buck. you'll wear his skin.
you'll breathe easier with Simon's hands around your neck.
and sometimes, when he touches you, you can even pretend that the pit in your belly is hunger, want, instead of the dread that doe must have felt when a broken little boy tucked her into bed at night, and gave her a goodnight kiss.)