deathpixie | NanoWrimo - 30 short stories

She's early tonight.

I listen to the sound of muffled voices, hers still sleepy and languorous through the layers of floor boards and ceiling plaster, answered by a curt bass rumble. It brings to my mind thoughts of the growling of wild beasts and distant thunderstorms. There's the scrape of high-heeled shoes against linoleum, telling me she's gone into the kitchen; I picture her long pale hands lifting a glass to lips the colour of bruised plums. The image catches my imagination, teases it with hints of sooty long-lashed eyes and the barest whiff of perfume - nothing sweet or flowery, but musk and spices. Those long hands tipped with the same deep red-purple as her lips. Blood plum.

The deep voice cuts across my nascent fantasy, shredding it like so much mist. There's the thud of heavy footsteps vibrating through my ceiling, the squeak of bedsprings - he's a man of action, this one - and her low laugh. Perhaps she's had the same thought, made the same internal joke; great minds thinking alike. I wait for her to tell him to take his leave, to deny him what he so easily assumes is his, as I would do, but instead there's another scrape of shoes, another laugh… and then the squeaking of the bedsprings intensifies, takes on a rhythm echoed by the pounding of my heart in its frail cage of bone and skin. Fine white motes drift down from the ceiling under the force of their fucking - I cannot call it lovemaking, there's no love to be found, only need and domination - and I reach for my book. It's a second-hand Ian Fleming paperback; tales of bravado and courteous assassination.

The pain grumbles and mutters inside me like that distant storm, that hungry beast, that deep voice, but it's not time for the pills yet. I try to lose it and myself in the musty pages of my book, trying to flee memory by means of a fictional car chase: James Bond to my rescue. But for once 007 seems to have met his match, my mind occupied with the phantom teeth gnawing at my nerves, the long slow burning seated in my spine. Then the noises upstairs slow, cease, punctuated by a grunt, and he is up, leaving, the door thudding behind him.

She is mine again.

I track his heavy tread down the narrow stairway and past my ground floor door, out into the street, before I lean back, Ian Fleming's golden boy forgotten. It's not surprising she's slow to move, after he's gone. So much force… I can picture the red welts rising on her pale skin, the marks of fingers staining her smoothness with a mockery of the plum smearing her lips. I wish I could be there, wipe the sweat and traces of his touch from her skin.

Instead it is me with my book and the traces of plaster dust smeared across the bedside table.

NanoWrimo - 30 short stories

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