All mine

There he was, arms like hanger steak padded on to bone, all gristle and muscle with snakes of throbbing veins warning of the tempest of blood that rushes to his hands gripping the ragged old fan belt he had hanging on his grease stained garage filled with rotting hamburger bits and dried cum.  He was pacing, forehead tight and wrought with overworked veins, beads of sweat desperately trying to cool a mind filled with rage. Jaw tight and flexed, hiding gnashing teeth and a tongue searching for the answer to life’s questions in the inside of his mouth: frantic, panicked.

“Why,why, why?” He kept asking the chair, the table, the beat up cheap plastic chandelier and fan combo barely able to turn, much less provide ventilation, as if it too, was cutting through the tension of the air.

He kept pacing, playing with the plastic belt, slack and tension dancing an all too familiar dance. His head was swiveling up and down, left to right, exploring all three dimensions of the air around it. Incensed by this, he wraps the fan belt around his head, from the top down to his chin, like a little oily, 5 o’clock bearded little Bo Peep. Then he started tugging, the sharp and ragged edges of the belt streaking red on his bare scalp and turning the sides of his head into its own personal railway.

“Mmm… hmm… urhmm,” was all that she could muster, lying slack at the corner of the little apartment. Her flimsy dress worn thin by years of hand washing was now soaking up the grime and month old piss that she sat on. She was wringing the front of her dress to a tight little ball wet with sweat and tears. The straps were taught with the effort of keeping the dress in one piece, digging into her shoulder blades which were colored like a two-day old eggplant: mostly violet, with a splash of green and mottled veins.

“You’re making me do this, you bitch,” He whispered. “I told you to wash the dishes after you washed the clothes, but what do I come home to?” His voice trembling, rising like the sea, crashing in a scream, “A sink filled with filthy dishes!”

If you were there, you would have sworn it was not a person he was castigating, but a stray cat, too frail from countless nights in the rain, eating only what the gravel, and other strong vermin, left for it to eat. All you could hear were quiet whimpers and labored breathing, as if the tension in the air made it more difficult to breathe, clawing at her trachea, drowning her in fear.

In a split second, the fan belt was slashing through the air, like bloody thunder crashing into her cheek, reopening a wound two weeks old that never got to heal because of the constant kind open palm slaps. A foul smelling mix of blood and clear fluid drained out of the wound, now two fresh channels of exposed flesh, the new path starting as white snow, only to perspire beet colored blood.

“You’re making me do this!” He screamed as he cocked back for another blow. “You should listen! Everything I tell you is simple! Are you really that dumb?” He belts out as he lashes once more. Aiming for her legs, which have countless scars in different states of healing, making her once creamy skin look like an archipelago of long, keloidal mountain ranges, fresh new wounds, a kaleidoscope of bruises and smaller islands of dried, caking scabs.

Lash, after lash, after lash. Like a familiar love song she hears on the radio when the DJ plays old classics in the dead time of the afternoon, she knew the beat, rhythm and rhyme of this activity. He got like this every time he felt guilty of something, lately, it’s that whore dispatcher from the job he has on the new construction site. His twelfth job this year.

She isn’t stupid. In fact, when they first got together, people frowned upon her decision to hitch her blooming office career to his down and forgotten star.

But from the first moment they kissed, she knew, she knew deep down, that she had to have him. That she’d face hell and high water to be with him. He needed a part of him.

A part of him.

Just a little part of him.

And that’s what she got.

As he was lashing him, a steady, perfected process that is second nature to him, she tripped him, and let him fall to the shearing scissors she was hiding. The scissors were those you would normally see in sweat shops; big, solid that makes short work of thin leather. As he fell forward, the scissors punctured the top center part of his abdomen, piercing the lungs and heart in an upward angle.

She held her tight in a soft, calming embrace, running her free hand through his hair, staring deeply into his fading eyes, listening as you would an old classic, for his last dying breaths… and she kissed him. Deeply, as though she wanted his life to be transferred to her body through one kiss.

“I’ve loved you, ever since I met you. I know I never could survive without you,” she whispered lovingly as she turned the scissors around, warm blood sputtering from the gaping hole she’s created, the resistance of his innards a feeling in her hands that reminded her of mixing together a nice dough for sourbread. “I could have taken the beatings, in fact, I have. I loved the pain, and the pleasure we share afterwards,” the life was leaving him now, fleeting electrical impulses sent out by a panicking body the only thing keeping him alive. “Don’t die on me, not just yet,” she said as she forced him to look at her.

“But you should’ve known… I never liked to share.”

And with that, she lost the love of her life.

But she knew, that she still couldn’t live without him. That she wanted, nay, needed a part of him to survive… just a little part.

---

“Damn, McGregor, I’ve seen some crimes of passion, but not like this,” said the grizzled detective to his youngish partner.

“The perp sure did a number on this fella, sir. Even forensics would have a hard time piecing this guy back together.”

“Not even the king’s men can put back this Humpty Dumpty.”

---

Far into the forest she walked. Dazed, hungry, thirsty, her feet proving to be no match for the terrain of the woods. But she didn’t care, she was stroking him, his best parts, tied to a string like a necklace, like a sick pendant, his severed dick and balls.

“I don’t like to share, I don’t like to share,” people say they hear a woman’s voice hum those words over and over again, hiking in the forest that ate her whole.