Saturday, March 16, 2013

Blade Queen, part 2


I got her name out of her: Lily Weiss. It’s a stupid-sounding name if you ask me, and I have no clue why I even bothered getting it out of her. But yeah, her name is Lily Weiss, and she’s twenty-five—four years older than me. God, she’s polluted the world with her stupid for far too long. Something too stupid to realize that being killed is supposed to be a bad thing that you don’t want should’ve just been put out of its misery at the first opportunity. Actually, maybe that’s it; maybe she actually realizes how stupid she is and knows that the world just shouldn’t be subjected to that kind of stupidity anymore. Maybe that’s why she’s so okay with me killing her.
            Anyway, you’re going to want to shoot me for being such a jackass when I tell you this, but I actually climbed down in that stupid ditch to cover the miserable bitch up with the sweatshirt I stole off that guy I got the other day. I just wanted to kill her myself instead of letting the cold steal my victim.
            But if that’s the case, why didn’t I just smother her in the damn sweatshirt?
            My god, what a jackass I am turning into!

***
           
I woke Lily’s miserable ass up earlier this morning. “Look what a jackass you’ve turned me into,” I snapped at her. “You know you’ve turned me into a jackass if I let you live to see the morning.” She just blinked stupidly at me and said, “I see. I…appreciate you letting me live this long, I suppose.” For fuck’s sake! I knew exactly what she was up to and there was no way in hell I was going to let it happen. I grabbed her by her ugly blonde ponytail. “Just because I let you live this long doesn’t mean you should expect me to let you out alive, little girl,” I told her. “The only way you’re getting out of here is in death.”
            “I know.”
            Son of a bitch.
            She’s scared, that’s what’s going on. I scared the poor little bimbo out of her mind and she’s come down with fucking Stockholm syndrome. Ha. Ha. Ha.

***
           
I fed Lily nothing but a very minimal supply of berries for breakfast. I told her it was too damn bad if they turned out to be poisonous, it would just get the job done more effectively if they were. I don’t know why I said that. I also don’t know why I chose to feed her the berries I knew damn well weren’t toxic. I eat those things for breakfast every morning, for Chrissake.
            “Thank you so much,” she said, before digging in like it was a feast for a queen. She didn’t even seem to be thinking over the possibility that I might’ve been poisoning her right then and there. Pathetic, pathetic, pathetic!
            After she finished the five or six berries, she had the audacity to come over to me and ask me my name. My better nature told me to push her down, or kick her in the stomach, but for some reason I didn’t listen to my better nature. Instead, I just told her my name. “Blade Queen.”
            “Oh, because of that blade you carry?”
            Wow! “No, I’m named that because I shit razorblades.”
            She laughed.
            People this dumb just shouldn’t be allowed to exist. I narrowed my eyes and said, “Girl, you’re really beginning to piss me off. You get back in that ditch and stay away from me for the rest of the day, and you might get to see one more morning. Might.
            She nodded. “Okay.” As I headed back to the tent, I watched her head back to the ditch. It made me laugh. That’s the only thing stupid people are good for, making people laugh.

***

            I really am a jackass.
            I told Lily to stay away from me after breakfast because of her stupid-ass laughter. The thing is…I liked it. Okay, I said it: I liked it. I sent the bitch away from me because there was no way in hell I would ever admit to liking the way she laughed at my stupid razorblade comment.
            Why did I like it? Just…why? I mean, I hadn’t actually heard the sound of laughter—except for my own, of course—since I ran off, three years ago, and back when I heard it I hated it. It was an annoying sound, a terrible sound that wormed its way into my ears and perpetually bounced off the insides of my head, never exiting. I’d cover my ears to block it out, but it never worked. The sound would linger on, signaling me to the happiness of others, happiness I never felt and never would feel. I didn’t learn to laugh until I ran off and got away from that disgusting waste of space others called my father, and away from the morons at the schools. I laughed after particularly glorious kills, imagining the victim to be my father or my mother or one of the assholes at school—this was the first time I’d ever felt the kind of happiness that brought forth laughter.
            I loved the sound of my own laughter for this reason: I had only just learned to very recently and it gave me a sense of accomplishment to hear my own laughter. I went through my life suffering the laughter of others and being completely unable to laugh myself. However, there was something about Lily’s laughter, something about the sound of another’s laughter after years of only ever hearing my own…I hate this! It doesn’t make sense! None of this makes sense! Or maybe it makes so much sense that…that…
            Oh dear god. I need to hurl. Now!

***

            I didn’t hurl. I’m probably gonna later on, but I was saved this time around. I ran down to the creek and wretched for about four or five minutes, and when nothing came up I headed in the direction of the tent.
            My better nature was telling me to go back to the tent and leave well enough alone, but it seemed like today something was fighting my better nature for the very first time. I hated it. I absolutely hated it. I hated the unknown, unseen force that was prying me away from the tent and dragging me down to Lily’s ditch instead. What do I even need to come around here for?! I wondered as the feet that weren’t mine—couldn’t have been mine—carried me to the edge of the ditch. I peered over the edge, and there was Lily, the source of my misery for the day.
            She was damn lucky I had given her that sweatshirt to cover up with. Even with the sweatshirt, she was shivering like a wet dog, and she was just lying there and letting herself shiver. She wasn’t crying or whimpering or anything else I had learned to expect from victims; she wasn’t even tossing and turning. She wants to die, I said to myself. She shows no regard for herself at all, and is probably training herself to embrace death. I knew people like that existed, but I had never gotten a single victim like that. Not in my entire time out here in the woods.
            There’s a full moon out tonight—those big, white moons that give me the only joy I know in life besides killing. The rays illuminated Lily’s face, which was as milk-white as the moon itself. How could anybody be so pale? I wondered. She’s like a ghost, for Pete’s sake. Her blonde hair turned pale silver in the light of the moon. Her lips looked pinker and had flecks of cream here and there. Her milky skin and the moonbeams seemed to blend with eachother. I have no clue why I stood there and stared at her long enough to be able to write this description.
            I found myself forced to admit that she was a pretty little thing. Not pretty enough for me to want to have my way with her, but still a pretty little thing, nonetheless. The moment I thought this, I figured the moonlight must have been getting to me and I really had to get back to the tent to regain my senses. I shook my head, trying to clear the lunacy from it, and finally headed to the tent to let the moonbeams play on my own skin. They turned my ebony to a polished-looking onyx, like that of a statue or monolith, and I liked it that way. In a way, I was a monolith to this forest. I was a legend.

***
           
Lily was up before me this morning.
I left the camp to grab some more berries this morning and returned to find that my usual breakfast spot was laid out with all these crazy plants and berries. Half of them were inedible and many of them were actually poisonous. I hate to admit, though, that the layout was very decent. There was even a fucking floral centerpiece, for crying out loud; a fruity little arrangement of pink and yellow creek flowers sitting dead center on my eating rug. I know I’m calling it fruity now, but at the time that newly-formed annoyance inside of me—the one that forced me to feed her those berries, and made me check on her at the ditch last night, and refused to let me just give her the good beating she deserved—was going on about how many pains she must’ve taken to arrange this. It doesn’t matter, you idiot! I told that annoyance. It’s all toxic! So that’s what her game has been this whole time—she’s trying to kill me before I kill her! This made me absolutely furious. Nobody did Blade Queen in! Blade Queen was immortal, dammit!
And there was no way in hell the queen of blades, the queen of the forest, would be done in by some little, ghost-white blonde bitch!
I smelled burning meat, and followed the scent to find her trying to cook this huge-ass slab of deer over my carefully constructed cooking oven. Oh god, she was trying to poison me and she was stealing my meat!  That was it! In a second I was on her, pinning her down like a panther about to feast. I forgot about how much I liked her laughter. I forgot about everything I felt while I was checking on her last night. I couldn’t give her anymore freebies. I couldn’t keep her alive a second longer. I had to kill her.
I withdrew my blade and pressed it to her neck just as she said, “Oh…good morning.”
Good morning, my ass!  “I’ve figured your game out, little girl,” I told her. “Let me tell you, I am immortal. There is nobody in this world—nobody—that will end my life before I end theirs. I am the deathbringer. I am the grim reaper. Your attempts to poison me are absolutely futile, and now that I know your game, I must do away with you. You’ve lost any shred of respect I might’ve had for you.”
“Poison you? I’m not trying to poison you. I’m not trying to poison anybody.”
“Bullshit!” I pressed the blade deeper in, hard enough to draw the first blood. I pressed my lips to the wound and licked it up. She didn’t wince from the pain. She didn’t move. She didn’t speak. She was completely ready to die. “I know these woods, and half of those plants you so generously laid out for me would kill me in a few hours. You think I’m too stupid to know that?! These woods are my home, you moron!” There was more blood, which I licked up.
“Well, I don’t know these woods,” she said. “And I didn’t know they were poisonous. It was not my intention to poison you, and if you’ll let me go for one second I’ll clear them all out.”
Now she was fighting for her life. She was finally making an attempt to put off her death. “What’s the matter with you?” I asked her. “You wanted to die before. What changed your mind? You’re not getting away, if that’s what you think.” “I still don’t mind dying,” she told me. “But you don’t want those toxic berries around your eating area, I’m sure.”
“Are you being a smartass, girl?”
“No.”
I removed the blade, savoring just a bit more of the blood. “Go clean my spot up and come back to me.”
“Okay.”
I tended to the deer meat while she did that. She’d been cooking it all wrong. I know her game now…

Friday, March 15, 2013

Lynn's Trip, part 2


There were three houses, and they all looked pretty much the same. There was no way for me to tell which housed the crazy rednecks and which housed the friendly farm folk. Besides, I had no earthly clue what I was supposed to say. I’d gotten lost once before, when Erma made a wrong turn while we were heading to a Shinedown concert. But we had our cell phones then, and called a friend who knew the area. I was an idiot and didn’t take my phone to the birthday party. Goddammit, I cursed myself, the one freaking time I don’t take my phone with me, something like this happens! I wondered if this was some kind of punishment for forgetting my phone.
For a long while, I screwed around in my head with possible things to say, until I realized I was making a big deal out of nothing and only had to ask if they knew the way back to Turnersville. If any of them turned out to be a crazy, gun-toting redneck, I’d do my best to haul ass before he could shoot me.
I walked up to one of the dusty front porches, rang the doorbell, and crossed my fingers behind my back. I tried to listen for sounds that indicated the guy was getting a gun, and then realized there wasn’t even any sign of anybody being home. No lights were on, no cars were parked in the front, and everything was so unnaturally silent. This was true for all three of the houses. But Al had said there were people in them…but how was I so sure he wasn’t trolling?
Just as I was thinking this, the door opened so abruptly that I jumped. The occupant of this house was a short, stout man with black frizzy hair and a thick black moustache. He reminded me of Super Mario. Before he could ask me who the hell I was, I instantly began to speak. “Hello, sir,” I said. “I’m really, really sorry to bother you, but I’m really lost. I’m from Turnersville. Do you know where that is? Is that anywhere near here at all? Can you please tell me how to get back to Turnersville?”
The whole time I’d been babbling, the guy just stood there and played with the tip of his moustache. He made no move to interrupt—I’d been talking so fast that I expected him to say, “Whoa, slow down.” But he didn’t speak until I’d said my piece. “Tur-ners-ville? Never heard of it.” Then he closed the door in my face.
It was then that I realized exactly how far from home I must have been; I was in a world where the statues moved and talked, for Pete’s sake! I wasn’t only far from home, I was far from the normal world! How is this possible?! I thought. How is this happening? “I’m dreaming! I’m dreaming!” I cried out in desperation to nobody. I didn’t know what to do next. I hadn’t even left the Mario guy’s porch yet. I stumbled around frantically, acting as if I meant to go somewhere or do something, but I was unable to figure out what it was I had to do or where it was I had to go. Finally, I just threw myself down on that guy’s porch and bawled my eyes out. I thought of Mel, Erma, and Sunita and how furious I’d been with them for dumping me. My fury subsided upon realizing it was impossible for them to have dumped me in a place like this—I’d somehow gotten away from them during the time I’d been passed out. I thought over stories I’d read about dimensional rifts, blips in time, and transport to other worlds. They were all fiction, or at least I thought they were. Who’s to say the stories we pass off as fiction aren’t based on personal experience, but outed as fiction because they sound so unbelievable? I didn’t know what I believed anymore! I just knew I’d have given anything to see one of the girls I’d been so pissed at not too long ago. I’d have given anything to see any of my friends! I’d have given anything to see my guy, Dirk!
I heard the Mario guy say, “Hey, lady? You all right, lady?” I hadn’t heard him open the door to come out, I’d been bawling too loudly. I must’ve looked like the world’s most pitiful human being right then, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to go home, rest off the party in my own bed, and watch House with Dirk.
The Mario guy went back in the house, and returned with a thin terry cloth rag, which he held out to me. “Wipe yer tears, lady,” he said in a scratchy voice, “and we’ll figure out what’s to be done about ya.”
I really didn’t like the sound of those words, but I took the rag and cleaned up my face anyway. I was beginning to feel gross from all the snot. “Th…thanks,” I stammered. I balled up the cloth in my fist and glared at the guy, wondering what he was going to do next. If necessary, I would strike him.
“’s that better now?” the man asked.
“Yeah…” It was a bullshit answer.
He patted my head. “Now come on inside and we’ll see what we can do for ya.”
I didn’t like the idea of going in that old farmhouse with that scratchy-voiced dwarf at all. I felt it would’ve been just asking for trouble. “N…no!” I stammered. “No! I…just remembered where I have to go! I gotta head out…I think I have a friend waiting for me!” If he could tell I was scared, I didn’t care.
He seemed to accept my answer. “All right, now. You take care of yourself, girl. You’re a right pretty little bird.”
Ew! “Right,” I said, rising to my feet. “Bye.” I speed-walked off that porch and back down the dirt road in the direction I came from. I may have been bullshitting about knowing where I had to go, but I hoped the part about the friend wouldn’t turn out to be bullshit too.
Please still be there, Al! I silently pleaded. Please! 

Friday, March 8, 2013

Lynn's Trip, a whole new kind of Wonderland tale: Part 1


I didn’t ask for any of it. In fact, if I had my way, I would forget it happened altogether. But I just can’t forget it; I close my eyes every night and there it all is, from beginning to end. Since I don’t want it to screw up my dreams, I usually get it to go away by thinking of beer commercials, or what happened on NASCAR the night before, or my guy. But the memory never completely leaves me; it’s right back in my head again the next night, or even at random moments throughout the day.
            So, much as I’d like to, I guess I’ll never be able to completely forget the zany mess I went through after Mel’s birthday party two weeks ago. I suppose you just can’t forget something like that. It was an adventure, though. A real adventure. I don’t know too many people who can honestly say they’ve had a real adventure. So I figured hey, since I can’t just forget about it and pretend it never happened, I might as well write the whole thing down…

***
My best friend Mel is as much of an alcoholic as I am. Every birthday, she seeks out a new bar in hopes that each one will have better booze than the one last year. Sometimes she succeeds, and we get to spend the night drinking ambrosia like gods. Sometimes she fails, and we’re forced to get by on distilled monkey piss. But no matter how good or bad the bar of the year is, it’s my annual duty to take the stands as her birthday drinking sidekick.
I must’ve gone a little overboard this year, because it’s the first year I’d ever drunken away the ability to walk. Mel and Erma—both drunk enough themselves, but not to my level—both had to shoulder me out at the same time while our designated driver started up the car. But try as they might, I still slid off their shoulders and hit the ground the moment we exited the bar. I don’t remember what happened after that; I was out cold.
I woke up the next day feeling like one of those cartoon characters that get their heads smashed with anvils. I was still on the ground, on my back and looking straight up at the sky, and I was pissed at the girls for just leaving me there. It didn’t take too long for the all-too-familiar feeling of my stomach going into reverse to force me off my back, though. I spewed all over the ground in front of me, wiped my mouth with a wet-nap I’d gotten from the bar, clutched my head, and moaned. Then I staggered to my feet and reached into my dress pocket for the quarters I’d thrown in there before the party, in case of a situation when using the bar’s single pay phone would be in order. I was relieved to find that nobody had picked my pockets while I was out.
It was only right then, as I had finished up checking my pockets for the coins and was imagining all the cussword-littered phrases I would holler at Mel over the phone, that I realized I wasn’t in front of the bar anymore.
“What the hell?” I examined my surroundings the best I could with a throbbing head. I had no earthly idea where I was anymore, but it looked like one of those dusty-meadow-type places I see when I go visit my friend Justin way out in the countryside; wide, grassy farmland and little ramshackle houses scattered here and there. It was the kind of place where you run into two kinds of people: overly-friendly farming types (like Justin) or crazy rednecks. I was livid. Obviously the girls had decided to take advantage of me the one time I’d drunken myself out cold, and they just piled me into Sunita’s car and dumped me out here in hick town. I was more furious than any had ever seen me and probably ever would, and I swore to myself that if I ever laid eyes on either one of them again I would beat their ass then and there. “Goddammit, goddammit!” I hollered, kicking the ground in front of me to punctuate each cuss. I spun around and blindly kicked something behind me—some kind of old-timey Greek statue of some sort—before I leaned over and spewed again after my stomach decided to protest my outburst.
That’s when this gravelly voice out of nowhere said, “Look, lady, I don’t know why you’re so fired up, but there’s no need to kick other people about it. Go and kick the guy who pissed ya off, will ya?”
I stumbled backwards, landing on my ass, like a cartoon character. “I…what?” I blinked a few times just to clear the haze and all. I’d watched enough TV to know what was going on here: my hangover was so bad that I was hearing talking statues. I never hallucinated during a hangover before, but I’ve hallucinated while drunk many, many times. Oh, well. What else was there for me to do but talk back until I snapped out of it?
“Sorry,” I said, just as casually as if I were at work and a talking statue asked to find a book the library didn’t have in. “I really needed something to kick and I didn’t know you were…you know, animate.”
“I can see up your dress.”
Whoops. I was pretty…sprawled out at the moment. “Look harder, you might see something real interesting,” I said, closing my legs and sitting up on my knees.
“Don’t flatter yourself, girl. You’re not my type.”
“Too fleshy for you, am I?” As fun as it was trading smartass remarks with a statue, I really wanted to know where the hell I was. But I didn’t think my hangover-induced hallucination would be able to answer that.
The statue asked, “You want something to stop that vomiting?”
“Yes, please,” I replied. I’d have given anything to get my stomach to stop churning, even if I was only imagining that it stopped. “And can you get me something for my head too? It feels like an elephant stepped on it.”
So that’s when the statue stepped off of his pedestal—one foot, then the other—and walked off, presumably to get some Tylenol or something. He was surprisingly fast for how I’d have imagined a statue to move; I figured all that stone would weigh him down, I guess. But he moved with the same walking speed as a human, making the sound of two stones rubbing against eachother as he did so. I clutched my head with both hands and waited patiently for the imaginary Tylenol.
I didn’t have to wait too long before I heard the rubbing-stone sound that marked his return, though I was a bit surprise that I still hadn’t come off it yet. He held a flask of some clear, bubbling liquid in his right hand. “Aw, no,” I said, “I don’t need alka-seltzer. Did you bring me anything for my head too?”
The statue leaned way down—more stone rubbing on stone—to hand me the flask. “I don’t know what alka-seltzer is,” he said, “but this should do the trick if you drink it down.”
Well, if you can’t trust your hangover-induced hallucinations, who can you trust? I took the flask and gulped the fizzy stuff down, much as I really hate having to one-gulp anything that fizzes; the bubbles went up my nose and the fizz burned my throat, so that when I finished I was coughing. Still, I managed to splutter out, “Thanks.”
To my astonishment, both my headache and my stomachache disappeared as if I never even had them in the first place. Oh, good, I thought, I’m finally coming off it. I looked up, expecting to see the statue back in place on his pedestal, looking down at me with the cold, stony—and rather condescending, I always thought—eyes that were becoming of a statue. But instead, what I saw was the statue twisting his upper torso back and forth—producing those rubbing sounds with each twist—like I do when stretching for the gym. He was looking down at me like I was something really interesting he was examining under a microscope.
My first instinct, of course, was to back away and run screaming down the dirt road. But that would make me look like a pussy, and what good would that do? So instead, I just said as casual as could be, “This isn’t a hangover-induced hallucination, is it?”
“No, it isn’t.”
“So you’re really talking to me, and moving around and everything?”
“I don’t see what’s so offbeat about that.”
“Oh my god.” I pressed my palm to my forehead and shook my head. “Where the hell am I?”
“Obviously not anywhere familiar to you,” the statue replied.
“Obviously.” I stood up, shook my head again, and handed the empty flask to him. “Do you have a name?”
He returned to his pedestal and stood with one hand on one hip. “Doesn’t everybody have a name? Do they not have names where you’re from?”
“Of course they do,” I said, momentarily contemplating the absurdity of not having a name. “But where I’m from, if a statue has a name it’s carved into its pedestal, and I see that’s not the case with you. Oh, and by the way, the statues don’t talk and move where I’m from, either.”
The statue shook his head. “Well, then, so far I don’t like the sound of where you’re from. So, if they have names where you’re from, then what’s yours?”
“I asked you first!” I said. “Oh, fine. My name is Lynn. Lynn Falkbridge. Now what’s yours?”
“Alowicious Albert Edmonton Mumford III.”
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” I said. “I hope you’re okay with me just calling you Al.”
The statue nodded. “That’s fine.”
So we were finally getting somewhere. “All right, Al,” I said, as polite as could be. “Now, can you please tell me where I am?”
“I can tell you that,” Al said, nodding. “You are in Hickory Dickory Hamlet.”
Aw, shit. Now that stupid nursery rhyme would be stuck in my head all damn day. “Is there any relation to Hickory Dickory Dock?” I asked, chuckling at my own reference, which is what I do when I really hope somebody gets my reference. But unfortunately, Al didn’t get it. “Not that I know of,” he replied. I couldn’t see where else they would get “Hickory Dickory” from. “Is everybody here a statue, then?” I asked. I glanced at the shacks dotting the meadow and imagined crazy redneck statues bursting out of them, brandishing stone clubs and screaming at people to get off of their property.
“I’m the only statue around here, Al said, which really ruined my funny mental image.
“So, did somebody build you,” I asked, “or do the statues around here all have little statue babies?” I’m not even going to touch upon the mental image that gave me. Al rolled his stony eyes at me. “Somebody built me, of course,” he said. “But don’t ask me to remember who it was.”
“Was it somebody in one of those houses over there?”
“I don’t rightly know, Lynn Falkbridge.” Al returned to his original position on the pedestal. “If you want to know about the people in those houses, why don’t you go over there to those houses and ask them?”
I looked over at the shacks again. “Because I don’t exactly want to go knock on some random guy’s door without knowing whether or not the random guy has a shotgun,” I told him matter-of-factly.
“Well, then,” Al said, “I’ve given you all the information I have, and I can’t give you anything else.”
“Well then at least give me one of your arms to use as a shield if you expect me to go over there and as those people for help.” I was only half joking, and also half wondering if statues like Al could feel pain from being shot. “How do you handle being shot?” I asked him.
He gave me a snarky but for the most part good-natured grin. “I’m not letting you test it out,” he said. I could tell he was half joking too. I said, “Oh, boo, you’re no fun. Well, here’s hoping I don’t run into any crazy hicks, then. I guess I’ll be seeing you.” Though the truth was, I didn’t actually plan on seeing him again. I just wanted to know where I was, so I could figure out how to get home to holler at the girls.
Al gave me one of those cheesy fake salutes. “I guess so, Lynn Falkbridge,” he said cheerfully. Then he reached out and patted me on the back—a surprisingly delicate gesture. I saluted him back and began heading down the dirt road, towards the hick houses. For such a smartass, Al was a pretty nice guy. I usually get along the best with smartasses, anyhow.
How many people can honestly say they’ve met a statue who was a pretty nice guy? 

Blade Queen, the Story of a Monster: Part 1


There is nothing I adore more than the smell of blood!
            Have you ever experienced the smell of fresh blood? No? Well, you’re really missing out. But if you ever get to experience it someday (and we all know you won’t, because you don’t have the balls to do what it takes to get the experience), you’ll see that it smells just like a combination of tarnished metal and sweet red liquor. Delicious!
            Well, my blade just so happens to be covered in that lovely liquid right now. Yum! Pardon me while I indulge.

***

            Aw man, that guy’s blood really sucked. But I got a new sweatshirt off of him, so he wasn’t completely useless. The rest of him went into the Pit with the rest of them.
            I know exactly what you’re thinking: “Who is this psycho licking some guy’s blood off a blade?” Well, maybe where you come from, I am a psycho. Maybe in your stupid, sheltered, frilly-fluffy little world of bullshit, I am crazy, sick, psychotic, deranged, demented, and a monster. But guess what? I’m not from where you’re from. I don’t live in your world, and I don’t follow its rules. I live in my world, and I make the rules. I am the queen, ruling my world with my sharpened, blood-stained blade. And that’s who I am: Blade Queen, the queen of my world, the queen of blades, and the harbinger of death. If you enter my world, you will die. If I like your stuff, you will die naked and empty-pocketed. If I like the way you look, you will die pleasuring me.
            You’re probably going, “Bullshit, nobody’s parents would name their kid Blade Queen.” Well, aren’t you so fucking observant? Do you feel proud of yourself for reaching such a perfectly clever conclusion? So even though this is really none of your goddamn business in any way, shape, or form, I will tell you who I was before I was Blade Queen: Rebekah Hearst. But I’m not her anymore, so if I ever catch you calling me that, you should not expect to keep your spinal cord for very long. In fact, now that you’ve managed to badger that kind of personal information out of me, I’m a little pissed off at you. You’d better go away for a while, before I’m forced to do something that just might involve my blade and your throat.

***

            It’s my twenty-first birthday, whoohoo.
            I shall celebrate with a little moonshine. Normally, that shit is deadly, but not to me; I’ve been playing with the stuff for a long enough time to develop the balls for it. I started in high school, and was expelled when I decided to head into the girl’s bathroom after hours to do some brew work. If you ask me, it’d taken way too damn long to get me out of that hellish place. No, I will not talk about high school anymore; you already got enough goddamn information out of me.
            Here’s to three years of birthday moonshine and cake from the flesh of my victims, and to a hundred more. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to be so wasted that I won’t even have a mind anymore for the rest of the day.

***

            Holy shit, do I ever feel very goddamn pathetic right now.
            Give me a minute, will you? I feel like too much of a jackass to write about what just happened right now.

***

            All right.
            So I was minding my business rolling up a smoke by the creek, and heard some rustling around in the leaves. Around here, that means I’ve got some fresh meat coming my way. I spit-shined my blade and headed off to deal with the intruder the way I deal with all of them (and I was pretty PO’d at this particular intruder, because the bint interrupted my smoke, so I was not going to go easy on them in any way, shape, or form).
            I placed myself in a suitable hiding place among the trees and got a good look at my victim: a pale little blonde girl screwing around in the brush right next to my campground, looking around with this oh-dear-me-I-am-so-very-lost expression. The extra-stupid ones are always the most amusing—they’re the ones who always start screaming and crying about how they only lost their way and please just let them find their way back and they’ll surely never come around here again oh they promise with all their heart that they’ll just be on their way. Their expressions before they’re put out of their misery are priceless.
            I took a good hard look at this little blonde mid-twenties bitch and imagined the face she’d make while she was dying; some people made “Aaaah” faces, some people made “Ohhh,” faces, some cried, some just widened their eyes and stayed that way after the kill…this girl looked stupid enough to be an “Ohhh” face, or perhaps she’d die with a stupid smile on her face, like she was in so much denial that she was about to die that she just decided to laugh about it instead. She looked like one of those stupid sacks of shit who didn’t even know their left from their right, and yet still wanted to go on living in that condition. I was happy—that was the kind of prey you fuck around with as much as possible before offing them. It was one of my very favorite kinds.
            Well, it was now time to get the bimbo’s attention. I picked up three branches and snapped them all in half at the same time, and the girl jumped and spun around to look at me like a deer in fucking headlights. Her eyes were wide enough to be big rig tires. She was one of the dopiest-looking people I’d ever seen in my life, and I couldn’t help but laugh out loud upon seeing her. Poor little bitch. I could tell no one would miss this one once I had my way with her. Who wasted their care on something so utterly pathetic?
            I took a step toward her and made sure to make myself look like I was nobody to fuck with. Before the bimbo could even think of trying to run, I pounced on her like a panther that’d been poked in the ass one too many times. She yelped, which I found hilarious and made sure to let her know it—it really gets ‘em when you laugh in the face of their misery, when you show ‘em that you think it’s absolutely hilarious that they’re in pain and about to die. I had a bit of fun with her, pinking her arm with the blade a couple times just for shits and gigs. I was hoping she’d scream and yelp and entertain me some more, but she had fallen completely silent. Oh great, she was one of those assholes who decided to just shut up and accept their fates. Either that or I had effectively terrified the voice out of her. I was really hoping for the latter.
            “Listen up, you little blonde bint,” I said, pressing the blade hard into the back of her neck. “Nobody comes back her and lives, and if you think you’re gonna be any different, you’ve got another thing coming.” I was all set to put her out of her misery. I envisioned the blood spewing from her neck--maybe I’d keep going until her head wasn’t even attached anymore--and thought of how she’d start crying and screaming at me to let her go the moment I began to cut. Of course I wouldn’t just take this one out in one blow, that would remove the fun aspect. I began to laugh at the thought of it all.
            So then she finally grew the balls to say something. She said, “Okay.”
            Just…”okay.”
            No pleading, no screaming, no begging, no crying, no struggling to get away, just a whole lot of silence followed by “Okay.”
            I thought I must’ve been having some kind of trip, or else I didn’t hear her correctly. Without moving the blade, I bended way the hell down so that I was breathing right in her left ear and said, “What did you just say?”
            “I said ‘okay.’”
            “Did you not hear what you’re saying ‘okay’ to, or are you just that stupid?”
            “I heard what you said.”
            “So you’re okay with me ending your life right now?”
            “Yes. You can kill me if that’s what you need to do.”
            Hol-y shit.

***

            I let her live. That’s why I feel like an utter jackass.
            I didn’t let her go, I just let her live. And for the life of me I could not figure out what possessed me to do it. Maybe I just thought she was some kind of hallucinatory experience stemming from all the smoking I’d been doing—which couldn’t have been possible, because I’d smoked practically all my life and I’d never had any sort of hallucination from it. Maybe that leaf I’d rolled up had been a psychedelic—no, I knew these woods inside and out and there were no psychedelic plants in here. Maybe she was just such a whole new kind of pitiful that I found her too pitiful to even be worthy of being killed by me.
            And then I figured it out: she’s suicidal. I’d never gotten anyone who actually wanted to die, but it made complete sense that I’d keep them alive if they were suicidal. Death was what they wanted. Their lives were so utterly trashed that death would be a release to them. Of course, I would keep that type alive when they so desperately didn’t want to be. Score for Blade Queen!
            But of course I didn’t let her get away. What, do you think I’d be so stupid as to let her get away so she could run off and blab about me to anyone she wanted? In the outside world, I was a sort of ghost story—I’d learned this from a few of my past victims. Everyone knew nobody who entered this neck of the woods ever came out of it, so they started telling eachother that it was a ghost killing everyone or dragging them to the spirit world or turning them into ghosts and all kinds of other shit. Some said it was some kind of supernatural force, or even the devil (the devil! I laughed hysterically when I heard that one. I, Blade Queen, had actually become the devil!). Either way, the ghost tales covered my ass and kept more stupid thrill-seekers coming to look for the ghost—more fun for me, of course!
            So if I let this girl go, she’d go around telling people it wasn’t a ghost. So after she so graciously gave me permission to kill her, I grabbed her and tossed her into the ditch I used to have to live out of before I stole this tent from some campers I got rid of. I guess I should’ve at least cussed at her or something while I was throwing her in the ditch, but I was struck dumb or something (emphasis on dumb).
            I pushed her into the ditch and I told her she was to stay there until I decided when the appropriate time would come to end her life. “And if I catch you trying to flee,” I said, “you will meet my good friend Mr. Rifle.”
            “I won’t try to escape,” she answered back. God, she really must be stupider than even the stupidest of stupids. I stood by the ditch, expecting her to try to spring out and take off, but she just sank to the ground and wrapped her arms around her knees. I looked at her huge-ass eyes to see if she was even crying, but she wasn’t. Her eyes weren’t even wet.
            I was tired of looking at her. I ran back to my tent, feeling less enthusiastic about my first suicidal victim than I really should. I checked on her not too long ago, though, and she was sleeping like she was in the luxury suite of the world’s fanciest hotel. She’s completely unaware that she’s about to freeze to death.
            Or maybe she just doesn’t give a shit. 

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

If the World Was Like a Bubble


If the world was like a bubble
floating up to the bright sky,
each corner would glisten and shine;
it’d be a beauty to the eye!

If the world was like a bubble
its edges would be pink and gold
and it would be just small enough
for all to fit into one mold.

If the world was like a bubble,
so delicate and fair
we could take the hands of one-another
and float into the crisp, clean air.