Journey of a Pain Slut – A Little Ghosting
The Little Girl’s coming…She’s already here.
She slips through the casement; she’s smelling your fear…
I knew the house all too well. The electric gates, the double-garage, the stone cladding masking an unremarkable, yet essentially overgrown and ugly pretentiousness.
I knew the hallway, the turn of the wooden staircase, the landing that led to the bedrooms and his study. Not his anymore.
I knew where she would be sleeping. Alone now, in that huge bed. Perhaps she’d been watching the TV, or listening to the radio. Something to distract her from the empty silence of the house that was now just hers.
Her breathing is quiet. Her head still on the pillow. One arm stretched out to where He is not. Is she how I imagined her? Perhaps. Her hair has a faded loveliness, pale as the moonlight. Her lips, parted, remain full, soft, damp. Her neck long; lined with the years but not that of the middle-aged woman that she is. Her breasts, beneath her dark negligée, rising and falling, still possessed of a youthful firmness.
I imagine Him lying with her, his arms around her. I imagine Him making love to her. Thinking of me. His eyes shut, holding a picture of me. My open mouth, my dark hair, my slender body, my parting legs. And Him, on her, kissing her, pushing into her, lying to her.
I want to touch her. That’s why I have come. In the night, to touch her. To stroke her cheek. To part her hair with my fingers. To let her eyes open. To see me. To see what He wanted, what He took, what I let Him have. Her, all alone now. Her, in her big empty house. Her without Him. Him without me. I want her to know. To share me. I want her to see me; me, as I am. The me He made me.
I blow so gently into her nose, her gently-tilted nose that must have captivated him when he was at Medical School. Her sweet, girlish nose. I blow so gently it could be a breeze through the early-budding trees that sway in the darkness outside. She opens her mouth. Her tongue grazes her lips. Her eyes will stay closed, but she will see me now. I pass my hand, my wounded hand, through her face. She will see me now. I can imagine her eyes. Her bright blue eyes. Open beneath their shading lids. Wide open, staring at me. Staring at me as I arch my body over her. Staring at me. Her mouth open, her breathing faster. Staring at me.
And I stare back at her. I smile at her with my sweet soft lips, the lips He loved around Him. The lips He pushed open and entered. I smile at her and she looks at my dark, matted hair. She looks at the gash in my cheek, darkened by dried blood. At the whiteness of the bone beneath. At the slow trickle of yellow and red-flecked drool. At the maggots as they crawl in and out.
She stares. Behind her hooded eyes her pupils widen. Her eyes are black.
I lean over her, I touch her cheek, her neck, the softness of her ear. I touch her breast. I feel her.
I watch as her hidden eyes look down my body. My ravaged chest; black gore and torn flesh that were once my sweet breasts. As sweet as hers. Sweeter. Kissed by Him.
My hands touch her body. My hands, my tortured hands: their broken bones and gouged nail holes that weep slowly to my finger-tips. My breath is on her. Filthy, stale, salty, watery breath. The disgusting breath of rotting fish and seaweed washed onto a stony shore. Foul, disgusting, unearthly breath. Utterly corrupted.
My body over hers. My silvery entrails falling, rotten and torn, from my belly. My opened belly, my torn, awful belly. Green and brown and stained and stinking. Entrails seeping blood that has long-ago lost its fight to suck in life-giving oxygen. Dark, dead, heavy, greasy mire. The crimson gash of the knife that opened me turned pale white. Barely flesh. The rip that was once my lovely agate jewel destroyed and open to the blade-scraped bone of my pelvis.
She shudders. She cannot stop herself from staring. At my blackened, coral-torn legs, at my shattered feet. She cannot stop herself from staring.
I smile. I turn the side of my face to her that still hints at my past loveliness. I whisper into her ear. I want her to remember me. To remember every part of my ugly, destroyed body. To know what He did to me. She should know me. I shouldn’t be a series of texts on a phone so easily thrown across the room at Him. She should know me. What He did to me. She should always know. And now I know that she will.
I whisper into her ear.
I tell her my name. I tell her what He did. I tell her about the things He did to my young body. In the forest. In the cell beneath the City Hall. I tell her how we kissed and made love and how I lay between His legs in the foaming water and how he took me to the mountain and how He killed me. How He slowly killed me. I tell her how much I wanted it and how much He loved it. Every moment of it. And how He still thinks of me all the time.
He thinks of me all the time.
I whisper into her ear. I tell her my name. I tell her my name. The name I never told Him. I tell her to remember my name.
She opens her eyes. Suddenly. She is soaked in sweat. She is frightened.
She looks feverishly around.
But there is nothing. I am gone.
She tries to mouth something. She tries to speak. I can barely hear. She is whispering my name, Again and again and again.
She will never stop thinking of me.
I am her ghost. I will never leave her. I will never leave her…. Unless…
