anti-glory
It's summer time. The night air is deliciously warm while distant fires put ash in the sky that makes the world soft to the touch. The poppies bloom red among the tall grasses, festive flowers to welcome the circus into town.You’re standing on the borderline between the forest and the grassy expanse much like a meadow and you’re drenched in the darkness as the screams of fun-lovers pierce the air, drifting over from that lit-up fantasy-land you have your back too, the one with the Ferris wheel looming high over your head.
A single scream that filters out of the masses, heard above the rest.“Hey!”You wince because it’s her and her angry voice.
“Hey you!”
With a sigh you turn around.
She’s pretty pissed, hell burning in her dark brown eyes “Give it to me!” She’s not asking. “Give it to me now or I swear to God I’ll kill you.”
“I don’t have it-”
“Liar!” she cuts you off by throwing out a hand at the speed of light, grabbing a fistful of shirt, yanking you towards her. Her breath is like apples and honey and mint, a sugary contradiction to the hate in her face. “Give. It. To. Me.”
“I can’t,” you say with a shake of your head.
She is so very very close, too very very close, and you’re choking on the smell of summer that clings to her, almost masking the stench of decay.
“You left me like this,” she growls, “left me to die.” And she is oh so pissed. Her lips press to your cheek, leaving their rot behind on your face in a perfect kiss. “I will kill you if you don’t fix me.”
“I can’t.” You’re like a broken record.
Her hand releases its grip on the fabric of your t-shirt, leaving behind traces of her skin and blood. She flicks her fingers over your chest, as if to brush away the detritus, with as little effort as possible. The action just leaves more gore behind on your shirt.
“Oops,” she says.
“So sorry,” she says.
She spins around on the toe of her rubber yellow rain boot, her tangled blonde curls and dirty pink tutu flouncing with each step she takes into the darkness.
You look up at the sky: it’s indigo-black, tiny pinpricks of stars tickling your skin in the new moon’s darkness. And you’re left to your own devices to wonder “where did I go so wrong?”
Of course she’s right. You ditched her-they came for the both of you and you just dropped everything and took off. They grabbed her and tossed her into that cage of a cell, and you didn’t try to get her out. All she needed was one person to say “I care about this girl,” and they might have let her go. But no. You were too scared. You didn’t want to be tossed in next to her. You weren’t going to let them take you.
You sink to the ground and you sit there, thinking, and her words echo in your head “You left me to die.” The words bounce around inside your skull “I’ll kill you.”
You were happy once. You really were. But “once” was so long ago.
Her voice finds company in a million memories of you and her flitting across your vision.
You want to say something-anything-to validate yourself, even though you know she’s not there to hear you.
“I…” no words come out.
“I would have come back for you.”
Your head spins on your shoulders. You hadn’t heard her come up.
“No, you wouldn’t have.”
“Yes I would of. You were my best friend. Of course I would of.”
“I’m still your friend!”
“No, you’re not.” Her words are like a slap and your very soul stings from the impact.
She runs her fingers through her hair, and long strands come away in clumps. Disgust contorts her face as she spazzes her fingers in an attempt to shake the locks free; they flutter to the ground, defying gravity to make the journey as slow as possible. Some of them catch on the browning grasses, never touching the dirt.
The poppies have started to wilt over night, their bright red petals like splashes of blood in the shadows.
“Why won’t you help me?” All the anger is gone from her voice. She sounds so sad, so pitiful, and it’s like you’re both eight years old again, and she’s asking “why won’t you talk to me?” and you can’t even remember you were so mad and giving her the silent treatment in the first place.
“I don’t know how.”
“But you said-”
“I said a lot of things,” you tell her, your fingers sliding into the pocket of your hoodie, brushing the coolness of metal. This is your chance to set things right. You can’t make her live again, but maybe you can finish what they started.
“Why didn’t you help me then, at least?”
The whole night hits you hard.
It was fun until the hunters came. You’d been just sleeping outside, not wanting the night to end, not wanting to go home, hoping that you could just drag each and every minute out into eternity to put off the inevitable sunrise.
The moon had been full that night, so bright it nearly overpowered the stars. It hadn’t been particularly special, as far as you can remember, at least not until they came. She was already asleep, sitting and leaning against a tree in the forest just a handsbreadth away.
Then there were: footsteps, barking dogs, shouting voices. You tried to shake her awake, but she was gone, and they were just getting nearer and nearer. You remember running so fast and so hard you weren’t sure if your lungs or your legs were going to collapse first.
You made it, though. You’d run all the way into the center of the city, a thriving, living mass with too many people for them to come in and snatch away their victims, even in the smallest hours of the morning. When the sun had finally risen, you’d gone back to get her, hoping that maybe they hadn’t found her, hadn’t taken her.
But she was gone. You’d shouted her name for what felt like forever, but you never found her. And you just accepted it.
At least until a few days ago, the day the circus came into town.
She’d found you. You had been out for some fun with some friends. There’d been the rides and the cotton candy and the popcorn and the balloon animals. Then the cliché short man, the one in the waistcoat under the long coat that reached down to his knees with the striped pants and the top hat, had been shouting that the show was to begin. He’d been asking the crowd if they were fans of the fantastic.
You’d thought “I’m a fan of the fantastic.”
You’d gone into the big top, and there she’d been, in all her experimented-on anti-glory.
She had looked awful. The bruises had been bad, but not nearly as much as the patches where the skin had come away altogether. It looked as if her hair hadn’t been washed in weeks, and it was missing in some spots, revealing a scalp that had been a ghastly blue in a color. Her lips had been chapped and scabbed; blood had been trapped under her nails. Her clothes were just as bad-she had been wearing the same cheery yellow rain boots she’d worn for as long as you can remember, but her daily t-shirt-and-jeans had been replaced with a stained and threadbare pink leotard, tutu, and tights, like a ballerina fallen on hard times.
She was serving as the magician’s assistant, and the magician was a man in even worse shape than herself, the experiments leaving him far too thin and with few teeth.
That was the nature of the circus nowadays. No one who came was interested in the clown’s antics or the magician’s tricks. They only wanted to ogle the decayed bodies of the dead and the somewhat-failed attempts to reanimate them.
You had tried to avert your eyes, but it had proven too hard-it was a morbid fascination that kept them in a fixed gaze.
She’d caught your eye.
She’d recognized you.
As soon as the show was over, you tried to slip away. But she caught up with you. She found you. She threatened you.
You promised her you’d fix her. You told her you knew a guy who had a cure for what they’d done to her “in the name of science.”
But that wasn’t the truth.
Your fingers are still in your pocket, still brushing the metal. You shove them deeper in and you grasp the
wooden hilt.
The truth was: you didn’t have a cure, you just had euthanasia.
And she’d died before-they’d killed her just so they could play their sick little games with her. You just wanted to kill her for reals, to give her peace. It’s what the real her would have wanted.
When she had learned how to drive, she’d said “If I crash this car and turn into a vegetable, I want them to pull the plug.”
So how different is this from that?
“Why didn’t you help me then?” she asks again.
“I tried.”
“Well, you didn’t try hard enough!”
You pull your hand from your pocket with more speed than you thought yourself to be capable of, sink the blade into her stomach, give it a good jerk to the side.
Black blood oozes up from the gash, staining her already dirty tutu. Her dark brown eyes go wide, but then they droop close as a slow smile spreads across her face.
She drops to the ground, dead.
You run as fast as the day you first killed her, running
running
running…
xxx
wtf, zombies? XD
june 2008