Narcissist. Sadist. Whore.
I'm all of these things. None of these things. I am everything. I am nothing.
I'm a devil, I'm damned. I'm an angel redeemer cleansing the souls of the faithful. I'm an electric red-light hooker Madonna nursing fetid milk from a barbed-wire breast.
Sticky, wet deceit and hard-wired synaptic malfunction are my earliest memories.
I'm to write these pages, this testament to my gospel of days so that they can understand me. But I don't think that's possible, this mutual psychosis of understanding.
Can you explain the instincts of the hawk to a field mouse?
Run from me, little mouse. Run.
Or stay, take tea with me, said the spider to the fly.
Examine as closely as you like, this strange little death-bug. I'm not so rare a specimen as you might think. Pin my wings splayed for all to see, there are no distinguishing marks to identify me from your kind.
Still not convinced? A woman could never be so brutal, or have such disregard for life. But why not? From the darkest abyss of the womb we bring life into this world and it is an ugly work. Such pain. Such suffering. And it is good.
Femininity in its most basic of cycles, the Maiden, the Mother and the Crone.
I worshipped as the Maiden, gave succor as the Mother and wielded my craft as the Crone. Is it not good? Is it not beautiful?
Death with her fleeting embrace and her cold mouth.
Ultimate feminism, equality in all things. Not just the pretty things that are pink and fresh under the rolling clouds and blue sky. But the things beneath, the things that crawl in the creeping shadows and stretch out dirty fingers to burn the world above.
It's funny, that they are still looking for my "companion."
Little ol' me. I never could have committed such atrocity on my own. I need a big, bad man to tell me what I want. To tell me how to hold a knife. To tell me how to fuck.
That's what old Horskey says. He watches me. He wants me. I think he'd fuck me if he could, if I'd let him. Maybe I will. He wants to hurt me too. Just to see if he can. Maybe I'll let him do that, too. Because it would break him.
He wants to talk about my first. He says that is so important to what shaped me, what gave birth to my deviance like a gutter whore's laboring cunt. As if one fleeting sexual experience could mold the clay, and harden it in the potter's fire to be forever stone. But nothing is so immutable, not pleasure, not death- it is a fluid thing; waxing and waning like the moon.
But I won't tell him this. It's beyond him. I'll tell him about Ally. Beautiful, broken, Ally. The first, his mold that he will try to fill with all future analysis... And it is only right that she should live on in the annals of infamy as the cornerstone of my art. After all, didn't the Masons shed the blood of sacrifice into the mortar that crafted their foundations?
And she was my foundation, my Ally. I never would have left her, but Death made my choice for me. She is ever a demanding mistress.
The first time I saw her, she was sitting on a rope swing beneath the elm tree in the front yard. She was wearing a short summer dress with little pink flowers. Her legs were crossed and she was twisting the swing from side to side, her blonde hair fanned out behind her, almost like a halo.
And then she smiled.
There was an ethereal quality to her, an innocent luminescence. I had to be near it, wanted to touch it. But she was like a butterfly. You can hold them, even stroke down their slender bodies, but keep your goddamn hands off of their wings.
Her wings were smooth and soft and I had fairy dust all over my clumsy fingers.
We shared a room in that foster home. I would watch her sleep, and I would envy the moonlight, the way it was free to roam her body, to kiss her mouth.
Until I saw her in the barn.
She was sitting on a crate, with a razor in her elegant fingers and her skirt hitched up around her hips. I watched her as she sliced into her thigh. The blood welled there, almost as if it were loathe to leave her body. It ran in thin rivulets down her skin. And as I crept closer, I could see an intricate webbing of delicate scars criss-crossing in a macabre dance across her flesh.
I had to touch it, taste it...
Ally turned when she heard my steps and she clamped her legs together as she dropped the razor, a startled sound coming from her.
I knelt in front of her, like a supplicant. Though I dared to touch that object of reverence, I slipped my hands between her knees and spread them as they had been. I kept my eyes on her face as I picked up the razor.
She could have told me no, that's why I waited. I wanted her to be very sure of what I was going to do to her. But there was a look of anticipation on her face, her lips were slightly parted, and she trembled. Her breathing was ragged as she pushed a lock of my hair behind my ear, and her fingers traced my cheek and finally over my lips.
Then she spread her legs wider, offering herself to me.
I thought that my hands would shake, but they didn't. I sliced into her flesh with the surety of a surgeon, though I didn't even watch my own actions. I was still falling into the pool of her eyes. I watched them darken as she gasped, and as she pushed me nearer my work.
Her blood was sweet and warm over my tongue. As the blade bit into her flesh and again, and her cries were becoming louder, an intense heat built inside of me. It was something more than sexual, almost spiritual.
Then she pushed my mouth further, splayed herself wider. She had my hair tangled in her fist and pleaded with me to taste her. So I touched my tongue to the very center of those damp, white cotton panties and finally pulled them aside to get at the core of her.
Ally couldn't seem to get close enough, and she was panting and growling. Her limbs would stiffen and she would almost stop breathing, only to whimper and plead some more.
Her thighs were a bloody mess. Not my best work, but it was my first.
She needed something more.
I grabbed the first thing that was close enough. It was a metal Maglite flashlight. A three cell.
Without thinking, I rammed the handle inside of her. And she screamed; blood flowed down the handle and over my hands.
But she came.
Later that night, she watched as I took my own virginity with that same flashlight handle. She'd wanted to do it for me, but in the end, couldn't do it. So I did. I had her mouth on mine to keep me from screaming. But I found that I didn't want to scream. I wanted to hold it in, to feel all that it had to offer me.
Ally never could hurt me. She could never hurt anyone but herself.
I'm not going to talk about her death. That's intimate. Something between us, that's only ours. Now, only mine.
What do you say, old man? I know you've been reading my journal. That you think it's part of my therapy. Are you going to hurt me now? Maybe some ECT? You know I'd take to the bit.
Are you stroking that dead little cock? I know you are.
I have something for you. Something deep and dark, something sacred. That something that you've been looking for, that depravity that you want to reach out and take, but don't dare.
That's why you work here, isn't it? To reach out weathered old fingers and grasp at immortality.
It's hiding in my dark places. I know you will find it. If only you'd try the scalpel.
*ECT- Electroconvulsive Therapy a.k.a. Electric Shock
Copyright 2006 Saranna DeWylde
Originally published October 2006 - "Supernatural"