She had young flesh on her face worthy to be bitten off.

From the first day I saw her when I opened up a tarot store by the sea, I knew she
was fate’s handmaiden. I just wished I didn’t fall for her, to let my guard down. But
in the end, as I sit here now ready to slit my wrist, I knew there would be no escape
from the lovecraftian love spell she had weaved.

Especially for me.

She was too tall for her age, too gothic for her makeup. She reminded me of those
devilish women who served the most disturbing and grotesque personas of the
dark. Nosferatu’s lover or the black sorcerer’s daughter. A solid form like a
swimmer, a loud presence like a whore actress, where the theater was her world,
and her audience, small whimpering failures before her majestic monologues. She
could straddle you and abuse you with her recklessness and yet, you’ll love her and
even pay her for it.

She just finished high school and ran a store by the beach, with her equally wild
mother, selling cheap pornographic t-shirts and colorful slippers. The store
reflected the family in some way. Weird, fantastic, surreal. They did air brush
tattoos, sold skull lighters to the junkies, tents for the runaways and the homeless,
skimpy bikini’s and g-strings for the perverts and the kittens. And they always
attracted cats. Deformed, undersized, phantom like felines that prowled their store
like a parade of guardians, hissing at me at times, hissing at priests and monks.
Witches and artists were drawn to the shop, buying beach towels emblazoned with
pentagrams and lanterns for scaring off the dark. They all always looked haggard,
pale, haunted. Amongst them, the mother and daughter duo shined like dark
beacons in an ocean of lost souls. That was the strange thing about the shop. The
‘normal’ people would pass it by without noticing it. I should’ve guessed at its
deeper implications. I should have questioned it all. But I was too busy growing
unruly feelings for the jail bait girl. The mother was loud and round like a punk
goddess. Together, the two of them dominated the vintage amusement park by the
sea.

It was only much later, when the daughter decided to own me, to demand my
allegiance, that I realized I was in too deep under her spell. She had played the
game all along and I could do no other thing but surrender my damned soul.

In the beginning, when I first joined the community, she wouldn’t talk to me and I
had no courage to speak to her. I didn’t even attempt to ask the other tenants about
her. Some animalistic sense told me not to involve the innocent. She was my own
private danger. I would observe from my store, during the silent hours, that she had
a menagerie of regulars. Strange starving boys would visit her, like sick addicts
coming to claim their drugs. There would be the back alley gangsters, tattooed,
coarse and schooled by the streets, bringing her gifts of sugar water and rich fruits
as if in worship. The mafia like tycoons were most elusive. Shaded in their upscale
tuxedoes, they would offer her obsolete coins in cheap translucent bags and red ties
presented in coffin like velvet boxes. Her visitors made the scene around her store
all the more surreal, fantastic. I should’ve seen the signs then. But I didn’t.
Perhaps, these visitors, or clientele, prevented me from making contact with her,
largely because I was not of their kind. I was simply a poor cartomancer, trying to
bury my past by starting anew by the shores. The cards I worked with wouldn’t tell
me more about her. They did speak vaguely, of miscommunication or fortresses, an
inability to get through, but they spoke loudly of illusion and karma, the dark night
of the soul. I should’ve read deeper into it, but again, I did not. That is the danger of
reading for yourself. You do not pursue the warnings but chase after cards that
affirm your own desired outcome. That was truly my mistake. I could’ve been saved
if I listened.

I could have escaped.

I spent days and nights just watching her. Sometimes I would catch her eyes and
that glitter in the dark would make me lose my breath and bearings. Sometimes,
when I was reading for a client, she would saunter by and her strange crematorium
scent would distract me to no end.

Then I started dreaming of her.

Most of the time, she would be naked in my dreams and would have no orifices. We
would never have sex but she would sit on me and tell me prison stories. She’ll rub
her scaly torso on mine which would always be limp and weak and dead. I never
remember any other details, not even of the stories, but the next day, as if on some
cosmic coincidental cue, I would see police officers sharing jokes with her. Young,
unhealthy looking men in uniform, smitten by the sea side enchantress.

She would side glance at me occasionally as if to watch my reactions. Making sure

my eyes would follow hers, she would direct me to the handcuffs hanging by their
belts. My spine would freeze every time that happened, as if she knew something I
did not remember then. Of all the ghastly boys she would laugh with, she always
displayed sibling attraction rather than sexual hunger. I had a feeling that at some
stage, these boys were going to draw blood for her, turn pale and comatose for her
love. But she would remain like a sister, stroking their almost dead face with pity
more than adoration. They all seemed like little brothers to her while she truly
needed a brutal king, an oppressor much greater than her, to rule her nocturne
body.

Our very first contact happened on Christmas Eve.

At midnight, she pounced upon me unaware and tried to strangle me to death. She
laughed like a child when she let me breathe again. I was hard during the process. I
tried not to struggle. I wasn’t afraid. I let the blood rush and roar in my head like an
insatiate beast.A new sexuality appeared to have dawned upon me. Sex and death
got engaged. Not a word was exchanged during those crucial seconds. She just
stared at me with criminal lust and a cold calculated smile. Then walked away.
Crazy bitch. No doubt. But I loved her for it. The mother didn’t know about the
incident of course and by some silent consent we kept it between ourselves. Some
kind of twisted relationship had begun, like the steaming screams of a monstrous
locomotive set to shoot off at the end of the world. It didn’t feel like we would be
lovers. She was after all, only seventeen. I was almost twice her age. And yet, my
body parts found her uncomfortably familiar...

My dreams of her got more disturbing in late December.

She would be pissing on my face and I would choke on the overwhelming smell of
turpentine. I would awake exhausted, trapped by a source less guilt. After washing
my face, I would find faded paint marks around my eyes. Blues, yellows, browns,
greens. Black. One for each night after Christmas. It seemed unusual but it felt
vaguely like a common occurrence. Like it was natural to have paint on my face.
Only later would I realize it had been omens.

On New Year ’s Eve, she stabbed my leg with a penknife.

Not a deep gash but bloody enough. Again she did this without her mother’s
knowledge. She caught me off guard, behind my push cart,so no one else would see
the ritualistic act. She then got down on her knees, to drink from my wound. Her
tongue felt weirdly like leather as it probed and slithered into my pain. It got me too
high for words and when she was done, I was too numb tongued to say a thing. It
was she who spoke first and her first words to me were, “You will remember.”

Her voice made me wet. As she walked off, licking her lips, I could do nothing else
but wonder what she had meant.

Soon. Very soon. I would find out.

That night, I sat in my hall studying the wound with a mirror while I thought of her,
my little devil laughing witch dominatrix. I did no stitching, no bandaging, no
cleaning. It was throbbing, her spit was bubbling around the open flesh. Digging
into my wound, I wet my fingers with my blood and her saliva. To taste her, to
touch her on a molecular level. The blood was warm on my tongue and like some
living pharmacologic specter; I felt it seep into my system, taking control. A rising
high started to shimmer in me, and then a terrifying peculiar darkness seized me,
scented with her ashen perfume.

Crone power of night she was, but from some other place. Extraterrestrial, un-
luminary. Her womb was like a serpentine cave on an unlit planet, a deep
unconscious residence filled with shapeless moisture and formless slime. How
horrible the headaches that followed. How breathless I became as her poisoned
nectar possessed me. I then saw, in my minds eye, a marionette of her, her head
titling and bobbing about as she moved out from her dark quarters.My puppet
princess with a broken neck. She held a ceremonial blade which I beheld and
understood as the object of my final wounding. It gleamed into my astral eye as I
watched her dancing her cosmic dance of creation. I became reformed, deformed.
Muscles stretching and tearing, bones snapping, skin contracting, bowel loosening,
semen spurting.

Then I blacked out.

When I awoke, I was in a closet and believed I was stolen and kept for her grisly
pleasures. But as I tumbled out, I found myself in an art studio. One I had owned
years before.

Long before it was destroyed by the fire.

Oh Lord.

The fire.

I started to remember.

Like she promised.

You cannot believe how much I wanted it all to be a dream. But it was real, at least
to me.

I could smell the paint and the incense I always used. I recognized my worktable
and the work bench where...I had chained my lover... for brutal sex and for art.

Chains. Locks.

Left alone.

Fire.

I had spent all those years, hypnotizing myself to forget what had happened. And
yet, I could touch the paint tubes, I could smell the turpentine. So slightly altered
the studio was but it was essentially the real thing. It wasn’t a dream. The past was
now, what had gone, had come back, by some trick of the mind, or by time and
continuum, or by the witch....

My heart palpitated as I approached the covered easel stands. Some inner volition,
probably urged on by the witch, made me uncover my old artworks. My fetish art.
Where my lover was my model. Saran wrapped. Gagged. And left alone.

For the accidental fire.

God forgive me, the fire...

The turpentine.

The uncrushed cigarette.

The erotic thrill of leaving her in the dark. Helpless.

The fire. That took her. No escape. Left to die. By my careless drugged out mind.

I fell to my knees. The studio mocked me. Judged me.

“My love, you remembered...”

That voice. My wife to be.

As I fell, shivering and shaking I brought down the easel stand with me. Uncovering
the unfinished master piece. ‘cocoons damnation.’

My wrapped up love now absent from the key painting. A big blotch of white among
the black vine metallic hell hole background. Mixed crudely with the colors that
appeared on my face, after the witch had urinated on me with the turpentine that
killed her.

My crazy puppet bitch witch. The lover whom I had killed. My ghost huntress. My
angel of death.

The phone in my studio rang. Absurdity raped me.

Twisted in pain, some inhuman force dragged me to the shrieking thing.

Weakly I tugged the wires to let the phone fall on me. I listened in with dread.

It was the landlord from the community.

“The fire.” He said, lost and dazed. “The fire destroyed the whole community.

Those last hours were so unreal. So...unreleased.

Like a perpetual disjointed dream, I journeyed from the remade studio, wraithlike, to
the blackened amusement park, to find everything ravaged. Burnt, polluted,
destroyed. A mirror to my being. By then, my mind was mere static, my soul
blasphemed by the return of the repressed.

My haunted, burned alive valentine.

Every other tenant was there, except the girl and her mother. Absently, though I
knew the answer, I asked the stricken landlord about them. No such persons. He
had never rented out that store for years...

It all came together. Solidified. All those strange visitors were as dead as she was. It
was a way station for the wandering ones. A lighthouse for the deceased. All
gathering to mock me in secret as I sat there enchanted by a dead lover I could not
recognize.

As I rummaged through my area, I found no salvation and the scent of the

crematorium followed me. Mixed with burnt plastic. Smoldering saran wrap and
flesh. I felt dizzy, I vomited. A glint caught my weary eyes. And there, among the
ashes and puke, was the ceremonial knife. As I pulled it out of the mess I heard her
laugh.

“You remembered.” She repeated. In her little child voice.

My dead lover.

My torturer.

She who had released

that which I repressed.

In her cackle she stated the price I had to pay...

So now, having offered me her ceremonial knife, I offer up my final art piece.

All my blood upon this unfinished canvas.

To fill the blank where she once was.

And to her, I speak these final words.

Post-death, shall we wed.