Or was he a boy?
She hadn’t decided.
She always found the beauty in everything. Even in her own wretched pain, the festering rot coiling within her soul – that lancing burn that sometimes blocked out EVERYTHING, even the ability to breathe… Sighing, like the earth after genocidal tidal waves vain efforts at a message no one wants to hear, she smoothed the last of the semi-translucent petrol. Head bent, her gaze was lost - seeing beyond the staccato tile floor - futile endeavors to salvage memories she felt she needed.
What she really needed was hope - but that was far beyond her now.
She turned her gaze back to the center of the room, the frigid cadaver table - stark and brutal even as it lacked quick edges or gothic décor. To the organism breathing, those shallow inhalations only the comatose or deeply drugged do. The conflagration smoldered her extremities, they twitched as though acid had pooled at the tips; aching itch – the need to touch.
No thoughts had formed or time had passed it seemed, INSTANTLY she was beside him; bent and leaning slightly over him and watching, the way hazmat crews observed CHERNOBYL or HIROSHIMA – with that morbid enthrallment engrossing every iota of their being. Lighting gently upon his clavicle, her forefinger hummed with the soft heat his body gave, tracing over the ridge the ice eased softly from that INTREPID digit. Oxygen optional, her breath froze as slowly she traced along the length of brachiating bone and curling, the way cars curve around long highways doubling back along themselves, up and along the throat, climbing the soft hill of the sternomastoid in soft ascension of the mandible and tracing downward. Ceding upon his lips, orbs lidded she breathed, crawling along the stillness that had consumed her. Pulling away so that her distals grazed his face, she stood.
He hadn’t moved, and in many respects appeared DEAD. But he was alive; she NEEDED him to be alive. Shoving the needle into the carotid, the thrum of his heart’s song traveling in gentle permeation through the metal and plastic of the hypodermic, sweeping upwards into the chilling phalanges – she paused. Pressing in bitter vehemence with prehensile, the serum vacated its holding cell; finding a new journey within that sanguine causeway.
Hoisting the weighted surgeon’s apron over her head, she admired the thick slickness of it; the matte black almost absorbing light, as though it were destined for this and was ready nigh eager to soak the claret sprays into itself. Turning to behold him, the char pigmented vinyl gloves slid across the steel tray, ushering a sadistic whisper into the silence this place had claimed. The fluttering of his lids told her he was waking, as did the change in his respiration. Sharp and swift, the inhalation devouring as much atmosphere as possible; awareness surged culminating in the rapid flick to open those soulful windows. Pulling those void gauntlets over her writhing digits, he saw her and remembrance and recognition blazed like stars in those windows. Grasping the hacksaw she sighed and looked at him directly, gazes locking.
You’re beautiful.
But that just isn’t enough.
