Trash

It was one stain on the floor.

One crimson blush.

It wouldn’t budge.

She’d used every commercially celebrated cleaning apparatus on the market - if the kitchen had been a body, it would have been scrubbed and exfoliated in such harsh detail as to draw it down to the bone.

She could see her reflection in every veneer.

Except for the crimson blush on the fucking floor.

He was out in the shed. His fingers had fallen off by now. His toes gnawed by fuck knows what, probably rats, possibly decay. His face was gone. His mouth hung off. It had been raining a lot. Who knew what the fuck went on when you were buried in a place like that.

He’d crept in through the window a month ago. She knew him. A little. Enough to share a moment of questionable merit between the both of them when he’d woken her up, blind drunk on whatever, tripping over the mantle.

Initially, she felt humiliated. It was a ridiculous impulse, she knew. Of all the things she could have been scared of or worried about in that moment, it was the state of her bedroom, the underwear she was sleeping in, the dried up make up on the pillow - which bothered her the most.

She hadn’t cleaned for months. There was a breadcrumb path leading up to the bed of old, crusty underwear torn off in the midst of misjudged dalliances, used johnnies, shredded stockings.

There were books left open at pages which declared boldly her mindset, her gnawing ache.

There were half eaten sandwiches, abandoned mid bite.

There was a belt still buckled to the steel headboard where her wrists, neck, and ankles had been shackled and snagged. She always picked the men who would willingly abandon her. And like Houdini, she’d wriggle free, course with the stench of a used companion, and sit on her bed contemplating what to do now she was free.

And now he was in her room. And he was standing there. He saw everything. And she was humiliated.

He was rotten from rain. Decayed, like a soiled notebook.

It was a challenge, like the moment an opponent pulls out the first fist, and you have a split second to choose whether to dive out the fucking way or duke it out.

She did nothing.

It was the most romantic thing she could have imagined.

He merely walked over. His stench infusing into every one of her senses, even her fucking sight was watered by it, her hearing dulled by the pounding of her sickened heart.

He dragged his nose across her thighs. Her stomach. Her tits. Her ribs. Her neck. Her ears. He settled between the frozen applause of her snatch, sniffing like a dog finding a discarded crumb of a dinner round the back of the bins.

She stroked his scalp, sticky and wet, she found his face, half torn and flaking, his vacant eye socket. She shoved a finger inside and he purred with approval.

She was bleeding herself, and he began lapping it up.

She pulled her foot under his t-shirt and found a gash by his ribs, and probed her foot the whole way through. She found his still heart. His weeping chamber of what used to be.

She knew him. He lived in the house at the back of hers, and at night he’d sit by the back window and stare out.

She never closed the blinds.

He never closed the blinds.

Every act in that room of hers was a performance, and he saw every movement.

But she was still ashamed to have him here, like a fan stepping foot on the set of the movie they knew every mechanic of, she knew the illusion would be shattered. The fantasy over. It was all lighting and scripted and propped and caricatured to fucking perfection.

She couldn’t judge him in his current state. We all went this way eventually, she realised, and at least he’d managed to crawl back through death and offer himself to her, finally.

She wished she had a cock to shoot herself up into him with - to solder his insides with every volume of her lust.

He was fascinated by the beat of her body. The orchestral thrum. She was a funeral march.

She pulled at his skin. She sucked at his fingers, until his index dropped out in her mouth like a refrigerated pacifier. She peeled the flesh from his shoulders and carved her name into the bone.

She gave head to his hollow eye socket, and nibbled at his lips - spitting out fragments of pout and blush.

He made love to her the only way he knew how - by inhaling every inch of her that he could, by digesting every fluid, by petting everything which strutted out the life which he’d now lost.

But everything has it’s expiry.

His was long before now, but theirs was this instant, in a bouquet of projectile, gory crimson, like a bride tossing the flowers out at the next in line for matrimony.

He convulsed and withered. He stopped.

She dragged his body downstairs like a bag of trash. A trail of innards and flesh and blood and loss, curdling against linoleum.

Exhausted, she left him on the kitchen floor and sat up on the counter top. She found cigarettes. She lit a few. Smoked a few. She stared at the body. She stared at the blood on her foot. She could still taste him.

She missed the fuck out of him.

She fell asleep on his caving chest - his decaying steeple of ribs pillowing her fractured rest, before throwing him in the shed amongst the rest of the junk she’d accumulated over the years and never looked back at.

No-one could ever know.

It was fucking romance, and it was gone.