Grim

by D.J. Krimmer

Grief is not sorrow. Sorrow is a guest who will leave. Grief is a parasite—it latches on, it feeds, it remakes. It is a rot that eats away at you and leaves only a husk. It is the weight pressing down on my chest with every breath, my dark shadow beside me, whispering I will never be whole again.

And I—well, I am no longer a man. I am aftermath. I am ruin itself. And the aftermath doesn’t heal. It haunts. Ruins do not heal. I am nothing, yet I still breathe. The words whisper tauntingly in my brain. Over and over and over again. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

I am dead.

If I disappeared tomorrow, would the world just … keep turning like I was never here?

But sometimes, when I let myself think too long, I ache for a version of me that never got to be. I don’t need statues. I don’t need my name etched in gold. But I want someone to read my words one day and pause. Just for a moment. And think, She was here.

How could I not want a gift that you gave Me, even if it arrived in pieces? Glue them together in gold so I save The story of those imperfect creases. Wonder with glee what is wrapped up inside. It’s the thought though that’s truly the treasure. A present speaks loudly what you never hide. That your feelings for me are past measure. Why is it then that you look rather sad? You gave me your heart. I know it’s broken. Enough for me that it came from you, Dad. In my chest beats a love that’s unspoken. Carry your memory in this cage of bone. The heart we share means that I’m always home.

Because I was tired of being a scalpel when I could be a stitch.

I’m holding her.

“Not all of us are dead inside, Kane,” she fires back. I tilt my head, intrigued. “Aren’t you though?”

“You just licked away my darkest pains. Now let me lick you into unimaginable pleasure,”

flank the doorway, the top shelf stretching across like a crown above the entry. Sometimes, I take as much solace in the spines as I do the stories contained therein. I don’t just love reading books; I love looking at them, almost as if the titles etched down the sides contain the full knowledge of the pages bound within. It’s as though I can absorb the full dramatic weight and entirety of the exploration of the human condition within each of these books simply by reading the title.

“Your father might have treated you like a princess, Rue Chamberlain,” he says as he traces my cheek with his thumb, “but I intend to make you a queen.”

“I’m going to feast on your cunt,” he whispers, so close that I feel the words slide down the slope of my neck, “until you come down my throat.” His voice is low, dangerous, and somehow still calm, like a storm on course for land. My pulse roars in my ears. “And then,” he growls, “I’m going to flip you around and fill you from behind. Hard. Deep. Until we are both writhing and shaking with a desperate release so primal and feral it’ll echo in the walls of the OtherWorld.”

“That’s it,” I say without stopping my assault on her pussy. “Bury me in your cunt, Rue. Use. My. Face.”

“She is mine,”