You've Lost a Lot of Blood

by Eric LaRocca

Each precious thing I’ve ever shown him is a holy relic from the night we both perished—the night when I combed him from my hair and watered the moon with his blood.

I didn’t kill him because I wanted to. That would have been too easy. Far too plainspoken for my preference.

I knew for certain he was far more benign in his practices, his handling of life and other people.

I killed him because to let him live, to let him exist would have been an insult.

see his ghost—the ball gag fixed between his chapped lips.

Seeing him how he loved him

You’d think a young man qualified for even the most menial office job would understand I was the furthest thing from a delicate heirloom—that I was a vile thing, obscene, and unspeakable.

So he projects because he hates himself?

had lovingly tended to and kept burning within him for so long. It was only natural for the wax to melt, for the wick to shorten to a small nub, and for the flame to eventually go out.

I had thought of ending things for a while. I suppose we all do in some way even if we’re content, dangerously happy with the body we’re sleeping next to, with the body we use for sex, for companionship, for love. Little insects—barbed and dangerous with their glittering exoskeletons and their sharp pincers—circle inside my head and whisper indecencies to me. For once, I’d like to see myself outside of myself. If that even makes sense. I’d like to crawl outside of my head and look back at the horrible thing I’ve become, the soulless spirit residing inside my shell.

knew in my heart that I would always win, that I would never compromise, that I would never let him deep enough inside me to latch on and secure himself as if it were a new home.

I’d sooner swallow wet concrete than let him call me his or dare to call him mine.

invented by others. I killed him because if I didn’t, something might have tethered us together and that would have been a suffering far too unimaginable for me to even consider.

“Verisimilitude,” the boy says, as they filter inside the house. “The appearance of being true or real.”

think there’s a small, quiet part of you that enjoys the misery I carefully feed you each day— as if it were the very thing keeping you alive.

Something that’s scary is intended to cause fear, to frighten you. However, something that’s disturbing is intended to cause anxiety and be worrying.

I take from things all around me all the time. I take and I take and I take. I never seem to give. I’m just not that way.

A livid screech. Metal against metal. Tamsen jumps. She hangs up the phone.

Was the last time this happened the first time she went through this phone call experience with the cops and missing persons report????

Crawling toward oblivion without a head and franticly straining to survive no matter how terribly the world might want me to perish.

That’s the best word to describe me and Ambrose—“diluted.” That’s the word that best describes what we’ve become.

If relationships were physical things and not figurative constructs, then they would be parasites. Love between two people always changes who you are.