You've Lost a Lot of Blood

by Eric LaRocca

For those who are lost

In the following pages, you will find text written by Martyr Black and dated appropriately. You will also find several poems he had written and published, as well as transcript evidence he had recorded. You will also find the entire text of a novella (titled You’ve Lost a Lot of Blood) that Martyr Black had published through an independent press specializing in the macabre and uncanny. I’ve carefully constructed a narrative not necessarily detailing the chronological arc of their crimes and their life together, but rather a narrative to serve an understanding of them as human beings—not as monsters.

While most are rightfully repulsed by the violent nature of their work together, this sensibly curated manuscript is not meant to serve as an insult to the families of the victims. Rather, it’s my sincerest hope that these artifacts from an aberrant mind can help better understand his motivations for what he had done and make it so that no one else suffers again as his victims had suffered. Trent Pilcher Cambridge, MA April 2021

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

AMBROSE: Stuck in my mind. Like our brains are made of flypaper and our thoughts are little insects to be captured, caught, and killed.

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

I 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.

“I’d drown you in dark water if you weren’t so beautiful,”

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. Ambrose is, however. He’s a giver. Always has been.

There’s something unnatural, something so deliciously grim, when you consider what we’ll become in due time—when you consider how our fragile bodies will break down and rot, entropy and decay claiming us before we’re nothing more than a mere human stain: a sculpture puzzle of bones, a liturgy of human anatomy that once was and will never be again.

MARTYR: Because—humans are supposed to know better. AMBROSE: Do you know better? MARTYR: What’s that supposed to mean? Is he having second thoughts about this? Is he trying to say something to me? Is this like the philosophical equivalent of comparing dick size? Ambrose knows why I kill these young men, why I’ve spent so much time and labored so diligently to make certain I’m never caught. He’s helped me this far; he’s cleaned their blood from his hair. If I’m guilty, then he is too. I can never let him forget that.

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

Don’t you hate who you are just a little? I’d like to meet the completely self-aware person who’s enraptured with themselves, in love with their entire being. That person doesn’t exist. And if they do, they won’t be alive for long.

“Sometimes brutality is the only antidote to sorrow.”