Ever Been Cut

Author's Note (March 28, 2012): I'm posting this because this was one of my more popular (and less violent, which means still usable, now that I've become a good Mormon) pieces on Inkpop (which is now Figment.com). It's also a good showcase piece, I feel. And it's always good to have a backup of pieces you want to keep.

Author's Note (August 1, 2010): I am partial to the scenes from Pretty Maids where Kate chills in the shower and has nervous breakdowns. Those are always fun.

And here we have three very unique individuals: Jack Hollis, who is not the villain of Pretty Maids All in a Row despite being a homicidal mass murdering psychopath; Kate Madison, an assistant district attorney whose heart thunders in her breast for said psychopath despite the fact that she is a pillar of the judicial system; and Maggie, who is unique in that she doesn’t actually exist... and yet somehow, she does.

This scene is for fans of Invitation in the Bag, which won the WWC WK9.

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The water sluiced over her like a thousand sleeping fingers, the infinite touches of a thousand whispering, hissing non-entities that were determined to make her remember. She slammed her forehead into the cold tile walls, and flashes of blinding white light exploded in her head, the same brilliant shade as the tiles of the shower stall. The white, that bright white of snow and milk and the paleness of his wrists….

“Stop it,” Kate hissed, and smashed her head into the wall again, trying to beat the images out of her mind. “Stop it, don’t think about him.”

She’d taken her medicine. Why couldn’t she get these thoughts out of her mind? They caressed the inside of her aching skull like drunken, intoxicating velvet drenched with absinthe and laced with morphine. Her head ached whenever she tried to force the thoughts of her now-gone savior from her mind.

She’d never told David about him, never. She knew he’d never understand how she could run into the arms of a madman, but it didn’t matter to her. As long as she refused to think about him, about any of them, she could pretend that they didn’t exist, that they had never existed, that there was nothing wrong with her.

But the memories, like insidious whispers that screamed softly to be noticed, to be gloried in, to be relived, they burned and kissed and fluttered inside her. Her wrists clenched as her hands tightened into fists.

Kate glanced down, ignoring the pounding spray hitting her hair, dripping water down her face. She shivered as the whispers and shadows teased at the corners of her eyes, kissing at her consciousness. Her wrists were pale, so pale, and she remembered how they had been so white, all of her had been so white and bloodless when her mother had drunk herself to death.

She remembered how it had seemed as if all of her blood had seeped out of her in the night, leaving her dry and empty, her veins filled with tiny shards of glass no bigger than dust, ground up into poisoned powder and cutting through her veins and arteries in place of crimson blood. She remembered that day at school, so long ago, when she’d been only ten years old, and the broken piece of plastic had sliced so deftly into the fleshy pads of her fingers and swept through the flesh of her palm and the back of her hand…

So much blood, all of it so dark and so bright, such redness, such a rich color in her voided nothingness, all the colors leached from the world except for that shocking scarlet blood. It ran down her arm, soaked the sleeve of her shirt, crimson edging to the pristine, snow-white linen. It dripped off of her elbow, pattering tiny droplets like small lakes to the white, tiled floor. It pulsed and flowed, etching scarlet lines in her skin. Her skirt soaked up the blood, the cracks of the skin on her knees drank it up like parched earth. Her hair was tacky with it. All of it so red. She was translucent, evanescent, empty, as the crimson blood flowed and flowed, running in sweet, scarlet streams down her flesh.

Sneakers. Violet Vans, with lime-green laces.

They came into her field of vision, dull and muted but still arresting in the world of sparkling white and blisteringly bright burgundy blood. The lime-green laces glittered. Black flames danced along their edges.

She looked up, up the dark blue pants and the white button-down shirt that sucked life out of them all with its unlife-whiteness. Her eyes found the Sum 41 sweatshirt, saw the blazing red logo on the black cotton. Her eyes watered, thirsting for life and color. She continued to drink him in with her eyes.

Her blood was gone, a lake of red on white tile. The dark flames dancing along this boy’s body filled her veins with ebony light. She shuddered as her eyes found his neck, whiter than the tile, bloodless. Blue and red kissed his throat where the translucent flesh showed his blood vessels. Her eyes slid over his pointed, fox-like chin, his smooth cheeks and candy-pink lips. They were bloodless pink, like they should’ve been red and only his undead state made his mouth so cotton-candy pink. His nose was straight, with a spray of gray freckles.

His eyes burned her, seared away the numbness in her marrow, filled her bones with light and fire the color of the void. Her blood was like frost cutting her veins. Lightning flashed behind his eyeballs.

“Show me,” he demanded.

She didn't have to ask what he meant—she knew what he wanted to see. Blood, so bright that it shattered the walls and burned away the ceiling. His eyes sparkled with electric lights and the pale green tints of Easter lilies.

Kate held out her hand, with its slash across the palm. With its numerous, tiny red mouths on the back; with the long cut across her wrist, weeping scarlet.

Her own eyes, blue-green as a poisonous plant, pale as a dead fish, gleamed like a neon sign. Booze, blood, brilliance—all found there, in the hate and acid of her gaze. She could feel the sign etching itself into her forehead—If Empty, Come Here.

Her soul ached as he reached down and took the shard of broken plastic, translucent as her skin and as pretty as diamond knives, out of her hand. The razor-sharp edge sank into his fingertips, and blood welled up and flowed. A drop of it fell onto her wrist, brilliant against the white. Kate felt her eyes bleeding in sympathy.

“Have you ever been cut?” Kate whispered, but her voice was different, frosted over with ice and white sugar. Her eyes were washed out, pale, lit from within by a pearly sheen. Her face was blank, and only her eyes were alive in their bruised sockets. Her hands shook. Blood made pretty patterns, crimson against ivory. Her eyes bled where his eyes cut at her.

"Cut?"

"By a knife?" She asked.

"Sharper." His voice was a husky growl. She imagined a dog on a chain, gaunt and angry, baring teeth at the ones who starved it.

The voice didn't fit with the golden curls that framed his pale face, didn't seem right to be coming from that mouth the color of bubble gum. His tongue was red, his lips pink. His voice was black as pitch, ready to ignite in the heat of some unknowable knowledge, something Kate's intuition told her would be delicious and delirious.

Nervously, she licked the corner of her mouth, tasting the sting and the blood from where the plastic had kissed her like a boy. The boy reached into his pocket and pulled out a pack of orange-mint Tic-Tacs. He popped a couple in his mouth. His bleeding fingers left tiny smears of red across his mouth. She wondered what blood, mint, and orange tasted like. Was it tangy and delicious? Was it like absinthe and salt, or arsenic and lace?

"Sharper?" She asked him. She felt stupid. She ought to know what he meant. There was something in his eyes that made her mind ripple and her head sing. Her blood was cold and thin as it poured out of her. Everything was a dream. "Sharper?"

"Like ice. Ever been cut by ice?"

He didn't mean the kind of ice that was frozen water. She knew that by the way he said ice. "Aye-suh." It wasn't ice, but ice. The kind of ice that was everywhere. She saw it, and she realized he could too. It was the ice that had covered her mother's eyes when she died, covered her mother's grave and her father's face and her friends' mouths so that the cold was everywhere, all around, numbing her.

Blood warmed her, the cool sweet blood that was still warmer than the ice, so it steamed in the air.

"Yes…"

"Yes...shut up!"

Kate screamed, and threw herself against the wall away from the faucet. She threw her weight against the wall. Her breasts and her belly hit the tiles with wet slaps that stung like a palm to her face. She sank to the floor of the shower, hair hanging around her in a curtain of dark, dripping wet threads. She didn’t want to remember. She couldn’t let herself remember!

The water beat at her, belts and hands and fists of clear, diamond-hard water pounding into her flesh, bruising her fair skin. She was a princess, but she didn't have those hundred mattresses between herself and the bruising strikes. Only the air, only the thin, cold air to buffer the blows.

And Jack...she had had Jack, once, a long time ago. Jackie-boy, John-Jack, Captain Jack...

"He's here, Kate."

It was the soft, ice cold voice of Maggie murmuring in her ears. The shivering brunette shook her head, clapping her hands over her ears to block out the damning words. No, no, no. There was nothing, no one. Never, ever, not ever. There was no Jack, never had been a Jack. Middle school and high school and college had passed by without so much as a mention of Jack Hollis, the man who had plunged his switchblade into Matthew Madison's bloated beer-belly for daring to touch his daughter...there was no Jack Hollis.

No Jack Hollis, no. No Jack. No Jack. No Jack.

There was David, and Harold. There was Ian. There was Matthew Madison, the man whose semen had forged her DNA but who would never be considered her father. There was Maggie, and all the thousands of hellish voices that the ice-eyed figment kept at bay. There were all these.

But there was no Jack Hollis.

Kate repeated this to herself over and over again, trying to drown Maggie out as the other woman crooned in a sing-song voice, "Don't lie to yourself, Kate. What about the card? Do you remember the card on your dash board? It was a Joker card. You've seen the videos. You've seen what Jack's done. You recognize the neon eyes like poison.

"There is no cure for that poison, Kate. You and I both know that. We can never be cured of wanting to be cut by the emerald knives dipped in absinthian venom. We will always be sick for it, Kate. We will always need it. Always crave it. Always dream of it.

"We recognize those eyes. We remember them. Eyes that have been cut. Eyes that cut. Don't deny it, Kate. You know we're sick."

"I'm not sick," Kate hissed, scrunching up in on herself. The water pounded the crown of her head. Water ran in streams down her face, dripping off the raised flesh beneath her eyebrows and the point of her nose. "I'm not sick. I'm getting better. Leave me alone! I'm on medication. Leave me alone!"

She screamed this last, kicking out at the faucet in an attempt to turn it off. She managed it, but not before the sharp metal sliced through the thin flesh of her foot. Blood welled up and ran like a river.

Kate stood up on shaky legs, her knees doing their best to knock together, and got out of the shower. The blood was bright against the whiteness of the bathtub, stark as reality against the creamy bathroom tile on the floor, sickeningly scarlet as it rolled in rivulets over her pale skin. The pain sliced through her, throbbed and kicked at her to demand her attention. She ignored it and grabbed a black towel off the wrack, anxious to scrub away the tainted residue of memory.

"Kate..." Maggie whispered her name, a sinful invitation. "Kate? Kate, Kate..."

"Shut up," she hissed.

"Have you ever been cut, Kate?" Maggie demanded. Other voices chimed in.

"Kate's been cut..."

"Cut, cut, cut..."

"Bleed, cut and bleed, cut and..."

Voices, so many voices; they shrieked in whispers, screaming like a spring breeze across soundless chimes. All of them demanding she remember, she think, she ponder, she reminisce.

She didn't want to think about him. If she did, her need would rise, sharp as a knife blade and hungry as a starving cobra. Don't think about it.

Don't think about the curls against her cheek as he leaned over her, moving her to suit him, as they played with the glittering sharpness of razorblades and pain and fear.

Don't think about those candy-pink lips the color of unlife moving over her mouth as kids screamed because the park trees were burning all around them, because fiery claws were reaching out to snag their Halloween costumes as Kate tasted blood and mint-orange TicTacs and anarchy.

Don't think about Paulie Talcov screaming that he'd never try to goose Kate again if only Jack would stop hitting him with his own lacrosse stick and don't think about how Jack didn't stop until the stick was broken and Paulie was bleeding and whimpering.

Don't think about Jack. Don't think about Jack Hollis. Don't think about Jack.

Don't think about him.

Kate shuddered with the phantom memory of that first blazing, tangy, bloody kiss, and wrapped herself in her thick purple bathrobe so she could go out and put her clothes on.

Harold would be by to pick her up for dinner soon. She had to be ready. She couldn't let him know how she felt. Couldn't let Harold, New York City's knight in shining armor, see her, and see that Maggie wasn't keeping the voices at bay.

Why had she agreed to take that medication, anyway? It wasn't working. She was still seeing everyone. She was still seeing Maggie. But at least when she could see Maggie, she could count on her other half to beat the other pieces of herself back into the abyss of her psyche. Maggie was better than any medication. She wasn't going to take it anymore. It was a waste of time and money.

Pushing open the door to her bathroom, she came out into her master bedroom and froze. On the bed was a beautiful dress, all burgundy silk and chiffon and satin, with a plush velvet coat draped over her bed beside the dress. There was even a burgundy velvet purse and pumps the color of burgundy wine. Even makeup—lipstick, blush, eye shadow, nail polish—was set up on the white wicker nightstand beside her bed. The dress and accessories were like spilled arterial blood against the pale creaminess of her sheets.

On the dress, pinned to a blood red rose, was one of those old-fashioned Joker cards, the ones that had the jester-demons in faded black ink.

Typed on the glossy surface of the card were the words, "Have you ever been cut?"