Imagine a giant insect larva, eight feet long, and thicker than a man’s body. We found it, crawling in the backyard, writhing with a dozen others like itself, like blind maggots tearing into the dirt.

(You want to scream. To puke. To run away. But there you stand, contemplating the things.)

The pale white forms thrash angrily in the ground, perhaps sensing us somehow when we try to get close to them. They seem angry, like they’re practically humming with a rage they’re helpless to express.

(The smell is sickening. Like rotting flesh growing from a sickly plant.)

Looking at them, you get a sickening sense of their desire to hatch, to rip open, and release whatever awful monsters might lurk within. What gross forms are gestating within those lengths?

(You imagine mandibles. Compound eyes. Hairy limbs dripping with strange fluids.)

In the alley, one of the larva has been broken-open, a strange green jelly leaking out of its wounds, with an implication of great, muscular limbs coated in thick black fibres, like hardened lengths of hair.

(Next to that is the corpse of your neighbour. He’d taken an axe to the larva, and was now twitching on the ground next to it, dark pools of blood leaking out his mouth, and anus.)

You know you should go. You know you should. But can’t pull away from the awful sight.

She asked me to hit her, so I did. Open palm transitioned to closed-fist. I told her to close her eyes, and I watched her tremble. 

We rode each other like we wanted to break the bed; the sun outside denied access by those thick curtains, thick like a cement wall. We bounced off the walls, like superballs, until we ached all over, fire ants in our veins, biting at our bits from within.

I was torturous, sadistic, cruel, and sometimes even creative. She cried loudly, at several points in time, and came even louder. She came like there was storm in her cunt, full of lightning and rainclouds. 

I held her down, in cold water. I washed her clean, and spit in her face. I told her what I thought of her, how much I adored her, in the worst words I knew. I used language on her like a whip, meant to make her bleed. I lashed at her with my tongue, until we both were sore. 

And I hit her. After she asked me to. Hard enough to make her see stars. Another time, to make her lip almost bleed. She swooned and adored me.

We held each other in the dark.

Alone, she waits for me. Heart full of lust. Gun full of bullets. She adores me so much, she’s boring a hole straight through me. 

I cough a smear of blood across her lips when she sinks her tips of lead into me. It’s like lipstick. She licks it and swallows; it reminds me of something, something sort of unseemly. It seems like something I’ve maybe seen before, dreamed before.

Her heart’s got fangs, like some great vampire bat that comes down from the smoke that hangs over the city at night. Her heart is eating mine, beat by beat. I can feel it, turning in me, churning in me. The thought of her is eating into my heart like a worm rotting its way through an apple.

She sets off fireworks in my front yard, which is maybe just a metaphor for a really good blowjob, or maybe it was the real thing - maybe it was love. My brain crystallizes in the blast; it turns to hardened candy, refined sugars and artificial colours shattered like blades of glass hidden in the grass. 

Yeah, she ate my candy brain. She left me nothing to think with except a sticky little trail marked out by her tongue. 

I’m dancing with her; I’m ignoring her; I’m fucking her.

I’m fucking her, for all the world to see. If we were primates, if we were savages, I’d haul her up onto the biggest rock I could find, and have just right there like there, so everybody could see, could hear the sounds she’d make. 

I’m dancing with her; I’m lying to her; I’m deceiving her heart.
I’m deceiving her, but it’s not hard.

She likes to be lied to; she’s the sort of slut open-minded-girl who’d lie down with anybody. 

She kisses like a boxer. She gets all up in my face, and she does some damage while she’s there. She takes her five pounds of flesh, and then retreats back to her corner. 

I’m dancing with her, I’m enjoying her, I’m in love with her.
Or maybe I’m all alone in the room.
It’s hard to tell sometimes, with her. And me.  

She backhanded me with her kiss, battered me with a smattering of affection. 

I said, “I really don’t think I deserve this sort of treatment,” and she just laughed. She laughed and put her heel down on my karma. 

I wish, sometimes, that I had a more heroic stature, that I wasn’t so small and petty minded. But you have to work with what you’ve got, and I’ve got a mind built for tearing apart smaller things, like a mad dog on a chain. 

She made love to me until it ended me, until I was left, dead and spent, ready to be black-bagged and hauled away to the morgue.