The note was left tacked to her door.

In dreams, I’m your perfect man. I kill. I climb mountains and swim oceans. 

I destroy like a motherfucker. 

I wake up and I’m weak and little; my hands are numb claws. My wings are broken, gnarled things that stick out from my back like the twisted branches of rotting trees. Under my feet, the ground burns, and burns, and burns. 

I want to be your perfect man. I want you to strip me naked with your desire for me. I want you to reach for me with such force that you break my back. Yeah, I want to be busted in half by you, swallowed down by you like a pill.

Gently, she pulled the paper down, and crushed it in her hand. 

I asked her to seduce me with sugar, so she sat around eating poprocks all day, and then she drew me in close to kiss, and puked it all over my mouth. 

The caustic candy had grown angry in the bile of the stomach; it was a rainbow-coloured burst of sweetness in sour juice. 

I wanted her to love me forever, but she thought I said “for whatever” so she came onto me with total indifference, like a well-fed zombie hord chewing but seeming not to swallow. You get me? She seemed not hungry for me, but just sort of interested in biting off little mouthfuls she could spit out after a bit.

“Make your mama sigh,” I mutter to myself, steering my jet-pack across the city.

Deep in the dusty subways of the city, the last of the royal family is slithering, laying eggs the size of human-head that hatch into scaly flesh-eating monstrosities with hides as dark as black magic, and hearts as ugly as sin.

My aim is sure and my blade is sharp and my jet-pack is very fast. I am scared, but this fear drives me, drives me on, drives me on into darkness. 

The Queen’s got claws that can carve through cement like it was soft butter. The Queen’s hungry for human hearts and the fingers of babies. The Queen breathes cruelty and soft curses, muting the air around her and depriving it of oxygen. Yeah, it’s hard to breathe around her. Her great, bulbous eyes can see through time and space and city walls.

She knows I’m coming.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp, and my jet-pack is very fast. 

I meet her in the darkness, of the abandoned city’s abandoned subway system. She screamed for vengeance in a language spoken only by the great extinct lizard who used to rule this land. She screamed for my life. She screamed that she wanted to tear me into shreds. Her eggs trembled with anticipation, still-sleeping lizard-monster-babies dreaming of destruction.

She wants to kill me. She wants to devour me. She wants to destroy me.

But my aim is sure, and my blade is sharp. And my jet-pack is very fast.