She comes to sit with me for a while. She comes and sits beside my cage. She rattles on my chains, pulls on their lengths. She watches me, like you might watch a fish, or something you were going to order for dinner. 

Yeah, I’ve done some bad things. That girl, she really liked me, and I couldn’t have cared less, so I made her let me jerk off on her face, and then told her to walk home like that. And she smiled and did. We never spoke again, which was probably for the best. She sort of disturbed me a bit.

They found me, cracks of cement caught between my toes, blood leaking from a thousand holes drilled with garden shears. They found me caught between a lie and hard place, stabbing myself in the back like masochistic masturbation. They found me, but all they found was the meat-suit I wear. They never really found me out.

I never got kissed in high school, unless you count that one time on that greyhound bus, which I guess I do, but it still never seemed to matter. Kissing a girl is still such a weird way of obtaining something, Permission, perhaps. Or getting just a taste of something else.

I wanted to write something you’d notice; I wanted you to sit up and notice when I came in. But… not yet, okay? Not quite yet. 

Oh, I’ll tell you a tale. 

A tale of the Land Squid.

They say he’s over a million years old, you know? And yet, he has no name. They say he ate the dinosaurs, most of them anyway, all the important ones. He wiped them clear off the earth, one by one. He was sucking the mean from their bones when the ice age started, and he was still sucking them clean when the frost began to thaw. 

He’s bigger, bigger than can be seen by a whole human head, in one go around. You’d need three or four stares, or a couple of friends, to take in the whole of the beast. It’s hide is thick and purple, almost luminescent, and its eyes are the red of the sun as it sets; a brilliant, fiery red that seems to see way down deep into your soul. 

I saw him once, I saw his outline, moving across the horizon of the Rocky Mountains. He was a strange, horrid sight, capable of blotting out the sun, or ending a thousand lives with the twitch of one of those impossibly long tendrils. 

But he looked kind of sad, too, sad in the way that only a thing that’s a buncha million years old, can look. The sort of sad you’d almost expect to see on a thing that’d eaten the earth’s last Tyrannosaurus, and now had to subside on lost teenagers and small villages in Northern Europe. 

He was a mighty thing, the Land Squid. I thought I heard somebody call out to him once, I thought I heard somebody call him, call him, “Barry.”

But I know that I must’ve been mistaken. 

For the Land Squid, as you know, he has no name. 

I expected her to be birthed like an angel, but in truth, she looked somehow more like a fly, crawling and devouring its way loose of the maggot-shell that was once its true form. 

I thought there’d be feathered wings, not those thick-veined things, a grotesquely deformed face distorted with multiple rows of compound eyes. Her mandibles cackled hideously in the still dawn air, as I watched the beast, a housefly some hundred and sixty pounds in weight, crawling her way out of her own corpse, and into our world. She let out this laugh, as she emerged, and the sound of it chilled me to my bones. I felt my balls shrink up towards my abdomen. 

Down the wall of the shack she slowly crawled. Her spit was bubbling black acid, burning everything it touched. Her arms and legs were an uneven number of dark, grasping limbs, coated in heavy dark hair. She smelled sickening and organic. Like something rotting, and bursting with rotting life.

My girlfriend took my hand as we watched the thing crawl down towards us. “I hate so many of your ex’s,” she said to me, and then we both went for our guns.

The bitch up top dropped her hold on the wall, and fell towards us, shrieking. 

Time froze for us, as our hands filled up with gun-power.

Everything, in that moment, was electric, and alive.

And then the fury came on. 

I write out of the hopes that somebody like you will notice me.

I write, hoping they’ll appreciate me, what I have to say.

That’s a lie. 

I hope they’ll read what I have to say, and strip off their clothing, and mail themselves to me. I hope they’ll arrive in safely wrapped and addressed packages that I can slowly tear into. 

I hope you’ll get naked for these words. I  hope your skin will prickle and goose bump and you’ll think that maybe, maybe you could just take your shirt off, just a little. Maybe you’ll sneak me a handful of your underwear, under the desk.

Baby, you could be my bright light, you could be a burst of insight into grey. 

Or you know, you could just sit there, staring me down. Like you’re waiting for the perfect moment to strike like a snake and leave me smitten. 

Smitten with the idea of being torn apart in your jaws.

Ah, maybe that’s not really why I write.

Maybe I’m just trying to remind myself of something else. 

Do you, do you, do you still wanna drink my blood?

I know you’re out there; out late, playing with your toys. They’re such playful toys, aren’t they?

And I; I don’t really need anything new from you. I don’t need any fan mail, I don’t require love notes stuck under my door. If I really want to be loved, all I need is a mirror, or an animal to feed. If I really want to be appreciated, I can start at home, where they know all my names and call on me simply by looking in my direction. 

Are you still out there? Are you reading yourself, writing yourself, wishing I’d read or write to you? Do you want to be penpals - lovers - zombies - bestest friends forever - vampires - lesbians - gayly in love with each other? 

Do you still wanna drink my blood?

Because I… I want… I want all that, and all that more. I want you and your roommate and your mom and dad and the snacks, the leftovers at the back of the fridge, the spare change under the couch cushions. The spare karmic change left over under the cushions of the casting couch where young wannabe-starlets suck stock roles in exchange for a dream or two.

But do you still want to notice me, what I’m doing here, why I came back here for you?

Sure I came back for you. Sure I did.

Because, I, I wanna drink your soul.

We were still in bed when the cops came for us. We were still naked, and eating jam by the spoonful. 

They said we were criminals. They said we were bad people. I said we were just hungry, just hungry and looking for some place to lay down for a while. 

The mattress under me is soft and squishy. It’s full of sex and blood and other runny bits of humanity. It’s like sleeping on a waterbed full of foam. 

The walls in this place are shot through with bullets and disinterest. The whole place is falling into disrepair even as we watch; wallpaper sliding down the walls, plumbing leaking brown waters onto the floor. 

The cops come stomping up the stairs in their big black boots, their guns in their hands and their mouths full of commands like “cease and desist” and “freeze suckers” and “don’t you fucking move”. They love this bit; running up stairs and kicking down doors. They look like a troop of soldiers on the warpath. 

She drops a match into a bucket of gasoline even as the cops hit our hall, and we’re out the window and onto the fire escape even as the force of those authority figures comes barreling into our home. 

There’s an explosion of warm air, and then we’re loose in the air. I can hear the sounds of bodies, cop-bodies, frying in the midday sun, frying the inferno we left behind us like footprints of angry destruction. 

She holds me, all the way down. Her voice in my ear, her hands down my pants.

She put me to her lips and lit me up; she turned me into smoke and sucked me down. Down, down, down into her, deeper and deeper, I was drawn. 

Hold me. Keep me yours. Mix me with your blood. Let me into your brain, so I can change the way you think and feel and act. Let me live in your favourite songs, in your comfiest chair, in the spaces between the sheets of your bed.

I’m yesterday’s lie told at tomorrow’s frequencies. I’m a short ride to somewhere you’ll be for a long time. I’m the other side of coin; the one you didn’t bet on. 

She used me up; drained me, dreamed me, made me hers. Bought and sold.

I struggled like I didn’t like it, like I was going to drift loose of her, and on into the ether. 

But I stayed on her lips, like a kiss, or a dirty word. 

I wrote a story one time, so big and brilliant that it devoured my life in the night. I was replaced by my own fiction, I became a character without a page to call home. A narrative without a plot-line. A voiceover voicing the same routine over and over again.

Caught on a chapter heading, I noticed her pouring our drinks across the way; some sort of strange reverse-waitress, she was mixing metaphors in big tall glasses usually reserved for pints of beer and cutting cunts about the chin. You know, you smash the glass down hard on the edge of the table, and then it’s not a nice beverage anymore, it’s just a weapon. 

Cutting edge technology we called that, back the old country. 

I grew up in the real world, but I left it as soon as I was able. I traded in my union cards and I burned my magic underwear. I found and founded religions based on pop music. Criminal empires situated around futuristic speculation. Cybernetic bitches looking for a bastard to kick around with their tin-can hearts.

You’re on my radio-station now, fucking on my frequencies. I watch you in still-life photographs, like a bowl of fruit; a bowl of fruit that slowly spreads its legs and reveals, well, you know, softer fruit. I reach for the portrait, hoping to get a taste of honeysuckle where there should be only canvas and paint. 

You’re wet; your ink isn’t quite dry yet. I lift you up, put you to my lips.
And blow you away.  

Her name was - you know what? Don’t worry about that. She wouldn’t answer to you anyway.

She had hair, you know, dark stuff that hung around her face, giving her head a certain sort of shape that changes when the wind hits it. Her hair, her patterns, it all changes when the wind hits it.

She had, you know, those things I tend to notice. An ass, tits, a midsection you might hold while dancing, hands you might hold while walking. She had a body, like most people do, and I appreciated that about her. She had eyes, and she had, as they say, quite a mouth on her as well. Yeah, when she opened her mouth, it was like the clash of metal in a car accident. 

Tattooed in cursive across her shoulders:
“I’d love to believe in, you know, something. Anything much at all, really.”

“I guess what it is that I don’t like about you, man,” I said, sticking the scissors in, “is that you don’t seem very jaded to me.”

He says something against the duct-tape that covers his mouth. It sounds like “mmm”, but urgently. 

“You don’t seem like you have very discerning tastes when it comes to choosing your sexual conquests,” I went on, watching his blood flow around the metal, and down his shirt. Such a pretty shirt. “And I get that. I’ve been where you are, I think. I just… made different choices. Became a different person.”

His skin is going pale as all his inner self just leaks away through the hole I put in him. His eyes are wide, and unfocused. He looks dizzy, tied to that chair.

“Ah, maybe I was never as capable as you anyway. Maybe you’ll always be something which was, I don’t know, better than me?” I pause, and sort of laugh. “No. No, you know I don’t believe that. You’re just better at different things than I am. That’s all. We have different skill sets. And yours, just happen, to set you into direct opposition to mine.”

He struggles, wiggling the scissors in his abdomen. 

“I want to live a good life, in a fun and engaging world. And I’m afraid there’s just no room for you in either of those things.”

I pull the scissors back out, and a little spurt of blood shoots out across the room. He slumps over in his chair. 

“I don’t think of us as her ex-boyfriends,” I explain, “not exactly. I prefer to refer to us as Past Boyfriends. We were real at one point. And in the past, we always will be.”