There were many steps around his fingers, round and twisted distortions of feathers. The distinguishing mark of his vein seemed blue and realistic, as if the sun had set vineyards we were watching. He said, “There were many distinguishing features of our jawbones.” A corrupted tree was the sign of a new intention. And we were clever; all we had was sawbones, or bones that were sawed, it was hard to tell with racks of pain. She tried mangling her hair again, a sculpture of divine proportions and she fucked anyone who could afford it. I hated the incompetence on my part, I didn’t take up the rope and strangle all politicians. It was an impasse and the blades were drawn onto sand. She said she liked it, especially when my hands were a warped conception: as long as we weren’t conceiving.

She held me tightly and as she gripped and stroked me to point of cumming, I felt her fangs pierce my neck. I came and went. I came and my blood went, both into her and onto her until I was spent and dead. And to think that was the end of it.

He had been bleeding for a number of days now and it was beginning to worry him. What troubled him was that he couldn’t pin point it’s source, just a thin puddle everywhere he went, usually left at the bottom of whatever seat he was sitting in, or around the soles of his feet. No one else seem to mind, occasionally someone would point out to him that he was bleeding, and embarrassingly, he’d nod his head and mutter, ‘I know, i’m sorry..’

And after he passed out, she reached into her purse, pulling out an exacto razor blade. She went back to the limp form and turned him over, straddling him. Carefully, having bent close down to his face, she stretched the skin of the eyelid with two fingers, between the eyelashes and the eyebrow, the top of the socket. Slow and precise, she lowered the razor.

He dragged her to the opening in the ground. She sobbed and laughed, tears and smiles, eyes half-closed and smeared mascara, grizzle in her teeth.
He couldn’t understand, didn’t care to, shuffling along, grip ion the handcuffs, tugging her, sandpaper scraping of her boots.

He checked the window again.
She was late.
The phone rang. He picked it up on the third ring. “Yes?”
“Hi honey, I just got home.” Susan. It was his fiancee.
He checked the window, cradling the phone between his ear and shoulder. “OK babe. Get some sleep.”
“Goodnight then, hey, tomorrow at five?”
Headlights turned onto his driveway. “Of course,” he checked his watch.
She was an hour late.
“Sweet dreams hon.”
“You too”, he blew a kiss into the phone and hung up.
A knock at the door. He opened it and she came in wearing only a raincoat and spiked heels.
“You’re late”, he said.
“A late fuck is better than no fuck”, she walked into the living room, shouldering off her coat, “C’mon handsome, the welts you left me last time are beginning to heal.”
He looked at the phone and then slowly, eyes now on her, entered the living room, undoing his belt.

so we were cutting her up, skinning her to tell the truth, and well, she kind of frowned. we had plenty of time before we would actually ‘disassemble’ her, as terri had put it. but that’s how we went about it: skin her and then saw through the bones. we had pretty much worked out the details, this wasn’t our first time. we weren’t amateurs, you know. plenty of experience, let me tell you. one time we had to chase down a girl down in the bayou. shit, terri got all pissed when he fell flat on his face, almost right on a crocdile. ripped that bitch almost right up the sternum.

‘It isn’t always quite as easy as this.’ he drew across the floor a line in the dust with the mangled branch he found outside. ‘We’re lucky that there’s still time to catch the flight.
She turned from the motel window. Making sure that the curtain fell back over the view. She could barely see him or the stick, even though she had been the one to find them both. Kneeling down where there was a huddled mass of something thicker than the rest of the room, she tried to make out the dust or the line in the dust, rather than the floor, she had enough of floors and things to be standing on. Gently her hand found his and he was shaking, by then she could make out the stick in his hand and she could see that it had done drawing the line across the dust piled on the floor, and that it was steady. ‘Of course’, she whispered.
‘What?’ he turned to her and could see her fascination was somewhere else and he didn’t mind, not that he could have any say in the matter. that was how things were between them, not much thinking about aloud, no harassment to spare, or even subject the other to, neither had considered it for a long time, and besides, the sun was setting, they were little time left, and left only to each other. Trust had to be a somehow come out of this, something as impossible as that, not sex, not love. Not a night’s worth of passion and just plain old dangerous liaisons as one would say, nothing Hollywood happening here, just them and the stick and an overfilled parking lot that hung outside the door with dread and silence.