There is nothing left to feel.
I am hollow; empty. Without substance.
He will find me, decayed and broken. He will see the maggots crawling from my orifices, slithering habitually into my wounds, and he will cry out. They will gather around him offering condolences and tears. They will believe his shrill screeches and anguished wails. Time will pass, he will leave, and I will waste away into the forgotten archives of this town. I will be reduced to a signature, timestamps separated by two decades, and a series of photos showing my twisted, rotting flesh. Small children will whisper my name in the dead of night as they sit underneath tattered sheets with flashlights illuminating the caverns of their faces.
He will choose another. She will be a pale ghost, a neverending contrast to the shadows that entwine with her hair. When her eyes fade and glaze over, she will remind him of me. In that premeditated moment he will whisper my name; the memory of something lost tugging at the corners of his mind, possibly in a corner where his soul should be.
When he lifts his mask and allows his weakness to shroud him momentarily, I will strike.
They will find his body in the early twilight a month after his passing. He will have maggots devouring his eyes along with the membranes of his nose while miles of flesh stretches taut over his broken bones. They will not cry out. They will not mourn him.
For now, I am tasked to simply observe from the air he exhales as he wipes the sweat from his brow. The girl who looks like me, but isn’t, is strapped to a metal exam table. Her pupils dilate as adrenaline begins to swarm through her bloodstream wreaking havoc on her nervous system. She contemplates how she ended up here with every half-tempo breath. I wondered the same thing myself in the centuries that seemed to occur between the moment where he picked up the metal scalpel and the moment where it slid effortlessly through the skin of my chest. Will he notice how similar our insides look, our color palettes nearly identical? I take a small amount of comfort in the fact that she will never elicit the exact same thrill in him as I did. I was his first, while she was merely an attempt to quell the withdrawal he could not seem to shake.
For months, he followed me as I made my way between classes and work.Occasionally, I would even make it home to my room with the Pepto-bismol pink wallpaper and the mint green carpet. In an attempt to save my sanity I would dismiss the clicking of his camera’s shutter outside my bathroom window as crickets, even though deep down I knew it wasn’t anything so innocent. How many pictures had he taken of me in the sixteen months before he discarded my body on the bluffs near his house? How many different positions had he made my muscles and bones perform before he decided our ‘relationship’ was plausible enough to fool the those on the other side of the lens? We were in love. I adored him. He was my soulmate, although I was never made aware.
Just as the girl bleeding out on the table had loved him. Her blood pools crimson and slick into the stained trench outlining the edges of the exam table, the liquid swirling into a corner and down a tube that leads to the drain in the cement floor. He has perfected his incisions; his hand no longer trembles with a concentrated mixture of terror and anticipation. My wounds were jagged from haste and impatience, a mistake he would not make again. He has frozen time for her, allowing himself to embrace the adrenaline produced by tracing each vein pulsating beneath her skin. He has learned where to carve if he wishes her to bleed slowly. Although she looks like me, her resolve is stronger. She is scared, but she is stubborn. She will not give him the satisfaction of screaming.
I had wailed the moment his fingers grasped my wrists, my eyes opening from sleep to see a stranger hovering over my face with his knees on either side of my chest. Although I yelled for help, none came. I remember the sharp sting of the needle sliding with little resistance between the muscles of my neck followed chased by the warming burn of sedatives. As the edges of my world began to blur I noticed the pictures of him and I staring back at me; taunting me of vacations I had never been on and dinners with people I didn’t know. Later, I would watch as the police rifled through what little possessions I had owned. I would cry out in confusion as they lifted up his shirts without becoming suspicious. Why didn’t they realize that his things did not belong in my sanctuary? They came to him many times throughout the investigation, and each time he walked away unchained. I was his, in death before in life. The ring they found on my half-eaten finger proved his story true. We were in love. I was his. They needed to find whoever did this to me.
Eventually, they gave him my belongings in an orange bag with my name scribbled on the front in black marker. The ring he forced onto my corpse now weighs down the ring finger of the girl who isn’t me. Her apartment is yet untouched, but soon it will be littered with photoshopped memories that will exonerate the skeletons in his closet. She has bled enough for today. He would not like for her to lose too much; we are less fun to play with when we’re unconscious. As he carefully threads the curved needle, the girl glances over in my direction, her eyes pleading with me to do something. I am envious of her. I was alone when the last breath exalted itself from my lungs. There was no god or man for me to bargain with. He sews her up with speedy precision, the obsidian stitches uniformly hugging her flesh. Her insides may be shrouded but she is still exposed.
Now that she is too weak to run, he undoes the leather straps securing her to the table. She is considering whether or not the last bit of adrenaline left in her will be enough to escape. I shake my head and watch as what little hope she harbors in her heart turns to nothing. The ending of her story is drawing near, and until then, she will be a girl trapped in a doll’s body. He will pose her in various places: a green screen, her room, the pool in the backyard. Once he is satisfied that the facade he has created is perfectly crafted, he will infiltrate her home with the false story of their life together. No doubt, she is isolated and alone. No one will object to her finding such a sweet and handsome young man. No one will question his clothes lying neatly folded in her dresser while the only laundry in the hamper is hers. They will not wonder why there is only one toothbrush to split between the two of them. These seemingly inconsequential discrepancies will eventually lead the authorities to him, although not in time to save her.
As he dresses her in the white dress with the aging lace and brass buttons, I can’t help but find my consciousness drifting into the crevices created by a decade of weightlessness. What will her fingernails look like when the flesh beneath them is gray and the blood clots in her veins? Will he learn from my death and make sure she is more easily recognizable? The melancholy timber of his voice lures me back to the present as I avoid gazing into the medicated black void of her pupils.
He tells her she looks lovely. It is true. She will make a beautiful corpse. Tiny red spots begin to seep through and wick into the lace front of her dress.Her stitches have burst. She struggled too much; she was too combative. I stand near the wooden shelf lined with glass jars. Some hold herbs, some hold rocks or bottle caps. I fixate on the bottle with my name written carefully on the cork stopper. It is hidden in the back behind a bottle of worms. The contents inside are turning yellow with age, but they remain distinguishable. My teeth. Not only did he steal my life, he also chained me here with things that do not belong to him.
I can vividly remember the jolt of pain soon shadowed by the taste of rust and metal. With each molar he removed, my gums hurt a little less while the copper taste of oxidizing blood only grew stronger. Until that moment, a small ember of hope had smoldered below the surface allowing me to believe that I might survive this. It wasn’t until he began altering my anatomy by subtraction and division that I realized the truth of my reality. I had no need for teeth if I were dead.
Is that same reality setting in for her? Her breathing becomes labored as his routine continues to play out nearly identical to the ritualistic dance he performed with me. She has ruined his mother’s dress. Any mercy he was willing to show her has now diminished completely as his hunger sets in.When he allows the needle to puncture her jugular I find myself imagining the feeling of rubber muscles and tendons as she drifts off into sleep. The final act will not be easy, but the sleep that comes after will at least seem welcome in comparison.
I follow him down the icy roads that lead into the small town where the girl who is not me lived. Small stores litter either side of the street, the people passing us busy with their idle chatter and shopping. No one notices the beat up cadillac with mismatched doors speeding by them. Just like no one notices the man with the shaggy beard and deep-set emerald eyes clumsily insert a house key into a home that does not belong to him. He has become an expert at looking the part of reputable while hiding the sinister nature he has never been able to shake. Her apartment is similar to mine in that her belongings are sparse and there is barely anything that shouts of her existence. He knows what to look for; someone who is quiet and won’t be missed. Someone with no life of their own. Maybe that’s how we ended up here. Would our fates have been altered if we had simply tried to exist in the outside world instead of being content to just observe? Is our lack of living before our deaths why he can so easily insert himself into our pasts so that no one questions his presence? As he sets up the photos, I find myself smiling at a picture of her in the white dress. His arm is around her waist as they stand in front of the Eiffel Tower, her eyes focused on something distant behind the camera. I do not smile because the photo is a mirror image of the one the police examined on my nightstand. I do not smile because of how lovely she looks despite the nightmare of her reality. Instead, I am smiling at the mistake.
In his haste to reach the end, to achieve his climax, he signed his own warrant. The police will notice, as surely as I have, the blood stain forming on the front of her dress. It will be too late, but they will notice. Eventually, there will never again be a girl who looks like me, but isn’t. Back at his farm house, the girl awakens to the all too familiar feeling of cold metal and restraints. I place my hand on hers, offering what little comfort I can as he begins the the painstakingly and unnecessarily brutal task of removing her teeth. Her body convulses with each extraction, yet despite the agony, she never once cries out.
I expect her to be gifted her own glass bottle, although she is not. Instead, her teeth now jingle against the same prison as my own. As her life begins to fade into the nothing that exists past our death, I feel her fingers interlace between mine. Her eyes glaze over as her grip grows tighter, a silent signal of a truth we are now both unfortunate enough to know.
I am at the forefront of his thoughts, and I hate the way my name rolls off his chapped, windburned lips. I lunge at him, my voice anguished and guttural as I try my hardest to rip the flesh from his bones. I need him to suffer, to hold his fear in the back of his throat with every breath, but I am nothing. I am hollow. There is nothing left to feel.
He will ditch her body down by the river where he and his brother used to swim as boys in the sweltering July heat. He will find her, thirty-two days from now, decayed and broken. Her body will be bloated and infested, and he will curse the gods for taking her from him. They will offer him their condolences as they wonder how something so tragic could happen to such a likeable young man. We will watch as they escort her body away in the heavy black plastic that has come to signify death. She will be reduced to two dates, a signature, and a manilla folder filled with crime scene photographs.
He will choose another. She will have fair skin and dark hair that will mat around her face when she is disposed of. She will look like us, and when the light from her eyes fades, he will whisper our names.
When he does, we will strike.