Wyntyre

READ THE AUTHOR'S NOTE FIRST. Thanks.

Her dry eyes stared up through the dust-coloured reeds, crackling and clicking in the windless atmosphere. The white sky pressed down on the ground, bloodless and without blemish, empty and unechoing. Time dragged the ground beneath her, sliding it endlessly across her raw skin as the fingertip of Fate pressed her solidly in place, an immovable weight on her chest, her limp arms and legs once working for a displacement that existed outside of her dead, constant sphere. Limbs that had long since stopped flailing when her bloodied and broken mind had finally accepted defeat. She only occasionally turned her heavy head to the buzz on the too-near horizon or to the sagging house, the lone structure, that stood silent and smug-faced on the near end of the dusty field. The house that offered sick, tattered memories for a break in the monotony. In this world of ambers, dusts, whites, and greys, she rolled her head on the ball of her thin neck, eyes sliding up into her skull, skin ripping and gaping, fingers twitching. She turned her head to the solitary pied-à-terre of pain, the never-ceasing shadows with no perception of night or day striping her gaping face.
“Mid-fucking-west charm,” her distant mind bitterly spurted.
She blinked, and when her dry eyes refocused, she was cornered neatly in the cage of the outdated parlor. The flat, pregnant light streaked in diluted yellow bars through the window that was riddled with angry cracks, all of them dancing down to the collapsing, roughly circle-shaped indent that he had made with her head the second or third time she had tried to resist. Dust motes lingered close to the filthy floor, the dense atmosphere above them forbidding flight. She choked on the stale air, ripe with the stench of clumsy fingers, bites and bruises, stretching and sharply stinging, broken female flesh. She gagged and retched, tears carving angry red trails down her gored face. The faucets all dripped in unison, oozing sick male sweat and her terrified tears. She bit through her lips, her blood dry dust. Her dog, her Kota, lay dead across the floor, his frozen face level with hers. The perpetual pause in this place had perfectly preserved the dog, the black sticky pool beneath it undisturbed. Its skull was a shattered bowl full of greys and washed-out pinks, the edges jagged like dull teeth. Its glassy eyes challenged her, and she broke the gaze first, eyelids fluttering as grains of dehydrated bile scratched the back of her splitting throat.

He had shot the dog, gun pressed to its ear, because she had clung to it, and it had to tried to protect what had been there long before he came along, tried to protect her from his bruising fists and disgusting hungers. He had laughed when she screamed, gore dripping from her face, scrabbling backwards until she hit a wall. Kota’s teeth were pulled back into a grimace, a death-grin leering at her, and she had screamed until he rammed the butt of the gun into her temple and she reeled, screams reduced to garbled whispers. When she awoke, she found an vengeful purple bruise that snaked back into her hair.

Later that night he came back to the room and forced himself against and into her body, fingers tearing out fistfuls of hair as she vomited over the back of the broken-down couch and screamed again, her fingers tearing through the cheap upholstery. Her skin turned inside out and crawled along the splitting shell of her sore and bruised body. When he was finished, he cradled her face in one hand, called her beautiful, and then slapped her. Her face landed in her vomit and he laughed, locking the door behind him as he left. When he was gone she sobbed in the dark, not sure if she should touch trembling, timid fingers to the face he had blackened or the other place, the place he had split open.
“Cunt,” he had called her.
The smell of her own sick stomach filled her nostrils, assaulted the roof of her mouth and the underside of her tongue, brushing against the ripe smell of his repulsive body. She bit down on her arm, pulling away a crescent-shaped piece of flesh that she gagged on as she tried to stifle her screams.

She ran her fingertips across the puckered, glossy scar on her forearm and closed her eyes, head nodding back and forth, lips moving soundlessly. Her arm dropped across her chest, knocked away by the eternal exhaustion she felt in this place where she could no longer even stand. Colours that only the blind can see danced across the insides of her paper-thin eyelids and she opened her mouth wide, releasing short, hoarse screams and there was no one around to hear her, to beat her down into the unconscious reaches of her mind, to call her "bitch" or "whore". She screamed and there was no echo, just the ghostly solitary shriek ringing out shrilly and abruptly being swallowed up into the dead air. One scream and then silence. She screamed again and again and again, and still no echo. Then her voice broke and there was nothing but the empty hum and her body silently shaking and heaving, her arid eyes with nothing to give up, forbidding her even the release of tears. She dug her fingernails into the torn linoleum and dragged her hands backwards, raking them across the scarred floor, fingernails grimed with grit before they were shredded off completely, tearing cuticles and tender, hidden flesh. Her blood seeped in a black sticky trickle over her fingertips, oozing to a stop almost as soon as it had begun to well and pool on her mangled hands. She smeared it across her face and up into her hair and laughed once, abrupt, eerie and insane. The shadows of the house hid in the corners, under the table, behind the sagging, shitty furniture, whispering in their own private tongues quickly to themselves, crouched and oblivious. She pulled hard and two fistfuls of matted hair came loose in her fingers, the piece of scalp dangling at the end of each bearing the same dark spotting as her thin fingers. She managed one more scream and then, finally, the blackness came and pressed its fingertips hard into her eyes.