Dìpucitna's sanguine arrow pierced my pallid flesh. I felt it tear in and through my mortal breast, three and a quarter inches below my left collarbone -- with a searing sting and violent flood of sickly white-hot heat -- before the cold clutch, pull, and tug; as half my human heart was torn from me.
She stood over me, terrible and beautiful. My ears filled with warm thick liquid and I could hear her frightful whispers inside my pounding head.
She dared to call herself Roma, but I knew her true name. The widespread wings of darkest red (black but for a glint of crimson, caught in the strained light of the waning sun), the bottomless quiver of gleaming arrows (poisoned points, sharp as chiseled bone, polished ebony shafts, nock feathers of murdered mourning doves), showed me legend come to life. Myth before me, flesh and bone. Reality shifted.
Dìpucitna. A black rose plucked from death's own garden: fed by the blood of a martyred Saint, watered by the tears of an Emperor's sightless child.
She held my dwindling essence -- pathetic and weak, but still beating -- cradled in her boney bloodstained hands. All fire and passion ran from me. Ice crystals blossomed in my veins. Numbed, she left me -- a shell: halved, hollowed -- doomed to amble through the rest of my earthly days, a shadow of myself, in a fruitless search to fill an intangible void.
Loveless.
My name is Lillian Betts. I was born on the Fourteenth of February 1971. I am (I was) Roma Dìpucitna's 1,737th victim. I was whole, once, not so very long ago -- complete and alive with passion. The memory lingers, haunts me, but it is elusive. I search mirrors for something recognizable (a light behind my eyes, a half-remembered secret playing at the corners of my mouth, a palpable sensuality, an infectious sexual energy) -- heat -- something I know I was... some proof that I'm still in here, somewhere.
My ears ring -- torturous, the silent stillness -- straining to recall a sweet rhythmic sound that used to soothe my weary mind. My body mourns forgotten hands. My lips tremble against absent kisses. My legs fall open for a shapeless ghost.
A distant disjointed dream holds me in my sleep, but I awaken cold and alone.
Everyday, I feel her poison at work inside me. Icy fingers probe and coax me -- compel me to roam, half-dead, on a futile quest to reclaim an indefinable part of myself, to win back the
something
she took from me -- but they offer no clear direction. There is just this inconceivable ache, this hole... this thirst.
I know I knew something beautiful. I felt it, held it, touched it.
It was real. It was mine.
My lust is ugly now. My passion: sad and desperate. I see it reflected back at me: pity, fear, and disgust in the eyes of strangers. I am unaffected by their thoughts or wants or needs. I steal in and out of their lives taking nothing of use to me -- impervious to their most ardent exertions -- and yet I seek them out. Slave to the hunger, I find them. Bound to a memory, I look. I try. I search.
* * *
He is nobody. I tell myself, that's okay. His breath is hot and wet against my neck. Strong hands tangle in my hair. Calluses graze my scalp. I'm pinned against the bathroom sink. His shirt is torn. I think I did this. He is fucking me from behind. I don't know his face, but it -- he -- seems almost pained to please me.
He has something to prove. I have something to find.
I meet his eager thrusts in earnest, slamming between the cold hard porcelain and the strange elusive warmth of him.
His cock is beautiful. It does not excite me. His rhythm is perfect. It does not move me. His words come raw and potent. I want them to stir me. They do not stir me.
"You like that, don't you..." It's not a question -- and, if it had been, not worth answering -- just damp empty words without purpose.
His fingers slide down my body, into the wet heat between us. I grind into his hand, trapping it between the unforgiving sink and my aching unresponsive clit. I need to feel something. I want it to hurt.
I want. I want. I want.
"Is this what you wanted..." More nothings take sound and vibrate against my neck. I lean into them, aching for teeth.
I beg him to bite me. He begs me to come.
He won't. I can't.
I press my hands hard against the glass and push. He groans long into my ear. The low wet drone seeps into my brain and scratches a coarse trail of mind-numbing echoes. My jaw locks down on the forgotten sting of dental anesthetic. I scream long and loud inside my head: a waylaid war-cry that fails to rally or waken my deadened nerves.
My body mimics the unheard scream -- reeling back in search of sensation, plunging into unfound consciousness. He is so deep inside me and, still, I ache with emptiness.
I can find no release.
He's watching us in the mirror. He is telling me I'm beautiful. I don't see it. I am her puppet, a clumsy half-naked marionette. Only I detect the strings. Only I see the mark she left, the hideous ragged scar marring my breast.
I beg him to fill me. He begs me to tell him he is.
He can't. I won't.
I feel the telltale tremors, the tension, mounting in him. I know he's close. I don't want him to come... Not yet. Desperation wells up in me. I plead, pounding into his orgasm -- a violent fight for any last stab of pleasure, pain, proof of life -- and, even through his delirious climb, the explosive twists and wanton grunts, I see it flood his narrowed eyes.
There it is. Pity.
Poor frigid slut, vulnerable and impenetrable, at the same time... lovely and ugly... soft and unyielding...
Pity.
I deflate, crumpled, a broken down doll doubled over the icy sink, forehead pressed hard against the smooth cold mirror. The room is still. I hear that pseudo-apologetic sound, a quiet clearing of his throat, and feel him pull from me. It's a sad hollowing slide, which seems to take my stomach with it.
Still, my body -- like the room -- feels only slightly less lonely as he leaves it, than with him in it. Dull echoes of remorse take his place. A thin vibrating shame, tweaked like a nerve, a hot liquid pulse inside my ears and head.
I beg forgiveness into a dark violet void. My hands claw at the mirror. My lips graze its chilly surface -- open, wanting, parted in hopeless search -- hungry for remembered warmth, tender absolution.
Eyes wide and unblinking, I stare into the vacant gaze that meets them. I am as alarmed by what I don't see as what I do: suffocated, stolen -- a thing consumed -- no fire, no light, no flicker, no smolder, no heat. My skin looks so thin, fragile and stretched, like the slightest nick might bleed me out. Fear shakes me and I begin to weep. My reflection watches with dry soulless eyes.
The tears swell and run uncollected. I breathe fat hapless clouds onto the mirror. They evaporate as fast as they appear.
Who are you? Where are you?
The words are phantom whispers -- slipping unheard, spilling uncaught -- no ears to hear or understand them. Not even my own.
* * *
He is nobody. I tell myself, that's okay. His mouth is warm and soft. His kisses melt over my lips and tongue, laced with cigar smoke and scotch. The tastes awaken an odd swelling calm in me.
I am backed against a tall wooden fence in an abandoned parking lot.