DarkJanuary
With his stomach in his chest, he raised his hands high and lifted his feet, screaming all the way down.
The smell was rank. Carl had no idea the smell of corpses would be close to smothering him. But the pay was good. It took nearly an hour to suppress the urge to gag, but figured it out. After two hours, the sight of mangled bodies and the stench of death almost didn't bother him.
There were rules, both explicitly stated and implicit. When he came home, dinner was supposed to be ready. When you came home, she had to clean and quickly because she had to make dinner before he opened the door. If and when these rules were broken, so was her face.
You see the red and blue lights but you don't hear them. Somewhere between panic and mortification, the sound of your heart skipping irregularly pulses loudly in your ears. Someone is easing you back on a gurney and asking you questions. You open you mouth and can't find the air to speak or breathe. You close your eyes, sinking into something that feels a lot like sleep.
Spicy brown, it warmed her mouth in all the best ways. She hummed and he laughed. "I can't believe you actually did that," he said. When she looked up at him, there was a mischievous grin on her face.
Lost in her book, she didn't see the dark shadow growing on her bed, or the hairy hands reaching out for her hair. By the time thick gnarly claws sunk into her neck, it was too late to scream.
He always kept something to talk about in his back pocket because awkward silences were, well, he couldn't think about what would happen if he allowed silence in, and anyway talking brought people closer to him and kept the people who didn't care about him far away, so he didn't see any harm in keeping the conversation going and going...
This was scary. The last time she'd tried, she'd fallen flat on her face. It'd taken over a year to put herself back together. But he promised he wouldn't let her fall this time. He promised he'd be there to catch her every time. So she opened her arms and heart and fell.
Her lips were smooth and there was a light sprinkle of freckles along her nose that he hadn't noticed before. She didn't close her eyes, so he didn't either. It felt like kissing a human, real and exciting, and he decided then and there it didn't matter.
She was going to the special cabinet. The one that held the family heirlooms. That's how Alan knew this was serious. How many women had he brought home in the past five years? Dozens. But for this one, his mother insisted they use china for dinner. He was surprised at the relief flooding him.
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writing since 2018 · 32 entries · 32 days shown up
each square is a day—lit means DarkJanuary showed up.
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32days written
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the words DarkJanuary reaches for
eyeshomehandscloseheldhairothershourdoorbeganpayopenedsmellwalkedheadallison