jaymg
She shelled pistachios with her teeth. The cracking sound made me want to shove her face first into the canal. The shells would be strung around her neck by a yellow neon shoelace the following day, destined to torture my ears with their clacking at her every move.
It had arrived in his pocket without him knowing - his fist encompassed it, hoping to squeeze it out of existence. When he found he couldn't, the drop of sudden regret in his guts made his palm spasm open, and he felt the paper wrinkle itself outwards again, like a time-lapse film.
Right at the bottom sat a button, holes clogged with dust, the corpse of a white spider resting beside it. I reached inside, my whole arm disappearing into the vase as if I was about to pull out a rabbit by its ears. It was cool in there - the air untouched by the summer outside the china - the depths endless and illusionary, and I wanted to dive in, wrap myself around the innocuous little fastener and breathe in the scent of where it used to button across his chest.
It only took the time for him to take off his shoes to commit to it. It made him chuckle. Why take off your shoes if you can't swim anyway; if you want to sink anyway; if you could use the extra weight anyway? He took off his shoes as if he was about to dive in and save somebody. He watched the bubbles rise above him and left those shoes placed neatly at the jetty's end, facing out to sea.
"I'm so pleased for you!" said from between tightly shut teeth, escaping through the uneven gaps like vomit she was trying to avoid spattering across the back of a taxi.
I drove past, slower than an old man on a giant snail, wondering how it looked so much bigger than when I was a kid - surely things get smaller when you get older? They'd painted the front door black, neatened the wild heather bushes that took over the front garden each summer, replaced the moaning half-hung side gate with a regimentedly straight slatted door, fixed top and bottom with sliding bolts. It was not my house any more. The lease was for three years, but even in thirty I doubt I'd have enough money to buy the place back.
She lay in the scoop of the earth-mover, feeling the vibrations shudder through her spine as it rolled slowly forwards down into the pit. The only thing above her was metal teeth and sky - a sky punctured with stars and dusted with post-rain clouds. Though her body was still warm, by the time they found her - if they ever unearthed her before they laid foundations over her grave - she would be cold and gone.
It was supposed to unlock the door - a simple biomechanoid converter that you could find at any back alley store - but the instant the device sunk teeth into her thumb and wrapped previously unseen tendrils around her wrist, she decided that perhaps she didn't really need to rob this place quite as badly as she'd thought. It was generating a beyond-uncomfortable amount of heat, and an unnerving hissing sound that made you think of imminent explosions and pieces of flesh flying across the room.
He flailed through the stench, sucking him down faster than he could move forwards. It burned the hairs inside his nostrils; it gathered between his teeth, gritty and foul; it stuck his eyelashes together and made his skin prickle with numerous, invisible crawling things. He didn't panic when he could no longer move his feet. He didn't panic when it squeezed around his chest so tight he could only pant his meagre breath in and out. He panicked when he glanced down to find the invisible crawling things had been busy and the mud surrounding him was beginning to turn a dark, dark red...
Pick me up by my head with forefinger and thumb. Place me down carelessly, in full view, exposed to the danger of the voyeuristic, bloodthirsty crowd. Forget about me. Sacrifice me for the sake of some pompous king. I'm just your plaything, I'm just something to be discarded, I'm just a servant. But I'd die for you, over and over again. Set up the board once more; no matter how rough you treat me, I'll always be there to make your first move.
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