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I fell in love quite unexpectedly.

No, not fell. I crashed, head on. A devastating collision.

As if a tornado spun through my chest, shrieking and thrashing, uprooting buried sorrows like wooden houses and tearing them asunder. My heart ached. A feeling so unfamiliar, I was convinced I was in cardiac arrest. Dying.

She took my clammy hand, the one gripping the blade, and our eyes met in a way so intimate, it was sheer violation. She licked salt from her lips, her face flushed dark rose. Her eyes, the brutal peridot of a crocodile, probed deep, seeking out the stiff cogs of my heart; lubricating. I wasn’t dying, I was being resurrected in her image. I surrendered the blade.

I surrendered.

She turned the scalpel, our images in brief reflection, twin dark smiles. I felt the shift of oiled wheels in my chest as she whispered, her breath burning a passage to my soul,

‘Let me kill her.’

-o-o-o-

I had worked alone for many years. People like me are, by nature, isolated and narcissistic. The company I seek is fleeting and unrequited, in shades of red and pale, pale skin. The first was a fortuitous accident, lust and rage colliding uncontrollably as things do in the minds and bodies of teenage boys. Pain, fear, passion, release. Endorphins flooding like hot syrup. That was my first wet dream—soaked iron-sticky to the wrists as my heart seemed to stop; freeze me in shared death for a long, long moment.

When I came round, I guess I was an addict. Cravings building with every day that passed. Then every hour. Alcohol and drugs had never held me; the thought of poisons coursing through my body, altering, impairing. Disgusting. The desires of the weak. The chemicals released by that first kill, they were all mine: albeit enhanced, racing through my tissues. They changed me forever.

I tried to recall that first occasion when the addiction bit and gnawed on me. Staring at my hands, imagining the gore that had crusted under my nails. The way it smelled like a good rare steak. Sadly, after several days, all I could smell was the expensive hand lotion my grandmother gifted me every Christmas. It’s not just ladies who should have beautiful hands, Armand. You are a fine man, from a fine family, not some grimy blue-collared- worker. The hand lotion was exquisite, but nothing like the slick-slip of still warm blood. The biting and gnawing grew too much, so I gave in to it. The chemical rush. The shades of red.

I would kill my Gramma on a bland autumn day. Trees giving up their dead leaves to the breeze; I could smell them mulching in the yard. I remember the feel of Gramma’s powder-puffed neck beneath my fine, moisturised hands. Like the old tissues in her purse, or tired rose petals. Under that powder, that mask of vitality, her skin was blue-white, horribly papery. When her tongue protruded from smeared-peach prune lips grotesquely, I placed a lace hanky over her face. I lay next to her for several hours. Feeling her cool and stiffen while the chemicals danced across my brain in sharp heels.

And so it went. The cravings. The yielding. A back and forth for many years. Many cooling corpses, dancing chemicals. I was a madness of one, and content. Until her.

-o-o-o-

I had no desire for anything other than the taking of life, yet I liked to cruise the parts of the city where desperate people worked and sought grimy pleasures behind dumpsters. I enjoyed the stink of such base need in the air. The uglier addictions leaving their smears on graffitied walls. These people so like me and yet nothing like me at all. I was their evolution.

I knew there was something different about her in the paucity of her fear. She was working a quiet stretch of street after midnight, alone, arrogant. Taking her time approaching my window, a nonchalance I found deeply arousing. The sharp click of her heeled boots keeping time with my pulse. She bent from the waist, fluid and firm, and my car filled with her perfume – vanilla and citrus – drugstore hand cream, olive oil shampoo. In the subdued light, the menace in her eyes was hidden to me. Later I would see so clearly, I would know she was like me. We were half-souls, unaware of any absence until we collided on that filth-strewn street.

I told her my pleasures were not of the flesh, in copulation. She lifted my hand, pressed it to her cheek; fresh rose petals under my fingers. A pulse in her jaw that electrified me.

“Will you show me?” Her voice was blade on skin, a ferocious whisper. I imagined I could smell my own blood in the wounding.

-o-o-o-

The couple whimpered like golden-haired puppies when I showed my companion into my basement. They kept their heads down, their incessant shivering causing their bindings to chafe harder. Blood beaded on pale, pale skin.

I sought her reaction and it was mesmerising. She blinked slowly, deliberately, as one might soothe a nervous cat, but the veins in her neck throbbed. I trailed her to where my tools were displayed, gleaming with deadly intent, watched her fingers brush a scalpel. I picked it up, small compared to the rest of my collection, the precision tool of saviours, it penetrated with featherlight pressure. A hot coupling of blade and flesh. I felt the chemicals begin their dance.

‘Let me kill her.’

Her crocodilian eyes stayed on mine as she deftly swept the blade across a quivering, white throat. Not my choice any more, I had bored of the mess some time ago, but she was revealing herself to me. Her mode, more carnal than her nakedness could ever be. Discarded, the scalpel rang off the concrete floor like a church bell, announcing our union. She placed her hands on my face; I imagined washing the gore from them later, slathering them in my fine cream. Then we kissed, a seal of blistering purpose. Lost in the moment, I almost forgot the second golden one. He was spattered red, silently screaming.  

My new love stroked my cheek, her mouth hinting at a smile.

‘I want him now. Slower.’

And so she had him, and more, many more, and we fell willingly into madness.

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BIO:

JP Relph is a Cumbrian writer hindered by four cats. Tea helps, milk first. JP writes about apocalypses a lot (despite not having the knees for one) and her collection of post-apoc short fiction was published in 2023. She recently got a zombie story onto the Wigleaf longlist, which may be the best thing ever.

A novella, Watcher, which was co-authored with Mathew Gostelow, has just been published.