Human Ruins

She sleeps, chest rising and falling in the steady rhythm of life. Moonlight streams through a crack in the curtains, a pale sliver of her neck. Scent drifts off her body, out the windows and down the stairs. It draws me in. Somewhere in the house, a doorknob turns. I’m no longer here. My mind floats above me, choking and frothing as I watch myself ease open her bedroom door. The hunger is all consuming. I grasp at the shreds of myself, hoping they might tangle my feet, stop my pursuit. Instead, I am pushed forward . My gaze rakes over her figure. Face, fresh and ripe. Her feet, soft.

I lick my lips. My shadow casts over her, and her eyelids flutter. The same eyelids. The same lashes. The same hands, the same hair, the same smell. Lilies. I force myself to pause and take a look around her room. Anticipation only ever makes the meal sweeter. Photos cover the walls. Photos of her, of her life. And of him. My vision tunnels on a photo. Pressed together, side by side. His eyes are pinned on her. The saccharine smile on his face is enough. Rage pulses, crashing against the shores of my sanity as the flimsy plastic of a polaroid bends under my grip. Will she taste of him? Will his name be emblazoned on the glistening flesh of her tendons? I salivate at the thought. Dropping the photo, I watch it drift to the ground, a crease down the middle.

The visceral bonds that exist between her and I, the strings designed to bring us together, it tethers me. I waited too long, and it has made me ravenous. Ready and willing to devour her to the ankles. To tear into the skin and bone that separate us, to love her down to the marrow. The yearning is almost holy. A gentle worship of sinful things. A paradoxical need to be needed, an urge to devour and be devoured. Perdition would be my heaven if you let me. Hunger gnaws at me. It brings me to my knees, it drags my mouth over the thin sheen of sweat that coats your skin. It clamps my hand over your mouth, over your nose. It drowns out your scream. It lives in my fingernails as your skin splits at the seams. It is the salt in your blood. It is your flesh between my teeth. I am frenzied, starved. Inebriated. The notion of your DNA melding with mine as it diffuses across every place I touch you. I hook my fingers against the spewing veins and arteries, clawing at your chest. They brush wet, sticky muscle.

I clutch your heart in my palm as I drag it from between your ribs and the mess of your body. I cradle it, this gruesome epitaph to your loveliness. Stepping away, heart in hand, a violent shudder. I stare at the masterpiece of you from under hooded eyelids, plastered against the canvas of my memory. The man-made ruins of a mad man’s love.

Vedika Sengupta