Goddess of Ruin

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She lifts her head from the sofa pillow and gropes for her cigarettes. Her hair is everywhere, a fine tangle that somehow avoids the flame of the lighter. She lights, she inhales, she holds, she releases. She finds me with her red-rimmed eyes, the mascara from the night before smeared and adding to the ruin. "I hate you," she says.

That hurts, even though I know she is talking to herself. "I hate you, too," I say, but my lie is different from hers.

Another morning. Gritty eyes, Cheetos scattered over the once-beige carpet. Neither of us even like Cheetos. She hacks up some of last night's tar and the blanket slips and she's unaware, and she's beautiful in her unselfconscious innocent corruption, a tired saint of disaster.

"You haven't shaved," she tells me, accusingly. This I know; I haven't done so for days, although I'm not surprised she hasn't noticed. I don't tell her this. "You look like a tramp."

She rolls onto her back again, smoking vertically with years of practised ease. The ash falls from the end of her cigarette and lands on her naked chest. She brushes it away irritably, to join the Cheetos on the carpet.

"The ceiling needs painting, and the walls." This is not an accusation: more of an observation. We both do this, at different times: by observing we place ourselves above the necessity to correct.

"Perhaps you would like to paint them?" I ask her, my words dripping with sarcasm. She would not like to paint them. She would like them to become painted, with no effort on her part.

She doesn't deign to reply. Instead, she swings her legs around onto the floor and stands up, almost six foot of worn elegance. Her hair swings in a chestnut cloud around the smoke. She looks like a fallen deity, and I hate her.

We have spent the night together in this way many times before. The bed, which is small and uncomfortable, is marginally less preferable to the sofa, and as such I sleep on it. Neither place is large enough for the two of us, and so we make love on the floor, crushing the Cheetos with our bodies and grinding the dirt into our skin. Then we sleep, on opposite sides of the room, both of us dissatisfied with the situation for our own different reasons.

The clock tells any interested observers that the hour is 11:25. This is the hour at which we arose yesterday, the same hour that we arrived home last night. The actual time is 8:13; too early, and yet we are both going to be late for work.

The shower is broken. She has taken to washing her hair in the sink, long brown hairs clinging round the plug hole and soap caked to the taps. This contradiction of cleanliness would have bemused me once; now I am immune to dirt and destruction. You can grow used to anything, if you truly try.

I watch as she dresses, in her lacy lingerie: black, red, the colours of evil and lust. Then a dress falls over her body and hangs in silken waves, barely covering her flesh. I observe this objectively, as one regards artwork, but also with desire. This is my goddess, the living incarnation of a future statue.

Just as the faithful hate their vengeful gods, so I see the evil inside her. She is splendour fallen, a tribute to the lost art of dying without grace. Women may live longer than men; she will still die first, and I am glad.

She doesn't speak to me, just sashayes from the room into the kitchen. Our flat is a disaster; rooms flow into one another with no boundaries and the kitchen houses mainly old books and clothes: rarely any cooking utensils. No matter, it is still the kitchen; a greater area is given over to preparing what little food we eat and therefore it has earned the title.

I dress swiftly, splashing cologne across my skin and choosing a smart suit, in defiance of her careless slatternliness. I am clean, or at least some semblance of clean, from a swift shower at the gym yesterday. We pay for the gym membership, one membership between us, as part of the pretence that one day we will get around to fitness. This in turn is part of the pretence that we are normal people, with normal futures and normal choices: between exercise and obesity, between imprisonment and freedom, between a fixed future and an unremembered past.

She returns as I am fastening my tie and I am struck by the absence of a cigarette between her fingers. There are only two times when this phenomenon occurs: when she is eating, and when we are making love. Even during the latter there are occasional nicotine breaks. I should be offended; I am not.

The food she is eating in this instance looks rancid, but is no doubt a combination of the only foods left in the house. She collects the odd scraps and blends them, pouring the mixture onto wheat and devouring it without tasting. I know without asking that there is nothing left for me. Consideration isn't one of her strong points.

We leave together, in companionable silence. At the door she stops, and runs a red-tipped talon down my face. This sends a shudder of desire through my body, but either she does not notice or she chooses to ignore. Wordlessly she leaves. This is an ordinary morning.

NB: The first three paragraphs were written by vikingjs as a prompt for a contest. The remainder was written from that prompt. It has since been extended into the beginnings of a novel, which can be read here: "Invalid Item" .