Christmas Morning

Esther is a murderer, the handle of her knife hurts to wield.

It is Christmas morning.

The delicate red lights are filled with suffering. Fragile like a frozen rose, the image of love is held captive. And you saw off her limbs like making love to yourself. The lights are adorned with joy. There is a perversion in that. The scriptures are holiness gone wrong. Today a prophet is born, and we celebrate his suffering, and fixate on his forgiveness. We draw out innocence, tugging on it before it comes out slow like a jutting blade. Your hands are red, bleeding and bled from. This Christmas morning, the red lights are delicate. There is a perversion in that.

Like grasping innocent fingers, a deer walks by. The windows are fogged with the breath of a yearning kindness. The hallways are painted with decay. The air shutters and slams like the careless closing of a convenience store, the stumbling shadows waltz right by. Take another swing, the silence whispers. Your voice is filling in the quiet, in their shot of ecstasy. Your hands, grasping for it. Red, raw.

Be battered by the men and hammered by your hand. You drink like it's your crucifixion. There's no place left for you.

Imprison the gentle and keep it in a glass, like a casket. The moth tries to stumble away.

The wind howls a sad song, and Esther feels stripped naked. She rubs the tiredness from her eyes, and stumbles through the undead hallways, her throat raw and voice bleeding. She screams in laughter and in pain, in the sadness basking behind. The walls breathe and do not offer forgiveness. They offer screaming and they plead to move.

There are bodies in the basement.

She sighs like a blizzard, and plops her body on the stinking couch like an avalanche. There was childhood, once. It feels like an hour ago, and a thousand years. The bible burns a hole through her thigh. She laughs, and quiets down.

She closes her eyes and thinks.

"There are ghosts today."

We celebrate them indeed. They are tired of being mourned. They are tired of both.

They cannot rest. It was a cheap shot at peace, at hope.

The wind howls.

She adjusts her head and looks as inquisitively as any man can be, with a sea of anger within. It threatens to spill out, and she lets it out the gate. They rush out like the abscess of a contained wound. She smiles serenely, with relief and amusement, at the blood finally showing up.

The thing about corpses is that they can't scream. They have no fight. They are cold. There is warmth in that. There is normalcy in a rotting mass of meat, of time laying claim. Of nature taking course. She is human. She hates that. And makes a frazzled movement in the constriction.

Silence.

Anger.

She tears the bible. Stares down.

Sadness, concealed. She does not know. Refuses to feel.

She goes down the basement steps.

There is a man strung up from a pull up bar, who has no significance to her, and only convenience. Looking at him is like watching a sun flaming about, a knife brings a supernova. Speed up time with the science of suffering, make it long for others. She'll never taste it. Bring endings and forevers through violence. Bring begging.

Beg. Beg.

Give none.

Become.

The chrysalisis is death. The moth hits the glass. The crucible burns. She ends the suffering, finds compassion in endings, in satisfaction hard won, that she has not have herself. She finds it in the broken glimmers of the stars from the sea she'll drown in. But not yet. Compassion will draw out and time will feel like hate, like her. They'll thank her more later. She finds innocence in the delicate red lights. There is relief in expression, in watching what's innocent die, in the innocent dying. And there's expression in seeing what amount of evil there is snuffed out. The price is what's not. Justice is expression, seldom clean. Life is expression, seldom clean. Death is the last breath. It's seldom clean.

There's relief in being anything but herself, in having a shot of her own murder. In killing it. In satisfaction in words said, that now die.

Draw it out.

She whispers.

She wants to make him into a Christmas tree.

There are red lights in her hand. They bleed in her head. The man howls incoherently, muffled under ductape.

She stabs him in the thigh.

He screams and cannot.

She sighs.

Anything to feel like the world has wronged her. Anything to feel like justice. Anything for punishment. Anything to feel like she has control. There was none. But she has perverted it all, and wears masks made out of other's faces so she can feel her own underneath. The moth hits the glass.

She's tired now, and lies on the ground. Imagining stars on the dusty ceilings. She drifts at sea. The floor spins, she feels submerged under concrete. They bob viscously and hurt her eyes. She cannot move. She thanks her prison. It keeps her safe.

There are 12 moths two bodies down.

And a cacophony of dead screams and stench below her. There is innocence clinging on, preserved. Hidden behind screams, and screaming, because.

She does not see it in her.

The ductape comes off.

She lies back down, and starts a conversation.

He pleads.

"What... What did I do?"

"Everything."

"How!"

"With nothing."

He cries in disbelief.

"Whatever it was, I didn't know. You're sick. You're sick!"

"I know."

There is never relief for her, even in the chasing. It just gets worse.

She's sick.

"What are you going to do with me?"

"You'll find out."

"I have children! I have children!"

She freezes. Steels herself and gets cold.

"Even better."

He sobs.

"Please don't hurt them."

She keeps quiet.

"Did you ever think you'd be in this position?"

"What... What are you getting at?" His face is covered in tears and snot he can't wipe.

"Neither did I."

"Please! Please!"

"There's a deer outside. I found it quite beautiful, her luscious, heavy fur."

She continues. "There must be stars out."

The corners of her eyes entertain tears.

She steels, fails halfway and does not know. It looks real enough. But her heart saw the lie. Her mind still whirrs on, but weaker, now.

He sobs. He does not know.

"You never thought you'd be in the position."

He sobs harder.

She keeps quiet. It's quiet.

And she sighs. Like preparing a funeral.

Like putting on your best clothes before you die.

She locks the door. Cuts a gash into her thigh and buries the key, and sews herself up quick.

"What... What are you doing?"

"Letting you go."

"How?"

"Do whatever you want with me first. I won't kill you."

The tears in his eyes settle in fear and disbelief.

The tears in hers refuse to be seen. They're locked inside, like a cacophony of screams. There's no release.

She disconnects.

She cuts him down. He watches, afraid and frozen.

She ties herself up, asks the man to string her. He complies shakily.

She begs him to do something.

They stare at each other. For a long time.

The man bleeds out.

They both die.

She drowns in the ocean. It holds her for a while.

The deer sleeps softly. It is Christmas morning, and the red lights die out on the basement floor.