Little bitch.  Thought I’d never find out.  I found out all right. Oh yeah, I found out.  Knew it from day one.  Just kept my mouth shut.  Knew it all along.  Six months and counting now.  Kept my trap shut about it.  Sealed my lips.  Think I’m crazy, don’t you?  Think I’m pretty sad for sticking around.  Keeping her.  Hey, I know what I’m doing, man.  Been waiting it out.  That’s right.  Patience is the best revenge.  Fucking hard to do, man.  But I been waiting it out.  My girl’s been playing a game.

Too bad by my rules.

You know the best part?  My girl’s been coming home late at night.  Shit, the wee hours of the morn.  Me all in bed like I’m sleeping when I’m not.  Watching her in the dark, eyes squinty and all.  Watching her peel her clothes off.  Feeling those titties I’ve had in my mouth a thousand times brush against my arm as she gets into bed.  I make believe like I’m waking up and all.  Run my hands over her tight little body even though I know she been worked over by other hands not too long before.  Course, she’s gotta lay there and take it.  Then my prick gets hard and we fuck.  I fuck her hard too, cause she can’t deny me.  Can’t make me suspicious.  I fuck her hard.  There’s a nasty grin on my face.  It’s too dark in the room for her to see it, and I laugh to myself when I whisper all sweet shit into her ear.

Little bitch.

I know what her guy looks like.  Passed him a few times out on the street.  Once in a bar.  He don’t know who I am.  Don’t know me from Adam.  Besides, I blend with the crowd.  That’s my way.  None too special on the outside.  Just special on the inside.  That’s what momma always told me.  I was special on the inside.  Nobody else quite like me.  Took me awhile, but momma set me right.  Told the truth.  If she was still around, she’d be proud.

I know where my girl’s guy calls home.  Some apartment.  East side of town.  Where trouble lives, at least that’s what they say.  Gotta laugh when I hear that.  See, I was born on the west side and made trouble too shit scared to stick around.  That’s the only reason trouble lives there nowadays.  On account of me.

I told you, patience is the best revenge.  Been biding my time like a big old dog slobbering over a bone.  Never get too tired of gnawing on it.  Oh no.  Not at all.  Tastes sweeter the longer you work it over.  Understand what I’m getting at now?

Paid her guy a visit today.  Don’t look at me like that.  I had to do it. Only so long you carry a charade.  Look at me, using big words now and all.  Yeah, momma would be proud.  All grown up and I finally know what I want to be.

A better man.

Yeah, had a nice face to face with her guy and all.  Told him the way I see things.  Good thing to talk your grief out with another man.  Real good being social.  Separates us from the animals.  Told him I didn’t appreciate him fucking my girl.  He understood.  Told him I didn’t appreciate him getting my girl home late at night.  Not safe.  Plus it ruins my night’s sleep, especially when I get up early and all to open the machine shop.  Boss depends on me.  Got to give a good example.  Can’t do that with eyes half shut.  He understood that, too.  Real good being social, I told him.  We’re getting somewhere.

Then I slugged him with the claw hammer I had under my coat.

Gonna leave a nasty mark.  But you never know.  He’s got long hair and all.  Might just cover up the dent.  I apologized to him.  I have a conscious, you know.  Yeah, I apologized.  Except he couldn’t hear cause I knocked him cold.  Hey, I tried.  Counts for something, doesn’t it?

Dragged him into his bedroom.  Spread him on the floor at the foot of his bed.  Yeah, the same bed he been fucking my girl on.  Gotta make that right somehow.  Gotta balance things out.  So I strip the pillowcase off a pillow.  Maybe the same pillow my girl’s head been on?  Maybe.  Probably.  Don’t matter anymore.  Drop the pillowcase at my feet.  Close my eyes and jerk off across it.  Think of my girl as I do it.  Feel closer to her somehow.  Like we just had…what do you call it… a menash ah trah, or something like that.  A three-way, for Christ sakes, is what I’m saying.  When I’m all done, I shove the pillowcase into his mouth and gag him.

He’s stirring a bit.  Coming around.  See, I didn’t hurt him all that bad.  I slam the claw hammer across his knee.  Just to make sure he’s not going anywhere anytime soon.  Eyes damn near pop from his head.  I grab his throat good and tight.  Just getting his attention.  I think I got it.  Tell him if he wants to walk again, he best stop flapping his arms and leg around.  He listens.  Good.  I pull pliers from my back pocket.  A box cutter from inside my boot.  Then give him his choice.  Your fucking fingernails come off one by one.  Or I cut your dick off and shove it through your fucking eye socket.

***

I find a Heineken inside his fridge.  Import shit.  But it’s beer.  And it’s cold.  Bites the back of my throat a bit, and that’s all I want.  I scrub my hands real good.  Pulp going down the drain makes me laugh.  That poor fucker never had no choices.

It’s gonna be a long night.  But I can’t wait to see my girl later.  Gonna fuck her.  Kiss her hard.  Look into her eyes.  Tell her I love her.  I really, really love her.

There’ll be a nasty grin on my face.  It’s always too dark in the room for her to see it, and I’ll laugh to myself when I whisper all sweet shit into her ear.

~ Joseph A. Pinto

© Copyright 2013 Joseph A. Pinto. All Rights Reserved.

Heed the Tale Weaver: A year of decrepitude we have suffered at the clawing hands of our Damnlings; now the punishment is upon us. Come forth from the shadows, “WANDERER”, and claim from us our Damned souls as your prize!

Visit this wicked, wandering one at secondstaronther.wordpress.com

Nails grate across stone; she comes for me.  Hellish echoes impaling the frailty of my senses through the back of my skull.  Scratch, ssssscratch.  Blistering pants herald her arrival from somewhere deep within my institution of darkness.  Blistering, born sodden with covet, sin.  I am unsure to whom those breaths belong.

She comes for me.  My sex-starved thing.

Beg

Limbs twist; these cords bite into wrists, offering little freedom, holding fast my famished body to this chilled limestone.  So chilled.  I strain to see her; this dark surrenders nothing.  I shudder with the callousness of a desperate want.  So desperate.  Nails grate across stone; ever closer she slinks.

Beg

“Choke me,” into obscurity, I gasp.

Nether’s inviting ledge…always upon which I teeter.  A void exists below, an oblivion so familiar; I will be lost should I fall.  Much the same as this thing…this thing the light of sun has never licked.  “Choke me,” mouth too careless, eager.  My dick throbs, pulsing with a life I wish I myself had known.

I will taste you first

Toes curl; shadows shift so subtly beyond blind eyes.  Fingers clench; shadows shift so subtly beyond screaming senses.  She is all around me, shifting so subtly beyond wildest imagination.

Open

My sex-starved thing I never disobey.  Mouth parts; beads of moisture tease my lips.  I arch against my bed of gypsum, slam inhibitions atop stone, aching for her to break me.  Delirious, this wait.  I swallow dank air, the fester of her home; finally, her tongue fills my mouth with the sweetest taste I could ever despise.  Swirling, swirling over teeth, probing, probing deep into ragged throat.

Fire, raging through my head.  I gag; her tongue clogs my passage.  I desire more.  Always more.  “Choke…me…” I bite down upon pulsing meat in my mouth.  Chew upon festering wretchedness.  Deeper her tongue thrusts, sealing pharynx, sealing remains of wasted breath within my gut.  Endearing, her plague, burying my last wail deep into chest…snuffing life as I asked…interring me with the usual disclosure: she will never belong to me.

I have found the perfect end.  She was born to make me hurt.

Nether’s inviting edge beckons; body numbs, stars bursting behind my lids the only light mine.  From the cusp of unconsciousness, she gently rouses me.  I cannot see.  I am blind.  Her leer fondles; the skin crackles over her jaws.  Somewhere from deep within, the dissonant scuttling of things bloated with far worse than abandon.  She nuzzles my cheek; her tender, moist lips nuzzle my own, grazing so softly the diseased affection left unspoken.  With razor teeth, my sex-starved thing rends flesh from my face.

Sweet agony.  Howling…so desperate for her tease.  Fingers rake my heaving chest—Heaven.  Hades burns beneath her nails.  Squirm squirm squirm I do—her little slug.  These cords do not yield; in turn, she yields no hope.  Into my abdomen, sink her nails.  I spit the contagion of my devotion from reverent mouth, screaming for more.

Within the deadened, inky blanket of her lair, the fervor of her gaze singes my engorged organ.

“Consume me,” I offer.

My sex-starved thing snorts cruelly over my body; the chill she illicits delicious.  Breath swirls across pelvis.

Beg

Those bloated things, they scurry away.  Reverberating between the stalagmites, feelers seeking some other form of rot.  Done with me before even they start.  My beautiful destroyer, she has only begun.  “Consume me!”  A challenge from bloody lips.

Beg

“Please…”  Terribly deft fingers wedge a spreader bar between my legs.  “Consume…”  Cuffs snap, bite into ankle, nearly to bone.  “Me!”

I am numb to her affliction.

A chortle, repulsive beyond limits of known sanity.  Brutal, pitiless—a stony palm seizes my shaft, squeezing as her sadist mouth engulfs, razor blade tongue sucking, lapping.  Shredding skin from my dick, shredding as she bobs.  Coarse hair pricking my stomach, shredding shredding until I erupt; an orgasm of blood.  My essence, it escapes in rhythmic pulses, filling her mouth—the seed of all my sin.  Slowly I bleed out, for me, for her.  Body stiffening; this sensation of depletion exquisite, my only regret that no longer do I die virgin deaths for my sex-starved thing.  She has murdered me more times than I can count.

“Now steal me…”  Mouth betraying me always.

My sex-starved thing lies atop me, my death rattle commencing beneath her jaded eyes.  She laughs, the sweet music of all gone wrong.  Lowers her head.  Tears my throat apart.  She eats, she snickers; spits blood, semen back into the wheezing hole in my neck.  Taunts some more.  The joke is always on me; I love my sex-starved thing.

She slides along my body.  Nipples graze skin.  The stone, it chews spine.  I remain mutilated beneath her—an emasculated piece of nothing, a chunk of meat detained by her lure.  Broken, so willing for her promise.  Ruined, left yearning for more.

Blistering, the tortured pants between us.  Still unsure to whom those breaths belong.

“Steal me,” pleading to the worst of all I am.

She obliges; it is what she does.  My curse the blessing she delivers.  Fist deep she plunges into my chest, twisting, tearing at my very corruption.  Her brutality unmatched, rending my heart free of its cage.  The lump of flesh now my dick twitches.

It belongs to me

She devours my heart.

The gagging nearly immediate.

The gurgling incessant from her mouth.

Resurrect…me…

Somewhere in the dark, she collapses.

“Never,” voice oily in her lair.  I wait until silence clots my ears, shred wrists free of her knots.  For all the Devil in me, I love my sex-starved thing.  I could never tell her of the poison within my heart.

~ Joseph A. Pinto

© Copyright 2013 Joseph A. Pinto. All Rights Reserved.

A run; a run no different from any other morning that had come before.  The sun groped with lazy fingers the mounds littering the reed-choked hills.  Above the slickened grass, the evening gasped its last breath in wispy tendrils of fog.  Boots pounded broken road; dew kicked up against sodden pants.  A run; a run with the dirt-laden shovel cradled in his arms.  The mounds forgotten at his back.

But on this morning the old-timer sat.  Waiting.

He froze, keen to the presence of another set of eyes, sweat in long strands down his cheeks.  Tongue darted corner to corner along his mouth, tasting, swallowing.  He enjoyed the tang of his toil.  Eventually he cocked his head.  Saw the old-timer slumped within a rocker, set up on a sunken porch just off the lane.  He stared the old-timer down.  The old-timer stared back.

“Ayup,” old-timer grimaced, lips pinched by unseen fingers.

Gravel crunched beneath boots; slowly the shovel lowered from his arms.  “What are you doing out here?” he uttered, stoic in the middle of the backwoods road.

Old-timer: “Naw much.  Jus joyin anotha morn.”

Chest heaved despite his calm; he took a step closer to the old-timer’s ruined cabin.  He had run past it a dozen times.  Always seemed deserted.  He regretted that he never checked.  Never bothered to force his way inside.  “Too chilly for your bones, don’t you think?  A fellow your age should keep inside.  Stay warm.”

“Wutha-man says gonna warm soon nuff.  I believe in wut tha wutha-man says.  Don’t ya?”

He looked around.  Chewed at the bottom of his lip until it oozed coppery satisfaction.  From the road: “I don’t believe in much at all.”

Old-timer: “Nope, I s’pose ya don’t.  I s’pose ya don’t look tha type ta believe in anythin tha wutha-man might have ta say.  Ya look a different type ta me.”

“And what type might that be?”  The blade of the shovel tapped his boot; fingers squeezed upon its hilt.

Old-timer laughed; a warbled thing like a frog caught in death throes.  “Type tha takes mattas into his own hans.”

He propped the shovel against his side, studied his hands.  Nails chewed and rimmed with dirt, calloused palms caked black.  Intrigued, he looked back up.  “Never seen you before.”

“Were ya s’posed ta?  Ya do nuthin but run.  Run is all ya do.”

His eyes narrowed into slits.  “So you’ve watched me.”

Old-timer: “Ayup.  Lotsa times.”

He clutched the shovel again, scraped it along gravel in the road.  “I enjoy my runs,” hissed through clenched teeth.

“Course ya do.  Yer fit as a fiddle.  I wus like tha once. Long time ago… long time.”  Old-timer shook his head, jostling sparse white hair.  “But things change afta long times go by, ayup.”

He stepped closer to the cabin’s decayed porch.  “Time changes everything.”  No bother taken to disguise the rattlesnake in his tone.

Old-timer, squinting: “Yer him, I’m sure ya are,” then swatted at ghosts circling his skull.  “People been talkin bout ya ‘fore tha wutha-man comes on at night.  Yer him, yessir ya are.  Tha runner.”

Eyes drifted to his boots, laces awash in mud.  “I told you, I enjoy my runs.”

Old-timer nodded, pleased.  “Ayup, tha runner.  Knew it was ya.  Just knew all tha time.  So tell me, runner, where ya runnin to?”

He stalked deliberately, leaning against the old-timer’s fence post, rotted and crooked as a hag’s nose.  Shovel tap-tapped atop his boot.  “I’m not running from a thing.”

“Nah, ya wasn’t hearin me.  Ya wasn’t listenin careful nuff.  Didn’t say ya was runnin from somethin.  Asked what ya runnin to.“

Doubt lit his eyes.  He always had answers.

“Man runnin from somethin is a man in fear.  Man runnin toward somethin is a man ta fear.  Ayup.”

Tongue slithered inside his mouth, toyed with a pulpy strip caught between molars.  He had eaten not too long before; suddenly the urge to eat again seized him.  He licked at his lips.  “You have something to fear, old man?  Maybe something like me?”

Old-timer quipped: “Fear ya?  Not t’all.”

He always had answers.  Now he searched for one.

Old-timer jerked his head.  “Lemme see em.”

“See what?”

“Yer hands, course.”

Hesitation.  Eventually he raised one above the fence.  Old-timer, eyes sparkling a shade below madness, rose from his creaky chair.  Head crooked atop stooped shoulders, old-timer hobbled down the porch steps, across the front path, alongside the fence.  “Ayup, tha runner alright.”

“I’m getting tired of this,” he hissed, the shovel slowly ascending above his head.

With deceptive speed, the old-timer sprang over the fence, seized his free hand.  “Tha runnerrrrr…” he cooed.

They remained that way, runner and old-timer, hands interlocked like lost brothers now found, eyes fixed and steely.  The runner blinked first, noticing the old-timer’s chewed nails, crusty black around the beds, grime etched into wrinkled skin.  The shovel lowered.

Old-timer’s hands.  So much like his own.

He always had answers.  Always, his victims spoke to him.  Now he had none.

“I wus fit like ya once.  Long time ago… long time ago.”

He jerked his hand back, but old-timer would not let go.

He glanced over old-timer’s shoulder.

“Somethin ya should know.  Somethin ya should learn right quick.”

He looked beyond old-timer’s cabin.  Glimpsed what had been hidden from his sight for so many runs.  Glimpsed for the first time the uneven rows, the shovels pitched crookedly into the dirt, marking each grave.

Mounds littered the hills, both new and old.

“Ya see, I wus tha runner long before ya came ta town, son,” old-timer sang quietly.  “And I gots no fear of ya t’all.”

He broke the old-timer’s grasp; shovel clanged to the road.  For the first time, the runner ran from something.  Ran, boots stumbling across divots in the backwoods road, rising sun looming large in his frantic eyes.  Ran from old-timer and his dirty, chewed nails.  Ran from old-timer and all the ghosts that kept pace at his side.

“Wus a runner long ‘fore ya came ta town,” old-timer continued to sing.  He turned and hobbled back atop his porch.  Hobbled into his chair.  Sat.  Waited.  He had plenty of time.  Even more shovels.  “Be tha runner long after yer gone.  Ayup.”

~ Joseph A. Pinto

© Copyright 2013 Joseph A. Pinto. All Rights Reserved.