author: aj (another_juxtaposition@hotmail.com)
rating: nc-17
codes: cj/sam
disclaimer: not mine.
archive: ask, please.
notes: it's cold, and it's dark, and there's nothing redeeming at the end, so read at your own will. lot's of biblical references, most from the last 4 chapters of Revelations. i was a morbid child.

summary: "He's playing with her body and she's counting bones."

for laura, who collects the pieces, finishes the puzzles, and holds on tight.

*

Lying on a mattress in a nondescript room in a nondescript town. Names long forgotten. Her legs are sprawled across a spotted sheet, his hands tracking her jutting collarbone. She's organizing bones, a low hum escaping from her raw throat.

hip bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected . . .

His face looms above her, cheekbones and cartilage. His tongue runs along her teeth, fingerprints after skin is eaten away. Her body is alive, but she thinks she might be dead. The lake of fire is the second death and she's beginning to burn.

He's saying her name, calling her beautiful, as his thin hands roam freely across her fragile bones.

His fingers once fit perfectly in the space between her ribs, fingertips dipping in shallow channels of skin, expanding and falling with each deliberate breath. Now they are too thin, sinking, and she's still. Skeletal. She watches joint twist in socket, juxtaposed fragments connected in an elaborate erector set creation.

He's playing with her nipples and she's counting curved vertebrae. One to twenty-four. Cervical, thoracic, lumbar. She can feel only three of her own and her spine has a slight s.

He wants to be alive again, and she forgets what that means. She wants to give this to him, even though she? crumbling, marrow drying. She will die, she's dying, she's dead. But he might still be breathing.

Observing thin wrists, purple veins. She wants to slice herself open and see the blood flowing, the heart beating. Visceral organs. Spilling onto the bed, she could get lost in their warmth. Liver is rich in protein and he could eat it, be reborn. Transubstantiation of her own flesh. In death, we live forever.

She is already dead.

Knobby knuckles grinding into his back, kneading his thin skin. Sharp elbows poking, long fingers clutching.

She is dry when he enters her, biting back a scream. She feels and it surprises her. This is the way things are. Pain. Her eyes close but his face remains, bones and cartilage. He's calling her beautiful and she can't believe he doesn't know she's already dead.

Pelvic bone protruding against pale, yellowing skin. He thrusts against it. She bleeds. Leaves bitter brown stains on the already soiled sheet. Her blood mixes with his semen, brittle bones close to breaking. They are the Alpha and the Omega, the First and the Last, the Beginning and the End, and she? been erased from the Book of Life.

She wraps her long legs around him, closing her body off, keeping him inside. Ankle crossed over ankle, achilles exposed, and he? saying her name again. She wants him to put her bones back in order, piece by piece, this complicated puzzle only he can fit together. He's trying to make her whole again, but she knows he is too broken.

When she was a different person, still growing, she sang about bones. Ezekiel raised them from the valley and they danced. Dancing bones. Fifth grade and she sang about bones, 'dem dry bones. They danced and the breath of God filled them with life. They were whole.

She will not rise again. Whispers, "Yes, I'm coming soon."

Humerus, radius, ulna, wrist, hand . . .

She runs her hands over his neck, noting the spaces between, the crevices hidden. His skin slides easily, almost translucent in the flickering flourescent light. She touches his ribs, lightly, tracing the curves, the points of connection. Bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh. From his rib she was created, and from this rib she seeks her final penance. Fingertips slipping.

Carpals, metacarpals, all the phalanges: proximal, middle, distal . . .

His weight is over her. Her chest is heavy but she forces herself to breathe. Hands on his back, she feels shoulder blades displacing skin, moving.

She is flat like a board, hips popping out from the smooth expanse of her aging stomach, creating valleys near kidneys, pancreas, ovaries. He's playing with her body and she's counting bones.

Collarbone to shoulder to joint. Clavicle. Sometimes she can hear it grate, bone against bone, grinding.

"We'll make everything new," he tells her, "and the words will save us." She knows he doesn't believe it, three lies uttered in the fading light.

Together, once, their lives were thick with words. Justice, Right, Truth. They believed. But they are mortal, bone and tendon and marrow. They fell from the right hand, slowly eaten away as the world watched wide-eyed and clapping. Only bones remain. She sacrificed to a false god, sins of idolatry. Dabbling in deceit, she belongs to the fire.

She's on her knees, kneecaps shifting as she shifts. Deep throating him as he says her name, he clutches her skull. Runs his hands through her hair, cells already dead.

She is soiled and spotted through to her soul. She renamed herself, when she was twenty-four and out of school. Androgyny appealing to the future of her career. But now her name has been erased, forgotten. Her vocation chosen, not given.

She's a pile of bones, skin loosely attached. Sternum hard and unforgiving.

It's over then, and she doesn't remember why he is here but he's calling her name as he fills her mouth with creamy liquid. She gags.

It's over, she thinks. Shins connect to ankles, and ankles to feet and feet to toes. Distal phalanx. It ends with the toes.

He says he loves her, even now, but love means nothing in the end. In the end, there aren't even bones.

She gathers her clothes, strewn across the stained carpet in loose piles. It's over. He's been dead for weeks, and she's beginning to decay.

She hums, mindlessly.

hip bone connected to thigh bone, thigh bone connected . . .

*

the end.
  . send a flower .