chandelier [solo]

[Clover]

How long had she been sitting there, staring at the dark computer screen? After she had sent the email to Jersey, she had immediately regretted it. She’d tried to recover it, as if yelling at the monitor and beating the hell out of the tower made any sort of difference. Hacking was never her forte or she would have employed it right then. No, she’d gone down a different avenue; she had a different specialty. Where others gained actual skills and abilities, she leveled up in mistakes and graduated in **** ups.

Despite her many talents, or rather because of them, she’d had the best night of her life and the worst night of her life. Then again, how many of those nights could she really have? She’d said those words or thought those words or wrote those words so many times that they had lost their charm on top of losing their meaning; therefore, the night became just one of many. It was meaningless. She was meaningless. Everything was meaningless.

She’d come to that conclusion hours before, sometime between the abuse of technology and the destruction of general property. She’d thrown books and lamps; she’d overturned tables. She’d ripped her clothes from her wardrobe and scattered them around her room. She’d ripped the sheets from her bed and stuffed them at the bottom of her wardrobe. She had needed to find something or to get rid of something. She wasn’t sure what she was doing, but she was doing something. She had just needed to do something.

Slowly turning around in her chair, Clover forced herself to stand up and step over the broken pieces of plastic and fragments of glass. Her bones ached. Her pride wept. She wasn’t as angry, not anymore. At that moment, she was utterly numb. Clover pushed the chair back into the desk, forcing the legs of the computer chair to roll over the remnants of her temper tantrum. The sound of glass and plastic being ground in the marble flooring sounded like nails on a chalkboard, but she kept pushing until she couldn’t push anymore.

Standing there, looking down at the floor, she wasn’t sure where to go. Her house wasn’t large. She had no secret rooms or second floors. She should have known where to go or what to do, but she was lost and so very confused. Why was she taking so many steps back? Her figurative steps had her retreating to a point where she’d made absolutely no progress. She had passed the point where she had begun and then descended into a cavern she hadn’t known existed.

Clo pressed her bare feet into the sharpened pieces and reveled in the black blood. With every step, she left a trail that blossomed and disappeared. Her tiny wounds opened and closed, existed and ceased to exist. She made her way back into her bedroom and gathered some of her jewelry, including the piece that Renee had given her for Christmas, and then passed through her living room to get to the bathroom. The jewelry was beautiful; the pieces were so very colorful. She had to hold up each individual piece and admire the way the light reflected off tiny rubies, precious diamonds, and vibrant emeralds.

She’d almost gone to the mirror, but no. She moved toward the toilet and dumped piece by piece into the porcelain bowl. She flushed and flushed until the water began to overflow. At least the toilet had a use. At least the jewelry had a use. She stepped back and admired the way the water met the top of the bowl and slowly overflowed, spilling out onto the floor and spreading over it like a creeping, crawling monster. When she couldn’t stand the water that had overtaken her feet, she turned to her left and walked back through the living room to return to her bedroom.

“It’s okay,” she finally spoke. She had been saying that in her head over and over again. Those words were her inner mantra, the strength she needed to keep moving her legs. At least she wasn’t out getting shot again. At least she wasn’t being so reckless. And yet she was running out of things to destroy. Relationships? Check. Property? Check.

She went back and forth between her bedroom and her bathroom, carrying armfuls of her clothes, trailing armfuls of sheets. When she had no more clothing, no more linen at all, she stood over her pile and admired the wrinkled fabrics. The colors, though most of her clothing was either black or white, contrasted with the off-white color of her bathtub. She suddenly hated everything about her house. She wanted nothing more than to sell it and go--well, she wasn’t sure where she would go. Wasn’t that the problem?

Clover turned her back on the tub and walked over to the sink. She pressed both palms flat against the mirror. She tried seeing something that wasn’t there. If she couldn’t see her reflection, wasn’t that some sort of hint. She’d told Jersey that she just wanted someone to know; she’d wanted to know that she was real, that it happened, and that she wasn’t crazy. Slowly, she pulled on the door to the cabinet, almost dragging the little door open, and slapped the contents of the cabinet right onto the floor. Even with the new mess in front of her, Clover focused on the box of matches and the unopened bottle of rubbing alcohol.

What was she doing? She didn’t have the capacity ask herself, not at the time. She opened the container of alcohol and poured it over her clothing as if she were pouring laundry detergent over them. She made simple passes and made sure to get a little bit on all of the clothing. The matches were harder to light. She never really played with matches. She had candles in the bathroom, and they were the only reason to have the matches. She’d given up smoking.

“I don’t want you to go anywhere,” she mumbled to her clothing. “Just take a minute and think about this, Clover. Let’s go through the scenarios, Clover. Let’s go through every little possibility and then go over them again. One at a time.”

She’d finally lit the match and she dangled it over the delicate fabrics. When she let go of the lit match, the flame on the end of the stick immediately ignited some of the sheets. The flame shot up and then crept along her shirts and down the length of her pants, leaving nothing untouched. The fire wouldn’t last forever. The goal wasn’t to set her bathroom on fire; her goal wasn’t to cleanse her house in the flames. She leaned her lower back against the sink, her hands gripping the sides, and watched the flames extend upward toward the ceiling. The alcohol burned beautifully, but the flames had spread beyond the accelerant and smoke began to fill the room.

When she’d completely destroyed or charred most of the linen, she extinguished the fire. She’d used water and smothered the fire with the leather jacket on her back. The process took up more of her time, but it was a small victory. At the end, with her waterlogged bathroom as a testament to her attempts to forget one misstep after another, she calmly exited her bathroom and shut the door. The water had begun to leak out and bloom across the tile of her living room, but that didn’t matter.

Clover stood in the middle of the room and looked toward the front door. The lamp, the only light source left in the room, flickered in and out, casting eerie shadows all over the walls and ceiling. She wasn’t dressed properly to be wandering around the streets. She still wore the white tank top and the black leggings from her earlier outing, but the white top was stained with streaks of green and black from her brushes with grass and fire. Her leggings had tears in the knees and a rip along her right ankle. And her hair, her long hair, was a tangled mess.

She should have been self conscious, but she wasn’t. She walked right out of her front door, circled around the back of her house, and left the suburban-type confines of Larch Court. (She didn’t care that her door was hanging open, that her lone lamp was still flickering on and off, hoping someone would have the decency to put it out of its misery.) The pebbles along the street bothered the bottoms of her feet, but the numbness that had overtaken her had been replaced with a sudden rage that dwarfed any of the smaller discomforts she experienced. All she wanted to do was talk to someone. All she needed to do was talk to someone.

“I did the right thing. I did the right ******* thing. I’m not a bad person.” She repeated the sentences over and over again as she walked along the streets. The people that lingered on the darkened roads gave her so much space that she began to think she was a leper. She looked like she had some type of illness, a mental illness, but that didn’t stop her from muttering. It didn’t stop her from yelling at people to stop looking at her, to stop giving her those judgmental looks!

Didn’t they know she’d had an awful night? Didn’t they know that she had expected something more than a plea focused around the fact that she wasn’t wanted but she was wanted? She didn’t think she could handle being the nice person anymore, being the nice, considerate, sweetheart of a person. And even when she was sobbing her eyes out, shuffling her bleeding feet along the pavement of Coastside, she couldn’t get Victor’s voice out of her head. He was telling her to be careful. He was telling her that he didn’t want some asshole hurting her. Well, some asshole had hurt her. She was an asshole.

She was every horrible thing that came to mind and then some. She was the walking embodiment of self-loathing. She should have had ‘moron’ stamped on her forehead. She should have had some warning to ward away possible victims. It was too late for her, but not for them. Clo was so busy mumbling and crying that she didn’t notice when she stopped walking on concrete and began walking on grass. She slid on the wet grass and wobbled on her feet, but she couldn’t stop herself from falling.

“Are you okay?” A guy rushed over from across the street and he immediately went to take her arm. His fingers closed around her bicep and he slowly lifted her off the ground. “It’s okay,” he practically cooed, trying to calm her sobbing, “did something happen? Do you want me to call the police? Is there somewhere I can take you?”

He asked these questions one by one, allowing her time to reply. She just looked at him with watery eyes and dragged him into her chest. She wrapped her arms around him so tightly that she wondered if he could even breathe anymore. When she felt his hand pat her back a few times, she started her crying all over again. She was hugging a total stranger and it was exactly what she needed. She needed someone to ask her if she was okay. She needed someone to hold her and offer to take her somewhere. Clover didn’t know where she was going. Clover only knew that she wasn’t okay and that things would never really be the same again.

“Do you want to stop hugging now?” He seemed hesitant to ask and she seemed hesitant to let go, but they parted. He looked even more concerned. He was trying to find the right words to say to her. She could read it all over his face, almost as if she were reading the simplest of paperback novels. “Do you want to talk about it?”

Whatever rush of emotions had overtaken her had receded then and she regarded him with new eyes. He was a total stranger. A total stranger had provided her comfort when no one else would. It wasn’t even that no one else could. No one else would. She knew she was partially to blame, since her thoughts were jumbled and her actions absurd, but she wanted someone to try.

“Clover. My name’s Clover,” she managed to speak. Her voice was hoarse from sobbing and screaming. Her throat ached with the need for fresh blood. How many days had she gone without feeding properly? She knew she couldn’t survive on blood bags alone, but she’d tried. She’d tried to stop so many different deplorable acts. She’d tried to calm down. With every new irritation, every new addition to the family, she felt her control slowly slipping away.

“It’s nice to meet you, Clover. I’m Declan,” he smiled. He looked at her with his dimpled cheeks and his blue eyes and his tousled hair. Everything about him made her heart swell with something her mind despised. When he tried to touch her again, she stepped away from him. “Okay. Okay. I don’t have to touch you. Let’s just--where do you want to go? We can go get a cup of coffee. We can sit here and talk. Wet grass and all.”

Clover felt like crying all over again, partly because of his kindness and partly because of her own thoughts. Her eyes moved from his blue orbs to his dimples and then down the length of his jaw. Where she’d wanted him away from her before, she wanted him near her then. He seemed comfortable with her closing the distance between them, so she did. She pressed her lips over his, but she felt nothing and it made her start crying again.

“Whoa. It’s okay. It’s okay. I’m not upset,” he repeated over and over again, supporting her as her knees buckled. When he lowered her into the wet grass, they both ended up there. He sat down and just kept patting her back. She had to wonder how awkward it was for him. “I really can’t stay here, but I don’t want to just leave you. Will you let me help you to the hospital at least? Your leg looks bad.”

Before she could stop him, he’d looked at the bullet hole in her leg. He’d seen the way her flesh was slowly but surely knitting itself back together, one layer of shadow after the next. When he pulled back, she saw the confusion, the absolute uncertainty, written all across his handsome face. She had to turn him or she had to kill him. He wasn’t going to believe her if she told him he was seeing things. The lighting wasn’t bad enough. He wasn’t drunk or stoned, not that she could see or smell or taste.

Clover pulled her knees up to her chest and just stared off into the night. He was making odd noises, showing that he wanted to say something or ask something. She didn’t think she had the strength or the ability to make him forget what he had seen and he didn’t look like he wanted to let it go. He touched her arm and she let him.

“What did I just see?” His voice wavered, as if he knew he had seen something he shouldn’t have seen. “I thought I saw,” he began, “I thought I saw your skin rebuilding itself around the wound, like you have some kind of superpower or something.”

She didn’t know whether to laugh or scream that she wasn’t a superhero, that they weren’t in that type of world. Instead, she placed her hand over his and squeezed until she felt his bones begin to give way. When he started to scream, she relinquished her hold and looked down at the ground in shame. He was swearing and cradling his injured hand, but at least it wasn’t broken. She’d not gone that far. She just wanted him to know. She wanted someone to know. She wanted to flirt with the masquerade more than she wanted to flirt with him.

Just like she thought he would, he began to push himself away from her. His good hand slid across the grass countless times, but he managed to force his body away from her. Before he had the chance to stand up, she’d retrieved the gun from the back holster and pointed it at his head. Every little detail she’d admired in him became lost in the look of fear that overtook his face. He raised his good hand to try and reason with her, to block her in some way, but his life ended the moment he’d looked at her injury, or maybe it had ended the moment he saw her.

Clover pushed herself off the ground and she motioned for him to follow suit. He had more trouble standing up because his sneakers wouldn’t grip the wet grass. When he finally had his balance, she grabbed his upper arm and began dragging him along. She forced him along the street until she spotted the junkyard, and then she buried the tip of her gun in his back and guided him in that direction. Did she honestly want to kill him? No. Would she have preferred to turn him? No. So with her unwillingness to turn him, she had made her decision.

“I didn’t see anything,” he lied, his shoulders shaking as he began sobbing. “Please don’t kill me. This isn’t you. You wouldn’t do this.” He was saying anything and everything to get her to reconsider. Her chest began to constrict and her vision began to blur. Everything he said hit her right in the heart, right where she hated to be touched.

When they were lost amongst the piles of rubbish, he turned to look at her. In the moment it took him to turn around, she dislodged three bullets into his skull. One tore through his neck, one tore through his cheek, and one hit him right in the eye. She watched his skin part for the bullets. She saw the way the bone shattered. When his body began to fall, she saw the way his skull had given way for that final bullet. She saw right into his head.

She emptied the rest of the clip into his body, wiped any prints from the gun, and threw it into the nearest pile of junk. Her instincts told her to flee the scene, but she couldn’t leave him there. She watched as his blood made a puzzle on the grass. It wasn’t like the way the water fanned out across the floor of her bathroom. The green blades became a vivid shade of red. All she could smell was his blood. All she could see was his blood. She bent down over his body and ran her fingers over the mess that had been his face. Raising her bloodsmeared fingers to her mouth, she parted her lips and slowly licked the red liquid from each digit. She circled her tongue around her index finger, her middle finger, her ring finger, and her pinky finger. When the blood was gone, she repeated the action.

She covered her skin in his blood, rubbing it in like the most expensive of lotions. Clover wanted every exposed portion of her flesh to be that shade of red. And when the vivid color faded and streaks of rust were left behind, she wanted to restore the color with someone else’s paint. When she heard footsteps, she jerked away from his body. She tripped over his awkwardly placed limbs and fell onto her ***. The footsteps were getting louder and her chest was constricting again. She felt like her heart was going to burst from her chest, but not from its beating--no, it wasn’t because of a beating heart at all.

“Is someone there?” The voice belonged to a woman that time and Clo heard the familiar click of the safety on a gun. Instead of running, Clover hid in the shadows of the junk piles and waited. She watched the woman move closer and closer to the bloody mess. Just when the woman discovered the body and rushed forward to try and help the dead man, Clover pounced.

She used one hand to cover the woman’s mouth and the other hand to grip the back of the woman’s head. Normally she would have taken more pleasure out of killing, but not then. Clo snapped the woman’s neck and ripped open her throat. She lay back in the grass and bathed in the blood, rolling around in it as if she were a cat surrounded by catnip. She stayed like that for as long as she could, and then she grabbed both bodies and began her stereotypical removal process. She found a sharp object, an old kitchen knife, and did her best to hack them into pieces.

“We should do this again,” she breathed, admiring her masterpiece. “We should do this again,” she repeated, her voice softer, more fragile. Instead of gathering her physical mistakes and adding them to her collection of emotional mistakes, she left them. She left the body parts and the knife and the gun. She went back onto the street looking like a bloody mess and she walked along in the shadows, her shoulders slumped and her eyes blank.