Short story number one: Lily and the dead man

Lily and the dead man

(by Jen, October 18, 2012)

Lily stared down at the man beneath her, his handome green eyes gazing wildly upward, while his dark brown hair was splayed in a frantic disheveled fashion about his head. Some of the hair was just touching his pale cold forehead, while the rest was ruffled upward away from his face.

She leaned down, frowning at his handsome features, and had the situation been different she wondered if she would have liked him. But the plastered look of terror that will forever torment his face was unappealing.

Lily noted the blood. Bright red splashes that adorned his face and chin, pooled at his throat, and was spattered across his t-shirt adorned chest. It looked like the blood had simply danced across his shirt, leaving tiny footprints behind their elegant wake.

Lily touched the blood, imagining its sudden escape from his once warm body, how it must have leaped and galloped from his wanting flesh, driven by the excited beating drum of his heart and the rising melody of his screams, before he must have fallen into silence.

Now the dance was over, the music hushed to a sudden quiet when his voice stopped, forever leaving his body. Then his breath would have left him in an unnoticed sigh, so soft, so insignificant it was as though he had never breathed at all.

Tentatively, Lily touched her own face. Did she too, die with such a look of terror?

She tasted the blood upon her lips, not hers, oh no, but his. She had killed him after all, in her own stupor of pure instinct and a strange undefinable hunger.

But there it was, a hunger she only quelled once she'd sunk her teeth into his neck, where they danced, clinging, thrashing, tummbling about the room, bathed in the romantic flashing red and blue lights of a world gone mad.

Finally he fell, breathless, screamless, lifeless at her feet, arms tumbling unthinkingly to his sides. His handsome eyes gazed at her while Lily stood, stilled and startled by death's revelation.

This was how she had died. Someone had danced with her, serenaded to the music of her desperate screams, while they surrendered themselves to their own terrible hunger. Someone had watched the terror that had frozen on her face, as her breathing stopped and her heart shivered and shook into a quiet nothing.

But Lily didn't feel angry about her death. She tried, when she thought about it, but instead of the old familiar burning of rage in the pit of her stomach, all she could find was that same impatient hunger that knawed at her dead flesh, that knawed at what she felt for certain was her very soul.

All around her she could hear screaming. Little musical melodies that wept and cried, gunshots that rang and hit an impossible nothing.

She started for the door when she saw him stir. Her unnamed snack was twisting his head and looking at her, mouth opened in silence to ask a question that could not be asked or answered. She looked at him, understanding. He felt the same hunger that she did.

Lily held out her dead bloodied hand to him, gesturing for him to follow. Rising, he did, and into the screaming, crying world they walked, driven forever onward by an unending hunger.