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zeroplus

Writing commissions focusing on horror, romance, science fiction, and fantasy.

Her smile bared white teeth. “One day you, too, shall be left alone and shackled; perhaps it is I who shall bring you to such ignominy.”The wet glisten of his eyes cooled as he considered her. “My brother may have been right about you,” he stated, and then, as forcefully as a killing cleave from his sword, he shrugged. He slid his fingers over hers and kissed her knuckles on an empty whim. He rolled over, and he put out the light. She settled comfortably against his side. Peace came after that, a dull, thoughtless peace, like an intoxicated stupor, or a closed, averted eye.

She watches, inhaling and exhaling, timed to a synchronous rhythm, as if helping a mother in labor: at the center of the bud, a newborn larva wriggles. Had it found its way to that wounded core after the soldier's misstep had exposed it? Or had it always been there, and she merely had the ill fortune to see it as it roused? And when it pupates, what shall she be? Already petals split slowly up her fingertips, blooming; ants crawl over the bursting bulb.

She can read him, too, and the text is equivalently direct. The neglected marriage had collapsed somewhere outside of the view of his lens, and news of the distant event had been recorded on a perfunctory punch-card that may as well have been filed directly into the trash, disregarded either out of callousness or for fear of some living bug making its way into the works. But his heart does beat, she thinks; she turns her hips so that her thigh presses to his. The tip of her glossy, patent-leather pump nudges his calf. The hem of her skirt reveals black hosiery, and the sheer tint gleams fetchingly over her knee. It’s a little less interesting, now that it won’t be infidelity, but she still wants to know if she can do it.He takes one more drink, and then, after placing the beer precisely centered upon its cork coaster, he lowers his hand below the bar and rests it atop her knee. Remnant condensation from the chilled glass dews under his fingertips and melts into the nylon. His palm is warm.

Maria decides that she will be both first and last at this feast. She will guard it with her exacting bite. The thick bottom lip gives between her teeth, an incision made with practiced, surgical precision. With the same curiosity that has damned her, she savors a perishing welling of blood: it is viscous, arctic, and alive, the last pulse of a god roused to passion and taken in the only way the killer knows how.

Marcus swallows a sob, and he tries to regain control over himself; he wrings his hands again. He looks at the thing, and then he looks around, because it is not a kitten, even though it is— because his boss says it is, and because Claudia is petting it as though it is one, even as her fingertips get sticky with red. He looks to Vincent, and he balks a little bit, as people often do— because Vincent has a persistent anisocoria left by nerve damage from an untreated tooth abscess, the black socket pit left rotten and hurting for him to pray about. So he is uneven in the eyes, now, with one pupil lazy and larger than the other, which always surprises people when they see it straight on.

“Quite.” His finger shifted, lifted, and pressed down again. Laurence looked at him— a typical formality— and the vicar seemed adrift beneath a different sky, with a dull, smoky cloudiness reflected in his eyes, a gray cast that centered and darkened upon that crooked finger. Ludwig stared elsewhere. The image came of the needle’s sharp-end raised instead of the eye— a push, a prick, and then garnet spilling, jeweled upon silk.Ludwig pushed the tip of his tongue between his teeth. The vicar’s meeting-chamber was encapsulated well within the cathedral, without windows, without sight of the sky; there were no clouds to part; the man looked at him clearly. He pulled his hand from the pincushion and interlaced his surgeon’s fingers. He smiled, and it was short, emphatic, and very bright, polished to a gleam. “Then I shall expect nothing but glowing praise for our good hunters of the Church. Thank you, Ludwig.”