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i. orpheus
You are eating yourself alive and it is suspiciously easy. The birds outside your window are relentless, early in the morning with the first streak of pink across the sky, loud and cheeping as if they’re in constant danger.
It only takes a minute to snap their necks. A bone comes unlodged from the third bird, bending out of flesh, angle so odd. You can’t shake the phantom sensation of it stuck in your teeth, slipping down your throat, devouring you from the inside out.
The truth is that you should have killed yourself. You’ve said as much, as loud. Nobody wants to hear it, the starkness of the sentiment. You assume they prefer you like this, always drinking, always tired. You haven’t smiled since she –
This is mostly born out of a stubbornness that your mother taught you. When she would lose her head, she would sometimes clumsily call your father a motherfucker over the dining table and sulk till he forgave her after, unsmiling, unhappy. A little after a bullet tore into Villanelle, you saw a toddler at the grocery store accidentally sprint into a wall with cereal stacked against it and the sight of it crying on the floor made you want to smile but you resisted. Leftover parenting. Motherfucker.
The third day you spend with your feet in the gutter of the underbelly of a bridge on the Thames is perhaps the worst. Hair matted, have you showered? Mud thick in the whorls in your fingertips, something acidic and toxic from the river still washed into your lungs.
You think of Villanelle down there. Allow every depraved thought you could have, everything you fought to admit to yourself, everything you locked away from your consciousness to float through you. A world where the two of you would kiss each other fiercely, you would laugh if you liked a joke instead of holding it close to your chest. Something warm, bread baking and ungloved hands loosely holding each other in your jacket pocket, tucked away from the cold. Woolen coats, a summer house in the French Riviera. Being rude to your neighbours and a weightlessness to life, tied down to her and nothing else.
You would make fun of her socks and she would sulk like she hadn’t mercilessly torn into your jacket in the afternoon. You’d give in and coo, indulgent, amused, teasing and it would win her over. Half a movie enjoyed before giving way to a hand slipping below clothes, knuckles white, gasps swallowed. It warms you, thawing the outside for a brief second before it refreezes.
This is who you are now. A shadow, someone who lives in the cracks of the city, someone who will self-implode and bring nobody down with them.
It would be freeing if you existed anymore.
ii. charon
You must have fallen asleep. A boat glides in, barely touching the water. A single lamp is a harsh white spotlight on his face. A boy, barely eighteen. He looks deceptively like Hugo, may very well be him, with all its charm stored in that half-cocked grin.
He offers you a cigarette as you squint at him, that alone makes you stand, board the boat. He hasn’t tied it to what you can only describe as the shore, it bobs so violently that your left foot gets soaked all the way through.
The smoke of the cigarette goes right through you, sharp in your chest and unfurling in your throat. You’re thankful for it.
Ahead of you, an island. Mist a smoke ring that you blew, surrounding it. The air is chilly and has condensed on your cheeks, you must look like you’re crying. You look behind and there isn’t a trace of London to be found, even though you can hear the clang of the Big Ben’s hour. Hugo laughs at the awe with which you absorb the sharpness of the rock ledges around you, the thick moss that can be peeled off, tiny crabs so dynamic they’re invisible.
“Are you sure about this?” he asks as you climb off the boat, holding onto his soft palm for balance.
You want to nod. You don’t. He kisses your cheek and his nose is cold against your skin, pink when he takes a step back and waves. You crush the glowing half-smoked cigarette under your foot and wet coldness of the shoe extinguishes it before it is even touched.
You don’t know where you are. That has never mattered before.
iii. persephone
When you see the Konstantin-shaped body, it quietens some small part of you. He’s older, thinner, loose on his bones. His laugh is unchanged. It booms into the open sky, thunders in his chest like it used to. Like Villanelle thought was endearing, with the way she loved to take the piss out of it.
And here is Carolyn, in front of you, mouth stapled shut, metal digging into her skin. She sits, elegant as ever, tinged green all the way through. Her gills are caked in blood, violent slits with crustacean carbuncles.
“You can’t take her,” she whispers. “She’s not meant to be out there. Not with you. Not free.”
You would beg if it didn’t make you want to throw up in your mouth. Your wet shoe squelches and they look down at it.
Konstantin smiles, “You could be happy. Go, Eve. Leave her.”
You’re stubborn. You wait. You build a tower of pebbles and kick it down, watching them clatter against the wind-sheared smoothness of the rocks. Carolyn laughs and you hate her so much you could eat her alive. Joints clacking against your jaw. Gristle in your teeth.
You sit. You wait. Half-asleep. The way you’ve lived much of your life.
iv. eurydice
You hear her before you see her. No, scratch that, you don’t actually see her. An image conjured so vividly in your head you can feel it. The blonde of her hair, it’s soft shagginess against your forehead. The smile, wide, unbreakable, pinned up ear to ear, gums out and all. Oh, but how good it is to hear her voice, the rasp of it, the grin.
“I’m starving, we haven’t eaten since those fries, no?”
You choke on your laugh, half-turned towards her. Carolyn makes a sound in her throat, “Don’t turn, Eve. You can have her only if you get out without looking at her.”
They must have tired of waiting, of the impasse. But you can see she is pleased with herself for this version of Villanelle who is a cobbled together version of the one you kissed in Scotland.
“I can leave though? With her?” Your first words in days, months, maybe years. Your voice trembles under itself.
“I’m standing right here,” she huffs and you almost smile, “Would you shut up for a second. This is serious.”
Carolyn claps once, final, “Yes, you can leave with her.”
So, you reach behind you blindly and hook a finger through Villanelle’s belt buckle with your grimy hand. Her fingers wrap around your hand and squeeze. The two of you walk. The joy of it indescribable.
The two of you are silent till it gets dark. You aren’t sure why. The fear of saying something non-momentous is so much worse than the fear of wasting this for some reason. It’s paralyzing but excitingly so, what will happen when you open your mouth? When she opens hers?
“I’m in love with you,” she blurts.
“I wish you wouldn’t say that,” you say softly. “You could have told me when we got out of here.”
“I’ll say it then too. But it was killing me to keep it inside. It is not my fault you are such a cunt about this stuff. Some things need to be put into words.”
The breath has been knocked right out of you. You clumsily pull her head down to rest against the crown of yours and hope she won’t feel how intensely you’re quivering with the urge to say it back. There will be time for that later.
When the two of you stop to rest, flat on your backs before she pulls you back against her front, you hear the songs and croaks of the other creatures on the island. A concerto, like the ones you were forced into as a kid, violin tucked sharp under your chin, spiccato strokes synchronized. Too stubborn to admit you actually liked it.
She moves your hand, relentlessly tapping out a rhythm on the ground below you, to rest against her hip. When you don’t twitch, she noses into your shoulder and pulls it against her lower abdomen, raised scar ridged in there. Salmon pink, you imagine, like the inside of a bear’s mouth, warm against your fingers. You trace it like it’s holy, the intricate wood of a statuette that someone holds onto every night before bed.
“What would it have been like?” she asks. “I think I would have made you a good wife.”
And you are unable to put it into words. That depraved monstrous fantasy you held onto so dearly before. You can’t say it and lose her, man, what a fucking tragedy.
“I would have been a shit husband.” She laughs and kisses your neck, warm and wet, more tongue than lips. You imagine she knows.
vi. the immovable tragedy of this story
You don’t know how you fell asleep. You don’t know how she did either. But it is the next morning and you still haven’t seen her but the world is beautiful today. Trees glitter in the sun, translucent crinkled orange and yellow a layer over the tallest of them, red splintering bark falling on the ground by your feet.
The two of you walk, laughing at her stories of training in Norway, yours of high school in Connecticut. You can almost see an exit through the tops of trees, London Eye somewhat visible.
“Eve,” Villanelle says, “how much will you think about me?”
“Never. You’ll be there.”
“Eve, answer the question.”
“Never, you’ll be right there. You’ll be annoying and you’ll be a serious smartass about groceries. We’ll break up because you hate the way I look at you but refuse to say anything about it. And I won’t think about you even then, until it gets to be too much and I’ll call you and won’t apologize. But you’ll come back anyway.”
You think she might be crying. You don’t even know if she’s there. You don’t even know if she’s real. You’ve made her up before. You need to make sure. You need to look her in the eye, see her grin for yourself. You don’t trust yourself, the part that could make her so real. You will go into the world and claw your way through this pain and you will need her for it, real or not.
You turn.
There is blood on her chest, congealed. She is so beautiful that it is a meat cleaver through your bones. She smiles. You take a step backwards out into the world.
You smile back.
vii. at the very end
In a place behind the curtain, years after skin wrinkles and joints stutter. When sex with people you meet at hotel bars and through friends of friends is more comfortable than exciting, and the endless companionship life offers you ends.
Something warm and golden, the taste of her mouth bright, like honey and mint. Her hair wrapped in your fingers, laughing into the crook of her neck. The trees seem to reach up further into the sky, she grins and the world slots back into its place.