“You know this isn’t normal right?”
“I never said I was. In fact I’m the farthest thing from normal.” I chuckle, picking up a little stick off the ground and breaking it into tiny pieces before throwing them into the fire.
“Now that, I believe.” She laughs, kissing my shoulder, her lips cool from being wet. “You wanna tell me how NOT normal you are?”
“No.” I say a little sharper than intended, and she stiffens against me before relaxing again.
“Is that for the best?”
“Yeah.”
We sit in silence as the fire burns hot, flickering and popping as the flames hiss through the corpse. The smoke changes from dense black clouds with the burning of the oils and fluids in the flesh, to wispy white tendrils when nothing is left but the bones.
The stars move in the sky and the moon makes its cycle, changing position over our heads as we wait. She occasionally picks at her clothes, or fluffs her tousled hair, and I watch my work.
It’s different than all my others. The desire, hate, rage, disgust, none of that is in me. I’ve never killed with anything but fire, the trash dying as it burns, but this, this is weird. He’s just an empty sack, like a garbage bag already used but emptied. I don’t like it.
When the smoke dies down, the last finger of it disappearing into the night sky, I climb off the ground, stretching my back out. Phoenix looks up at me with question in her dark eyes but practically jumps out of her skin when I put my shoes back on and stomp on the glowing embers. Little pieces float into the air as the brittle bones crunch under my feet, falling apart into tiny pieces.
“What are you doing?” She asks, scrambling to her feet at the shock of my sudden aggressive actions.
“Finishing this so we can go.” I grunt as I crush the remains with my heel. “No evidence left behind.”
“It’s so violent.” She whispers as I freeze, hearing her.
The emotions in her voice are ones I’m not used to, fear and worry, but laced with compassion and dare I say it? Trust.
This is all wrong. All wrong. Stupid, stupid man. She doesn’t trust you. You killed a man in front of her, burned the body, and now your smashing his bones to dust like a mad man.
Anger brews inside me. It’s not at her, not at myself, not at the situation, but all of them combined. Here I am stomping on the bones of a man that I should never have come across. But I did, because of her, because of my infatuation with her.
Infatuation? Ha! Shithead. Obsession. You can’t even be honest with yourself.
“Shut up!” I yell out loud, grabbing my head, covering my ears, trying to block out the voice in my head that never fucking stays quiet.
He’s been there ever since I was a boy, alone in my room behind that locked door with no human company or interactions. He showed up one day as I cut a small line on my arm just to feel something and never left. He has my voice, my mannerisms, my everything, and even though I know he is me; he’s still an unwelcome presence sometimes.
You were only supposed to see if she knew who we were. Not follow her, rescue her, and expose us to her. Now what? Huh?
“Stop.” I growl, slamming my foot down again and again, demolishing everything under me until it’s just a pile of grey ash and splinters. “Everything is fine. It’s fine.”
“Zeph?”
I’m so lost in my actions that I jump when she reaches out and touches me. Instinctively I bat her hand away and stomp my feet harder into the now pile of dust.
“Don’t touch me.”
“Easy…” She says, her fingers brushing me again, her hands softly grabbing my fists from my ears and pulling them away. “Easy. It’s okay. You did this for me. You saved me from whatever that would have done to me.” She adds, pointing both our hands down to my shoes that are covered in grey and white dust.
“I’m a monster.” I mumble, looking down at the ground and away from her.
“No you’re not.”
“Yes. Yes I am.”
Those small, dainty hands of hers cup my cheeks, raising my face up to hers. Her eyes shimmer in the moonlight, and her face is pale from the cold and the fear that I can smell on her, yet still she holds onto me. She sees inside of me. She has to be able to. How can she not see the psycho underneath my crystal blues?
“What do we do?”
