Copper Coins

The silence isn’t really silent anymore. 

Time’s started moving forward without her. It’s moving around her. She’s watching it. It’s leaving.

She should follow behind, but something’s got its hands around her and it’s pulled her onto a bed of cotton. And the cotton, it’s-

It’s in her mouth. She can feel it pushing against her teeth, and the back of her tongue. She could just gag on it, but it sits so softly in her throat. It makes her feel fake, like a doll with a face full of stuffing.

The air’s sharp.

The floor’s kind of sticky. Her stomach kind of hurts.

 There’s a smell like copper coins in the air. It hurts her nose. 

Her ears are ringing, like she should just take a fork to them and tear them off. 

But-

None of that really matters. Because-

It’s so pretty. So pretty she could cry. And, really, she’s never felt like crying so deeply before. Not ever.

And suddenly, the feeling in her stomach isn’t pain anymore, but something ugly opening up and releasing. And she breathes in the copper smell and she can taste it through the cotton. Salty, twangy. Cool and mellow on her warm tongue.

She’s so happy. 

And the beauty of it all, it just overwhelms all her senses. The way the room has grown into a magnificent canvas.

Crimson against pale walls, the artful pieces of a jigsaw scattered across dented floorboards.

She knew it would be beautiful, she just didn’t understand how much.

She should've known. She should have never doubted.

When Theia had first met Tom, he hadn’t been beautiful. He’d been a puzzle already put together; smartly dressed, with a disarming smile to counter it. Wildly earnest, but somehow at the same time dangerously superior in his sensibleness. Boring. 

She’d been content to ditch him, except on their way to the station after a dull, lightless evening together they were jumped. By two men with stringy, pale statures and needle-marked arms. They had knives, but Tom had clearly decided himself stronger, and tackled them dutifully for her.

Perhaps he’d seen the roaming looks and crude gestures they were making, gesturing shamelessly at her bare legs and threatening her alternatively with the blunt end of their knives.

After a scuffle, Tom had sported a bleeding lip and several bruises.

A specific one, around his eye, had swelled and marred his face. Clotted blood under his skin turning it an enticing blue, and then a more piss yellow as the weeks continued.

That night, she couldn’t stop thinking about him. His evenly toned face suddenly coloured pretty; red and then blue and then yellow. Like the half set of crayons she’d had as a child; the ones she used to make beautiful canvases, before her parents took them away and made her promise not to draw anymore.

Tom’s bloodied face became the object of a lot of Theia’s daydreams moving forward. And, she revelled in having a newfound crush. She knew, with a padlocked certainty, that she could make him even more delightful if she wanted.

Looking at him now, cracked open and splayed as paint on her living room walls, she feels like she could wax poetic about how beautiful he is. Every complaint he’d ever made self consciously about himself- that his eyes were too far apart, his hair too thin, his legs too short- all if it became unimportant in the face of the greater canvas.

It makes her feel so warm and full- simple and complete- to see him wrap around her room like grand protective walls.

The sunlight that shines  through the windows sits innocently against segments of his severed flesh. It lights it in variance, creating differences in the hues of red, like stained glass windows. 

He’s perfect and pure like the virgin Mary.

She feels her chest build with feeling. She wants to join him. She wants to be a part of her masterpiece, to be suspended in time.

She loves him so much.

How is it possible to love something so much?

 She doesn't know.

She’d only ever felt this way about a person once before. 

With a girl, Louise, in her class years ago.

 Louise always wore long sleeves and jumpers, even when the weather grew hot and sweltering.

In front of teachers, she would cower and shrivel, curling into herself like a beetle; like some primal, animalistic instinct preserved in her somehow.

Kissing her behind a bike shed, it had been easy to pull her shirt up to see the bruises and welts all over her body. Her sad, crumpled expression when she tried to explain it away was only endearing at the time, her big brown eyes pulled wide and pleading only more enticing.

The first time Louise slept over at her house, she’d wet the bed and they’d showered together. 

Louise had been embarrassed about it, considering they were both 14 at the time, but Theia had taken care not to ask questions, and only led her through the hallways over to the bathroom. 

It was there she’d felt, for the first time, a stretching love so much bigger than herself. Under the warm streams of water, they were both laid bare and vulnerable.

And Louise’ body, so often covered and hidden, was mottled with colour and textured by scars. Theia felt she could only worship her fragility, and ran soaped up hands all across her, to memorise her every inch.

Louise’s expression that day held with it the hazy, gentle wariness of a person gone far far away. She was at Theia’s mercy, and Theia knew she could’ve done whatever she wanted to Louise, and the other girl would’ve let it happen, flopped and limp like a corpse emptied of a soul. 

Theia never had sex with Louise, like the other had perhaps expected for all those months they were together. She found that there was no need, when her love was comfortably full as it was.

Eventually a teacher noticed Louise, skin split and bruises dark, in the changing room after a swimming lesson. After that, she  was taken away from her home and soon her skin became clear and evenly cream coloured, no longer entrancingly torn apart and clotted. When she had had to move schools to relocate to a new foster house, well it’d been almost a relief to have an excuse to break it off, now that Louise wasn’t pretty anymore. 

With Tom, Theia did have sex. Perhaps partly because of his own demands, but also because she felt she needed it between them.

Growing older had brought with it, for Theia, an evolution in her tastes. She wanted more, she knew. More than beautifully haunted and mild Louise, and definitely more than boring sensible Tom. Something primal, and buried.

Something about sex, in turn, transforms even the most respectable people into something else entirely, and Tom was no real exception. Where he was usually so kept together, inside of her he unravelled to animosity. 

And when his mouth would hang open in a pant, and his tongue would loll, trailing rivulets of saliva, she imagined shoving her hand down his throat and pulling his innards out.

 His body, coiled and taut with exertion, was suddenly just muscle and flesh wrapped up in a binding skin, and his eyes rolling back seemed like they would be prettier bulging out of his skull. 

Violence is something more easily excused when you have sex, so she enjoyed herself scratching bleeding welts down his arms and watching the red trail down. 

Tom had always seemed less interesting than Louise, because his bruises faded after time, but hers had always kept coming. 

The only way to keep him pretty was for Theia to do her best to decorate him herself whilst he was distracted. Hickies, for a time, made for accurate enough substitutions for bruises. And the scratches down his back never seemed to bother him, blown off in his mind as something done mindlessly in the throws of passion. 

It had felt like it could be enough, but truthfully the more she felt her infatuation grow, the more violent her urges became. She wanted to claw into his chest and bury herself in him completely, cave in through his belly button and bathe in his insides. 

When they had sex the twelfth time and Tom collapsed on top of her and cried, she’d wanted to yell at him. To tell him that there was a way they could be even closer. That if he only let her, she could immortalise them in a show of pure nature. If only he’d let her zip him open and wear him like a skinsuit so she could embody him.

He’d asked her then, “Do you love me?” and she’d said yes with as much truth as she was capable. She did. She loved him. Loved him so much she fantasised about eating his heart cut right out of his chest. 

When he’d then asked “What do you love about me?”, she’d had no answer. At least, no answer that she knew she could give him. 

There was nothing about him that was particularly special when compared to any other person. She liked his ability to bleed, she liked the way he winced when she pushed on a tender wound. She liked that his flesh pulsed under her hands when she ran it down his back.

But, those things weren’t special. It was true of anyone. 

Truthfully, she could be in love with anyone. Boy or girl or anywhere in between, they all looked the same turned inside out. 

Tom was happenstance. 

Though now her love for him was absolute, it was without logic. From what Theia understood, that was true of most couples. 

The answer didn’t really suit Tom, though. Suppose people like to be special, and revered as individuals by the people they love. It’s overrated. The only thing to ever come from being special and different is an endlessly cold shouldered mother who wishes for the complete opposite.

When he began to walk out on her that evening, it was with an air of finality. The rejection didn’t surprise her, really. It was-

It was familiar.

Theia was prepared to let him go, despite the nauseous feeling she fought to keep down watching him retreat. Just as he approached the door though, she caught a glimpse of a scratch she had made on his back as he lifted his arms to get his coat.

 She wanted to pry it open wider with her fingers. Dig her nails into the still healing flesh and feel it give away under her force. The urge was so much bigger than all the other times. 

It was as if, before, she had been treading underwater, watching the thoughts and fantasies bob harmlessly on the surface. She’d never been close enough to reach them, only to admire them floating away from a distance. But now, she’d breached the water. And with just a miniscule reach of her arm, the things she had been imagining turned solid in her palm. 

The next moment, she killed him.

At least, that’s what she assumes.

It’s clear at least that Tom is dead. Whether a dormant bomb suddenly came to life and exploded out from his stomach, or she’d lost her mind and torn him open with her bare hands, the result remains the same. 

It is gorgeous and gory and complicated and intricate. It’s a drawing in crayon on the Sistine chapel, held tenderly by believers drawn to tears. 

Theia feels-

Disconnected.

She doesn’t want to be. She wants to be a part of it. She feels cold. 

Why does she have to breathe all this sharp air? She wants to go back underwater. She wants to go back inside. 

Her mouth tastes full of cotton. Her ears are buzzing. Her nose stings. 

In the carnage, reclined along multiple floorboards and covered in a healthy crimson is a long, winding intestine. 

If she squints and tilts her head, it almost, in some ways, resembles an umbilical cord. Bold and long and binding. 

In a daze, she kneels down on all fours and crawls pathetically towards the sight. Her hands and knees, already bloodied from violence she now has no memory of, are now even more soaked in hot blood. 

In the middle of it all, she collapses on her side and wraps her arms tightly around her legs, the intestine held safely between them. She is, like a baby, soaked through with red. It’s warm, and coats her completely. She brings a thumb up to her mouth to suck on it, and her tongue is now coated too, the texture velvet and thick. 

She lays there for as long as she dares, and feels suddenly as if she is only just born into this world. When she cries, it’s the cries of a baby as it breathes its first sharp breath out of the womb, and when she whimpers she is brought over to be held against her mother’s chest. 

Their breathing, from this, is synched in perfect harmony. Their bodies are indistinguishable from one another. 

Time moves forward without them. It moves around them. The silence is filled with the sound of their hearts thumping between them, jackrabbit fast.

Just that, the soothing sound of her mother’s heartbeat, held tight against her ear. And her own.

 Thump thump.

Thump thump.

Thump thump.