hcllixn

[hcllixn]

date: may 1st, 2020 time: 01:24 am location: basketball court status: @detectivewright​

Moths swarm to that safety of light, ever burning brightness illuminating dead streets. In these hours only ghosts walked the night, whispered on drunken breaths. Chuck’s stomach gnawed with a nauseated dizzy haze, her arms stretched to her sides as sweat glistened her forehead. She’d be warm in this light, kissing her exposed skin like nectarines. Her hands trembling, delicate fragile things they were- shattered with crimson knuckles dripping ribbons in her trail. Violence, a beautiful destruction.

Wade stained her scars, and whispered to the ghost who was tethered by a thread that was only visible when bounced off of dimming light.

That thread tugs, and she thinks her hands pull along it- following this diaphanous rope to the other ghost it wrapped and tangled. With the cosmos in their mouths that open wide and poor sorrows- intoxicated Chuck finds her mirror. A pool in the middle of the basketball court, one she could see the ever burning light spilling from the edges off.

Chuck couldn’t resist skating up, her wheels carrying the warning of her approach long before she was in sight of the sheriff. She stops in the spilling light, shadowing the man where he lies and gently taps her skate to the side of him. “Are you dead?” Words are slurred, and her eyes glassy- the remnants of the party she’s leaving. There’s amusement laced in her tone staring down to the man that sunk into the earth.

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An inferno seared the insides of the girl, she burnt so gloriously with endless emotions she only promised to destroy herself in the process. Flames licking from her tongue with each spoken word, the energy threatening to pour from her and burn any who stepped too close. Destruction too and by. She loved that game, coaxing the folks too close in town with that halo ridden smile her father branded on her face with wolf teeth blackened from charcoal. But with Fletcher, it wasn’t that. She was that burning inferno inside the man as well, that honesty staining his throat and threatening to spill the emotions into the night air. Chuck simply helped him, pouring gasoline on the pile of bones and flesh, and sour things Fletcher pretended to be.

And she handed him the match.

Spilling into the air, the words orange flickering embers joined the swallowing mess of the night sky. Honestly. She’d skate closer, this time slowly, the gravel carrying the sound of her turning wheels and flooding the silence. With a tenderness, she stood close- perhaps this was the same thing her father did to those who came to church seeking guidance. But this man did not seek. And she was not her father.

I see you. She grabbed his bandaged hand, the red welling at the gauze promising destruction to all those that got too close. Chuck wanted to be in that firing range. With her hands made for prayer, broken knuckles healed over too many times, leaving silver cracks where exposed fractured bone once saw. Two hands grasping one, but without the age, they could have been the same hands staring at their future.

I see you, and I understand.

Looking up at him with divinity blue hues, “I only know how to destroy. But at least I don’t destroy myself.” She knew what it was to swallow it all, to smother that flame and choke on the smoke. Only she never had that choice. It was one made for her. “No one’s as good as hurting themselves than this- they can piece themselves back together again and continue their day like they’re whole. Other people are good at that.”

Fletcher would never have self-described himself as wearing his heart on his sleeve. He did, sure, but it was more complicated than that – he wore a beacon of his pain, flashing out in some sort of depressing morse code for anyone who was just as tormented, just as suffocated as he was to read and understand. It wasn’t something he was in control of. If he was, he’d have turned the damn thing off and turned his feelings into a closed loop circuit, or at least that’s what he told himself. Because what was more painful than being known, truly and legitimately? Being alone. And Fletcher had grown up so alone he thought the silence that surrounded him would always be able to drown out the shouts of anguish that fucking emanated off of him like a heat wave.

But here was this girl who could see through it all. Who could get to the very core of him with one look, and he fucking hated it. For the longest time, he thought she had just been alarmingly perceptive, keen on picking at all his scabs just because she could, for her own twisted sense of amusement, but here, now, he was realizing she knew him, in and out, from the shape of every breath he took to the way he held his sadness in his palms like a prayer.

And then there was her hands. One on top of his bruised knuckles, the other flat against his palm, two of hers for one of his, and he felt something in him break, like a dam of truth finally bursting, emotion flooding through him. He was so fucking tired, so fucking beaten down, and her hands around his, it felt like someone, finally, was saying I’ll help you lift the load. He couldn’t stop himself, taking his other hand, his clean hand, his pure, uninjured palm, pressing it to the tangled mess of their intertwined fingers, as though he was hiding them away from the world, and feeling the pressure of her fingers against the aching bruise of his knuckles, squeezing her hand tighter just to feel the way his hand throbbed in protest.

But the moment passed as quickly as it came. Because she could claim they were the same as much as she wanted – he knew the gleeful joy she reveled in whenever he unraveled. He couldn’t muster that sort of sadistic pleasure out of someone else’s pain, even if he tried. Not like now, not the man he was today.

Fletcher ripped his hands away from her, shoved them deep into his pockets, and fixed her with a sharp glare. “We’re nothing alike,” he said, perhaps too emphatically. “You enjoy this too much. If you understood me, really understood, you’d let me twist myself into whatever shape I need to make it through the fucking day. Not make everything worse just to prove a goddamn point.”

With that, he headed back to his cruiser, slamming the door behind him, like he should have done the moment he saw her. Because whether he wanted to admit it aloud or not, she was right, and she’d burrowed her way under his skin, stretching long and languid, making a home for herself between his ribs, and part of him wanted to tear into himself just to root her out, but another part of him, a stronger, louder part of him, said––

No. Let her stay. This is what it means to be known.

FIN.

[hcllixn]

crow

i. what does it say about my god when i begin my prayers with "im afraid of my hunger"? 

ii. what does it say about me when i end them with "i hope you're not real"?

iii. i clutch a fistful of rust coated feathers. i call solace with my aching wings. i beat my wings in warcry against wind already dead. my god laughs.

iv. the sky is not home to something that shreds her own soul with scabbed talons, the sky isn't kind to the unkind. there is no room for birdsong cursed. the woods take me in, hobbling foot, broken wing, watchful eye, carcass hymns.

v. i count in silent words and undead language, i count till there is thirteen, i count till all there ever was is abyssal wings and unholy breathlessness. i count till my days are chewed and picked clean, i count till i am swallowed, hungry pecks, eager beaks, aching stomachs, i count till my bones become my own playthings.

vi. watch me vanish, watch me vanish, watch me vanish.

vii. why must you call it a murder when i do it to myself?

[hcllixn]

“Girls love each other like animals. There is something ferocious and unself-conscious about it. We don’t guard ourselves like we do with boys. No one trains us to shield our hearts from each other. With girls, it’s total vulnerability from the beginning. Our skin is bare and soft. We love with claws and teeth and the blood is just proof of how much. It’s feral. And it’s relentless.”

— Leah Raeder, Black Iris

[hcllixn]

ROBBIE .

a superstitious man, robbie believed there was two curses one him:

First, all those shitty paranormal things happening to him. he did some research, coming back from night shifts, still riled from the anxiety of walking in nightly wadian eeriness. there was an old legend, he kept remembering from his abuela, luz mala or some shit coming from his worst nightmares. god, how could he have faced death on many occasions while on tour, but was still scared shitless of ghost stories?

Second, all those shitty teenagers (they weren’t teenagers, and robbie, as an honest deputy, should not call them shitty) getting in trouble at night. especially since josie’s death, it was like … a constant need to get out, and though none of them would tell the cops of their own investigative work, they all knew they wanted as much answers as the cops. which was absolutely understandable. the need to know was stronger than anything, and robbie could understand that.

but beside the josie’s meddling youth, there was one that kept robbie on edge all the time. and that one was standing right in front of him, as he got his coffee for his upcoming shift.

maybe there was a third curse on robbie : charlotte milder, affectionately known as chuck. robbie knew brandt liked to call her chucky, like the scary puppet. the deputy, though he’d never admit it out loud, could not find the lie in that. “good evening, charlotte.” he took in her appearance, her stained fingers to the sly smile plastered on her face. “you’re in a good mood tonight. a little late for platitudes, though.”

Born with prayer on her lips, and a halo adorning her head- the blonde with talons where a tongue should be was once something holy. Radiant. Glowing. Whispered into the dark of nights, with wooden boards cold against her bruised knees, she’d know her hands clasp together. And even when her father’s shadow wasn’t in the doorway, and the lights of the house all flickered off- the girl would still pray to the thing she feared. 

God, make me holy.

Perhaps he listened, and cursed her the smile that cuts like sharp moonlight, and the barb-wired wings of an angel. Copper in her mouth, and gauzed holding those shattered pieces of her together. The ever burning light of a church candle, that flame consuming her insides. Flickering, leaving embers in her words. Those warning signs in her smile, those hungry sharp teeth- only angels could seem so grotesque.

She’s smile at his bite back, like sinking her own teeth into the plump flesh of a peach. Juice dripping down her chin, his words tastes sweet. “Don’t act like you know the goings on of this town. You know they’re all lying to you right? You don’t belong here, everyone knows that. Why don’t you seem aware? Just that good of a detective are we?”

[hcllixn]

FLETCHER .

Honesty brimmed in him, threatening to spill over. But how could he admit the truth to someone he barely knew when he could hardly find it in him to face it himself? Still, for one moment, just one moment, there was a flash on his face, a crack in the facade, that let pain spill forth into the dewey night air. For just one moment, he thought to himself, there are worse things than being known.

But then something else set in, the cold, the loneliness, the fear. He couldn’t keep doing this, ripping himself open, splaying his arms, letting his lungs, his heart, his kidneys fall from his mangled chest. Enough was enough, there had to be a line drawn somewhere, a line that stopped him from giving up the warped, broken pieces of himself to just about anyone twisted enough to listen to him, miserable enough to take the grief that stained his fingers like overripe cherries. He couldn’t keep tearing himself to shreds and then sewing himself up again. It was unsustainable.

Weary hands dug around in his pockets for a cigarette, lit the thing between his lips and exhaled, long and slow, pointedly refusing to observe decorum as he blew whatever ghosts were in his lungs out, into her face. “Goad me all you want,” he said, tendrils of smoke curling out of his nostrils, eyes glinting like pools of gold under the street light. “At least I’m trying.” The trying was what was going to kill him in the end, stifling everything in him, forcing all his pain away into a sick, blank nothing. That too was unsustainable.

“What have you ever done?” he asked, gaze hardening, shoulders tightening. “Besides pick things apart and dance in their wreckage. What good is it, the chaos you sew? Does it help people? Or does it hurt them?” Fletcher could hear emotion creeping its way back into his words, hated the way how cloying he sounded, even to his own ears. He was foolish, naive, being bested by a teenager, couldn’t even hold it together long enough to make her listen to him. How was he supposed to do anything else here? “All you’re capable of is causing people pain,” he said, quiet, as though he was staring into a mirror, as though he himself was on the other end of those words, not some poor girl who had the misfortune of getting tangled up with him on a really bad night. “And if that’s all you’re good for, well, what’s the point of you? When we’re all good enough at hurting ourselves, what’s the fucking point of you making it worse?”

An inferno seared the insides of the girl, she burnt so gloriously with endless emotions she only promised to destroy herself in the process. Flames licking from her tongue with each spoken word, the energy threatening to pour from her and burn any who stepped too close. Destruction too and by. She loved that game, coaxing the folks too close in town with that halo ridden smile her father branded on her face with wolf teeth blackened from charcoal. But with Fletcher, it wasn’t that. She was that burning inferno inside the man as well, that honesty staining his throat and threatening to spill the emotions into the night air. Chuck simply helped him, pouring gasoline on the pile of bones and flesh, and sour things Fletcher pretended to be.

And she handed him the match.

Spilling into the air, the words orange flickering embers joined the swallowing mess of the night sky. Honestly. She’d skate closer, this time slowly, the gravel carrying the sound of her turning wheels and flooding the silence. With a tenderness, she stood close- perhaps this was the same thing her father did to those who came to church seeking guidance. But this man did not seek. And she was not her father.

I see you. She grabbed his bandaged hand, the red welling at the gauze promising destruction to all those that got too close. Chuck wanted to be in that firing range. With her hands made for prayer, broken knuckles healed over too many times, leaving silver cracks where exposed fractured bone once saw. Two hands grasping one, but without the age, they could have been the same hands staring at their future.

I see you, and I understand.

Looking up at him with divinity blue hues, “I only know how to destroy. But at least I don’t destroy myself.” She knew what it was to swallow it all, to smother that flame and choke on the smoke. Only she never had that choice. It was one made for her. “No one’s as good as hurting themselves than this- they can piece themselves back together again and continue their day like they’re whole. Other people are good at that.”

[hcllixn]

FRANKIE .

“The rumors about what? The lady in your ghost story? No, I’m not interested.”  

Unlike Frankie, who found it challenging to reckon with the idea that she had come to the funeral home with a need for some kind of an answer; it was easy to assume that Chuck would have no qualms with busting in to the funeral home. Frankie could imagine her doing it on a regular Tuesday, missing body or no. She couldn’t buy into the idea that the younger girl had some kind of an investment into the disappearance of Mrs. Johnson’s body – if anything, it was likely a source of macabre entertainment. 

“What’s your plan? Gonna head into the back and look for your screaming lady?”

Such righteous words spilled from Frankie’s mouth and stained the night air in a way that made the blonde’s skin crawl, and bubbled a laugh to her lips. Sharp, her shattered halo promising to slide in such things. “No, I plan to go in through the back. Weren’t we all?”

Closing the distance between herself and Frankie, it was easy to see the flickering flames in Chuck’s eyes. The ones that danced in hellfire, and desired to see destruction. But to tell where that destruction was directed, it wouldn’t be that clear. Rather Chuck had the kind of destruction that longed for anything that stepped into her path. “These are all quite virtuous words for someone caught slinking around in the shadows of a home where a woman up and left from the dead, Frankie. Enough about me don’t you think, what are you doing here?”

[hcllixn]

PATCH .

     “But you’d have to turn quick, otherwise Josie might be two legs deep into her munch on Chuck-a-thon. Can’t exactly kick ass when you’ve got nothing to kick with.” He makes a kick motion with his foot, but not a very big one as to not toe punch his piano. Grabbing his wine bottle off the black top of his favourite instrument, he takes a swig and hums.

Seeing the hunger in Chuck’s eyes for any little tid bit from the funeral he huffs out a laugh. “If you wanted to know you should’ve gone.” He has to be a little shit, he can’t simply hand over information without first yanking her chain. This is probably why he got into so many fights in high school. Taking another swig of wine he narrows his eyes before a smirk plays on his red stained lips. “The body went walkabout. Just-” He makes a poof noise and a vague movement with his hand to represent her vanishing. “Red went ballistic, went the colour of his own namesake. Thought we were about to have murder numero dos.”

"I can bite back, did you want to see?” There was always something around Patch’s apartment that could catch the blonde’s eye- and she wasn’t shy to moving around to the first interesting thing she saw. Displayed on a shelf, or maybe it was just thrown there, Patch had a way of making both of those things appear to be the same event. She’d pick up as he spoke, before playing a dramatic huff from her lips and turning to him. “I was there, but you think people in this town will tell me shit? No, I got the fucking funeral was cancelled, go home. You think I’d miss another chance to see Red explode after last time? That man’s a walking bomb. I love it when he leaves the house.”

The thing in her hand- whatever it was, she wasn’t sure. But she twisted one of the elements of it, waiting for something, but was met with a disappointing lack of events. “Up and walked?” Even such a statement seemed ridiculous to Chuck, fixating her attention back to Patch waiting for him to laugh at his own joke. “You’re saying we’re raising the dead now? Not just eating the living? Unless you’re about to tell me you’re a part of this occult shit as well, you’ve got to step up your game.”

[hcllixn]

JUDE .

If his mind wasn’t racing before, it is now. He had heard of Josie, but he hadn’t heard that little tidbit about cannibalism. This only made him more nervous about the fact that he has chosen this town, out of all the damn towns, to live in. He must have some really bad luck if he just so happened to stop randomly at the town with happenings like this.

“I’ve heard of her, y-yeah.” The words fall out of his mouth before he can think much about what he’s saying. He’s too busy with his anxious thoughts to pay much attention to that. “Oh, t-that’s just g-great.”

It was something sweet to her tongue to watch this other person stutter before her formed facts, even in the broad daylight with cars sparsely passing almost on routine to return to their homes. A clockwork town, it was almost certain that the old man with the dog on a yellow leash would be leaving his front door two houses down in exactly ten minutes, and a lawnmower a block away would start up and sound through the town- and that yelling with pots and pans clanked around would start up any moment if they remained standing here. It always did.

But Chuck, she broke her stoic stare, and a bright smile quickly flooded her features. A change that would seem jarring, a sudden snap. “I didn’t quite catch your name, did I?” She holds a figure to her mouth then gestures, “How daft, daddy would say that’s awful impolite of me. Oh please don’t tell him if you see him.”

[hcllixn]

FLETCHER .

She was hellbent on getting a rise out of him, and maybe, if he wasn’t so fucking exhausted, maybe, if he hadn’t had such a shit day, maybe, if he was a different person, he would be able to go through life without sinking to her bait, but here she was, pushing back into his space, daring him to dive over that edge, to let the anger in and let restraint go, and god, he was this close to squeezing his fist, to twisting and snapping the delicate bones of her wrist, just because he could. But that wrath, that cruelty, it sent him jerking back into the shape he’d twisted himself into, Sheriff Wright, upstanding citizen, shirt buttoned up all the way to his throat, collar so tight it could choke.

He let go of her as though her skin burned him, stepped backwards, putting space between them, because he didn’t want to think about what he’d do if he stayed there, towering over her, didn’t want to think about the parts of him that were warped, messy, broken, bad because of the man who fathered him, because of the man who made him. No. He wasn’t that person. His hands were his own, his hands were his mother’s, she’d always said that, and his hands were shoved deep into his pockets, because he couldn’t think about what they’d do if he let them and his anger loose.

“If you end up dead in the woods,” he snarled, breathless from the task of having to keep himself at bay, “because you’re too senseless to understand what danger is– if you make me solve your murder because you can’t pull your head out of your own ass long enough to realize I’m trying to keep you, all of you, fucking safe–” He inhaled a long, deep breath, turning away from her because he couldn’t look at her for another fucking second or he’d scream or punch something or both. He wasn’t nearly as in control as he’d like to imagine, and he got the sense that she knew that, got the sense that she relished pushing him to this place, and he couldn’t understand, for the life of him, why.

“What do you get out of this, anyways?” Fletcher asked, whirling around to face her, voice crackling with frustration. He should have left, he knew he should have just walked away, but backing down from Chuck was worse than rising to her provocation. He’d rather be hotheaded and short tempered than a coward in her eyes – and just as he caught himself thinking that, he kicked himself. She was eighteen, and he was the Sheriff. What did it fucking matter what she thought of him? “I can smell the fucking liquor on your breath. I can see how much you’re enjoying yourself, so what the hell is it that you want? You want me to get pissed? You want me to arrest you? You want me to hurt you?”

He fixed her with a biting, wrathful sort of glare. “All of that can be arranged. But not tonight.”

"I know what danger is, Sheriff.” The words tangle on her tongue, mouth full of cobwebs dipped in saccharine honey. She was glistening with artificial gloss, that coaxed her smile. Something ripe, she was ready to have teeth sunken into. A cherry, freshly picked with morning dew making the skin look so artificial. Crimson, like the blood that wells on her knuckles, and aches her insides. Danger was what sunk its sharp teeth into her, juice staining chin, dripping to shirts. Danger was something that resided in the pit that burrowed where a heart should be. And she wondered, if Fletcher didn’t like danger this much, what kept him here? “Don’t you?”

Wide hues, full of curiosity search the man before her- tracing the outlines of his being and finding the edges of this mask he wears so proudly. The town’s hero, that’s what he liked to play. With his badge, and his gun, and his white knuckled hands hiding in his pockets where they do no harm. The control of this perfect image he exuded only frayed at the edges where shadows claw at him. 

“What do you want out of it?” She mirrors, because this game they played, she knew it was more than once sided like he wished to believe. Her gaze holds his stature, and her tone that asked with such honesty twisted in her mouth to something sharp. “Don’t you think I can smell the same on yours? Little sheriff ain’t doin’ too well in a new town, dear ol’ dead Josie haunting you? Is Wade drowning you yet? Or have you always been gasping for air?” 

[hcllixn]

JUDE .

He feels his heartbeat speed up as the words come from her mouth. She’d come across as friendly at first, but now his anxiety had spiked. Had he chosen the wrong place to go to? Out of all the places he could have picked, was Wade the wrong one?

Wade had seemed unassuming enough when he had first come across it in his car. He was just driving by a quaint, midwestern town. It seemed like the perfect place for his journey to end. Far away from his hometown, from Minnesota, from his mother, from his ex. So the idea that Jude had chosen the wrong town to come to had him reeling. 

He felt like his head was spinning.

He swallows hard. “O-oh? Is that s-so?” He doesn’t hear the anxiety evident in his voice.

Asphalt covered roads, stretch endlessly into the day where heat waves waft on the horizon- barley visible yet they distort all the eye can see. Even a place like Wade had secrets to hide on the edges of the earth, whispered just out of ear reach. But here Chuck stood, her words the warnings with a sharp toothed grin- that holy smile of hers. Staring back to a tumbling man, who’d eaten from her hands all too easily. How delicious.

“You heard of Josie, yeah? The rumours are true, it was that boy who moved in last summer found in her stomach. Everyone wondered what got of him. I guess, Wade had a particular interest in boys like him. Doe eyed, the silent type, you know?”

[hcllixn]

FRANKIE .

It should have been relieving to see anyone who wasn’t a cop, but the sight of Chuck Milder did relatively little to soothe the alarm that Frankie felt. Cherubic features be damned, the girl was a little menace. A frown claimed Frankie’s features as the younger girl stalked over to her, and she crossed her hands defensively as she came too close. “You’re here,” Frankie pointed out in response to the words that sounded like a threat, “and what are you doing here, anyway?”

Frankie’s expression twisted into a scowl after Chuck offered up her scary story, and she answered her question with a sharp: “you’re not cute.” 

Pale blue bows in braided golden locks, twisting that image of innocence that dripped saccharine honeysuckle in her tone. A mouth made for prayer. Adorned in white lace, like a porcelain doll, paraded around. Oh how good she was they’d all say. Just like her father. With that smile of sin, that masked so well to saints. Sitting in the pews, stain glass dancing colours cascading to her pale features, under this light the iridescent halo could be seen on her head. Something holy. White knuckled grip on her bible.

Worship me. 

“Oh, aren’t I?” Her teeth glistening in the silver moon light, “I wanted to know if the rumours were true. Don’t you?”

[hcllixn]

Chuck Milder

She’d grow unsettled. Restless. Wild and untamed, the trimmed honeysuckle hedges would begin to overgrow and a resentment would stain her tongue. For this world, the people in it. The praise held about those towns engulfed by the American Dream. Shattered glass. Oil slick glistening metallic in the moonlight. Flickering neon signs, illuminating a dead street. Those streets where ghosts slept in the cracks of pavements, and god turned a blind eye.

[hcllixn]

FLETCHER .

Fletcher didn’t think he was being hyperbolic when he said that he thought Charlotte Milder was obsessed with him. It was like, the first time he’d hauled her into the station for god knows what – underage drinking was the most logical assumption – she’d dug her claws in, and she wasn’t letting go, no matter what he did to shake her off. Some days, he thought to himself, why bother? She’s harmless enough. But nights like tonight, he knew and he saw it with an alarming clarity: she was a fucking devil. There was nothing benign about her, this fucking orb of chaos held together, reigned back by skin and bone and a smile that could kill. And Fletcher wanted to be as far away from her as fucking possible, but she seemed determined to stop him from doing just that, one of her small, thin hands yanking at the holster on his chest, pulling him close.

“I can’t believe I have to tell you this, but this isn’t a game,” he said sharply, anger licking at his heels, making his face hot. Or maybe that was the whisky. 

His right hand, the one with bandaged knuckles, gauze stained red, rose to her wrist, and busted or not, he still had the strength to break her grip on him, to yank her off and push her aside. Perhaps, inadvisable, given that he wasn’t trying to have Local Sheriff Injures Eighteen-Year-Old Girl as a headline, but he didn’t particularly care. Something in him reacted with spite, with white hot rage, with barred teeth and barbed words whenever she was around, and she needed to know he wasn’t always this fucking restrained, that there was something mean, something violent, something vengeful in him that he wrestled with every day of his goddamn life.

“I asked you to leave,” he said, once there was some distance between the two of them, once he felt like he could breathe again. “And frankly, I thought I was pretty polite about it. But who knows? Maybe you misheard me. So I’m asking you again: go home, Charlotte.” Her full name felt wrong on his tongue, but what else was he supposed to call her? Her last name felt somehow worse. “If you make me ask a third time, I won’t be so fucking pleasant.”

Reflective hues, cascading light trailing glistening shadows as Chuck would see herself staring back in the man. The same venom that blackened her blood, and stained her teeth to taste of copper. The burning insides. The waves that crashed and collided, stirred up by the storm that drowns her, trapped inside the vessel of her own being unable to escape. Wine dark waves starved of oxygen. Emotions, too many of them all at once. Beautifully promising destruction, and wreckage. She’d see it in him, and she wanted to coax out every last inch of that storm that silently brewed.

We’re the same.

Red twizzlers, artificially sweet candy coaxed, she’d smile with drugstore lacquered lips glossed and glittery. Too sugary, there was poison in her smile. Staining your mouth, she’d get caught in the back of your throat, and claw where you let her. Choking. 

Her laugh is sharp and shrill where he grabs her wrist and pushes her back, delight on her tongue as her eyes stare at his hands. His hands that hold her with such threat, trembling with ache for the pigmented bandages that hide that promise of frustration baring through knuckles. Chuck would know it well, that satisfying sharp splintering. 

Her eyes dart back to meet his, and she doesn’t allow him to push this distance between them. Not that easily. Under the sodden moon, on a lawn where dead women were meant to be buried and blessed. Chuck coxed those feelings of life from the sheriff. Her barb-wired tongue, dangerous as her name hit the air. There’s something hungry in her. 

“Oh!” The exclamation taunting as she closes the distance between them again, “Brave now are we? Are you actually going to do something for once in your life sheriff?”  Show me you’re dangerous. “What are you going to do? Feed me to the town so I can be found in the stomach of the next dear ol’ Josie?” Rumours, of course but that didn’t make it any less reason for Chuck to bite back with the words as she pushes him. Two hands antagonising the man, she shoves him. “Or what- what are you gonna do sheriff?”

[hcllixn]

PATCH .

     Patch holds his hands up in mock surrender before turning his hands quickly to flip her off. He lets his hands drop back down to his piano keys and plays the Jaws theme tune as Chuck moves about. “All the nuns are probably praying to God that the day of judgement isn’t coming since Josie peaced out of her own funeral.” 

It did disturb him somewhat. A vanishing body, zero answers, Wade continuing to move on like normal. But as Patch does- he prefers to make jokes out of it instead. “Who’d win in a fight, you or zombie Josie?”

Chuck shoots daggers in the man’s direction as he mocks her to be nothing more than a shark, swimming through the room as if she’s stalking something predatory for survival. Teeth bared, even in a town like Wade she’d be so much more than a shark. She was the thing dragging everyone down by the ankles, holding them in the sinking blue abyss. “Once she turns me into a zombie, I’d win pretty easily.”

“Tell me Patch, did you hear?” She was hungry for news of the funeral, besides her own tales she spun into the town, Chuck had little to no idea what actually happened in the funeral home that faithful evening. She approaches the man as he plays his piano, her steps slow as she pursed her lips together. “Did you hear what happened? Because I’m dying to know.”

[hcllixn]

JUDE .

It was exactly the houses that looked the same street after street that caused Jude to get lost in the first place. Everything looked so similar to him, since he hadn’t yet picked up on the nuances of his surroundings it was hard to discern what was different and what was new. 

He notices that the girl completely ignored his question, but he’s not bothered enough to say something about it. He doesn’t recognize her, but then again, he can say that about more than half the people in Wade. It would be impolite just outright ignore her, so he chooses to respond to her.

“Uh, I’m not from here.” He confirms what she had just said. “I’m trying to live here, that’s what I’m doing in Wade.” His answer is guarded, he doesn’t like talking about his past.

Like a holy being, Wade was all something encompassing. All demanding. It craved and caressed. Spreading through dreams, something dangerous and daring. Teeth sharp, crimson stains that rusted what once was gleaming. Moonlight breaths ether into such violent things, with wings once like angels now plucked and trailed behind where they walked. 

Chuck was perhaps just a warning of that, with her shattered halo splintering skin as she walked over it barefoot. A barb-wired tongue, that coaxed with the honeysuckle smile at those who dared step foot into the suffocating town. Newcomers, each with that breathless light cascading through dull blues, Chuck would watch the glistening reflections as they slowly sunk. Breathless, and begging. 

Sinking.

Sin’s never looked so holy, honey.

She’d laugh at the other’s words, live in a place like this? “No one’s told you yet have they? They don’t take too nicely to fresh meat here.”

[hcllixn]

FRANKIE .

TIME/LOCATION: around 10 pm, post “funeral services;” kane funeral home. STATUS: open for all!

Like every other lifelong Wadian – and probably like most of the short-termers – Frankie had come out with her Grams in tow to pay respect to Mrs. Johnson. When Fred Kane had come out and told everyone to go home, the Abbot women hadn’t resisted – Grams had remarked that today wasn’t the day with a kind of finality that had drawn a peculiar stare from her granddaughter, and had requested that Frankie drive them home. 

When Frankie had grabbed her keys a few hours after dark and told her grandmother that she would be out for a little bit, Grams hadn’t batted a lash. “Behind all things are reasons,” the old woman had remarked to herself, before looking up at her granddaughter with a smile. “Don’t stay out all night.”

Frankie had told herself that she was just going out for a drive to get some air, and to clear her thoughts. She’d ignored the pang in her gut when she’d found herself driving in a familiar direction, up until that uncomfortable feeling sat like a lump in her throat. When it finally became unbearable, and Frankie felt like she couldn’t breathe, she pulled the car over and killed the ignition. After a few minutes of in four seconds, hold seven seconds, out eight seconds, Frankie felt the suffocating feeling start to dissipate. When she finally looked up and out her windshield, she could make out the distant red door Kane’s Funeral Home about a quarter mile up the road, illuminated by a porch light.

Why she’d gotten out of the car, Frankie didn’t know – she’d told herself that maybe it was because she could breathe better in the fresh air. It didn’t account for why she’d started walking – just to calm down, she decided – or why she’d found herself dangerously encroaching on the funeral home’s property. By the time that she’d decided it was stupid – not to mention inappropriate – for her to be there, she’d already stepped foot onto the perfectly-manicured lawn surrounding the place. 

“Idiot,” she mumbled to herself, shaking her head and turning promptly on her heel to head back to the car. No way the cops aren’t all over this place, she thought to herself, and what the fuck would you even say? “I don’t know what I’m doing here either,” she whispered out-loud to herself, trying out what her response to local authorities would be. Huffing, she shook her head and repeated: “idiot.”

Frankie had made it off the lawn and back onto the street when she’d heard – or maybe just felt – another person nearby. She tried to ignore the sensation until it became undeniable, and with a harshly whispered fuck, spun around to see who (or what) was there.

Curiosity clawed at Chuck’s throat and stayed there, stuck in her swallows- even when she tried to breathe. It always got the better of her, that itch for something interesting in this dull town that cracked and frayed at the edges just like each of its subdued residents. Yes, the god perfect residents of Wade. So many born and raised just like Josie herself, now all collected on the lawn at the Recreational Centre, with warm beers and misplaced sorrow. Perhaps there still was sadness in the air, lingering in the rain that glistened the streets in this hour. But there was the question staining everyone’s lips.

What happened.

That wasn’t why Chuck had found herself approaching the funeral home that night, rather that tonight, of all places the Kane Funeral Home seemed the one place one shouldn’t be. So it was only natural that the blonde with hair damp still from the downpour she got caught in not moments prior, was exactly there.

“I wouldn’t walk these grounds at night if I were you, not after what happened today.” Under the glow of streetlights that dance shadows on her face as she crosses the gravel road, Chuck could have seemed something of a ghost tonight herself. The parchment pale girl, who still resembled something of porcelain no matter how many times she shattered her skin, only to cut herself on the shards that trailed behind her. Carved in violence, the girl that once resembled something holy, now had a mouthful of strawberry bubblegum and sin.

“Didn’t you hear what the Torres kid saw today,” Her voice barley above a whisper as she stands close to the other, “A lady with no tongue, screaming from the window in the backyard. Snuck out there before we were all told to get lost. Said she had eyes like the night sky. You don’t think she’s still in there, do you?”