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<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 08, 2007 01:55 AM: Message edited by: the submersion of ghosts ]</font>
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<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 08, 2007 01:55 AM: Message edited by: the submersion of ghosts ]</font>
April 07, 1995
She could feel the mask slip off, a Mardi Gras display of feathers and sequins lost somewhere behind her as they ran. The acrid burn of tears had already come by then. And once the schoolgirls had stopped running, Billie was tortured with useless sobs.
"Da 'ell is wrong wit you!" It was more of a scream than a question as James slapped her with plastic-ringed fingers. So hard across the swells of a cotton candy mouth that it instantly drew blood and terror. James herself was out of breath, an evening of violence and cardio had taken the fight out of her. And so after that initial blow, which had thankfully silenced Billie into shadowy nothingness, James sank down on a moldy tree stump.
She drew a pair of cigarettes from her sweater sleeve with fingers stained by gore, and Billie accepted a menthol ultra light with bloody prints. Homicide only suited one of them, and as Billie knelt in the grass, she began to shake with memory of what they'd just done.
"A dead man ain't no man, Billie. A dead man's not nothin'. He's bones. Why ya gonna cry 'bout some bones?"
Billie stared at her, wanting James' composure, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the killer's pride that curled at her smoking mouth.
James slid from her murderer's throne and rubbed the hem of her sweater, scented with cherry bodyspray and mildew, under Billie's tearful eyes. She kissed her cheeks and mouth, swallowing the girl's sadness between fervent pulls at a cigarette filter.
"You still love me, Billie-Ann?"
Guilt wormed its way into Billie's guts and turned the sweet taste of menthol into rotten, fetid bile. She watched the way her lover's fingers fluttered in the moonlight, realizing for the first time that they looked like baby claws.
"... yes."
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 08, 2007 02:38 AM: Message edited by: the submersion of ghosts ]</font>
May 01, 1995
"James?" The word was a whisper that weaved lyrical as a scythe through the darkness.
"Hmm?" Sleepy and drunk, the corpse queen responded in muted tones.
The shadows threatened to drown them where they slept. All hours of darkness had nibbled at their bones and wished to swallow them whole in the backseat of the Impala.
"You asleep?"
"I WAS.." James could spit the simplest of words like venom.
"...whatchu dreamin' abou'?"
"Disneyland."
The silence stretched like taffy before the tragedy child chirped up again. "James.. you, you think we're gonna go to da hellfire for what we did?"
"What you wanna think about that for?" James groaned and rolled back against the seatbelt fixtures, keeping her arms tight around her lover's ribs. "They was demons, baby. Ain't gonna go to tha devil for slayin' those demons, girl." Her fingers seethed like lava on the bony knots that chainlinked Billie's spine. "You know that.."
Billie Ann nodded in silent agreement and pressed her face into the deadly hollows of her lover's throat. "Yeah."
<font color="#a62a2a" size="1">[ February 08, 2007 07:56 PM: Message edited by: the submersion of ghosts ]</font>