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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 2:59 am
"Better safe than sorry, better safe than sorry, better safe than sorry, I can't believe she bit me!!
I, I opened the door before and I got bit for my trouble.
No.
Better safe than sorry! Better safe than sorry!"
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:00 am
I. Hours
Six months before he was corrupted into the Negaverse, Irinei Lazarev made a new friend.
Her name was Revmira Ivanovna, and she was a law student at one of the colleges in St Petersburg, which one he was never quite sure, it never seemed important. She liked the ballet, the Hermitage, and the art gallery, which was how she came to be at a gallery opening. After his date abandoned him for her girlfriend, Revmira Ivanovna had taken his arm and said, “Now they’ll all think that she got jealous of me,” and he laughed. Her nails had been painted a faintly metallic silver at the tips, a twist on a French manicure. Against the dark green of his blazer, they looked like daggers digging into forest leaves.
The rest of the night passed in a flurry of jokes, laughter, and good wine. Not enough cheese or bread, which might have turned the whole thing around, ended it quite differently. Instead, he found himself intoxicated: by Eiswein, by tiny rum-and-almond biscuits, by her. Her smile was white and her teeth, straight, small, like tiny pearls, or perhaps tombstones. She had painted her lips a shade of blood-clot burgundy that called back to tiny reddish accents in a tattoo he could just barely see through the slit in her dress. Her hair, dark and straight as a pin, dropped down her back with all the finality of the executioner’s axe. She kept him company for the rest of the night, kept her hand on his arm, kept his wine glass full.
He smiled once, as a photographer’s camera flashed. Not the usual sardonic little thing that featured in his about the artist screeds, all of which lied about his schooling and how he had come to be exhibited, so young, so talented. A real smile, lips parted, muscles of the face contracted, the corners of his eyes crinkled and dark as hers. The photo no longer existed by the time he boarded his flight to Destiny City, but the image remained plastered on the back of his eyelids for much longer than that, the white of her dress, the darkness of his suit, and the look in her brown eyes. They’d had a fleck of gold, right where the four o’clock would have been. She had been surprised when he mentioned it, gone to check in the window-pane, which had been frosted over by then.
February in Russia. Of course the window-pane was frosted, and of course they were all dressed to defy the winter--but only so long as they were inside.
She called him a liar and shoved him playfully, and then pointed him at one of his long-time benefactors. Irinei had only reluctantly paid the old man attention, nodding blankly through the endless speech on the topic of one of the pieces hanging on the wall. One of Irinei’s, of course, and so talented, and so young, and so handsome--
So handsome.
Later that night, Revmira went up to his apartment and they ********, which probably explained how she got his key. He was left in the morning, puzzling over the lacy underthings that were tucked into the pocket of his jacket, over the missing spare key.
(This would all make sense later, and he would come to regret it. But just then, his hangover had seemed more pressing.)
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:00 am
II. Daydream
He didn’t see Revmira for a week, which was unsurprising. His partners were often a one-night-only thing, single-night flings with no emotional connotation or connection, because that was how he liked it. If he ever saw them again, it was usually too soon; most people bored him, with their ******** manners and their delicacy and their promise to call in the morning. It bored him, having to deal with everyday life, having to play nice, having to be so tender around the emotions of others. That was his place, though. Artists were mirrors of the world around them, and if the world wanted a placid slate, he would damn well give it one.
None of that mattered with her, though, not after the second meeting.
He had been painting--he was always painting anymore, always scraping oils with his palette knife, always gessoing some stretched canvas or sanding down a board--when someone knocked. Of course, they did this on his housekeeper’s day off; if he expected people, he always had someone else there to scare them off. He ignored the knocking, and ignored it, but it was finally sufficient to annoy him enough to leave his easel and open the door.
Revmira’s walnut-colored hair was twisted into what seemed like a hundred braids, knotted neatly on top of her head. A bright knit headband covered her ears, and in her hands she held a cardboard tray with two cups shoved into it. “How do you know I want any of that,” he said. He blocked the entrance with his body, scowling blackly at her grin. “We’ve never had coffee.”
“I sized you up the moment I met you,” she said, wrinkling her nose and leaning in just a little. There was a little pop-hop bounce to the motion, something small and cute and it only served to irritate him more. “C’mon, aren’t you curious to see what I think you’d like?”
“No,” he said, shortly, stepping back and starting to close the door. Quick as a flash, though, she snuck under his arm and into the living room/foyer. Her boots left puddles of ashy snow on the hardwood, and he gestured vaguely with one hand at the mess before sighing and dropping it.
He shut the door behind her and said, “What.” She held out the paper cup of coffee, eyebrows arched in an implied challenge. “If I try it, will you leave? I was working.”
“Sure, okay,” she said, manhandling one of the little tchotchkes on Irinei’s souvenir shelf. She gave a nonchalant little shrug, and then wound the pashmina from around her neck before flopping down on the couch. “Yours is the big one, like your d**k.” Irinei rolled his eyes and picked up the larger of the two drinks. It smelled rather sweeter than the coffee he usually liked, and he was ready to declare victory right then and there. Better to look a coward than die from diabetic shock--although diabetes didn’t set in so quickly that one drink could kill him, he supposed. “Any excuse,” she told him, smiling as she toed off her boots.
The drink was sweet, but there was an appealing afternote of salt. “Salted caramel,” he said. “I thought they only did that one in the States.”
She smirked at him. “It’s only on the menu there, sure, but they have the materials to make it anyway. All you have to do is ask.” Revmira folded her hands in her lap, and propped her feet in their oddly-dry woolen socks on his coffee table. “How’d I do?”
“Pretty well,” he admitted, begrudgingly.
It was the first of many seeming coincidences. At first, how much she seemed to know about him--the restaurant he liked to order takeout from, the books he liked to read, the books he didn’t like to read--was off-putting. He’d heard of people who stalked celebrities, and he hadn’t thought he was the right sort to attract such obsessives. He was a painter, not a rock star. People didn’t stalk painters to find out such stupid trivia. Yet...
Revmira integrated herself into his life, only getting as involved as he let anyone else be--as involved as his agent, as involved as his housekeeper, as involved as his few-and-far-between friends--and he didn’t find her so irritating as to make her stop. She sang along to all the right songs and skipped the right songs, and soon he couldn’t remember life without her there as he painted, a textbook of law open on her lap.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:01 am
III. Dive
For someone whose work revolved around urban legends and creepy stories, Irinei didn’t hold much truck with them. He enjoyed the odd, the supernatural, the paranormal--but he didn’t fear it when he went to the kitchen in the middle of the night. He’d never worried about walking home alone, not since he was nine and barely cognizant of the real horrors in the dark.
Once, to piss off an English boarding-school friend, with whom he no longer desired to be friends, Irinei attempted to summon Bloody Mary in a darkened bathroom. To Irinei, it hadn’t seemed that impressive. The only real danger had been that the matron would find them with the candle he’d stolen from the chapel for this exact purpose. Students were not allowed possession of any sources of flame, and a candle counted. (The matches had already been doused in water and dropped out a window, so no risk there.) The attempt at enraging his peer had backfired spectacularly, earning Irinei a reputation as a brave ******** that had tormented him for years.
In a way, that instance had been life-defining: he resented the stories on a personal level, with quiet and studied viciousness. They gave people something to fear that would never hurt them--so he would make them afraid, wouldn’t he? He would season that fear with something real, with the dangers he saw. Then they would understand--
--but they never did, and now Irinei was twenty-three, unhappy, and doomed to do this for the rest of his life. They’d found him a niche and now he was stuck there, and he was tired of mining his fears for cash, but what else was he to do? It wasn’t as if he’d had a real education. So he painted, and channeled everything into the art, and never spoke to anyone--not even Revmira, who was becoming privy to everything else--of their true subject.
After gallery shows, Revmira walked home with him: “For safety,” she claimed, “and I live on your way, anyway.” And in early April, as spring’s chill winds bit through their scarves, she insisted on telling him about Elisa Day.
It wasn’t an unfamiliar story. Once upon a time, in a faraway land heavily implied to be the countryside in the Crimea, a beautiful young woman lived. One day, a stranger came to her town and romanced her. The first day, they shared a meal. The second day, he gave her a single wild rose. And on the third day, they met by a riverbank and he killed her, filled her mouth with that wild rose, and left her in the river.
“Of course, that wasn’t the end of it,” said Revmira, laughter in her bell-bright voice. “Now they say Elisa wanders a riverbank just like this one, killing any handsome young men she comes across!” And Revmira squeezed his arm, then, an impish smile on her face.
She sent shivers down his spine, and he stopped walking there. To their left, the Neva flowed ever-inland. Ahead of them was the passenger bridge where they would part, and on the bridge he saw--something.
He looked at the silhouette on the bridge. Upright, like a human. But something wrong, there. In the proportions, maybe. Revmira’s hand on his elbow was a chain keeping him in place--
“Boo!”
Irinei jumped, and turned to Revmira, who was grinning the wickedest grin he’d ever seen on her face. He pressed a hand to his chest and pantomimed taking a deep breath, or restarting his heart, he wasn’t sure which.
When he looked back, the figure on the bridge was gone. He parted ways with Revmira, smiling still, but the expression fell as he turned away.
The solitary figure, the just-slightly-off proportions.
The rim lighting on its face.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:01 am
IV. Coastal Brake
Revmira handed him the mail. “Big thick one, there,” she said, patting him on the shoulder. Any opportunity, any at all, and now it was mid-May and he expected to hear back from the Rackham Estate any day now. It had been his idea, not Revmira’s. He had never been to America, not even to visit his uncle and his cousin. A residency opening up in the city where his family lived was a prime opportunity to see how the other half of his mother’s line lived, if he was awarded the position, the prestige, the stipend that came with it.
He set his coffee aside and pulled a thick sheaf of paper from the manila envelope. Yes, and there on the top sheet in neat copperplate Roman lettering, Mr. Lazarev we are pleased to inform you and Russian interpreter on site. The next page was the same letter in Cyrillic, stilted and awkward and ugly. “I’m sorry to say we’ll be parting ways soon,” he said to Revmira, leaning over to kiss the corner of her jaw, right on a beauty mark. “It would seem that I’m going to America in late August.”
Her hands shot out for the packet, and he let her have it. There would be plenty of time to read it later, and coffee only stayed hot for so long before it became utterly undrinkable. By the time Revmira finished reading the packet of information, his first cup of coffee was long gone and he was working on the second. “This is wonderful,” she said, delighted. “Destiny City!”
“Yes,” he said dryly, “I will be going to the crime capital in the United States, and all you have to say is this is wonderful.”
She threw the packet down on the counter, and looped her arms around his neck. “Oh, Irinei,” she said, “We have to celebrate! I know. I’ll get us a reservation somewhere nice. I’ll bring my friends, and people will buy you drinks! This’ll be lovely. I promise. Promise me you’ll show up.” He smiled, crookedly, and gently disentangled himself. The last thing he wanted was to go out with her friends--they had all been so terribly… dark. They watched him like predators, and he didn’t like it. “Or maybe I could have one of my friends over here! You liked Lena, didn’t you? She’s a chef, you know. We should share your happiness with our friends!”
And Irinei thought: what the hell, he only lived once, and it would make Revmira happy. He didn’t intend to reignite their--whatever this was--once he returned from America, so these last few months would be important. Though he didn’t care about her enough to stay with her, he did care enough to make sure she would remember him fondly once he’d gone. “Yes,” he sighed, “You can have Lena over.”
He paused, and looked towards his easel. “Perhaps you could invite Damijana, too,” he said. “Yes?”
“If you want her here,” she said. “I’d better call her now, then.” She left in a flurry of bright skirts and those terrible rain boots, the ones that never seemed to get wet despite their obvious holes. Irinei sat down at the island again and pulled the packet over to him, perusing the list of documents for him to fill out. It didn’t seem that ominous, and would certainly fill the time until Revmira and her friend would return.
He would look forward to seeing his little sister, he decided. Maybe she would bring that new cat of hers--what was its name? Dione. He’d always liked cats…
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:01 am
V. Ascension
August dawned bright and clearly, and the time poured away almost too fast for him to keep up with it. His farewell dinner with his family was soon--tonight--and then it’d be two weeks of packing and preparing and making sure everything was in place for him to fly across the world to Destiny City. He already had his plane tickets, safely stored on his phone, and he would be mailing his paints in a few days; the whole process was vaguely mechanical by now, old hat. Irinei had lived through residencies in rural France, urban Britain, the tiny and knotted streets of Munich. He was ready to say goodbye to St. Petersburg for a while and see his aunt and uncle for the first time since he was ten, ready to see the city that his cousin had spent her whole life in before her abrupt disappearance two years ago.
So Damijana, Lena, and Revmira piled into his dining room, Lena’s ridiculous American-inspired menu dotting the small round table. “Let’s all say goodbye to our good friend Irinei,” said Lena, rolling her eyes. “May he enjoy his year with the capitalist pigs, and come back smelling less like flowers than he does now.” Revmira laughed, but Jana didn’t; there was some sort of unnamed tension in the air, something that had appeared as Lena said let’s all and was now hovering, heavy as a corpse.
Perhaps Revmira and Lena were immune to the pall that hung over the little gathering. “Do you remember what Professor Kalashnikov said about the right of first appeal,” Revmira asked, with a wicked little sparkle in her eyes. He wondered at that; usually he only saw it when she wanted to do something quite immoral. While there was a lot he would do, ******** someone in front of his little sister was not one of those things.
Lena laughed, a rough ack-ack-ack that sounded more like a seagull than the tolling of a bell. “Do I remember what Professor Kalashnikov said about the right of first appeal,” she parroted, and then she laughed again, louder and harsher, a bird trying to cough up a whole fish. “Do I ever--”
The rest of the meal passed in a blur of terrible law school jokes and uncomfortable anecdotes, the former spread about liberally by Revmira and her school friend, the latter coaxed from Jana. Ordinarily, it was all Irinei could do to shut her up. Tonight, she hesitated, left gaping holes in the story, shrugged off inconsistencies, and he wondered: what was going on? As the meal wound down, he found an excuse to get up and leave the room. It was well known that he made the best laced coffee of anyone in the house, even Lena-the-chef, and he wasn’t going to subject his sister to the horror show that was Revmira trying to blend whiskey and a nice dark roast--
The door shut behind him, and he turned to see a black-clad stranger behind him. Her dark hair hung pin-straight behind her back, and her gold-flecked green eyes sparkled over the finger she pressed to her lips. Shhhh. She leaned in and kissed him, briefly--and he said, “Revmira?”
“Revaillite,” she said, and she plunged her hand into his chest, and everything went dark.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:18 am
SOME BLOOD/GORE, READ WITH CAUTION
VI. Melanite
When he came to, he ached. Not the familiar pain he expected, but all over, as if he’d been put into a crucible and fired--and now he was growing a new skin. He had that feeling all over, dry like he’d fallen asleep inside his clothes. Ecdysial, was that the word? He wasn’t sure. He wasn’t sure how to tell, because this felt like the floor in his living room… His eyes were gummed closed. How long had he been asleep?...
“He’s coming ‘round,” said that voice. Revmira’s, but not. Revaillite, he thought, and he pressed a hand to his sternum, the first cogent movement he’d been able to force himself into since becoming aware of that brutal silence around him. Nothing there, he thought, and he opened his eyes at last, blinking away the tears that sprung up at the bright light.
Perhaps five inches away from his face, there was a slowly-growing pool of blood. He shoved himself back, but made no sound. “Sorry for the mess,” said Revaillite. She was standing there with a woman he didn’t recognize, this one blonde--and bleeding out on his floor was a young woman. The girl’s gray eyes were wide as they met his, and her lips formed something. Words.
A name.
His name.
Blood bubbled at the corner of her mouth, thick and dark red. She reached for him one-handed, but Revaillite stomped down on the young woman’s wrist. It crunched beneath the sole of her boot. “We’ll have someone by to clean this up,” she said, over the young woman’s unintelligible cry. “We didn’t want this to go this way, but, you know, when I was meeting all your friends--I didn’t expect your sister to be one of them.”
“You got the rest of them, though,” asked the blonde, her tone bored as she stroked a hand over the head of a cat. Jana’s cat, he realized, but the star was a different color now. Black as pitch, not a clear shining-star blue anymore.
Revaillite shrugged. “Yeah, all the ones who might follow him,” she said, grinding her heel in the woman’s shattered wrist. “No worries, boss. This is for-sure the last one!”
The blonde sighed. “And you’ve got the knight on watch?”
“Yeah, yeah,” Revaillite repeated. “God, Laemilline. I know what I’m doing.” The blonde--Laemilline--shrugged.
On the floor, the young woman said, “Irinei. Get away.” He thought, for a split second, that he recognized her--before that boot crunched through her skull, marring her features permanently.
Only then did he realize his breathing was slow and even. His heart wasn’t beating even a second faster. The girl in front of him was dead, and he felt nothing. Not even as the strange white uniform faded away, leaving Jana’s favorite sweater and jeans behind. Clean and neat, he thought, but they began to soak in the puddle of blood just the same. “Jana,” he said, and yet--there was nothing. A great yawning hole that only nothing could fill.
“We’ll see you later, Melanite,” said Revaillite. Her image flickered for a moment, too fast for Irinei to track, as she crossed the living room. As she exited behind Laemilline, she blew him a kiss. “Look out for us. It’ll be fun!”
He looked at Jana’s body, and there still was nothing.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:26 am
VII. Adrift
He stumbled out to a diner the next day, the sort of place he’d never go usually, and that was what he wanted, that was the ideal. He wanted the anonymity, the quiet babble of humanity. On the floor in his living room, the body still lay, blood and guts and brains soaking into the fabric. He’d never known that fluids in the body ran colors other than red. His research didn’t mention how the corpse would bruise on one side.
His hands were clean. So were his shoes. But when he brushed his hair out of his eyes, rust-red crusted his fingers, and it wasn’t dye. He slumped in his booth, and watched the people around him: girls in the same style of sweater as Jana, their laughter high-pitched and beautiful like bells. Nothing like Lena’s seagull-crackle. They ate, shoveling crepes and hash into their mouths. There was much to do, he imagined, much to live for, and of course they hungered. The body was an engine, and it needed fuel.
In their clumsy, funny hands, the steel of their silverware flashed, pointed tines and sharp, serrated edges. He drank three cups of coffee, and left without paying.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:42 am
When he got home, the corpse was gone. The carpet, too. The floor didn’t shine with anything to suggest a body might have moldered there for a night. All that remained was a small pile of drawings that Irinei didn’t remember making, but the Cyrillic notes were his, so he must have. He must have done it, at some point. There was copper smeared on the edges of the page. When he ran his thumb over it, the copper smudged, tiny particles of dried blood following the curve of the gesture. A hollow trail, pointing to where he had been.
Irinei gathered a blacklight from the studio, and shone it on the floor. Nothing there, not even a fleck, except one in the floorboards near his easel--one that he could easily explain, I cut myself with a palette knife, didn’t even need to say that, could just shrug, accidents do happen, officer. The hole in his chest burned, bigger and bigger, the more he thought about her. The more he remembered. Jana. Jana--
Accidents. Accidents happen. Was Laemilline an accident? Was any of this?
Lena and Revmira had vanished, before the appearance of those two. He hoped they were alright. He put away the blacklight, and spent an hour scrubbing at his floor with a toothbrush and bleach, until his knuckles were scraped raw and bleeding. His throat, hot and tight, working against the scream he didn’t dare release. Someone would look, if he screamed. Someone would look, and wonder.
His watch beeped. An alarm. For a gallery show’s closing ceremony. He wouldn’t be there, he thought, but--wouldn’t that be suspicious? Wouldn’t someone wonder? I could turn you in, he thinks, I have your names and your faces. Laemilline. Revaillite. But something in him, unrelated to that gaping hole, refused that thought.
She was killed here, said that traitorous something. And they’ll never find those two. Those names are fake. They must be.
He had to go, he knew he had to, but as he got up he saw the pictures again. Pencil sketches. The last images anyone would ever have of Jana.
He sat, not gracefully but all at once, and finally he cried--that hole inside him yawned wider, and wider, and wider. There was no word for what he felt, he thought that and only that clearly enough: there are no words for this. Not even her name sufficed, not even repeated like a spell to summon a spirit: Damijana--Jana Valentinovna Lazareva, Jana Valentinovna Lazareva, Jana Valentinovna--Jana Valenti--Jana. Jana Jana Jana. He looked at the sketches, the odd morbidity of it all.
This is the body of my sister, he thought.
Something about the curl of her feet.
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 3:55 am
IX. Inspiral
They came for him that night. Or rather, he went to them.
He knew, even as he knelt in the hall of violet crystal, that he was different now. Not a subtle difference from when he had been Irinei, heartbeats ago, but a massive one. No one who saw him--who saw Melanite--would recognize him for what he was.
“Good evening, Lieutenant,” said Laemillite. To her left, a violet streak of light outlined Revaillite. Her long dark hair shone in the light. “Welcome to the Negaverse.” He didn’t know what that meant; he eased back on his heels, trying to find a way out and seeing--nothing. This place had no doors. “Captain, you had something you wanted to show the Lieutenant?”
Revaillite bounced forward, long dark hair slapping her shoulders. Her clothes were a dark leather and cotton analogue, a cropped jacket, tailored pants, and a pair of a**-kicking boots. He remembered them crunching on his sister’s wrist and shuddered. And her fingers, glinting in the purple light, were silver-tipped. “Revmira,” he said.
“You’re so good,” she crowed, the corners of her eyes crinkling with delight. “You had me from the kitchen, didn’t you?” Melanite flinched back when she grabbed his chin, but she was too strong for him and her lips still pressed against his. Her thumbnail bit into his chin, and warm blood trickled down his chin. “But look, because you’ve been such an easy mark…” Her uniform faded away to the dress she’d been wearing the night they met at the gallery, and abruptly he can recognize her as Revmira again, not Revaillite at all.
Something finally happened, in the blasted space that his chest used to be: rage, pure and incandescent. “Don’t be mad,” she crooned, the dress fading into her uniform again. “Is this about Jana? God, she was so easy to kill. Just a baby soldier, really. Didn’t even know her attack.” She laughed, the sweet bells he’d actually loved to hear.
“Revaillite, that’s enough,” said Laemillite. She gestured the Captain back to her side, and then flickered her fingers at Melanite where he knelt on the floor. “My name is General Laemillite. You already know Captain Revaillite. And if you’d please come with us, we’ll tell you everything you need to know.”
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Posted: Tue Sep 02, 2014 4:05 am
X. Elegy
His first night in Destiny City.
No sign, neither hide nor hair, of the sailor soldier’s menace. No knights (his friend, Milena, the way the Page of Mercury’s face had contorted as Laemillite shoved her hand in his chest--the way Milena had knelt before her and accepted his new name, Muscovite). Not even a single guardian cat (Dione, peppily decrying Jana as misguided). He spent the day napping and arranging his studio space.
He didn’t feel a thing.
But that night, he woke up and didn’t wake up, all at once. Beside him, there was a body, small and brunette and soft. Shaped like a girl, but not a girl, not even a human. This had happened before, almost every night since that night, the night of Melanite’s birth--and he could not turn to look at her. Could not imagine it. Could not, therefore, know.
He knew the crawl of skin against skin. He knew the sweat-stickiness of the body pressed against his back as he curled in smaller. A breath ghosted across the back of his neck, but that was wrong: Did ghosts breathe? Like water flowing through a channel, like the ground after the first rain in a long drought, dread filled him.
In the morning, he combed the bed for the depressions where a body might have been. Here, perhaps a knee. There, maybe an elbow. And there, her head, sweet and perfect and whole.
But it wasn’t that kind of body.
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