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It’s the smell, more than anything. It’s the type of stench that coats the inside of your nostrils in a thick film, infecting any other scent that wafts through even days after. It’s the smell, as he leans close in the dark, that implies the texture. Soft, like worn leather. Soft, like raw dough. See, it’s the idea of it, more than anything. I’ve watched the way even a fly’s foot sinks when it lands, like wet sand.
His breath rumbles from his lungs, jagged breaths through drool and bared teeth, in a laugh he may not even notice, the sound broken through flittering consciousness, my fingers twitching from the electricity, blood swimming disoriented through rippling arrhythmia. Then his voice, as a skeletal bat emerges from the darkness, flying directly towards my face.
“It’s ok,” he says, “it was scary for me too!” He shushes me, says, “You’re safe.” He says a lot of things, as the lights snap on, as he taunts my family, as he taunts me. “The ugly truth of it is, Batssss,” he says, and sighs. “You love me more than them .”
It’s those words, more than anything. He doesn’t look at me as he says it, only at them. At his hard work, creating their faces. Strapping them all there. Rigging the cave to catch fire. Speaking to them, for hours, telling them things they’ll never repeat to me, as I sat there dead to the world. They keep distant for months, after this. Only calling a truce to deal with what comes after. His back to me, he says, “They know how you want me to kill them,” says, “How you leave the door unlocked at night, hoping I get them.”
A fly buzzes towards his forehead. I don’t see it land, but I can feel it sinking into the rotting flesh like pumpkin pie. When I touched it before, when I punched him at the reservoir, it hadn’t been off ice more than a day. It slipped off his cheeks like rubber, snapping in the moist wind. Sagging, yellow, and oxidized, his face turns back towards me so he can light the match.
This is the part where I stand, activating the flint at the bottom of the chair, catching the table on fire before I break my throne across the table—ripping out of my restraints—retrieve an explosive pellet from my belt, and hurtle it into the ceiling, flooding the cave. This is the part where I hold my son’s face in my hands as I unwrap the blood-sodden bandages, realizing it’s not his. This is the part where my family tells me to go, to leave them to take care of each other and chase him, and so I do.
He says, “You had to go and ruin the mood, didn’t you?” He says this with an axe in his hand, “Blowing out the candles, killing the ambiance!” His shoes soaked through as he runs through the stream, his pants splattered dark with water, he says, “Well, at least you followed me outside to console me, pick my corsage off the ground, and talk me back into your arm—” and it’s this, more than anything. The rejection.
Soon, I’ll hold him over the edge of a waterfall, one arm around his back and the other hand clutched around his wrist, the posture of a dance, and I can’t help but taunt him in his own language: I’ll whisper it to you, darling. And soon he’ll throw himself over the ledge with a jolt, and I’ll scream as I reach for him, watching his face fall above him. Soon, I’ll meet a young man at Arkham. Soon, I’ll die with him in another cave.
In his own language, I say, “I’m sorry, darling.” I take his axe when he falters, throwing it downstream. “You’re right,” I say, “but I don’t like it. You have to understand I don’t like it.”
The confused twitches in his exposed zygomatic muscles send ripples through his flesh like rising yeast. Half a laugh chokes out, more AH than HA. I touch a finger to the blue flower on his lapel, still attached and wired through with acid.
“You don’t want me to like it. You don’t really want them gone, do you? You like holding... this, over them. Over me.” The flower mechanism is hidden, or maybe, I never got a good enough look for it to exist in my mind. “You’re right. You took it too far, but that’s the only way you’d get to me. I’ve gotten too reliant, too comfortable... and it’s put them in danger. It’s no good for any of us.”
“This isn’t... no, no, you would never admit this! This is all wrong!” He snarls best he can without lips, but as he starts to pull away, I grab him, my fingers sinking into his face like putty. He lets out a choked hiss, as the skin rubs against his sticky, vulnerable tissue underneath.
“Things only get worse if I don’t.” My grip tightens, and his lips gape, soft and loose around his slick gums. “I hurt you tonight. You die. You die, and I hurt you enough you uproot everything. I thought this , what you’ve done, with the asylum, with, with that tapestry, with... I thought this was the worst, but this...” I have to look away. “You were right.”
“I know I’m right,” he snaps. “You can count on your loyal jester to know you better than anyone, to know you better than you know yourself.” His muscles stretch, pulling his skin like taffy, as he begins to laugh, a fly landing on his teeth. He laughs longer still, louder, as the fly crawls beneath his skin. “You’re only able to admit this, even within your own mind, because I spelled it out for you, letter by letter!”
His skin gives easy to increased pressure from my gloved fingertips. A lump bubbles across his other cheek before the fly emerges, its wings too wet to do anything but buzz pitifully near his ear—the first annoyance great enough for him to bother smacking it, shaking its gooey carcass off his gloved finger in swift, dismissive motions, before moving his hand to rest against my jaw, tracing soft white leather against armored black leather. His fingers trace the edges of my cowl, and my eyes flutter at the feeling of that old, oxidized leather on my skin. I swallow.
“You're still all masks. Down to the bone, to that gnarled hungry face underneath, you're all masks. You're trying oh so hard, so hard, to say the perfect words to make it all make sense, to sound sensible! Hmm?” The smell burns my eyes as he leans forward, pressing the forehead of his mask against mine. His nose folds against the sharp angles of my cowl. His saliva, pooling at his gums, licks out towards my mouth with every whistling breath, every misshapen word.
There’s a feeling, like my intestines forming an ouroboros, and my eyes lose focus. His eyes, one green and one white, overlap in pale celluloid, fading to black around the edges of my vision, flickers of floating noise flashing inwards, as the shadows fight to overtake me. My heartbeat hammers in the back of my head, a feeling more than sound, spinning, dizzying, like an unspooling roll of film. My skin, beneath another breed of skin, recoils in instinctive revulsion as his fingers brush my waist, the aftershocks rippling through as I shift a hair closer. Breathing through my mouth, quick breaths of sour air that barely reach my lungs before puffing back out against his exposed teeth.
“You’re disgusting.” It’s a breath more than a whisper. It’s the thing I need to say more than anything. He laughs, the force of it urging the trail of drool towards me, where it clings to my chin on its way to my chest. One hand moves on my waist, sending tremors through to the bone with every brush of his fingers, while the other holds my head in place. He’s still too close to see in anything but detail, his skin like a soggy stack of antique paper under my fingers. My other hand stays clenched at my side, and I realize it’s shaking, that I’m shaking.
“I know you mean that,” he says, and his thumb brushes my lips, sliding through the saliva on my chin, breaking the string connecting us. I don’t move. His thumb never stops, but moves only a few frames a second in circular motions, dragging down my lower lip and releasing it, in gradual cycles, getting closer to my gums each time until he finally crosses the vermillion border, the leather soft against the inside of my mouth. I look him in the green eye—if I focus on one at a time, I can see it—and as I stare, the seam of his gloves pulling a dry line across my teeth, his pupils are more than pinpricks. As I close my lips around the leather, sucking it inward until I can taste it on the meat of my tongue, they expand.
The muscles around his dry, lidless eyes move away, pulling the jagged edges of his eye holes wider. His wrist jams against his teeth to get a better angle, his thumb pushing down the back of my tongue. His knee locks with both of mine, thigh pressing between my legs. His grip on my waist crawls backwards, and I feel more of his arm on me until his elbow jams in above my belt, his palm on my shoulder blade.
It’s the silence, more than anything. The lipless monologues, they were relentless. He spoke circles around me, around everyone, with his whistling S’s and ventriloquist B’s, but now, the only sound is of flies. Of his ragged breathing. The wet sounds of the leather on my tongue. His drool puddles on the back of his hand, his wrist bent at carpal tunnel angles. When I look back at his eyes, he looks back in mine, still silent, and he shoves me backwards, locking his other leg around me, wedging one of my knees between his as an anchor as he follows me down to the ground, taking his position on top of me as the water smacks at the sides of my cowl. With the distance, his face comes into focus. His hand on my face grips my cheek, thumb against my teeth. He looks down at me, the holes of his mask in shadow except for the glint of his teeth, and the uninhibited drool slinking down towards my chest.
I grab the front of his shirt, pulling him closer, fighting with his top buttons around his tie, the tassels brushing against my face while that embroidered skull grins at me until I tear it off completely, throwing it to the water, where it drifts away. Frustrated in my gauntlets, I rip the buttons away, until I can place my hands on his skin, pushing away fabric until I see the hooks piercing the notches between his clavicles, securing his smile in place. When I rub the tip of the hook he can’t help but make a choked noise, like a laugh backwards. My throat clenches at the sound, and the sudden second thumb in my mouth, the bases pulling the corners upwards in a smile while the tips trace my quivering soft palate.
He leans closer, and the tilt of his head causes all moisture from his mouth to slide out in a tendril of liquid, where it slips directly into mine, the languid stream banking in the back of my throat. It takes a majority of my concentration to stop myself from gagging. My hands slide down from the hooks, resting between his chest and his shirt, cradled in the tight embrace of his slim low-cut vest. When I try to swallow, I feel it burning in my ears, in my nose. He presses his knee against me and my back arches, a gasping sound drowning as a gurgle in the back of my throat.
He laughs, full and loud, the sound filling the cavernous tunnels around us, and I can’t keep my eyes open. I smell the proximity of his face to mine, feel the thickening of the stream in my throat, hear the wet whistling of his breath against my face. His thumbs retreat, tracing across my teeth, my tongue, in soft strokes, pulling out in a caress, cradling my chin between them. I close my mouth for just a moment, swallowing hard against my reflexes, clearing room to fit in deep gasping breaths of air, my lips, my chin, my cowl, all slick with his uninhibited drool. A fly lands on my cheek. I can’t keep my mouth closed as he presses harder against me. My hand clenches around his chest, the seams of my gloves burrowing in the grooves between his ribs. My eyes open, catching slivers of him in my vision as his exposed gums, glistening teeth, lower towards me. His teeth close on my lower lip, pulling a groan up from my chest.
Still under his shirt, under his coat, under his vest, my hands find his shoulder blades, pulling him into me, the rotting skin of his face molding like putty around my skull. His lips, pulled to the sides with fishing line, press a perimeter in the skin surrounding my mouth, catching and folding with every motion of his jaw, with every delicate kiss of his teeth against my lips. It’s the sort of gentle, deliberate motion of tweezers in an impossible bottle. My mouth widens, head tipping back, anchored around his grip on my bottom lip. My tongue presses against his exposed gums, tracing each individual tooth.
My hands gripping his back, I pull myself tighter against him, water rushing between my cape and back, and his hands move lower until they grip either side of my waist, fingers notched between the reinforced leather of my belt and the waxed, armored leather of my suit. Then, they move inward, fumbling.
“Only I can get it off,” I say, mouth plastered against his teeth. “I designed it with you in mind.”
“Clearly.” He continues his efforts, knuckles jammed into my stomach as he feels up the metal buckle from the back. He sighs. “Would you be a dear and give me a hand here?”
My back against the ground, I remove my hands from his shirt, moving my fingers between his towards my buckle. It’s not a fingerprint system, and the motions, the configuration, can be achieved one handed, but it’s more difficult that way. He keeps his hands on mine, feeling the motions, learning them, which doesn’t matter. Not here.
The buckle clicks, and he asks, “any secrets to the rest of it?”
“They’re just pants.” I pull the belt to the side, wrapping it around my hand so it sits in a spiral, heavy enough to stay still amidst the flowing water.
“No,” he says, pulling back far enough to look me in the eyes, “the rest of it.”
“Yes,” I say, as he pulls the waist strap loose from every snap, one by one. “There’s a hidden zipper. A few layers of armor, each secured with different methods. To make it hard on you.”
“And more straps, I see,” he says, as he lowers the waistband of my pants, his leather gloves brushing against my bare skin.
“Of course.” I press my eyes closed, trying to focus. “Have you ever seen my suit ride up?”
“Oh, the cape does a GREAT job hiding your wedgies,” he says, and he laughs against me as his mouth returns to mine.
“You know that’s not what I mean.” Those oxidized leather gloves against my skin turn, his fingers grasping at the straps securing the top of my costume to the bottom, and the metal of the D ring is left to hang limp against my skin. “There’s some in back too.”
“I’m getting to that,” he says, and his hands, mirroring each other, move around the back of my waist. Elbows against the ground, I lift myself in a reverse plank for easier access. “How long does this take you?”
“I’ve gotten it down to 45 seconds, when necessary.” The skin of my lower back squirms against him. “But most days, it’s a ritual. Each piece, each step, with its own importance.”
“Your true face,” he says, the F whistling as his lips brush, stretched and unarticulated against the nose of my cowl, bringing with them the stench of rot. The last two D rings fall from me and he begins sliding my pants down my legs, from the back. The layers of armor, of ribbing, grip hard and tight to the tops of my thighs. He laughs, a high giddy sound, clinging in scattered, escalating bunches. “Now this is a nice surprise,” he says. “Obviously I expected a jockstrap, but this?” He snaps the back, and my whole pelvis jerks towards his. “Aren’t you full of surprises?”
“It’s for better mobility,” I grunt.
“Ah, yes, still armored, hmm?” His other hand moves towards the front, tracing the center seam. “All of this, it’s almost like you think you’re human.” He laughs again, another cluster of giggles. “You’re thorough, too. A thong AND straps underneath? I’m gonna have to turn you around pretty soon, aren’t I? To see if it looks as flattering as it feels...”
“Shut up.” The water, no longer held out by the cocoon of leather, begins crawling up the fabric.
He sits up, far enough to get a better look at me. The trail of drool follows between us until it snaps. He tilts his head back. The hooks in the skin of his neck, exposed by his unbuttoned shirt, pull against the fishing line, stretching his smile downwards. He swallows, tongue running along his gums as he sucks inward, a futile attempt at drying himself. He shrugs off his long coat and pushes his black sleeves up to his elbows, where his monogrammed cufflinks strain against the added tension. He grips the edge of his gloves, but before he can pull them off, my hand is on his wrist, tight. He smirks, an almost invisible twitch of muscle beneath loose skin, but he has the rare mercy not to comment. Instead, he flips our grasp around, undoing the straps of my gauntlet.
The hardened leather slips off, revealing the metal reinforcements underneath, blades on the sides connected to two pieces of softer, bendable metal, secured with velcro straps through slits in the opposite sides, a computer system embedded in the back. There’s a sizzling sound as he removes the velcro, tossing the interior of the gauntlets to the side where a blade snags into the cave floor, bending the flow of the water around it. I stretch my fingers out wide as he removes my leather glove, then he intertwines his glove with my bare hand, lifting it, pressing my skin against his flat smile. He then places it on his neck, between his skin and the fishing line, and grabs my other hand, where it rests under the water, to begin removing that gauntlet.
His skin, it’s warm and alive. His blood rushes underneath, quick, but not much faster than usual. I feel his pores, the invisible hairs, the natural grooves. It’s soft, but in the way a tire is soft. My nail digs into the skin protecting his jugular vein, not enough to draw blood, but enough to convince myself he’s human. My pinky extends to the end of the fishing line, where it loops over around the hook. I push it tight, and his throat hitches against me. There’s other holes in his skin, hard and scabbed, where the hook had been before. I trace them with my thumb, and think of every time I’d hit him hard enough to make it snap loose.
His belt clinks. “Stop me if you’ve heard this one,” he says, and when he pulls back—careful around my hand on his hook—I see he grabbed a batarang from my belt while I was distracted. My heart lurches. He unzips his pants. There’s smiley faces. Such a formal suit, such attention to detail, to color coordination, to symbolism and meaning, and his underwear is black with yellow smiley faces. “First, the Kanes are Jewish, right?”
“Don’t talk about my cousin while you’re... doing this.”
He laughs. “No, no, no, I’d never. I’m asking about your mother.” He slides his underwear down, the smiles disappearing once again under his pants. “I'm just trying to be considerate, since, y'know, that's a piece of skin I haven't carved off.”
My eyes widen. “That's not how that works,” I say, but he takes himself in his hand. “I'm not religious anyway, I—”
“Boooo! Give me some yes-and! Whatever.” He moves the batarang closer, the blade playing at the surface of his foreskin. “Let's put it this way, I think it'd be funny if the curtains matched the drapes. Comprendo?” He leans forward, and in a lower voice says, “You can indulge me with a gag, can't you?”
“You're crazy,” I say, but I don’t move.
“Yeah, yeah, so they say.” He paws at the tip of his foreskin, before scowling, and removing one of his gloves, placing it in his vest pocket. “Sorry,” he says, “awful grip in those things.” Looking down, his saliva drips from his mouth again, a lethargic rope of liquid. This time, he works one bare finger under easy, pinching the skin between two fingers and pulling. There’s a twitch in his shoulder and a jerk of his head, which reverberates through the fishing line. He pulls harder until his skin is taut. Then, with his gloved hand, he places the blade of the batarang against his skin. It slices in clinging strings like mozzarella, his tight grip on the skin creeping further away as more is released. He’s panting, and I can feel the buzzing tension in his throat as the pain registers amongst dulled nerves. Blood drips down his shaft, mixing with saliva, dripping beneath his sagging waistband to stain those yellow smiling faces.
He laughs, an ecstatic wheeze, as the last thread breaks and the severed loop of foreskin snaps into his fingers like a rubber band. He rolls it between his fingers like a fushigi before spreading it wide with two, and slipping it right back on, smearing the still flowing blood until it reaches the base of the shaft, fitting tight. Then, he removes the glove from his pocket, and slides it back over his fingers, staining the white leather red from the inside. He grins.
“You’ve been so patient,” he says. “That’s good. You’re not normally patient. No, no, you like to rush things with me.” He snorts. “You know when you’re driving with somebody who seems to think they can get to the front? You’ll be on a circular freeway, and they’re weaving through cars like if they just get past them all, they win the race.” He shakes his head, the stream of drool swaying in a rippling echo.
“If I play everything according to your schedule, more people die.” My nails dig into the cave floor, beneath the water. It’s the bleeding, still attached remnants of his foreskin, more than anything.
“I’m sure that means so much to you,” he says, and twists the severed foreskin back and forth without sparing it a glance. He leans his head back, slurping down his own saliva, then yawning. His head falls forward, orbital muscles relaxed in a way that makes his eyes appear half lidded. They’re wetter than they’ve been, looking almost a healthy texture. A fly cleans itself in his hairline. He grabs my shoulders, and runs his hands down my sides until he grips my bare hips.
His teeth are on my mouth again, a gentle pulling on my lips. My hand moves up along the fishing line to cradle his face, soft like curdled grease. He moves the knee from between my legs to the other side of me. I follow him as he pulls his rotting face away, but he places one hand on my chest, on my symbol, to push me back down. The sliced edges of his skin slide against each other like tectonic plates. There’s that twisting in my stomach, that intestinal ouroboros feeling.
“I was serious, before,” he says, barely a mumble, keeping his face just out of reach. He pulls on one hip, pushes on the other, and with some mild pressure from his thighs, he has me flipped on my stomach, my legs still bound at the thighs by my waistband. He grabs the ears of my cowl, holding my face just above the water. His grip on my right ear tightens as he uses his other hand to move my cape out of the way. He freezes against me. Then laughs. “My my,” he says, then nothing else. He yanks my head back harder as cave water splashes into my mouth. I push myself into a sphinx pose, and he moves his hand down from my cowl, to my chin, holding my head in place, as he leans forward, smell getting stronger, knee back between my legs, to whisper directly into my ear through the leather. “Do you know how hard it is to make me speechless?”
“Shut up, then.” I close my eyes, focusing on my heartbeat, on my breathing. Anything but the smell. Anything but the fact it’s him holding me, that’s making me feel like this. It’s the disgust with myself, more than anything. It seeps in deeper than miasma can, down to the bones. The snouted, fanged face beneath it all, as he would say. Something primal and hungry. Gnarled and twisted.
“I know you don’t mean that,” he says, as his hand twists around my cape. “What if I threw your cape over my head, like we’re in a Rene Magritte, or like you’re some innocent little bird I’m devouring.” He laughs. “I admit, I’m stalling. It’s not every day I get an opportunity like this. Even I can get nervous.” He passes the cape to his other hand, around the front of my neck. “It’s overwhelming. It’s all so overwhelming.” He laughs. “I can’t.. I can’t blink. I can’t close my eyes. They’re dry and burning, staring without reprieve.” The cape wraps around the back of my neck, then the front again, passed between his gloved hands. “My lips, my goddamn lips... The fact I can’t even say lips! Can’t make the P sound.” He laughs. “My nose itches. Not the cartilage on my face, but the skin. The skin I can’t feel, it itches.”
“Fine. You can monologue while you do it,” I say, and he laughs.
“Impatient! And you were being so good. What did we jusssst talk about?” He yanks my cape backwards, and it tightens around my neck. “I was paying you a compliment. I was saying, with this CONSTANT sensory overload I’ve been experiencing for OVER A YEAR, it’s your bat- ass that’s put me over the edge.” He can’t pronounce the letter B. I wince. “You don’t seem to like it when I’m being nice, do you? You always take me for granted.”
“I apologized,” I choke out in half syllables through my restricted airway, “didn’t I?” He laughs, and then the tension of my cape around my neck changes, the freed hand spanking me hard enough to make my glutes go slack.
“Oh sure,” he says, and as he releases the cape, my head falls into the water, just as I’m remembering how to breathe, and I pull myself out with a force that splashes backwards, onto him, as I stare out through wet, cloudy lenses at the dark cave in front of me, our shadows only a measure darker than the surrounding stone, which I claw for, to drag the both of us to drier ground, but he yanks the cape again, snapping my neck back hard as I’m gasping for breath.
“You don’t want me to be nice,” he says, and that’s when I feel him against me. My lungs convulse in an empty imitation of a gasp. He loosens the reins, only enough to allow me shallow breaths. “You want me to take control, don’t you? Gives you some plausssible deniability.” He laughs. “Pull your knees under you,” he says, “I’m not a plunger.”
As I shimmy my knees forward, my thighs bound by the waistband of my pants, an image flashes in my mind of mealworms eating his face. A gloved finger pries fabric away from my skin, clinging soaked with sweat and dripping with cave water. He doesn’t take it off, but moves around it, lining himself up. Instinctively, I clench. The tip is wet with either precum or blood, probably both. There’s a jolt—only felt because of my own sensitivity—and a hissing sound as he winces against me.
“Oh you can’t appreciate what it’s like for me to feel this,” he says, voice laced, high and breathy, with a giggle, and god help me, it sends my blood pooling and ignites a buzzing in my head that forces my muscles to relax. “I could cry,” he says, “I’m telling you, I could cry.” It’s slick. I’m soaked with cave water and he’s soaked in his own blood, continuing to nudge at the surface.
“You don’t cry.” I keep my grip on the stones below me, holding my head back from the blockade of my cape against my throat. I close my eyes.
“I could,” he says. It’s probably saliva, too, mixing with the blood. He presses harder, but not enough to breach the surface. “Has anyone else parked in your Batcave before?” and he laughs. “Tell me they have!”
“Don’t say it like that,” I say.
“Well,” he says, rubbing lethargic swirls against me, mocking. “There’s this nice young woman I know through work—you know her better than I do—and I get the impression she’s got quite an arsenal—”
“Don’t talk about her,” I say.
“No worries, baby, I’m not jealous,” he says, yanking my cape again. The smell gets stronger, and he’s close enough to whisper, “I know what we have is unlike anything else,” before gleeful clusters of laughter spill from the top of his mouth as he rights himself again.
“Please, just...” I wince, not saying another word.
“Please just what? Buy you flowers? Polish your boots?” He laughs. “Use your words, baby. Say, ‘oh, Joker, darling, pleassse shove your dick up my ass.’”
“Don’t say it like that.” I notch my chin into my cape, easing the pressure on my neck and muffling my words.
“Right, right. That’s your son’s name!” He laughs. “How unfortunate. For you, that is. He probably has fun with it.”
“I’ll leave,” I say, nails bent with mud from how tightly I claw with calloused fingers at the submerged cave floor beneath me. He yanks my cape harder, and my shoulder blades collide against his chest. Still holding the cape, his arm snakes around me, gripping at the edges of my symbol, tight through crumpled layers of fabric.
“No you won’t.” He speaks into my cheek, his skin soft like burnt scrambled eggs. His methodical rubbing at my chest yields success, as he finds the cover for the tiny hidden zipper, starting at my collarbone.
“I will,” I say, even as his leather gloves draw a slow, soft line down my sternum, over only my base layer of armor. But that’s not what makes me gasp. It’s the feeling of the fresh laceration, notched inside me right at verge, but that’s not all of it either. It’s the sound he makes, as I tighten around his newly exposed and bloody subcutaneous tissue, more than anything. I’ve heard him laugh through nearly every magnitude of pain, but this... His laughter slices through my skin like broken glass, leaving me raw and buzzing. My throat contorts into sounds that have never escaped my mouth, sliced down even now by him yanking my cape like a lifeline as he hisses with a distant gasping concept of laughter.
The darkness of the cave smudges in melting oil pastel, twisting in blackened smoke between slivers of seizing eyelids. It’s through this swirling, choking haze that’s captured all my senses, pinned them stretched to every corner, that a sharp pang of burning pleasure splits my insides with lurching force, my insides seizing as cracked shards of sound spill from my gaping mouth, sliding off my flat tongue.
“You love me, baby.” His voice is ragged, with choked ventriloquist B’s. “You love me. I know you love me.” I turn my head towards his, and taste rot against my tongue.
My lenses fog. The edges of that loose ring of skin, like a tourniquet, keeping blood concentrated in his bulging veins, curls against me. It’s his blood pooling inside me, slick and sticky, more than anything.
“You love me,” he says. His hand clutches my armor like a life preserver, abandoning my cape. I feel his chest rattle against me, deep breaths that whistle through his teeth and against the nose holes of his excised skin. The taste of him, it’s like licking the coagulated remnants of a day old protein shake out of the metal tumbler.
That ring of loose skin smooths back down as he pulls out, only halfway, and I’m stretched enough that the pain isn’t nearly as piercing as he pushes back in, my insides already slick with his blood. He holds my hips—snaking beneath my interior armor to squeeze leather gloves against my skin—to steady himself. The motion is tentative, at first, like an explorative motion of a scalpel. It's a lean forward more than a thrust. He pulls backwards again, as soon as that ring of skin bends. The taste of his face clings to the back of my mouth.
Before he ever announced himself, there was the abandoned factory. A dozen victims, twisted and rotting, shoved between broken machinery. Eyes bulging, zygomatic muscles contracted into tight knots. The worst part was, no external wounds. All killed by his chemical experimentation. How long did they each watch him, mixing stolen laboratory vials and drugstore derivatives? Hours? Months? While he stayed focused on his work. Trying one formula after the other, until one finally struck lethal and he’d find someone else.
Still, when I imagine him killing a warehouse of people, I imagine a lot of stabbing. Impulse, passion. An image of him, so overcome with bloodlust, he can't hold back. He's laughing. That is, in my mind, when at this point all I can picture is him with a knife, filling someone with new holes as blood splatters across his face. He's laughing.
The blood sinks into the dry floor of the cave, stretching around us in a fading rorschach impression of a valentine. He lays still, on his stomach where I laid him to rest, right by my side. I can’t reach for him. I don’t have the energy left to turn my head and look, but the image is burnt into my brain, as deep as the Joker card embedded into my eye, as much as the images from his other deaths are. His ragged face, from the chemical burns to the hole my teeth ripped into his ear, I can see it contorted in a mask of desperation, as he clawed towards the Dionesium. I see his face flying above him as he fell down the waterfall. The reflection of my own face in polarized red as he fell off that catwalk.
There’s the concept of a life review, reported by those who have come back from death. Dionesium. Lazarus. A defibrillator. Whatever the method may be. Interpersonal, autobiographical. Vivid. These flashes of image, of sensation, blurring into abstraction as death creeps closer. The brain firing every last neuron, in search of some final resolution, before