The forest air was a rancid kiss, a mix of stale sweat, mildew, and the iron tang of my own panic. Every step snapped at my nerves: poisonous nightshade, gnarled roots, hallucinations drifting like corpses on the breeze. My skull pounded a warning: Obliteration was coming. I wasn’t sure if I’d snorted GHB or licked a 9-volt battery, but reality was fraying fast.
She emerged through the underbrush like a fever dream: silhouette molten flesh, warped glamour crowned by a tulle monstrosity the size of a riot shield, bruised peach and powdered-sugar pink. Strands of molten copper hair tipped in blood-orange flickered in the smoldering shafts of light. Barefoot on unseen thorns, she trembled with electric agony.
Her dress, if sin could be woven into fabric, this was it, hung translucent at the edges, darkest where her nipples pressed wild through coral regret. Moles, spider-veins, scars mapped her body as if charting some grotesque hymn.
She held a cigarette like Frankenstein’s fever dream, its ember glowing jaundiced. Smoke coiled upward in lazy rings, marking her dominion over every airborne toxin.
I tried to speak; my tongue felt like kerosene-soaked asphalt. She tilted her head, eyes dark pools of hung-over venom, and in their depths I saw myself: a zombified junkie, Cheeto-orange shorts, a still-warm syringe twig lodged in my wrist like a stake through a corpse.
She smiled—a slash of brutality exposing teeth rusted like abandoned train tracks—and laughed, a low, dead tremor. My bones rattled with simultaneous terror and carnal hunger. When she extended her palm, I barely noticed the crystalline dust bag nestle into my sweating grip until my nostrils flared.
The world shattered: a tidal wave of cold-fire burning through sinuses, mind fracturing into dust. She whispered, “Hallelujah,” the crack of doom. I snorted fat lines of contempt and teetered on the brink of ecstasy or agony.
She knelt, fingertips like electric eels tracing my spine, every nerve ablaze with illicit pleasure. One spark sounded like jazz horns through a broken speaker; the next, a freight train crashing through a cathedral. Midnight-black nails chipped with gold carved secrets I’d never understand.
Around us, the forest became a perverse orchestra: crickets and cicadas confessing that nothing remained innocent. The sun dipped behind smoldering haze, painting the world bruised-apricot and psychic-scarlet. She rose, pelvis shifting like a guillotine, letting her dress slip from a shoulder to expose a faint bruise blossoming at her collarbone. A tarnished-brass crucifix remade into a necklace of blasphemy rattled against her sternum like a funeral bell for my sanity.
She pressed her hips against mine. I tasted her sweat—sweet, spicy, metallic, igniting a furnace in my gut. My hands roamed her bare thigh, slick flesh drawn like a moth to flame. Mercy died in that touch. She purred, “Hungry?” My rasped, “Hell yes.”
She led me deeper, to a clearing where vines yielded to sticky earth—blood, bourbon, crushed cans, pills of every hue. I knelt, traced a pattern in the mud that spelled “why” in jagged lines, tasted the question’s grimace.
She removed her dress like a surgeon prepping for surgery; coral fabric pooled at her ankles, unveiling neon tattoos: thorned vines along ribs, serpent coiling around her calf, and five cursive words looping her hip: “Hunger, Havoc, Hypnosis, Hysteria, Hollow.” Five damn H’s. Her flesh was a manifesto of self-destruction.
Her lips found my neck, tongue molten lead tracing my pulse. I tasted rum, regret, rusted metal, heartbreak. She bit me, and pain transmuted into white-hot rapture. My body became a sinner thrust into oblivion, heat devouring reason, flesh pressing flesh in a choreography of ruin and redemption.
I came apart into stained-glass fragments of mind; she whispered, “You’re mine now. Hollow as this earth, hungry as this grave.” She chuckled, a hollow sound like wind in a tomb. I didn’t argue; I couldn’t.
She slid off me, harvested sweat and saliva like fallen-angel nectar, flicked her Frankenstein cigarette into the leaves, and sparked a tiny inferno: final punctuation on our apocalypse. She strode away, hips swaying in triumph. I stayed, tasting burnt leaves and sticky ash raining like benediction. The first stars blinked in purple haze, each stabbing a question: “Why?”
I tasted my tears, salty and chemical, rolling down copper-stained lips. Ants crawled over my knees, indifferent heralds of decay. A cicada cried—an unholy chord resonating through my bones.
Staggering upright, I scooped scorched earth, let it crumble between my fingers, and swallowed. It tasted like hellfire and detonations, every sin snorted, every orgasm wrung from a corpse of regret. Her tulle brim engulfed the sky; all that remained was her laughter echoing in my skull. I looked down at muddy letters.
