Asleep (A Gothic Work)

Asleep.  Wrapped in nosebleed soaked cotton, her silhouette has been pressed through to the mattress in a carnelian stain.  She’s the flower preserved between two sheets in the name of a hunger that cost her the privilege of sound sleep.

In muted colors of night terrors seeping, her neuro-fluid rushes in a rhythm of rain water flooding a storm drain, leaving her head absent of equilibrium and near comprehended thoughts falling, scattering like leaves in the scrape of claws on pavement.  They flee the impending drowning that will catch up with them at the cul-de-sac’s bend.

The spectral fingertips quietly spread out upon her, caking her body in a clay mud, painting her bare skin in wounds of rough bones, twigs, and stone weapons; her body the war and the warrior.

Lifting her from the cold slumber, her limbs limp and head hung right, her length of hair sweeps the cobwebs and cold breath of the floorboards creaking in the wake of their footless steps.

Lithe are the hands of the dead, a haunting toil of a surgeon’s precision with a new mother’s delicate touch, stealing her body away to the pyre of sassafras and orchids where they lay her upon the vessel of ceremony.

Commencing the sacrificial rite, their rabid hissing and growling calls forth canine teeth and talons, tracing the language of their desires into her neck, painlessly slicing and folding back the flesh of her throat and meat of her tongue.  Unhinging her jaw, they study scars in her teeth, all the while seeking the source of her impenetrable silence, while force feeding her the jackal’s whine and buzzard’s scream.  

She gasps a strangled choke as she is pulled into the sudden reemergence of life, throwing her body over the edge of the bed, coughing and spitting the taste of nightmares against the wall, their long shadows hunching as they back away in a defensive creep to the window.

Turning in warning, they taunt her with the threatening of their return, as they liquefy, running down the brick and mortar, mixing with the rain, running towards the sewer grate. 

The blood flowing from her head, out her nose, and through her fingers, stains the memory of the terror to her thighs, breasts, and lips.

E.A. O'Connell