Last Days With A Dead Friend

Author: a Lyr

With half a mind to the ongoing interest in slicing up your skin around these parts, I here relay to you p*****s a secret tale. After this we return with the usual scenes and sniff out where I have the guts to look them in the eye. (If you can’t read a long story, I’m sorry that’s happened to you)

KILL ALL PSYCHIATRY

A girl I once knew kept a keen affection for growing out the nail of her left little finger. Relentlessly angry, her ingratiating kindnesses seemed to inspire the terror of a mark of a demon in most anyone who met her. In deadly dry library air her soft brown hair hung lank and floated about an impish face. She was highly prone to conducting electricity, probably because of the synthetics she liked to dress with, and often enjoyed the considerably awkward mischief of transmitting shocks by inviting the unsuspecting to shake her hand. She had established for herself a hatred of her father, hence all men, and a malicious inferiority complex over her status as a half-breed, as she termed it. With that she harboured a guilty conscience poised like a gerbil in its exercise wheel.

When we met again 5 years later, she had become a very beautiful young woman. A couple of heads shorter than I and very thin, her skin retained its youthful fat and practically glowed in my dimly lit rooms. She had arrived at my doorstep in a long dress she’d made herself, of a soft cotton fabric, deep red and sleeveless. The way she took off her thin black leather shoes when she entered my home endeared her to me as if we were meeting for the first time.

Barefoot on the terracotta floor we brewed a tea and in her familiar clumsy way she divulged, leaving nothing to the imagination, the content of the last six months of her life. And then we began to speak about certain proclivities that certain events may or may not have begotten. Beneath several armbands and wrapped leather bracelets beautifully displaying the sumptuous quality of her flesh were webs of wounds layered atop knotted scars. Ghostly, my fingertips traced the puckered scabs and velvety skin. I was impressed. This child, age twenty, was endeavouring to torture herself with a very serious patience. With her gentle, even breaths, the room was still for a while. Then she asked to see my knives.

I don’t know about you all but I tend to get caught up in the heat of a moment.

Any hesitation I might have had stood not a chance against the crazedly feverish look in her eyes when she asked if I had ever tried cutting with someone else (because, in fact she had, and indeed nothing earthly could compare to the kind of intimacy that violence in the form of love creates between two people, etc etc., the special kind of bond of pernicious secrets).

If nothing else, this last intimation should have given me pause, but alas, foresight did not penetrate my thirst for an opportunity to enjoy that outer world of neglected instinct and before thirty seconds had elapsed I was opening the loose floorboard in my closet to withdraw two hunting knives, a whetstone, a dozen pocket knives, and a collection of exacto blades of all different shapes and sizes.

At the sight of the latter she shrieked in one of those girlish giggles that may or may not straddle the line between comfortable childishness and no-return lunacy, and softly clapped her hands with anticipation. The dark walls of the bedroom seemed to press in a little, and I knelt on the thick Turkish rug and started to unbutton my shirt. She sank to the floor with me to inspect the sharpness of each blade against the soft light from a three-headed floor lamp. I warned her – the exactos hadn’t been sharpened in some time – which she gleefully took as her cue to reach for the whetstone beneath my elbow. Mildly entranced I watched her carefully drag the delicate blades across its white surface, leaving behind rust-colored streaks as the old caked blood flaked away.

Quickly she chose her favorites and screwed them together with their slender bodies. Holding two between the knuckle and thumb of her left hand, one in the right, she pushed my shirt off my shoulders, bashfully smiling when her spidery fingers delivered a characteristic shock. She gently cupped the outsides of my “mosquito bites”, as she called them, and dragged the edges of the knives against my skin, before brushing her warm hands down the length of my forearms to rest the heels of her knives on my hips. Laughing to myself at the candor of her touches I began unwrapping the bodice of her dress, damp with the sweet perspiration of women who smell new like a waning spring day. As it fell from her shoulders I had hardly a moment to admire her slight form before she caught my left wrist in her palm and swiftly opened a gash three inches down my forearm with a blade hooked like a 鎖鎌.

She had an even-handed confidence of a woman practiced in the art of pain and steadied the arm through my reflex retraction. The slice was only a few millimetres deep, but within fifteen seconds the dermis’ blue-white interior started to bloom with dark blood, and as it spilled from this new wound adorning my body the biting pain subsided into an angry heat. I felt my quickened pulse slow a little with the dependable wash of giddy pleasure and my half-closed eyes watched her watching thick streams of blood run off my forearms and stain black the red wool carpet in a rhythm of evening rain.

Hunched over the mess of blood, inhaling with slackened lips a body’s metallic fragrance, her staring eyes widened enrapturedly in a famished thrill I knew well even then. When she looked up at me from underneath her feathery eyebrows, her wolfish grin, the image of my own, was for me a rare kind of reward. Pain shuddered around the wound, and the small contractions of her hand, still wrapped tight around the end of my arm, sharply aggravated it. A couple minutes passed in silence as we observed coagulation slowly stifle the flow of blood.

Then, without relaxing her grip, she gently broke from her trance and began to speak in hushed tones, casually gesturing with her bloodstained exacto. She questioned me about how I felt (predatory), please could I forgive her haste and forgetting a cloth for the carpet (yes), didn’t I think it was a lot of blood (no), don’t I love exacto blades best (no), don’t I think it’s anyway so very different when someone else does the cutting and isn’t that SO much more fun (depends), and so on in a flurry of reflections and grand claims about how singular was her adoration for the special pain possible to inflict when two people share an appreciation for violence, here and there mixed with projective praise for my willingness to bring our previously distant friendship to new intensities.

Tiring of this I asked her whether my turn, as it were, had arrived, or if she would like to continue, perhaps with a different limb, since my left arm was slick with blood and the blade liable to slip. At that she cocked her head to one side with an inquisitive look, flashed me a calculating smile, and put down the knife clutched in her little fist to turn out the hem of her lovely woven cotton dress, which she unhurriedly swiped across my forearm. When I winced she laughed loud with narrow demon eyes, and I couldn’t help feeling a begrudging kinship with her; however performative or compensatory her display, at root was an unwavering authenticity.

Her dress in her hand, she paused, looked shyly up at me, and pressed it against my mouth and nose. With my blood on my lips I had to kiss her, just once and very gently. When I drew back her eyes were cold and intent, and in the same breath I felt her fingers close around my wrist. Looking down at my arm I saw only hers, blade in hand, a sight at which I would have laughed had she not at that moment slashed one then two cuts diagonally perpendicular to the first.

By that point however her grasp was not so steady. When she dragged the knife through my flesh my arm jerked back and the blade gouged a path halfway around my arm, deeper than anything I myself had inflicted with an exacto. I consider it a kind of miracle that we did not slice a vein, although it’s difficult to say how that could have been known to us at the time, given how much blood came pouring out. I’ve always thought it interesting how the deeper pains do not hurt so much as the shallow ones.

Apparently my dear friend felt confident enough in her judgement of an exacto cut not to worry, as she hardly paused before calmly drawing two shorter ones close beneath. Maybe we were beyond intoxication with the visual and olfactory seduction of all the blood, cold and sticky in our hands, spilled over our bodies and staining everything near to us; or maybe something told us it just didn’t matter.

We wrapped my mutilated left arm with a muddy green t shirt and a thousand rubber bands. Then she gave both her arms to me outstretched. I took the right one and placed it against my leaking bandage. Her beautiful hand was resting in the crook of my elbow, nestled between my arm and my left tit. On her request, with a blade like a miniature butcher’s knife, I made five slow neat cuts into the pillowy flesh of her upper arm, no more than a few centimetres across and hardly deep at all. She did not flinch. I desperately wanted to eat the blood dripping on her chest.

Instead, with a momentary flicker of self control, I listened to her breaths and searched her hazy blinking eyes. Her black irises glinted. She was softly smiling. After a few minutes like that she let her body drift down onto the carpet. I got a pillow for her head and for a moment we laid next to each other, eye to eye. And then she gathered her dress around her hips and instructed me to do as I please.

This was simply too much. We spent five hours in that room. We tried everything in my collection, and hardly bothered to treat the cuts, except for some wounds in her right thigh that looked as if they might have penetrated an inch and would not stop bleeding. Maybe we will go into those details some other day.

She took her own life not two weeks later. Hung herself from a cherry tree in bloom. She had been mixing her pills with alcohol for some time. That day in May when I saw her for the last time they had covered her broken neck with a black sweater. The official story was an accidental OD. She tried to call that night, left long rambling messages. We were all asleep.