Bare Exposure

A Story by Tash Hill

“I love you.” The words seem to hang in the room, tinged with flame but chilled with terror. “God, I love you.”

This perilous silence is enough to hold me an enraptured prisoner within the iron depths of your fiery irises. Burn and scald they do; your eyes, as you captivate me with that scorching stare . . . and I can’t look away. A tortured scream and an excruciated gasp are torn through my throat as if the very fires of hell were licking at my skin. Looking around me in a horror filled trance I realize, ‘this is my perdition.’

Your nails are clawing through me and under my skin, rending the once whole plains of my porcelain flesh into bloody ribbons. The red claret is joined by the swiftly flowing trails of liquid salt that seem to burn and sizzle on a downward journey. A smirk curves your luscious lips as a cruel laugh rumbles from the confines of your rotund chest. The sound lashes at me and caresses me " delicious as it is. Even now I cannot overlook your cloying splendour "an Adonis among man.

I try again to close my eyes " to look upon anything other than your graceful frame "but just as it always is, I cannot. Your grip tightens as if you had read my thoughts and were set upon quashing any notions of freedom. No matter how desperately I cling to them, your overpowering strength is enough to tear them away. It’s as if you have control of not only my physical being, but over even my internal struggle. You build the fear and then strip away any vestiges of remaining hope within me.

Grace " it seems "has deserted me, savagely tearing away my faith like some sick joke. Fate has broken me, and destiny has enslaved me. Bereft am I, at their loss - their absence leaving me void and hopeless and hollow. Curse at you and curse at fate and curse at destiny, I do.

But held beneath you I remain, crying and screaming and breaking. When will it end? Will it ever? Questions that are as desperate as they are hopeless, bound to remain unanswered.

Desperation grows within me like a thirsting man who had been too long trapped in the scorching gaze of the overhead ball of flames with not an ounce of water in his sights. Perhaps I should have saved myself . . . or at least sent out a plea to some superhero, somewhere . . . to rescue me.

But it is too late . . . far, far too late for regrets and thoughts of saviours in spandex and flowing capes. There is no saviour to be called, no one to hear that most desperate of pleas. So with a tortured cry that echoes off of the whitewash ceiling, I simply . . . wait. And wait. And then wait some more.

But what I am waiting for? Not freedom, no, definitely not that. I wouldn’t know what to do with freedom. Maybe just a peace of mind " if that’s even possible. Perhaps I could simply settle for a mediocre existence in which I am neither blissfully happy nor overcome with sadness.

You stole that, upon snake tongue and deceitful eyes that seem to glow with an angry ember; an ember that moves beneath my soul with the captivating allure of a thousand Sirens. But like those most treacherous of beings, there lies a danger that sulks and lurks behind the shining perfection of your outer shell. It is as if your external faultlessness leaves no room for internal transcendence. And it leaves me numb in my knowledge.

“I love you,” a whisper spoken on a broken tongue as your eyes continue to bore into my own - flame and passion and heat. “I love you,” words that force themselves out of my gaping maw and into the dense air that surrounds us. “I . . . “I can no longer speak. Silenced by you; silenced by my own captivated horror and silenced by your screaming silence.

I look at my captor . . . and the devil looks back.

© 2014 Tash Hill

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NoelHC

Very nicely written, a moving piece of work. I look forward to seeing more of this.
Something strange has happened with the margins, and a pert of some words on the left edge are cut off. I copied and pasted the text into Word, and was able to see the whole thing.