Thank Me Later

Whaddya do when a kid tries to kill himself right in front of you? Help him, of course.

The world moves in three-four time. One, two, three, one, two, three. I watch the congealing blood and smile because there are harps in my head, cotton balls of sound everywhere else. Owner of aforementioned red substance pulls the tendons in his neck all tight and his mouth moves. I can't help but think of puppets. They waltz to the sounds, strings pulling them this way, that way. His strings are getting all tied up.

Cotton dissolves.

"--ey! God damn it, get out of here!"

I blink. "What?"

He's incredulous, drops his head back onto the cement and winces after doing so. I wonder if he feels the wind in the exposed pulls of his arm. "Never mind. Never.. It.. yeah." He closes his eyes, breathes in deep and then sort of smiles which is good. It goes better with the music in my head. One, two, three, one, two, three.

"So what's your name?" I ask.

He cracks open one lid, blue glares through. "Doesn't matter." There is a scoff hidden somewhere in the sentence.

"Why not?"

Again he raises his eyebrows and sighs, rolling his skull on the ground. "Please just leave me alone."

"Oh. Oh, why? Am I bothering you?"

"Are you fucked in the head?"

"Yes." At least that's what they tell me. I wish, with a frown, that I were within reach of a pi-an-o. To play something as the boy on the floor spreads, seeps into the concrete, puddling, swirling whimsically.

Giving a laugh, sort of derogatory, bleeding kid is all, "Yeah, well. Me too."

"Mmm. Is that why you're killing yourself?"

He's caught off guard for a moment. "Oh. So you're not blind."

"No. What a strange thing to say..."

He smiles, laughs again, pitifully this time. "You’re.. you’re f****n’ crazy... you should get outta here. I dunno how this s**t works but if someone sees you, it could be seen as like. Assisted suicide or something."

"I don't mind. This is fun." But then my arms snap a little to the waltz that's bleeding from my ears.

"Dude. Do you have Tourette's or something?"

"No."

"Ah." He doesn't care. I guess I wouldn't either, had I been focused on squeezing the paste from my veins. One of his hands, the one attached to the arm with a smaller split, lifts and presses itself hard into the blood puddles. He drags it around, spreading rusty orange life into the cracks. It'll smell like him for days. It'll smell like the factories I used to pass on the way to school. Oily, metallic, sick.

"Soooo... you live around here?"

I shake my head. "Well. Yes. But no."

He waits for elaboration, blinks slowing. In the distance, I hear a whine. His ears must be stuffed full of my music, though, because he doesn't show an ounce of panic. I doubt they're calling for him anyways.

"... Cool. I live down the street." He frowns thoughtfully and then corrects himself. "Lived."

"Yeah. I bet it's nice. Nicer than where you're going at least." One, two, three, says the wind to me; it carries an intoxicating scent on it's back, a mixture of boy and blood. This makes sense in the moment, but I'm always smelling it really. It's just a little more potent right now.

Meanwhile, the boy looks disgusted and a little confused. "I don't believe in hell."

"That's all well and good," I say, without intent to argue. "But hell isn't really a belief. It's just.. there. Like the Rocky Mountains."

"That makes no sense." Wow, okay. He's getting worked up, sounding less scratchy in the throat as he speaks above the rising whine (it clashes with the three-four time, butchers the sound, scraping discomfort into my skin). "That... it just doesn't make any logical sense." Says the guy who just sliced open his own arms in a public parking garage. "Where would it be?"

"Not wayyyyyy underground," I explain, less distracted now even though everything is getting louder. It's so fuzzy as it floats, that noise. "It's in New York."

"Hah. Okay."

"It is! It's in the abandoned subways! I've been there and I only managed to escape because I met one of those weird homeless rat people...!"

"Look, just..." he laughs, weakly. "You're crazy."

"Yes, but it's real." The screams of the sirens make themselves very known. I am irritated.

By these sounds, the boy's attention has been stolen and he's half-sitting up, wincing when I reach over from where I sit to dig a finger into the hole he carved. It’s all wet and warm and s**t, making squelching noises when I shift the extremity. I can feel his heartbeat, the ebb and flow of biological tides. Out come the paramedics and his muscle tenses around my finger, blood spurts audibly, kisses my face and arms and neck and t-shirt fabric.

"Kid, what the hell are ya doin?" This is directed at me, from a paramedic. The others have kneeled and are tending to the boy who is kicking and screaming (nice of him, to keep his arm as still as possible so I can keep my hand in there). He really wants to go.

"Feeling the insides," is what I say, peering innocently up at the disturbed guy. His mouth is open. He says something unintelligible into the walkie-talkie, eyeing me as he does. I know without a doubt the police'll be here to pick me up shortly, but I also know they can't do anything to me. Knowing I have little time left, I dive over the struggling kid-who-doesn't-believe-in-hell to retrieve his weapon.

"Thank me later," is what I say right before I plunge that f****r into his heart. The look on his face kinda makes me laugh; he looks like he's taking a particularly massive s**t, and this is made funnier by the fact that pretty soon his vacant body will be expelling everything he'd consumed earlier that day. Refocusing on my task, I then jerk the dagger from where it is lodged in his unmoving chest. It relents, forcefully releasing his ribs with a sharp crack. I stab it again. And again. Then I stab his face (which does this weird, soggy tortilla-chip-crunch under the force of the knife). And for good measure, his crotch. I just wanted to know what it'd be like to do that last thing.

The paramedics are yelling super f*****g loud now, moving moving moving in a waltz. Tugging at me with insane strength to the one-two-three. But me, I'm nothing they've ever tried handling before. I grin, say sayonara, and cram that knife into my head. It cuts a space between my lower eyelid and eyeball, and I’m screaming with the music, the rise and the fall. The knife scrapes mercilessly against my exposed nerves, like freezing fire, tearing at the membranes.

It is the mitosis of the universe. Snap, snap, snap, I cut tendons out of my way and then I jerk my hand upwards, separating the eyeball from the optical nerve with a juicy spurt.

What follows is what I know to be a brief nothing.

But I also know, as I too invade the small cracks in concrete below my cooling body, that I'll be seeing that boy soon. In hell, of course. And I'll get him out. Because he doesn't know what he's getting into, doesn't know that it's not so easy to opt out of existence like that. That's why I'm here.

I sigh. The things I do for people. Seriously.

Author's Note

Yo, read and review please. Opinions are welcome, but I do ask that legitimate criticism be supported by evidence rather than... y'know... "This sucks." I want the why and the how, ppl.
Okay, thanks.