Prison

The deathly loneliness of drinking by candle light, and the one who stops that, however damagingly.

“You know we have electric lights, right?”

The candle light ripples through the room, thin and red, a beacon reflecting off the pale skin of two fragile hands. A teacup is clutched between them, slanting toward the flame without care, like resting in a dead man’s hands. They don’t move, but a pair of red eyes do, flitting from the flame to the man standing in the doorway.

“Kiro… Yes, I’m aware. I didn’t want to get up,” Itotia shakes her head, and her pony tail falls forward over her shoulder, exposing the hair to the light of the candle, creating a glitter off the dull black strands. Kiros, silhouetted in the glow from the hallway, shakes his head too, and walks into the room, closing the door behind him. He doesn’t turn the lights on.

Kiros sits down on the bed, next to Itotia. The mattress sinks under his weight. Itotia slides into the divot created by his body, leaning up against him, tilting her head away from his shoulder to not lean too much. The flame flickers, waves like a flag half-mast, and Kiros catches the look in his partner’s eyes. The despondence, the dull, dragging ache. Those sharp red eyes faded like smudged charcoal. Tears glint on her lower lashes. Kiros frowns.

“I don’t think this is what young girls normally do when they should be sleeping.”

Itotia can’t bring herself to smile. She wants to. She can’t. There’s too much tired. She can’t even shake her head. Her lips are parted, dry. The tea in the cup is cold cinders. Rainwashed, decaying leaves. “That might not matter anymore.”

A cough wells in her throat, racks her entire body. The cup crashes to the floor, shatters into a thousand tiny mirror shards, when her hands fly up to cover her mouth. Red seeps through the spaces between her fingers. She lurches forward. Kiros’s breath catches, his arm flinging out to bang Itotia in the stomach, shoving her back against the wall. A strand of Itotia’s hair floats into the candle flame, abandoned to burn, like Itotia’s whole head almost was. She’s still coughing, eyes squished shut, violent hacks like turning her whole body inside out. Those helpless tears roll down her cheeks. Kiros runs his fingers through her bangs, checking for flame. His burly arm is still across his partner’s thin stomach. The coughing starts to subside. With absurd gentleness, Kiros removes his arm from her waist. His other remains on the side of her face, bangs balled in fingers, kept out of eyes and blood trails.

Itotia opens her bloodshot eyes, squinting up at him. The candle light is fading. Kiros leans in closer to his partner’s face, still covered by the pale hand.

“What’s on your mind?” he asks. Are you okay? would be a pointless question. Of course she’s not.

Itotia mumbles. Her hand blocks her lips. Her blood drowns her lungs. “Nothing unusual, Kiros.” A big sigh comes from behind that small hand. “What else do I ever think about?”

Kiros grimaces, “Can’t I convince you this is all in your head? This ‘disease’ of yours?”

“Kiro, please, this is-”

“I know; it’s your dumb, dead family’s curse. I don’t know why the best of them has to have it the worst.”

That gruff voice is hasty, vengeful. A mournful ghost. He leans forward, closer, wanting closest.

“Why won’t you lower your hand?”

In the orange light of the candle, the pink on Itotia’s checks is faint, “I- there’s-” Kiros’s hand surrounds her wrist, yanking it away from her face. Under her flustered expression is a mouth dripping with blood, covered nose to chin in scarlet. A little trickle runs under her chin and down her neck, skating over her collarbone and onto her chest. Her hand is similarly stained, blood under her fingernails, buried in her heart line. Kiros gives a gentle smile.

“Have you eaten someone again?”

Itotia is ruffled, her mouth twisting into an embarrassed, disgusted frown, “That’s your thing, not mine.” Kiros laughs. He wipes her bloodied face with his sleeve of his coat. The patch of skin he leaves clear is rubbed as red as the blood. The color suits her lips.

Itotia shies away, covers her face with both hands. “Don’t look. I need to clean up.”

Kiros just smiles, brows knit together, sighing through his nose. She scoots to the edge of the bed again, stepping down onto the floor.

“Ow!” she jumps back onto the bed, bringing her knees up to her chest and grabbing one of her ankles with her hand. She cranes her neck down. Several shards of glass are stuck in the ball of her foot. Her eyes flick to the floor, a mess of porcelain and blood, glistening in the red light of the candle.

Kiros puts a hand on her shoulder, his heart jumping, seeing only more blood coating the one he wants most to be clean. “Ito?”

Itotia makes no expression. A lifeless, blank canvas. She grabs one of the larger pieces embedded in her skin and yanks. Blood oozes onto the bed, over the other shards. It makes them slick. Her shaking fingers take a couple tries to get the next chunk out. Each takes even longer. She throws them back onto the floor. Where she belongs.

Kiros only watches. His hand slides from her shoulder, onto the bed, supporting his weight as he leans into her, gazing over her as she finishes. Her hands bloody again, her foot, her ankle, the bed. She won’t look at him. Her injured foot hangs over the edge, above the floor with just more glass and more cuts and more pain. The blood drains from her body. Lightheadedness sinks in.

Itotia flops back, thumping down into the circle of pillows and blankets at the head of her bed. She pulls a pillow up and over her face, holding it down there with both forearms like trying to suffocate herself. Poorly. She’s left her mouth uncovered, red lips and red throat. The dripping stained the collar of her shirt. It’s dried and stuck like maple syrup now.

“This is a mess, Kiro. It’s a prison.”

Kiros raises an eyebrow even though he knows she can’t see it. It always feels like she can see everything. “Prison?”

Itotia’s fists clench, balling into the pillow case. Kiros wonders if she’s crying tears or blood under there.

“This body, this lifetime sentence to drinking alone. This suffocating feeling of never being the same again.” Drinking alone. Alone, she says. Kiros gets up from the bed. Avoids the glass. Tromps across the floor to the bathroom.

Itotia listens to his receding footsteps. Never being the same again. It’s that easy to lose. A door opens and closes. The lights never come on. It doesn’t matter if they ever do again. The sound of running water. Footsteps.

The darkness of the room isn’t much different from that of the pillow. Except for the beacon. Not the candle. Him.

Kiros shoves a warm washcloth in her face, scrubbing the dried blood from her skin. He holds one of her wrists in his other hand, pushing it into the pillows above her head to get her to lay still. She writhes, struggling against the solid wall that is Kiros’s broad chest.

When she is no longer the perpetrator and only the victim, Kiros sits up, letting go of that thin wrist. Itotia just lays back, arm across her eyes, breathing heavy.

Kiros states, “Never say alone when I’m right next to you.”

Itotia’s labored breathing hitches, clogs her lungs and causes another coughing fit. Kiros catches the hand that flies up to shield him from the spray, instead forcing the washcloth onto Itotia’s face. She sits up. She’s as close to Kiros as she is to death. Nuzzled in his chest. Kiros puts his arms around her trembling shoulders, pulling her red face into his sheltering chest. The wet cloth soaks through his shirt. The feeling of her nose and jerking pain do too. She’s choking on her own body. It sounds like a gummed up garbage disposal, shredding her insides. After ages, the coughing slows. Itotia pulls away, shivering, breathing with her whole body.

She lowers the cloth from her face. Her lips are dyed red, but the cloth soaked up most of it. She stares down at it. His arms are still around her. His face is so close he can smell her hair. Gentle and clean like spring water.

She wipes her hand on a small clean patch of the cloth and tosses it aside, onto the floor with the broken shards of teacup. She’s normally so meticulous, orderly. She leans her forehead against his chest, head tilted again, staring at the candle out of the corner of her eye. The wax is melted to a stub. It’s dripped all over the table, dried and held there, spread like tree roots from the candelabra. The flame will destroy that too. It can never not burn.

“Itotia…” Kiros whispers. He wants to say something. Do anything. Give her whatever she needs, desires. Rectify what he can only imagine he’s done. He’s given this death row prisoner a reason to live.

Itotia breathes, “Kiros.”

The candle light, however inextinguishable, flicks out of existence.

Author's Note

This is one of the quickest things I've ever written. This is the second version. Please tell me if any pronouns are out of place because I had a problem with that for some reason (I probably was up too late). Thanks for reading; I hope you enjoyed.
-Aura

Reviews

[C. Rose]

Congratulations!
This piece is a finalist of Promote Me! VII.
Go to http://www.writerscafe.org/contests/Promote-Me%21-VIII-%28Not-Poetry%29/50520/ to vote for this piece by 1.31.2015.

[Aura Inanna]

Thanks so much!