Short Stories With Tragic Endings
Kit's fingers went right through her, but she swore she could feel it almost as much as she could feel her voice -- so chilling and so beautiful.
Dawn knew it wasn't really Kit. Kit was dead. Dawn had been there and had seen her pale white skin with the strawberry gashes all over (all over). Kit had begged her to kill her faster and she had listened; she had followed.
Like always, never the leader.
Again, her hand hovered over Dawn's bare back, just hovering to the point where Dawn could sense that she was there. But not feel, never a true touch from her strawberry girl.
Dawn wondered if she'd get her very own strawberry gashes (a set of thirteen on each side) in return and then realised, no, that would be letting her get off easy. It was so much more fun to toy with a girl's emotions than it was to just hurt her. To kill her.
"Girls are so easy to tear into, aren't they, Dawn? So much easier than boys. The knife slides through them like it's a part of them."
Sometimes, actions don't speak louder than words. She could hear the words echoing in her dank hollow of a mind.
"Fate at seventeen. Did you cry for me, Dawn? Did you sell my old clothes? Did you keep the blade?"
She did. On all three accounts and now she was ashamed of the last two. But not the first. Never the first.
She sold Kit's old clothes because she couldn't bare to look at them. And she could never wear them. They were the anti-Dawn. Yet everything Dawn wished she could be.
And the blade? It was under her pillow, where it lie every night to remind Dawn, so she could never forget. She could feel the impression against her cheek through the old, thin pillow. The pillow had been had been Kit's. Oddly, it was one of the few things of Kit's she could stand to keep. Faded pink with white ducks. A remnant of Kit's stereotypical tragic childhood that Dawn had heard so little about.
"Short stories with tragic endings. That's the life I lived, didn't I, Dawn? But at least it's over for me now. Aren't you happy for me? No more tragedy. No more stoneface."
No more chloroform perfume and no more shattered childhood fantasies of Easy Bake ovens and Strawberry Shortcake dolls. No more razor-filled halloween candy, no more bandages, no more thoughtless apologies, no more life among the dead, no more bleeding white, and no more heroes.
And no .44 caliber love letter straight from my heart.
And Dawn knew, she knew, this wasn't the torrid ballad of the dead. This was the harsh industrial metal of an ancient evil that was beneath them, ready to devour. The Marilyn Manson of the underworld.
Dawn's lust for life was dead. In her dreams, she lived like death and she died like suicide. Just like Kit, always like Kit. In her dreams.