In honor of being true to myself as a writer and sharing actual writing (which is probably the point of this blog) and also in honor of a recently passed Valentine’s Day, I have decided to share a short story of mine. This was written over a year ago, and still a working-draft, but it is a fictional “Tell-Tale Heart” inspired story about love (albeit psychotic, but probably some sort of love nonetheless). I know you will be as disturbed and enthralled as I was while writing it… probably.

Fruit

Angelo is an incomparable talent. I am still undecided if it is him or is genius that I’ve loved more, but as my last and final conquest, I remain torn in the decision of its fate. How should it happen, if it is to happen at all. He lured me in, years ago, with a version of himself that I can barely remember, the pole of his person that is now a ghost. It was his decision to love me first, and I quickly and blindly followed. I was young and had so much to learn from this magnetic stranger. Nothing mattered. Especially not those who had repeatedly and unknowingly bared the burden of our betrayal. We both disregarded the wreckage we left in our wake of those whose love was both unequivocal and unrequited. In the beginning we could communicate only with our bodies. Angelo came from another part of the world that left words as something we lacked in common, but the white heat between us made everything cloudy and muddled and exquisite. Lust of this magnitude was as foreign to me as his idiom. My gut ached for him and what I wholly believed he was. I should have known it would start to rot in time. It always does. It festers and corrodes and I clean up the mess and move on. They all think I am weak, but if they knew the things I have done, they would understand the extent of my substance. Angelo didn’t understand, but he soon would.

William was my first fruit. I thought I loved him. I still think I may have, it’s hard to tell. I was 16, he was handsome and, more importantly, he soaked up my ridiculous lies which made him juicy and sweet and completely infatuated. It didn’t take long before I was all there was. He lost himself inside of me and I swallowed him with a thirst that only his sweet, ripe and naive liquids could quench. William changed to become as I wanted without the slightest realization he was doing so. He was molded and contorted and none the wiser. Perhaps this was why I loved him, because he never really existed on his own. After a year of young love and manipulation, I began to outgrow “us”. This realization coincided with a fairly substantial life transition for William that would take him a little over a time zone away. He was a scholar and fairly good at his studies. He would be continuing down this path on his own, as he was a full year my elder. His intelligence was not the most attractive thing about him. I know what it looks like, but I am not and never have been a woman to fear abandonment. My withering love had nothing to do with the fact that he was leaving. William still ached for me. He would have never loved again if I so desired, even with distance between us. No, it was not that. William, like our love, had began to soften with a lack of substance. It all became unbearably sweet. It was decaying and needed to end before it had the chance to ferment. A woman scorned by abandonment and blinded by love would never have such clear logic and fine sense of intuition to notice the beginning stages of erosion. I saw it all clearly and it was decided.

We began to frequent each other less. He could feel the emergent separation and became pathetic and desperate trying to mend something he had not the power to. I knew it was over, but he would not give in. He became like a child with a deficiency of the love he needed to grow. I could see him wilting into another person. It disgusted me. I had spent so much time building this man only to see how superficial his transformation had been. At the slightest notice of his world without me he melted into something else. A heartsick animal with no sense of self. An object that was nothing without it’s manipulator. A boy who could not live alone. It got so bad that even the sound of his voice had become estranged to me. His words could no longer reach the sympathetic, loving part of me. There was no sweetness left in me to give to him. I was drained to the bone. My disappointment and disgust in him was overt and tangible and, shortly thereafter, it would be even to William.

William came to my home upon request. When he arrived he was timid, awkward and unrecognizable. He must have known why I had asked him there. I had planned to break his heart and tell him everything. I would tell him how the very thought of him now made my skin burn and how he had ruined it all by allowing this pitiful self-mutation. It was his fault and he had to know, and when I looked at him I could tell that his face had already changed even more drastically than I had thought possible. I had not done that. In such a short time, a matter of weeks, the differences in him were startling and worse than I could have ever imagined. I was not prepared for this. No one could have been prepared for it. It was bewildering to me and I could barely think overtop of his annoying new nuances, mannerisms and facial expressions. Where did they come from? Who was doing this to me? His skin was pale and stretching uncomfortably across is body. Before I had the chance to tell him it was over, he approached me with these saddened eyes of his that I had never seen in all our time together, and he kissed me. He had the gull to kiss me in a way that was unrecognizable. He was kissing me with a disgusting strangers tongue that left a rotten taste in my mouth that lingers to this day if I think of it long enough. I threw the shell of what was left of the William I knew to the ground and covered his mutating face with a folded throw from the couch. The throw stayed firmly atop of him as I spat repeatedly to get the wretched taste of his transformation off my lips.

Now, I cannot get a handle on the time that had lapsed, naturally, after what he had put me through, I was a bit shaken. And that taste! My stomach turns at the thought of it and where it came from. I do know that at one point he surrendered and his attempt to struggle ceased. A warming calm washed over me and that horrid taste finally left my mouth. When I lifted the throw his face was familiar to me again. He had returned to the William that I had loved all this time. I understood it all at that moment. It was his decision to stop, to give in. I could have never killed William in the way most would think, and before judgment is passed an explanation needs to be heard. He gave himself, all of himself to me. It was the only thing left for him to do. He decided to die knowing that I loved him instead to live a life with the knowledge of my distain and without me. I showed him mercy by sparring his heart and inside himself somewhere he knows to this day that he will always be mine. It was I who suffered, and stomached in absolute silence the agony he had put me through those last months. It was his burden to carry, not mine, but instead I choked it within myself to give him this peace, this gift. Sometimes my kindness surprises even me.

William was still a boy, a thin young 18. It was not terribly difficult to move him, which is a testament to my physical and emotional strength. He knew when he made the decision to die that I would take care of him and I knew the perfect place for him. A place he seemed to have chosen himself and within the hour he was contently settled under the massive peach tree at the far edge of the property. There was budding that would mature to become blossoms on its branches. It was beautiful and perfect. I knew him well and could still feel how moved he was by this gesture. I had saved him, preserved him in our love. He will remain unspoiled now, and he is grateful to me.

It didn’t take long for people to start asking questions about the whereabouts of William. His disappearance stirred our small town with questions, but I was not phased. Our relationship was the only thing tethering me to what he had done to himself, but I kept his secret for him. When the noise died down a bit, I could feel hunger stirring again in my pit. Ben was there when I needed him to satisfy my cravings. If only it had ended there.

Oh, poor innocent Ben. He and I had no idea of the monster he was to become. Oblivious and ignorant we entered into a story that would end not just broken, but mangled. I had no intention of making Ben love me. He wasn’t initially my type, but his twisted sense of humor and awkward personality made its way inside of me. The attraction was minimal on my end, but his desire for me must have been contagious. I gave in and tried to give my heart to Ben. He fell completely and I tried to follow his lead but with little success. My appetite had become insatiable and could not be satisfied by Ben. To spare his pathetic, inexperienced young heart, I allowed him to believe I loved him while fulfilling my needs elsewhere throughout our four years together. I did this selflessly and only to protect him. I was careful to keep these transgressions hidden from him because, in his eyes, he had it all. I kept this fantasy of his alive with my wit and charm and he was happy. Although for me, our time together lacked a certain depth, I knew that for him it was the only love he had ever known and in that right it was perfection. I set my feelings aside and played the part and gave him four precious years. I allowed Ben to become his own person. I did not try to save him from himself because, although I cared deeply for him, I did not love him. This is for certain. Honestly, I was doing myself a disservice by being with Ben. His charms were not worthy of me. Everyone but him could see that. Yet another testament to my selflessness.

Ben was content, all the while oblivious to my constant sampling. I prided myself in self control and had tasted many different and exotic produce without diluting the experience with sentiment. There was occasional repetition, but I made sure to keep it to a strict minimum. I had to protect them all from their natural urge to love me. If I frequented just one too often, they were sure to fall victim. It was all so simple, and then I met Angelo. He was intoxicating and I could not stop. It was only after Angelo that Ben began to be suspicious. He could see a change in me. I could feel a change in myself and no matter how hard I tried to fight it off, I kept going back for more. I became weak. At first it wasn’t even love, but I had never experienced anything like Angelo before and I wanted to drink him up and understand all of him. Ben could smell the nectar Angelo left behind, but was too much of a coward to reprimand or question my fidelity. He became so small and insignificant. He acted as if it were still all the same even after everything had changed. I couldn’t see clearly while my veins pumped Angelo throughout my body and Ben faded into the background of an afterthought. I was so overtaken by this new man that inside the smallest part of myself that still acknowledged the existence of Ben and his feelings, I knew it needed to end. Angelo had consumed so much of me that there was nothing left for Ben. I needed to cut him out before he began to starve, wither and dry up, and before he watched the love he had so poorly built crumble to dust.

I found Ben in his usual spot and in what had recently become his usual state. On his apartment balcony, inebriated. Behind the gloss covering his eyes I could see him through his consumption and that he understood why I was there. He sat his uncoordinated body on the edge of the banister as I began to tell him the truth about the fantasy he had been living. I hadn’t even finished my first sentence and had certainly not mentioned Angelo, when Ben turned into a madman fueled by passion and spirit. His body and face contorted and swayed as he attempted to spit out incoherent hateful words. He had turned into Mr. Hyde and despite all my efforts to calm him down, he was beyond reach. He saw only red and his body jerked violently as I approached him. The scene was a whirlwind of rage, sadness, vehemence, tears and desperation. I watched the entire useless tantrum with a deep mortification. In one final desperate attempt to reach Ben through the ire and alcohol I resorted to physical contact. I can remember broken frames of Ben being startled and losing his balance and then a familiar feeling. I can remember him holding onto my arm initially as only a natural reaction to keep from falling four stories. I can still see his monstrous glazed eyes looking up at me before he let himself go. His eyes warned me to stay away. They told me that he didn’t want me to save him, but that instead he wanted to be in control. I could understand it all from one hideous glance. Ben may have known the truth all along and just been pathetic enough to put up with it, or he may have genuinely been oblivious, but it doesn’t matter now. He was too childish to experience love in its entirety and in the end it drove him mad. Even if I had wanted to help him, his eyes asked me not to in those final moments. Ben couldn’t live in the misery of knowing I had chosen someone else, so I let him escape his new reality. Now he will never have to know the agony and humiliation that was to be his future. He now rests with William under the peaceful umbrella of a newly flowering peach tree inside of a fairytale love that exists only for him.

Angelo knows little of those who came before him, nor do I think he cares. Once I was conquered he slowly began to divulge himself to me the way the rest of the world already knew him, but there was nothing I could do. Everything vanished before him and in confront of him. I fell into his trap and willingly lost myself almost completely. Something inside of me wanted to live only to please him so I gave him everything. I became the moth to his flame, addicted, and buried so far within and beneath him that he saw only himself and his craft. I am supplemental. I can feel the weight of him bearing on me always, but there is a part of me that can’t live without it. How can I pull myself out of something which I have wholly become when I can no longer tell where I end and he begins. This feeling is beautifully suffocating, but he feels nothing. This time I have been the one fooled. I can see that I have been the one ingested and forgotten. There is no escape from a person and an arrogance this centrifugal. An ordinary woman would never stand a chance, but I am anything but ordinary.

Yes I can admit that I was weakened by Angelo. He managed to steal years from me without my recognition. I suppose this recount has awakened me to the burning I have held inside for so long. I need to rescue myself from him, to cut off the part of me that has merged with him. I will tear away from him and place myself before his eyes and just before his moment of pure epiphany he will see what he had trampled on, swallowed whole and left forgotten. I just have to rip myself back from the insides of his stomach, from the place in him where he has held me a willing prisoner. I will sever us apart and cauterize my wounds to never be the one who bleeds again. He will no longer over power me with his lure and dexterity now that my ambition grows as does my rage that any madman could deliberately place me in his shadow. If he wasn’t so blind he could have had it all, but I should have known it would start to rot in time. It always does. It festers and corrodes and I clean up the mess and move on. He thinks I am weak, but if he knew the things I have done, he would understand the extent of my substance. Angelo didn’t understand, but he soon would…