The Kiss of Vanity Blessed Me With A Spiritual Murder

It's dark, and he's not alone anymore.

What appears to be the sunlight is just a candle, ripping through the pitch black with its yellow and casting an obnoxious shade across his body. He isn't sure if he is the one screaming or it's someone else from the dark, but he's the only one the monster is currently looking at. It's intruding, and he can feel his blood coiling across his ribcage while thundering inside his head; his stomach is clenching in discomfort while he's holding eye contact. The eyes are so pure, so golden, so bright, like daylight on delicate flowers and forest streams that flickers sparks into dark holes in the ground.

Those same eyes that feel so warm come closer and the darkness around them thickens, bold straps across thin air that reeks of old basements and little children's worst nightmares. The creature smirks and the shadow deepens again, and Gerard can feel the artery on the left side of his neck beginning to throb.

He feels the skin open and the scream his throat releases is much more intense than the others before it. It kills every noise in the space and drowns any ounce of hope left in his stiffened body- it sounds like death and he swears that it feels like it, too, even more so when the blood starts to spill down his back in unruly spirals and lines that cut dark red through the freckled white.

It separates the part of his brain that deciphers pain from the one that fears it and the creature laughs, gripping at the wound on his shoulder with its nails, all scratchy and sharp, and drags the flesh downwards to his chest. It smiles into his face and it's the kindest smile Gerard's ever seen, all bashful and sweet like cotton candy and ferris wheels in late July when everything is a carnival dream, but then it turns almost as wicked as burning sun and scorching droughts and he can't breathe anymore.

He opens his mouth but the air that crawls inside is more lead than oxygen and the creature cackles into his face. He can sense something hot in the back of his throat and his gag reflex starts working- he vomits all of the blood right into his lap because he can't lean anywhere else. It's darker than it should be from all the tar and it tastes like liquid rust and fire and torture, and his eyes are watering from all the pressure on his head.

His throat feels raw and it burns like a thousand acidic needles are digging holes in his flesh, his larynx bleeding out and clogging his airways. He’s trying to yell, trying to fight but the creature has him there- still, pliable, poisoned- he separates his lips to scream but all that comes out is just more jet black tar mixed with blood-red bile, spilling in a colorful line over his Adam’s apple.

The creature just drags its nails down and rips more of his chest, reaching down almost to his navel. He sucks in a breath and it's disgusting, but he'd rather do it all over again than look into those beautiful eyes that make him want to puke all over himself once more. He feels contagious with venom pumping through his veins, like a curse, and the pain shooting all across his torso isn't helping. His blood is getting darker and thicker by the minute and it's pouring down in unsteady waves like his body is pushing it outwards, fading red mixing with greasy black and swirling his brain into a sickly sweet sense of sleepiness.

The creature's face is closer now and it's looking into Gerard's tar-stained eyelids, dark hair matted around his neck, face wrecked and whiter than the sky on a snowy day.

Then he can feel a grip on his forearm. It's slight, and as gentle as a feather of a dream catcher lost amongst cobwebs after cobwebs in the corner of an old attic. It’s familiar and he knows it’s telling him to open his eyes since now there’s a known brightness in front of his eyelids.

So he does.

The first breath is always the unsteady one, getting used to the surroundings and the feeling of a soft blanket covering his back instead of his own blood. His hair is in his face and it smells nice, peaches or some shit, his head is too heavy to remember now.

The rain is drumming against his window, falling harsh and grainy from murky thunderclouds, calming his heartbeat a bit so he can finally find the strength to sit upright. He can still feel a slight knot in his wrist, the one that warned him he should wake up.

He ignores the red around it, he thinks he’s probably just banged it against a cupboard or something. Maybe he’s scratched it too hard last night, but he can’t really tell since there isn’t any scraped skin to go by. He sighs. There’s nothing to his dreams, he supposes, but he still can’t get rid of the unnerved feeling he gets whenever he remembers it’s the same dream all over again.

He puts on slippers and heads downstairs to get some coffee. He hates Sundays- nothing is a good-enough distraction on Sundays.

*

The week passes in a strange kind of hurry.

Gerard can’t say he hasn’t noticed when people started putting the decorations up, but his perception of time is miserable at best, so it’s nothing unexpected that Gerard is taken aback when Jamia calls him on Friday afternoon and asks if he wants to go trick-or-treating with her.
At first he just says he needs to help his mom with something and that he’ll call back, then drops the phone onto his bed before sliding with his body onto the floor. His eyes stare at the window but he doesn’t know what he’s looking at. It doesn’t matter, anyway.

He still remembers the first time he’d taken Mikey trick-or-treating. The kid was hardly five years old and he missed both of his front teeth, but instead of declining when Mikey asked if he can go with him, Gerard ruffled his dirty blonde hair and cut up the whitest bed sheet he owned. Mikey hugged him then and told him he was the best brother he could ask for. Gerard just kissed his forehead and made some holes in the fabric so Mikey could see where he was going.

He remembers the last time he’d taken him, as well. Gerard was trying to hide his cigarettes in the pocket of his coat, and Mikey, aged thirteen, was laughing at him from across the room in a Darth Vader costume that was way too baggy on him by then even though it was a teens’ small. He was mocking him how the face paint was ridiculous since he looked dead enough as he was, and Gerard hit him with a shoe. It was the last time Gerard left the house for Halloween.

He sucks in a breath, steadying himself, pulling at his hair, coordinating his breathing. He doesn’t need this right now. He sends Jamia a text before he goes to look through his closet.

‘fuck halloween. pick me up @ 7.’

*

“I don’t even like candy,” Gerard says, hands in the pockets of his giant black robe. “I mean, I do, but Halloween chocolates suck.”

Jamia told Gerard he looks like a hotter version of 1931 Bela Lugosi when she showed up at his doorstep. It was probably funny how red Gerard turned then, but he doesn’t mind, he’s almost at ease while Jamia is there.
He wasn’t even getting at Count Dracula but he supposes it was inevitable- he is the most popular vampire out there, anyway.

“They do,” Jamia nods, twisting a lollipop in her mouth and trying not to peel off the artificial scab she’s painted across her right cheek. She makes a really good zombie, Gerard concluded when he first saw her- all green face paint, matted hair and plastic guts poking out from underneath her ripped shirt. They probably look like a badass monster-villain duo, he dares to think, but he doesn’t voice it. “That’s why other candy exists. I’m pretty sure gummy bears are my favorites, though, even though they’re probably the least healthy kind.”

“Isn’t that, like, the point?” Gerard makes a face and she laughs, elbowing him in the side lightly. He smiles.

“Damn,” she says, climbing the small stone staircase leading towards the graveyard. [“It’s not Halloween if we don’t go to the graveyard, Gerard,” she said matter-of-factly, pulling him towards the road that leads to the cemetery.] It’s small, and eerie in a cozy kind of way- Gerard almost smiles at his way of thinking, his mother says he’s been just slightly macabre ever since he was a little kid. “The only thing I love more than this place, is, like-” she pauses, furrowing her brow, “my mother. Or something.”

“This place looks like a Fugazi song,” Gerard helpfully notices, and Jamia just looks at his serious face before she cracks up. “I’m not playing with you.”

She just laughs and nudges him to tag along, skipping around the tombstones like half-drunk while whistling a tune familiar to Gerard’s ears. He drags himself across the wild grass and meets her in one of the corners of the graveyard. She stops in front of a rock and rolls her eyes when he asks if it’ll make their asses wet.

“It’s not wet,” she says, and pulls something from the rock swiftly.

“What the-” Gerard stops himself, but she just giggles and waves her hand like it’s no big deal.

“Ryan and I have claimed this spot as our secret castle when we were nine,” she smiles, eyes nostalgic, and looks at the big rock again. “There isn’t much left of the castle, but we still come here to get high sometimes. And for a town as rainy as this one, you gotta’ be safe. Therefore the ‘raincoat’.”

“You knew each other when you were nine?” Gerard asks, a bit baffled. He doesn’t think he remembers anyone he’s known in middle school, let alone any earlier.
“In Redwood, you pretty much knew everyone when you were nine,” she breathes a laugh and settles down on the rock. “It’s really not wet.”

Gerard tentatively sits down, checking if there’s anything that might poke him in the butt beforehand. He gets his cigarettes from his pocket as soon as he gets comfortable enough in the spot to just relax and take his surroundings in. He lights two immediately and hands one to Jamia, breathing in the dirt, the rain and the smoke.

“It’s the place where he kissed me for the first time,” she eventually says, blowing the smoke in front of her, watching it hit the closest tombstone and then evaporate towards the sky. “We were fourteen and it was summer,” she bit her lip, the pink turning white against her teeth. “He told me he wanted to be my first kiss.”

“I don’t know how to kiss,” Gerard admitted, cheeks heating up. He wanted to scratch his wrist a bit and make the nervous feeling go away, but he settled on sucking on his cigarette instead. “This girl tried to kiss me in fifth grade. It was a disaster, awkward as fuck, she cried when I told her I didn’t like her. I felt like such a dickhead.”

“Aw,” she coos and Gerard flips her off, pulling his knees to his chest, balancing his feet in the dents of the rock. “I’m so pathetic, Jesus Christ. I mean, I’ve dated a couple of people over these few years, but they’re not-” she cuts herself off.

“They’re not him,” he finishes for her. She mutters out a ‘yeah’ and Gerard leans his head on her shoulder. It’s not a big deal, but he knows she’ll appreciate the gesture. “And you’re telling me about pathetic. I’m pushing eighteen years old and I’ve never even kissed anyone. Not for real, anyway.”

“Well, it’s not like you’re old or anything,” she takes a drag and looks at him, blowing the smoke into his face. “You still have a long way to go. And I don’t think it’s a bad thing you haven’t kissed anyone if you didn’t think there was anyone worth kissing- if that makes any sense.”

Gerard smiles, waving her smoke off with his free hand. “It does, yeah. I mean, I suppose I could’ve-”

She tenses up. “Hush. Did you hear that?” Gerard stands still for a moment, not making a sound, and he’s about to tell Jamia to stop freaking him the fuck out, when he hears it. It’s just shuffling at first, so quiet he’s wondering how she’s even picked it up- his head immediately fills with images of vampires and other creatures with inhuman hearing- but then it turns more rhythmic and his ears begin to decipher footsteps.

It seems that the person isn’t in a hurry, and they’re slowing down frequently as if they’re trying to maneuver their way around the graves. The footsteps become louder yet again, and when he squints a bit, Gerard can see a moving silhouette in the dark.

They’re not very tall and their clothes seem plain, black, maybe a bit rugged since he can see blobs of light in the knee area as if the person is wearing jeans ripped at the knees. They come closer and Gerard’s breath catches in his throat when he sees the face, the familiar glint of the lip ring and the messed up hair curling above the ears of the person he immediately recognizes.

He looks at Jamia and she looks just as confused as he feels, and she mouths ‘Frank?’, as if he’d be able to hear from that distance.

But before he can reply, he sees Frank sitting down cross-legged in front of one of the tombstones. He pulls out a crumpled pack of cigarettes from what seems to be his back pocket and lights one real quick, grabbing the thing he dropped while he was settling himself on the ground. It’s a miserable bunch of meadow flowers but it looks like he picked them himself, and Gerard’s heart falters a little at that.

“Hey, ma,” he says with the smoke between his lips, but then he takes it out and smiles at the tombstone. “Happy birthday to us, I guess.”

Notes

lucki flipped me off frm across the ocean bc of that horrible reference. rip me. fuk u lucki. <3

all my body's proteins are coagulating at like 40 degrees celsius. rip me. come save me. it's hard 2 be a vampire when u live in the mediterranean.

oh, & a quick psa:
balancing ur laptop on a broken skateboard while writing is NOT a good idea.