Loving Is Destruction With a Devil as Your Bride

Bone followed Gwarish into Hell. What preceded her entrance defied the logic of her imagination, the images entering her eyes like red-hot needles. They first traveled through her corneas, searing the edges with surgical precision before inserting themselves past the optic nerve and into her brain.1

Gwarish had loved Bone for her brain. He'd eaten it raw with horseradish and mint, savoring the selected complexities with the vigor of an epicurean returned from a voyage at sea. 2

Bone had loved Gwarish for his matchless vicissitudes. One day he was a connoisseur of corruption and gender, sampling the world's offerings with a contagious bon vivant. The next day, Bone would wake up beside him unable to move. Caught between the steel trap of his legs so that she couldn't escape, he would tease her with kindness. 3

"I love you like I love myself. I love you like starving coyotes adore the screams of dying rabbits. I love you like a stranger in a corridor, a glint of metal in his hand." 4

"I hate you, too," Bone would whisper, secretly meaning that she loved him and hated herself. Fortunately, Gwarish spoke her language and understood the subtleties that meant so much on those early mornings. 5

Then he would eat at her brain.6

Hell hadn't been an option for Bone, at least at first, but a gaunt skeleton of a woman -- clothed with dirty rags and damaged scalp -- will be stopped by no celestial forces. Her blond hair mostly fallen out, her eyes dark with bruises from sleepless nights, she trailed his bloody steps with scrupulous attention.7

He wasn't supposed to ever leave her. That wasn't their bargain.8

She had let Gwarish commit his many abuses against her. In exchange, he was never allowed to leave her. That was the commitment, the quiet contract they had between them. Gwarish could hurt her, beat her, stab her with syringes of boiled water and lime, but he wasn't supposed to leave her alone. 9

He was not allowed to abandon.10

That morning when he had died, his aorta crushed down upon itself with invisible force. His heart stopped, halting the flow of lifeblood in his veins, causing death within a matter of seconds. Bone watched it happen breathlessly, frozen into inaction by the sight of Gwarish, the only person still in her world, toppled down into death by no foreseeable cause. 11

For the first time in months, Bone stood up by herself.12

Her skin looked like nothing more than dirty cellophane wrapped around bruised femurs and broken ribs. The pain of being on her own did not stop her as she rose to balance on the soles of her fragile feet. By this time, the strange death that had fell upon her love had forced a pool of blood from his body onto the floor, surrounding his corpse with a nimbus of curdling red.13

All the nightmares that lived in her heart cried out in recognition of her last true fear; this is what was happening. For the first time in her life, Bone was being left alone. She would have to fend for herself. She would be the only one to tell herself when to eat, when to rest, who to fuck and what to care about. 14

Standing half-naked in the unheated bedroom where Gwarish made her sleep, Bone clutched at her arms with a shivering horror. The blood pool had spread, reaching her bare feet, comforting them with her love's last remaining liquid warmth. 15

Alone. She was utterly at her own mercy. How would she exist? Before his death, every single day, instead of whispering sweet nothings in her ragged ears, Gwarish would repeat to her the truths that she had known all along. 16

"You are stupid. You are an idiot." 17

I love you.18

"You are worthless. You have no intelligence worth speaking of."19

I love you so much.20

"Without me, you'd be dead already. Be grateful for the care I've given you."21

I love you.22

"You're a useless, ugly whore. I am the only one who could ever stand to be near you. You're repellent to the entire human race. They look at you and see a reflection of their own disgust. You're mine. That's your only definition. You're mine." 23

Without you, I'm nothing. 24

The words burrowed through her brain like syphilis, repeated to her again and again every day like a prayer. Instead of whispering the Our Father, or turning towards Mecca, or lighting a sweet plume on incense to a metal idol, Bone and Gwarish would pray together; one as worshipper, the other as God.25

Such an arrangement had not gone unnoticed. Hell had lusted after him for the longest of times. Gwarish's final death was welcome news to its denizens. They came with the speed of hate.26

Dark shadows swarmed upon Gwarish as Bone stood there, watching. They surrounded him, the true him that waited by his body on the floor. The shadows licked at his panicked screams like the sweetest of sugars. The daintiest of treats. The most succulent of susurrations.27

Still delighting in the taste of him, they circled and tangled with his essence, doing what they had came to do.28

One last shadow lingered in the room for a minute before disappearing through the floor with his kin. His form was that of a mutilated hyena, saggy skin hanging off in strips over a glistening red stomach of muscles and pulsations. His tiny nerve endings were delicately stripped from his body, half-pulled away from their original habitation and twined together, braided with the precision of French lace. 29

He gestured to Bone as she half-leaned against the end of the bed. She understood his message, as clear as if he had spoken it aloud. 30

"You may accompany us, if you like," the demon didn't say.31

"I will go with you," Bone didn't respond. 32

The hyena shadow reached to her with a quivering paw. Bone took it with her fleshless hands and followed, her emaciated form offering no resistance to the black joys of the abyss. 33

The images came right away upon arrival, costing Bone an unexpected price; seeing the final sight of her Gwarish, hanging from ropes of scorpions with his body stretched beyond its capabilities, destroyed her eyes. Her irises were lacerated away, replaced with ever-gaping holes that leaked clear liquid. Her macula was seared into non-existence. Her pupil burned to ash.34

If she were back on Earth, with her ill-treated body and flimsy health, she would have gone blind. The loss of vision would have eaten her like a cancer, destroying the worthless remnants of whatever life in her still remained.35

But Hell was not Earth. The rules were not the same. 36

Here, Bone could see without eyes. She could walk the fires on the ground and run her fingers through the freezing nitrogen exhaled by her hyena guide. Hurt held a different meaning. Her body could not be harmed because Hell did not want her body.37

Hell wanted Gwarish and, with scorpion stings and scalpel precision, it had sculpted him into a plagued object of its desires.38

"Bone." His lips framed her name, but no sound came out. It is hard to speak without a tongue, and harder still with no lungs to pump the breath through a bisected esophagus. 39

"You cannot leave me," Bone whispered, gliding to him with ease, not feeling any pain as the fires parted in her path. "I love you." 40

He stared at her, unspeaking, unblinking. It is hard to close your eyes when your eyelids have been removed. It is even harder to remember who the woman is before you through a sparkling haze of torment. 41

The hyena moved to her side. She understood his words, even as he didn't speak.42

"He will stay with us forever," he didn't say. "There is no alternative for him. You cannot bring him back to life." 43

By this time, the acidic effect of Bone's first vision of Hell had eaten away at her entire eyeball. The white sclera had melted into the flood of pouring vitreous humor, the retina reduced to jelly while her irises, originally as green as summer grass, disappeared into blurry nothingness. 44

When Gwarish looked upon her, he saw nothing but the black hollows of empty eye sockets. One could almost imagine that the fluid running down his pocked cheeks was repentant tears. 45

In Hell, one could imagine a lot of things. 46

"May I stay here?" Bone didn't ask, but communicated anyway. 47

The hyena didn't answer her at first, turning his canine head to the center of Hell, where the fires burned hottest and the blizzards froze. A moment passed with the speed of an arthritic invalid. Bone waited for the answer. 48

Finally, while Bone finally learned to enjoy the music of the wet gurglings in Gwarish's throat, the hyena looked at her. 49

"You may stay if you join us. You will be our sister, beloved as one of our family. Or you may return to Earth. Make your choice." 50

As the hyena non-spoke, the thousand other shadows that Bone had first witnessed on the floor of her apartment gathered around her. They had been near-formless in the bland sunlight of Earth, but in the glow of hellfire, she could see what they truly were. 51

Shimmering birds with buttons for eyes, strange obese men with tumor-like protrusions dangling from all parts of their bodies, broken porcelain doll parts connected with an underwire of sinew; they were all so beautiful, in their own way. 52

Bone reflected upon the hyena's offer. All these extraordinary creatures would accept her as one of their own. They would love her, in a way vastly different from how Gwarish had loved her. They would not force her to fuck strangers for the delight of a camera's eye. They would not fill her mind with such a self-loathing that to look in the mirror was to cause her nausea. They would not force her from food, call her 'fat' and 'pig' and 'ugly' until she could no longer bring herself to swallow. 53

With them, she would never be alone. 54

Bone came to a decision.55

"You are my family now." She whispered the words aloud, binding the contract with vocal acceptance as the hellfire washed over her with the soothing mutability of a bath. 56

Her body, which had never really been hers to begin with (not if Gwarish had had any say) transformed itself under the caress of Hell. Her arms grew larger, wider as muscles upon muscles developed in the course of a minute. Her body thickened, growing stronger with the demonic exercise of will. Her calves tightened, her thighs grew. Her waist knotted itself with abdominal muscles. 57

She was becoming strong again. She was becoming the woman she had never been.58

The pale, slick cellophane that had once been her skin slid off of her body in a painless pile. Nothing emerged to cover her new, bulging muscles. She felt naked, exposed and yet, at the same time, rebaptized into a new and glorious being. 59

Her fingers itched and she looked down to find that they, too had changed. Delicate, serrated needles emerged from her knuckles. She realized that they were surgeon's tools, allowing her the utmost meticulousness with her feminine touch. 60

Her face began to alter itself, but she could not see what was happening to it. She could feel it stretching, reforming itself into something new. Something better. 61

There was no mirror around that she could see, but perhaps Hell had gifted her with something better; a more accurate reflection of what she had become. 62

Hell had given Gwarish back his eyes.63

Feeling the last remnants of the woman she once had been flush from her system, erased with the adrenaline of being born, she gazed down at Gwarish with a sweet and loving smile.64

"You swore to never leave me, lover," Bone purred, finding that she liked the new, deeper baritone of her voice. "Now you'll be with me forever." 65

Flexing her fingers, she went to work as her new brothers and sisters watched with silent approval. Gwarish had no tongue to form the words, but the twisted, shrieking wail rising from his depths was enough for her. 66

She stroked his glistening liver with her ring finger and drank at the juices that flowed from it. 67

The course of true love never did run smooth.68