Hide And Seek

Hesitant fingers reach sheepishly toward the exposed flesh.

Porcelain. Inquisitive pools dance selfishly across his bones; innocent in origin. She wants to consume him, sinfully, in a way that's so completely new that it stirs a frightened murmur in her intestines. Fingers search idly, navigating open flesh in the hope of port, curious and nervous. She runs a dry tongue over the peak of her pink lips, anxiety bubbling like a nervous tick in the apex of her throat. Every part of her flesh craves, longs from afar, under the sheets where they can't hurt her. Where words are no more than an idyllic lullaby murmured into deaf ears. Where pain is nothing more than something imagined by macabre minds.

Broken promises murmur behind her ears, whisper cruelties covered in charred flesh. His face is just another -- melted and shifted until he could be absolutely anyone. But he's not. He's not. Every inch of her screams, writhes within the prison she's locked herself in. He advances, a sign of his muffled impatience. And she wishes nothing more than to respond, to let roaming fingers wander, to let hidden shades disguise her hesitation. She wishes that there wasn't a lock within a heart: a wall constructed of stone, built with bruised fingers and broken bones that wanted nothing more than a safety that they had never been provided. 

White Lies.

It's in the silence that he hears words. Murmurs, whispers. Delicate promises spoken earnestly under the kitchen glare. 

"Genius," he manages to mumble between paralyzed lips.

They watch him tediously. Dark pupils secluded to evacuated corners, shrouded in a familiar film. He wishes to touch them; to extend a forearm and brush his fingertips of their corpses, return the welcome they had so graciously given him. But he would not. More accurately, could not. It was perhaps because his wrist was not connected to his hands, and instead the white models hung lifeless at the end of each arm. Paralyzed, like his lips, with a morbidly buried fear.

Time slips like a ribbon through his conscious. Recluse eyes observe that the time is exactly eight oh three. He peers only a moment later, and the numbers have morphed, and it now reads twelve fourteen. He wonders, remotely, if he has moved within these four hours, or if every muscle within his skin has ceased to work. His physique in denial, rebelling against the tenacity of his vivacious thought pattern.

"Come," they beg.

He obeys.

He slinks purposefully across the wooden floor, scraping bruised knees and cut elbows. Brown eyes dance tirelessly from the repetitive detail of the floor to the caricatures of his reanimated hands. It's at this moment that he notices their color.

Maroon.

A sound gurgles from the precipice of his cracked lips. It resembles a scream.