Story I wrote a couple years ago.
David comes over after band practice on Friday nights. Lily is always there waiting. She cooks for him and then does the dishes while he tells her insignificant details about his band mates' lives. He speaks of his own life but never asks her of hers.
Once the dishes are done they move into the living room. He rents a movie, something horrible, no doubt, that they only watch half of before one of them says, "I'm falling asleep."
"Me too," the other replies.
"Want to go to bed?"
"Yeah, that sounds good."
He gets up, smiles at her, and goes upstairs to get ready for sleep. She walks slowly around the living room, turning off the TV and VCR, turning off the lights, picking up stray cups and taking them to the sink. Lily picks up a bright red, shiny apple from the bowl on the counter to take David for a snack. She sighs as her feet drag up the stairs and she turns off the last light.
When she steps into her bedroom, he's already there, under the blankets, arms tucked under his head. She tosses the apple to him. Now it's his turn to wait. She smiles and takes down her hair. Lily sits on the edge of her bed to undress; she can feel his eyes poking sharply into her back. She hears the wet crunch as he takes a bite of the apple. When she pulls her pajama shirt on, picked in cut and material to please him, she wishes that she didn't love him. As he finishes his apple, she goes to the bathroom to brush her teeth.
During the night he moves around frequently, stealing the blankets and pushing the pillows to the floor. She sits up and stares at him. When she looks at him in the middle of the night while he's sleeping, it makes her cry. The light from the streetlight lays in lines over his face as it leaks between the blinds on the window. He is the only thing lighted in the small room.
His ashen hair glints and his slightly parted lips shine as breath is pushed through them. The skin on his naked chest and arms glows. She imagines he's an angel and is happy he's in her bed instead of the one across town.
She knows, however, that there's only one reason he's laying there next to her and it's not the reason she would like it to be. He's not there because he loves her. He's there because he's everything to her and he knows it. Lily knows he doesn't love her and he avoids talking about the nature of their relationship at all costs. So, she looks at him, shining like a golden statue, and cries.
He never wakes when she sobs. Well, maybe he does, but he gives no sign of it. She wipes her tears and places her head on his shoulder, breathing in the smell of him. The good clean smells of soap and sweat radiate from his form. She runs a finger down his sternum, loving the silkiness of it, coming down to the tender spot where it ends, right between the last ribs. It's her favorite spot on his sculpted body.
She likes the vulnerability of this sweet spot, right below and between bones that protect his heart and lungs. She slightly digs her long fingernails into his flesh. He moans and moves as the blood red nails, painted just for him, dig deeper. Any other night it would have awoken him, but not tonight. When she takes her hand away she can see pink crescents left in his skin. She kisses the place and again breathes deeply the scent of him. Her movements are like ritual. She closes her eyes and lays back in bed, against David's strong arm.
Tonight is different though. Very different. When making his dinner Lily had slipped some tranquilizers, stolen from her crazy, drug-addicted father, into his meal. She throws the covers off. The streetlight now falls on her face. She pushes her black, short hair away from her bright green eyes. They glitter like those of a cat watching a mouse.
Tonight she wants to get from him what he refused to give her, his heart. She quoted a line to herself, "I always get what I want or I change my mind." She hadn't changed her mind yet. A good movie, her favorite movie, A Dream for an Insomniac. He was forcing her to do this really. He brought it upon himself by refusing to love her. If he had only loved her.
No one ever loved her. Except for her mother, and now she's dead. Her dad is crazy. He doesn't know who he is much less his own daughter enough to love her. All he ever wants from her is money for drugs and alcohol. He never calls her unless he's running low on his supply of substances he says he uses to, "forget the horrible things your mother put me through." It's a lie though. She knows he's a liar. Her mother had been nothing short of a saint. She had put up with her insane husband for years and had still managed to bring up Lily to be a wonderful girl.
She walks slowly down the stairs, turning on the lights she had just a few hours before, turned off. Her naked foot, with nails, for him, painted the same blood red as her fingernails, smacks the cold tiled floor of the kitchen. A few more steps and she reaches into the sink to pick up her knife. Her knife. She uses it whenever she has need of a knife. Opening packages, trimming down candles, chopping vegetables, she uses her knife to do all these common things.
Lily picks up the knife and droplets of water run down the handle unto the blade where they shine and drip off the pointed tip. She hears the drops of water as they each hit the floor. Splat. Splat. Splat. Splat. She pricks her finger with her knife and squeezes out a drop of blood. She smears it with her thumb and smiles at how nice the color looks in contrast to her white skin.
For months she's been thinking about this night. She is finally going to get what she wants. Standing in the kitchen and fingering her knife, she thinks about all the things she's given him over the years. She thinks of all the things she's done for him. There were so many times when she had been there for him. She had even forgiven him for once calling her at four in the morning drunk off his ass.
She had groggily answered the phone, vaguely thinking that it might be an emergency, to hear him stammer, "Lily. Lily, I'm so drunk Lily. I'm so fucking drunk."
In the background, one of his moronic friends yelled, "Bloody knuckles! Bloody knuckles!"
"David, what are you doing?" she sighed and closed her eyes.
"Lily, don't pay any attention to any fucking thing I say. I'm drunk. You should come over because we're so horny right now we'd fuck anything with a pussy. We're so drunk."
She gasped and then laughed. "That's not really how you should flatter yourself into a girl's pants, you know? I'm going to sleep now David and I'm turning my phone off."
She had been somewhere between amused and very offended by the phone call. The next day David and the moronic friend had apologized. Neither of them could really remember what had been said and when she told them the gist of the conversation the friend was very embarrassed. He had been yelling "bloody knuckles," because he had
been punching a door and he hurt his hand. He'd been more sorry than David. David didn't care if he'd been offensive to her. He knew she loved him and would still be there on Friday nights waiting for him. He had picked lilacs, her favorite flower, for her that week. Lily knew that he was just trying to show off for his friends though.
It makes her mad, thinking about these things. It makes her eyes flash. She's taken for granted. He doesn't appreciate her even the slightest bit. Tears begin to form in her eyes and they turn into emeralds. Hard, sharp, and sparkling. With a quick intake of breath she grasps the black handle of her knife in her right hand and heads upstairs.
Upstairs, in her room, she looks at the sleeping man. She climbs on the bed and straddles him, knife still gripped in her hand, fingers like steal. She points the knife at him. The knife pokes her favored spot and she presses down and moves it up with as much force as she has. She knew the sturdy sternum would be a problem, she had hidden a hand saw under her bed weeks ago.
Her knife draws a red line right up his middle. She knows to always cut away from herself, never towards. His blood matches perfectly the color he had chosen for her finger and toenails. She puts her knife aside and leans over him to listen to his breathing. It is very shallow. She must be careful not to disturb the fragile lungs. They are so close to the heart. She sighs longingly and puts her hands on the edges of the cut skin.
Time for the saw now. It goes very slowly but after a half an hour or so she's through. She sees it there. She puts her steal-like fingers into his chest and pulls the ribs further apart. It's beating, pumping life, mocking her. It's to be her most prized possession. A smile plays on her red lips. She stares at it and licks her lips. She picks up her knife again. This is the easy part, cutting veins, arteries and muscle. Finally, she is able to lift it in her hands. She holds it at eye level and peers curiously at the still beating
organ, blood running in crimson rivers through her fingers and down her arms.
"Well, David, I have it now, in my hands. Your heart. I really wish you would have just given it to me freely. I didn't want to have to take it forcefully, but there it is. I need for you to love me, respect me, appreciate all the crap I put up with from you. Now you will. Now, I have your heart."
On her vanity sits an ornate golden box. All around the base dance little "angel babies," as he had called them when he gave it to her smiling. It had been her Valentine's Day gift. One of the only nice things he'd ever done for her. She had lined the entire box with pieces of opal, the stone that heals the heart. The lid is off and sitting next to it, and shining brightly in the lamplight. It was the perfect size to hold the pulsating muscle. Lily lets it slide through her fingers and into the waiting box with a sound that reminds her of frozen juice sliding out of a can.
Lily looks at the bleeding corpse on her bed. The white sheets and comforter remind her of a dead rose. She didn't really like the pristine white of that stuff anyway. David is the one that likes things white and simple. But nothing is ever white and simple to Lily.
She reaches under the bed and finds a book her mother gave her years earlier. Lily had learned her lessons well. She turns to the pages that she doesn't have need for because she knows them like a bee knows how to get back to his hive. But having the book open, and next to her, is comforting. It reminds her of her mother and the great love they had shared. Her mother had taught her so many things. So many tricks and spells she had learned from her mother had come in handy over the years. Her lessons are coming in handy tonight, definitely.
She also gathers from beneath the bed a very sharp needle, black thread, some bloodstone, a length of blue silk and a red rose. She dances around her room, humming to herself, lighting the many candles scattered throughout. Red candles for love, gold for confidence, and blue for patience and health.
She sits and sews the water-colored silk into a little pouch ready for the ingredients that it needs to hold. Lily snaps the stem of the rose off and crushes the flower in her powerful hands. She puts the destroyed flower into the pouch along with bloodstone. She sews the opening tightly shut. David is laying there, open to the world. She carefully places the strange little packet into his empty heart cavity and grins at her handiwork.
She pushes the ribs back into their original spots and ties the pale pink bones together with some of the black thread. The sternum now looks fragile enough that someone could break it just by touching it. While she sews up the smooth edges of skin she says the spell to the spirits in the room. "Mother Earth, I bring you a gift of this man because I have come to you today to ask you to help me. I wish to remove his power over me. And return the power to me!" Lily hears the little spirits brushing past her hair. She continues, "Teach me to be wise and to trust in the beauty of all life. Show me the way so that I may grow in the understanding and wisdom of the Universe."
The light bulb in her lamp shatters, sending glass onto the floor in a shower of diamonds reflecting light from the candles. The flames of the candles dance as if someone is trying to blow them out but not blowing quite hard enough. "Make this man alive again," Lily yells as she makes the last stitch, "so that I might experience the power you have granted me over him!" The spirits are flying around so quickly it sounds like a tornado in her ears.
Whirling and whirling. So fast it's making her dizzy but she holds onto him. She feels the breath move his lungs. The box on her vanity jumps and the heart starts beating. Blood is running through David without the presence of that heart. Everything in the room is spinning and jumping and confusing her. Finally, she's so dizzy that she lays her head down on his shoulder and closes her eyes.
When she opens them David is nowhere to be seen. Lily quickly sits up and looks around. The room is completely clean. There's no evidence of what had gone on. When she lays back against the fluffy white pillows, her black hair fans out behind her, and she pulls the spotless comforter up to her perfectly clear green eyes. The red lips purse as she tries to figure out what's going on.
Her door opens and David steps in, carrying a tray with pancakes, fruit, and a glass of chocolate soy milk on it. She smiles at this unusual sight. His shirt is off and there's a red scar straight down his chest. "Good morning, Love," he says in almost a whisper. "You were sleeping pretty restlessly last night. You tossed and turned the whole night. I hope you weren't having nightmares. I woke up early and decided to give you a break in the kitchen."
He sits on the edge of her bed, where she sat the previous night to change, and sets the tray in front of her. She leans over the tray to run her hand down the scar, feeling the rough texture of it. "I don't know why you do that," he looks uncomfortable at being touched there. "My new heart is fine. I'll live for years with this one. I'm all better. I promise sweetheart." She smiles at his misconception of why he has that scar.
"Hey, I'll be right back. I forgot the syrup," he says as he stands up and kisses the top of her head. "And why don't I cut up one of those great apples too? That one I ate last night before bed was really tasty!" As soon as he's out of the room she reaches for her box. Lily opens it and, nestled amongst the bits of opal, there sits an apple core. Lily's eyes open in shock. She screams and throws the box, along with it's contents, at the wall.
David comes running up the stairs, two at a time, to see what's the matter. He comes in the room, apple in one hand, Lily's knife in the other. "Baby, what is it? what's wrong?"
"You took it back didn't you? Why'd you do that? You put that stupid apple core in my box," she screamed at him, jumping from under the covers.
"Lily, yeah, ok. Yeah, last night when I got done with my apple I stuck it in your box. I was going to get it out, I swear. I just forgot."
"You still don't want me to have it!"
"Have what? What are you talking about? Please, calm down," David is trying to speak in a soft voice.
She screeches and runs towards him, knocking the apple out of his hand and grabbing at her knife. She yanks it from his hand and pushes him back, against the wall. Still screaming, she brings her knife up over her head and down again. Lily is splattered with crimson as she rips through skin again and again. She doesn't take time to aim. She slashes through stomach and intestines. David yells and then is quiet, he watches her with dull eyes. She stabs higher between ribs, getting at the lungs and a gurgling noise sounds in his throat. Then, of course, she gets at his heart. She makes sure he'll never use it again.
She stops and pants, knife in hand. David's ravaged body slides to the floor and ends in a slump against the red streaked wall. She wipes off her knife on her pajamas and walks over to the apple she had knocked out of David's hands. She picks it up and cuts off a piece. She places it in her mouth and loves the feel of the cold, juicy flesh of the apple against the roof of her mouth. She remembers that apples were her mother's favorite fruit.