Free Needles & Sins by John Everson Page B

single couch offered us a sterile respite I dared not indulge in. I knew all about the yin-yang of pleasure/pain that love caused in death. And I liked my death quiet, and with little blood— little of my own anyway. At least, that’s the thought that crossed my mind as I wiped a pink smear on the cuff of my shirt. I was falling in love. We were doomed.
    “Come, sit with me,” she begged.
    I followed, and my blood began to boil beneath my skin as I smelled the lilac rich scent of her. She handed me a goblet of purple nectar, and told me to drink.
    “The grocery downstairs had this,” she said. “Transcendence Nectar. I have never tasted anything like it!”
    I inhaled its fragrance, and knew then that the lilac smell was not her, but the drink. It made the brain reel just to take one sniff. I gingerly tested it with my tongue, and nearly choked at the heaven of its taste. “Oh my God,” I gasped, and she giggled like a girl, hitching herself up on her knees to lean in and whisper in my ear.
    “I thought there was no God,” she laughed.
    I tossed back a shot of the thick purple elixir, and the room disappeared in a spiral of fireworks. A thousand hands rubbed and traced each nerve of my skin. I think I passed out for a moment. It was amazing; just what heaven should be about.
    “No,” I said finally, minutes later. “There is no God, but Transcendence is definitely from heaven.”
    “You said sometimes souls here do die…or at least they fade away,” she said. “If they are not going to a heaven, where do they go?”
    I stroked her cheek, and when my fingers pulled away, her skin was slick with blood. Hers, or mine, I wasn’t sure. But it had begun. When we touched, our hearts bled. The pain was soon to follow. And the flensing. I shivered.
    “Perhaps they are recycled and reborn again to life,” I said. “That’s what the Buddhists would have you believe.”
    “What do you believe?”
    “I believe there is a time and a place for everything. And when yours is done, you should let it be done and stop holding on to past and memory. I think that those who disappear have finally stopped holding on to nothing.”
    “Letting go,” she sighed.
    I nodded.
    “The shopkeeper told me to buy the Transcendence in small doses, because it is as vile when it corrupts as it is exquisite when it is fresh. Should I run downstairs and get some more, for both of us? He also said it gives you an awesome buzz if you have more than a shot or two.”
    I laughed and said sure, I’d have more, if she was buying. Then I opened my wallet and gave her a slip of currency so that she could actually afford to buy some. Even in death, we continue to live by the false principle of valueless paper equaling valuable goods.
    She slipped out the door and down the stairs, and I leaned back on the couch and felt my heart pound. What was I doing? Just days before I had scouted her out as a worthy meal, someone whose fear and flesh I could feed off of, for a while at least, until she either faded or flew. Now I was almost playing house with her, and surely about to indulge in the ultimate act of sacrifice—love kissing lust in a bloody twine of razor wire and delirium.
    From outside the small room, a scream broke high above the din of traffic, and then another. Fear gripped my heart. I ran to the window, and saw the body lying just outside, in the middle of the street.
    It was her.
    I dashed out the door and into the night to save her. Once on the street, I saw her tormentor was still there, taunting her with unknown words, and thrashing her back and face with the lash of a long leather whip. Its end was threaded in wicked barbed hooks, and my love’s face was already all but torn away after what I supposed was only a handful of blows. The white of one of her eyes looked doubly large, as he’d ripped the eyelid off with his hooks.
    But it was the sickle in his left hand that had truly done her in. He’d swiped a clean, deadly sweep right