I wanted her to not only die, but suffer. I wanted to grind her soul into nothing.
I wanted to bend her into treble cleft screams and leave her in a locket, safe inside her jewelry box. I wanted to make her so very mine that her fleshy little frame snapped. And her frail heart would drip down a broken record uterus, gathering bacteria in her panties that perverts would mistake for menstrual blood. I wanted to throw her out in the garden with last week's mystery casserole
and not have the decency to bury her. I told myself:
She'll decay with dead flowers that should have blessed my pillows and kitchen tables while they still lived, and the dogs will piss on her while she tries to sleep.
I wanted to be her end, but I ended up with her pale orchid mouth, feathered and damp and pretty as all, seducing every molecule of life from my lungs and leaving only a deep, frantic hole. I wanted to paint her cheeks with bruises, the color of want, but I died as her cheeks flushed the pinks and whites and blacks of a Japanese flower garden or a flaming goddess flamingo.
Burnt into my pages like a plague, I dreamt of black lace and ribbons tied into her spine,
as if I could unravel in her marrow and inhabit her womb, licking the smoke trails and fingerprints from her barren bones and walls. She will be the kingdom of skull and bones I always wished for in a world of fantasy-lined cloud doors and muses without keys,
and I will be buried in the carcasses of her past lovers and victims alike, lying in ditches where their eyes should be.
I wanted to incarnate the icicles on her eyelids in the winter, my Queen of snow and death, she dreams as everything dies. I would melt into pools of water worshipping her toes, come spring.
I wanted her to hate me enough to haunt me.
I still want to make love to her, too.