The Art of Trembling - Selena Kyle (top ten ebook reader txt) 📗

I was peeling back my skin. I was taking it off. My need to expand was greater than my need to be bound unnecessarily tight. That is when he came in. I saw him and he saw me. He saw my bones, fleshless and gleaming. The stench of copper and dreams was overwhelming, even to me, and he did not flinch. He made no move to run, or hide, or to even look away from my grotesque form, nothing but a pile of bones in a corner. He was not ashamed to see me in my vulnerable state of literal nakedness. He did not wretch, he did not laugh. He just was, and was, and was… and right then I knew.

I picked my skin up off of the floor like last night’s party dress, wrung it out, and, wrinkled and dirty as it was, I stepped back into it. I affixed it to my bones as I inched my entrails back into their tight pale casing and when I looked up he was still there, watching with quiet curiosity. Cautiously, trusting him with all my being, the needle with the sparkling white thread hanging from it was passed from my trembling hand to his. As gracefully as was possible, I slowly, seductively, turned my back to him and used both arms to hold my raven hair off of the gaping wound. Like a woman asking her lover to help her zip her dress, I was asking a stranger to help me put myself back together.

I was peering over my blood smeared, porcelain shoulder as he made a knot at the end of the thread and pushed the needle through for the first time. Bright, white turned crimson in an instant. I could feel the bond between us growing stronger, punctuated by the chunks of gore falling sporadically to the ground. It was as if, while he was stitching my wound, he had also stitched our souls right together. Never to be apart again.

He used his teeth to tear through the thread, the needle dropped to the ground without so much as a sound and his sheepish eyes once again met mine. My gaze dropped to the small smear of me that was gracing his lip just as his tongue made it go away, it only took a moment. He wasn’t disgusted in the slightest by the fact that he just consumed a part of me. Shamelessly I turned to face him once again and as I did I reached my hand out and gently took his cold, clammy, hand in mine. Quietly I crawled inside.

Exhausted as I was, I felt like I could have slept in his steely, grey eyes for days but something wasn‘t right. He should’ve been shaking. He wasn’t shaking…

Publication Date: 04-07-2010

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