Salt on my tongue while I’m waiting for the gun.
Piecing together what little I have left to scream.
My coffee mocks me and the consistent coughing I expel just to try to say to her I have nothing left to tell.
There is no reason for explaining how she is pulling away from us.
There is nothing left to hold across this dingy diner table.

With something to lose in my back pocket,
I let her pull the trigger, keeping eye contact with her grinding, bearing teeth;
Lips a deep obsidian – as ominous as the cloak of Death -
Making her gums look more of a grey, watered-down pink.
No salty-sweet liquid smile spreads between those lips.
No more warming gesture left to give….

Deeply split:
Right through the skull.
I **** in air through my teeth.
Dead and shattered, I refuse the refill from the waiter.
I’ve got no stomach anyway.

She eats my brain, feasts on the memories, ripping them with her blood-black canines.
She tears my lips right off;
My face;
Giving me little room to say my piece.

I’m only now just starting to hate her.

Down her gullet goes my sight.
I’m blinded by the spit she threw into my eyes.

I really meant nothing to her anyway.

My body cripples under her steely knife talons.

I dream of Afterlife and what peace it has to offer:
A couch to myself.
Room and
Space and
Time.
No hidden, broken shards of her shoved into the crevices of my home.
Bare and
Abandoned.
Alone and
Undisturbed.

As I dream, her hands ravenously caress mine.
Luring her prey in, I see. Killing with saccharine kindness.

She still cares about me.
She hopes I can forgive her.
She still wishes for me to be there.

darling you just ate – no. ****. darling you just tore me into shreds.

She frowns.
Brow furrows.

Her blade finger nails drag away
leaving deep swelling, gashes on my hands.
Black nails.
Black lips.

I fleck the rust off my rage and it burns anew.
We have done this far too many times.

I never wanted to ******’ be here in the first place…. You brought me here. Remember that.

I need a ******’ cigarette. This coffee is *****.

She looks like she need a cigarette too.

She only smokes when I’m around, and since she’s trying to **** me off, she refuses my offer to dip outside to refresh our lungs with nicotine.

This diner air is still and
stale and
suffocating.

Hell, maybe I’ll die twice today. That would be something.

Her feet tap underneath us.
She is only waiting for me to say everything is alright.
That she is in the clear.
That I will just disappear from this very spot once she gets up to go.

Listen, I will gladly keep clear from your path, but do not, do not, keep breaking me to bits if it’s you who keeps needing me around. You want rid of me, you have to not need me. I have no control. It doesn’t work like that. I hardly think it’s fair th-



The old man in the corner slurping at his spoonful of soup, raised his eyes as he watch the lady in the dark cotton dress rush out of the dim-lit diner in a fuss. A swoosh of wind met her outside, causing her sleek, crimson scarf to almost catch in the closing door. He pitied the poor stranger. She had been sitting alone, looking frustrated and disoriented, speaking pleadingly into what he could only assume was a telephone headset. His wife had bought him one before he retired, but he barely ended up using it regardless. He felt it made him look to others as if he were talking to himself.