A Novel Proposal: Chapter 1, Part 2

Carrying on the tale- Check HERE for part 1.

           I used to sleep peacefully and well, before.  I could fall asleep in between breaths, curled up beside her, my right hand on her left breast where I could feel her heart fluttering beneath my fingers.  I would breathe in her hair and count her heartbeats until I fell into a dream.  All night I would dream and I would inhale her youth, her spirit and her charm.  Every day I woke up with a smile.  Now my heart is as heavy and bruised as the February sky.  My heart is punctured and ice water drains out into my veins.  I haven't slept for 6 days.  This is night number 7.

            My cigarette is finished and I toss the last glowing ember over the edge of the balcony, watching it fall the 19 floors to the black and glossy concrete below.  I want to follow it.  I need to follow it.  How many seconds would it take for me to hit the ground?  But if I have it in me to fly, why am I holding a knife?  I don't remember bringing the knife outside.  It was a housewarming present from my mother.  I wonder how she'll take the news.  I wonder if she will feel abandoned now as I did so many years years ago, on the day she and my father packed up and left me behind.  Left here, in the cold, grey, dirty, beshitted and damned city.  The knife is so shiny in my hands.  I flirt with the blade.  I tease myself, dragging the blade along the soft skin of my inner forearm.  I haven't broken the skin, not yet.  I've merely scratched the surface.

            I finish the bourbon in my glass and light one last cigarette.  I pick up the knife and see that it's still shiny and reflective even now, even chromed in red.  I can still see the reflection of my eye through the blood that is smeared down the length of stainless steel.  I don't remember making the final cut, but I can feel the ice water that was so recently, so safely ensconced in my veins, now dripping down my hands.  Dripping off the ends of my increasingly numb fingertips.  Pooling on the balcony floor by my feet.  With every pulse, with every beat of my too-frail heart, I can feel the metallic sting in my bleeding left wrist.  It is simultaneously strange and familiar.  My eye is still reflected in the blood stained blade when another bolt of lightning crashes down, so near that I can feel it.  The hairs on my arm stand up.  So do the hairs on the back of my neck.

            That is when I see Him for the first time, standing behind me, looming over me, reflected in steel and blood.  He sees me notice him and smiles.  He smiles at me the way a shark would smile.  He smiles at me the way death would smile.

            "Tonight you live, tonight you die.  Either way, tonight you fly."  His whisper sounds like white noise in my head, like something heavy being dragged through gravel.  It seems to emanate from inside me and reverberate around me.  I don't have much time left.  He lifts me, suddenly, in his arms.  He is inexplicably, incomprehensibly strong.  

            "Choose," he says...



Stay tuned for part 3 next week....