Falling in Love with Marissa:

The Beginnings of the Cycle

by Megan Auffart
*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*
This is what happens when you listen to Tool. Great band, but makes me write sequels that I never intended to write. Blame them if you don't like this. Read and REVIEW.

Today it came to my attention that we were all alone. That there was no one up there. That our lives were just like toads bumbling around on a log wishing that something would happen, that something would be different. And then a snake would come along and eat them. Toads. Snake. The image wouldn’t leave my head.

I mentioned my revelation to Marissa as she sat on the couch in her living room, reclined with a blanket covering her lower half like a Roman empress at her leisure.

She smiled at me; winking darkness with the black sinkhole of the gap between her two bloodstained teeth, and with her free hand summoned me over to her. The other hand was holding a dead rat that one of the traps in the basement had paralyzed, but not killed.

I walked over to her, breathing in her scent. The smell of rodent blood overpowered the way her skin smelled and so I was disappointed, but at the same time relieved. Whenever I smelled her breath, her skin, the ecstasy would render me unable to understand all but the simplest of orders. I wanted to hear what Marissa had to say.

“Sweetness, you are alone in this world except for me.”

“But what about the other people…?”

She dismissed them with a wave of her hand, “The other people don’t matter. They have done nothing for you.”

I nodded, accepting that, reflecting over my life before I had met Marissa. All my mother had done for me was to go into labor. All my father had done was raise me until he could legally force me to leave his home. She was right; no one had done anything for me like Marissa. No one mattered as much as Marissa.

“You’re the only one that matters, my love,” I said.

“And you are the only one that I care about,” she whispered back, and then something began to happen.

The conversation we’d just had began to repeat itself in my mind and I couldn’t stop it, no matter how I tried. Was this what Marissa had been talking about? The disease? Was this…

Thoughts interrupted, my head swam as small flecks of light swirled in front of my eyes and I realized that I was starting to sway. The information she was giving me… the words that were marching up and down my skull like Vietnamese soldiers, like Waterloo and like General Patton giving orders, they were the greatest story ever told. I didn’t know what the various syllables meant anymore, but there were beautiful, meaningful, right. I couldn’t handle it.

Something was happening to me. I could feel it, my blood churning like angry eels, a whole tub of eels swarming over one another, liquid creatures ready to bite. There was something wrong here. Something had been wrong since when I woke up, but nothing as bad as this. The eels were biting me. My blood wanted out.

Marissa frowned at me, her ever-moving eyes looking almost angry as I stumbled backwards, falling. She took another bite of the rodent, ripping out its spine with her teeth as splatters of blood decorated her bare breasts. The rat squealed and then went limp, its tail falling straight like heaven’s exclamation point. Everything spun about me and then I felt something wet strike my face.

I felt around with my hand, the room turning circles and pulsating. Marissa had thrown the rat at me. I groped around on the stained carpeting, trying to find it as a pressure sank in and out of my skull, squeezing and then disappearing. Faithless whore. Godless widow. Heartless night. Oh, the intolerance!

There. I wrapped the meatiness of my fingers around the rat and pulled it closer to me, violently shivering.

Marissa’s voice seemed to come from all around the room as I blinked wildly, trying to see again. Her voice seemed to chase away the endless dirge of the sounds in my brain, and her meaning came through in quick razorblades of understanding.

“I warned you, sweetness. I told you that you wouldn’t last. And I couldn’t even taste you before it happened...”

She was displeased! My lady was displeased with me! I couldn’t handle it and I raised my hand to my lips and I bit down on that stretchy meat between the pointer finger and the thumb. It was the only way I could think of. How else to do it, I had no idea.

The pain was red flowers, blooming in constant climax, as I shrieked, biting harder and harder until I felt my flesh give way, a chunk of my own meat landing on my tongue. The taste was not pleasant and my hand was nothing but fire.

The eels had found a way out, it seemed. As the room slowed its spinning, I watched them slither from out of my wound, barely hissing in a constant stream. The eels were making their escape. I hadn’t realized how red they would be, nor how painful.

I took a breath and the room came to a halt. My hand was burning with venom and throbs. The eels had turned back into a stream of blood. I briefly wondered how I would get the bloodstains out of my trousers, but my hand hurt too much for me to think about it.

The pain did what nothing else could and the delirium slipped away. I could see Marissa again, staring at me with her face a painting of mixed emotions. A portrait by the most skillful artist in the world couldn’t show me what her face was showing me now; sadness, anger, horror, lust, love… The list could go on forever, but the most important thing was that I could see her again. That I wasn’t dying. Yet.

“You came back…” she murmured, and my heart thrilled for having pleased her. I hadn’t failed her. My love. My life.

“I had to. I can’t leave you. I love you,” I said as the blood from my hand joined the puddle from the rodent, mingling the two together to make a large crimson aura around the rat’s corpse.

“Come here. Quickly,” she ordered and I obeyed, leaping to my feet and scurrying over.

Her fingers, quick and soft, curled around my wrist and brought my injured hand towards her face.

She opened her mouth and closed her lips around the wound and began to suck, probing the angry nerves with her tongue, making me shiver with every one of her swallows. I felt my skin grow cooler and cooler and I was fascinated with how blue my veins were. Or maybe it was just how pale I was getting, my arm the same shade of white as the cracked pitcher in the kitchen, the walls of my bedroom, the shade of her teeth with the gap in the middle.

She drew back too soon and I collapsed on top of her. Inwardly horrified at having profaned Marissa with my unworthy body, I struggled to get up, but my legs didn’t really seem to be able to do anything except kick weakly in the air.

Marissa reached down and, instead of pushing me away from her as I felt I deserved, she instead pulled my head up to next to her face and held me like a child. I tried to smile, but my face felt strange and I couldn’t, exactly. However, Marissa must have known how happy I was. She was so beautiful.

“Your hand is healed,” she said, lifted up my arm in front of my face to show me the layer of fresh skin covering a fleshy dent between the thumb and pointer finger.

“I cannot move,” I tried to say, but the words came out in a mumbled whisper.

She hissed her silence at me and I was satisfied to see that the two sharpest teeth of her mouth, the canines, had elongated themselves to their natural state. That indicated that my lady had been satisfied with the taste of me. Their surface was the most wonderful shade of pink.

“You have served me well, sweetness,” Marissa said as she moved out from beneath me, allowing me to rest on her couch in her place. The seat was as cool as her body. And it smelled like her.

I listened to her as she moved out of the door and into what I guessed was the bedroom. A rustle of falling papers and the creak of a lid; she was opening the large mahogany trunk that I was forbidden to touch. A sharp crack as the lid fell back into place and then Marissa was suddenly back in the room, leaning over me with a small box in her hand.

“What’s that?” I managed to breathe as the feeling began to return to my injured hand. I couldn’t move it yet, but I would be able to, soon. I still felt embarrassed for having succumbed to the primary stages of the disease.

She opened the box to reveal a blue velvet interior with nothing inside save a quivering ball in one corner. With one of her smooth hands, she lifted the thing up for me to see it better as it unfolded itself, its many hands waving futilely as she dangled it over my head.

“The disease withers all those who stay near me, but you knew that and you’re still here.”

“And always will be,” I murmured.

“Yes,” she nodded and forced open my mouth with her free hand. Carefully, she dropped the struggling demon inside and I began to shudder as I felt him crawl towards the back of my mouth, into the esophagus. I felt a pinching sensation and then a pressure in my neck. The demon was making his way up into my head.

“Why did you do that?” I asked her, managing to wiggle some of my fingers, adjust my arm for a second before the weariness returned.

“The mustard made the demon uncomfortable and so it fled my skull before it withered away. Now it’s in you.”

I still didn’t understand and Marissa saw that.

“There’s no great memories or secrets in your head that can feed it nearly so well as your pain.”

I bent a knee, pleased that I could move my legs again.

“Then I won’t die?”

Marissa smiled.

“You won’t wither away, my sweetness. But there’s more than just the disease that can kill you.”

“So as long as I’m with you when I die,” I answered back as I felt the beginnings of a terrible itching in my skull. “So as long as we’re together.”

Marissa nodded at me and left the room, leaving me alone as I concentrated on regaining my strength with the aid of the demon in my skull.

The End

Please leave a review...