Amber

Don Harold

It hadn't taken long for me to find her. Maybe a few days. Perhaps less... Time slides through my fingers when I'm alone. Either way, she wasn't really one of those people who hide when others are around... You know the type, those people who cringe into their corners when shadows pass by their windows? This person was the opposite. She was a social bug. Once in a while people grew bored of her, and that is when she sought new company... Lucky me.

Tavern lighting with it's little shadowy corners didn't diminish her smile. Red lips under a pair of amber-shaded eyes, such beautiful eyes..In any case, she wasn't something to be discarded and ignored, that I knew... I smiled back, though confuzed, I chatted with her for a long time, watching her carefully, warily.

It hadn't actually taken much to spend a day with her. Patience, it seemed was more one of my virtues than her own, as she rummaged about for the day, with me there, at her side, waiting, biding time, nodding when I thought she wanted me to and shaking my head if the questions she asked deemed that I not respond to her positively. Other than that, a shrug was adequet. Simple as it sounds, it felt at the time to be a horrifying experience, as she walked along, her small dark-haloed head tilted up to me, expectantly awaiting a response.

Numb. That is a word for what I felt all day long, as she spoke and I only barely registered what she said, I tried to smile to her, curiously watching her. Oftentimes my eyes would wander back to her eyes and stay there for a long time. She indulged me in this, at least for a little while, before moving on.

Blood stained my hands. It was sticky, and it seemed to cling to me, even as I pressed my hands flat on the bedsheets, I wept. I wasn't taking off any of the grime, only making small sets of distorted and misshaped dots.. The eye rolled on the sheets as I pressed my fingers to the straw bed in despair, and I moaned, watching it roll to my hands, and did nothing as it came to a halt against the small fleshy part between my fingers... Sorry, I jumped a bit ahead... Let me tell you what happened, please?

It hadn't been hard, physically, but emotionally, it was exhausting. A fury had contained me and I loathed myself to put the curved blade to her throat and press down hard, my free hand reaching to her hand quietly and pressing down.

A moment later, and her eyes were open. Wide. Those amber eyes shone in the dark like a lit torch and she knew very suddenly what I was doing. I could fee it in her chest and her throat, somehow, through the knife that she was trying with all her might to scream. Her hands flew at me, but due to sheer size and persistence, she had no chance of fending me off with them, so I ignored them.

We were both crying, and I could feel the tears run between my fingers, to her withering mouth, that had been so pretty when smiling, was now torn into a final grimace of horror and disgust, when I tore the knife through her. It was dull, and it was less sliding through her than it was tearing. I sat there, my hips ontop of hers, pinning her down as her body spasmed underneath me, and I held her down, weeping under my breath, I shook my head, and closed my eyes. Though I hadn't heard any scream come from her mouth, or bubble from between my fingers, I could hear it, ringing in my head, hard.

I could feel blood reach my face as soon as I pulled my hand from her neck- it seeped from underneath my fingertips before I was even free of her then it dripped away, back to where it was pooling on my clothes and on her neck, the bed. I rolled aside and laid there, I could feel the blood on my cheek, and for a long hour, I sat there, watching her still form, no longer breathing and no longer blinking, just staring off, up into her dilapidated ceiling and dreaming...

It was tedious to cut the eye out without damaging it. I had to use the knife handle to break the small but firm bones that would have otherwise framed the small amber eyes, trying to be careful and precise through my tears... Everything blurred and I could feel the knife grow harder to hold onto in my current state, I frowned and proceeded to cut away flesh and bone peices that clung to other shattered remenants, pulling the eye with my fingertips, slowly teasing it out of the socket.

Then it was in my hands, this seductive eye that had wooed me into bed with her, where I had taken the liberty of carving both of them away. She hadn't felt me, but the screams still burned in my head, pounding until I couldn't bear it anymore