blistering sweetness blistering sweetness blistering sweetness blistering sweetness. i felt a clear, cold hand against my back, shivered at the touch. alone with destiny's reviled cousin discipline, feeling the teeth in my shoulders, the tongue against my cheek, the fingernails embedded deep into my erection, drawing blood into a cup, a memorial to incest, black pain as a banquet. "how deep do you imagine me?" she asked, "how vivid is your awareness?" snapshots of lust and wandering attention, swept away by the virus, the scrytch, the hand caressing my wounds, the delicious pull of the undercurrent, the angst of the television commercials that sold me pressure, significance, sanctity for a bloodied dollar. "how much do you love me?" she asked, the bastard glass of wine, breasts like dragons breathing fire against my chest, warmth i did not deserve, flesh i could never call my own.

lizard tongue snaked from my mouth, wrapping itself around her neck, snapping it simply. i didn't need her, for god's sake.

as the lifeblood poured from the corner of her mouth, the visions came. raped by a dozen aliens. razor appendages penetrating every orifice, bulbous fleshy masses in her mouth, dripping painful black ejaculate, spurting viciousness and horror, demons summoned by the weakness of her dyingness. the corpse is animated. discipline a ghost he chases. he alone with no companions, he is the one who summons caustic old pretension, crafts odes to dead end phrases, picks scabs and sucks the blackness, feels the razors in his throat, in his ass, and no matter the distraction, he shall soldier on. drink that glass of lonely blood, his own mouth upon his wounds, bludgeoning stones against her skull, smashing it like paper bags, strapped against a wall of quivering skin, embalming fluid injected into the corners of his eyes, directly into his eyeballs, into the soft flesh between his fingers, between his scrotum and his anus. puking her presence into his lap. exploring it, explaining it, gasping.

"you don't know me," she says, suffocating her child with his rhetoric, sawing through his chest with thrift store steak knifes, grade school insults.

it is the nature of the virus that he must endure this barrage of almost-intention, this wave of not-quite-meaning. when she feels every nerve in her tight body contract with the need to puke her wildest dreams onto the cock she sees before her, when he tongues a crevice made of glistening sweet blisters and ooze made up of cream and ambiguity, in those moments we see the greatest proliferating of the deadly virus known as scrytch. we see its ultimate desolation, the world laid waste amidst a toppled stretch of towers and heartless pleasure. they fuck as though it mattered. blood pouring from their mouths like waterfalls. sex ripped from soul like bandage torn from skin, sex torn from hidden depths with all the artless precision of the casually insane. they fuck by pounding bloodied stump against savage injury, reckless turns of phrase, gagging them, immersing them in power and frothing orgasm.

"i would only suggest," says dr. nicholas solitude to his extraordinary student andrea change, "that if we had the ammunition, we'd exterminate them all."

he is able to discern one final meaning before she wraps the plastic around his head and tightens it around his neck. that he was yanked into self-recursion and cliche against his will. that he expected much much more from all the prophets, all the convulsions. that every time some stranger knocked him down and fucked him, every time some banker's cum nearly choked him with dismay, every time some wartime atrocity got labeled with his name and gave him hard-on after hard-on, he understood the way his life had been a blessing. and as she strangled him, a wave of pleasure sweeping through her mutilated torso, she knew that this was just one more sac of misery that the world no longer had to worry about, and she smiled, and her fangs shined bright, and she took a new, more unfortunate name that you will learn soon enough, cousin of slavery, bastard child of abuse, you will learn soon enough, as she makes eye contact and drives you from your home.