Margaret

The woman tossed the frazzled red hairs out of her face to reveal a vicious expression. She let out a long, slow breath, shoulders thrown forward and up against gravity, her arms pulled back and down, bent awkwardly and no doubt painfully against the metal slate on which she was bound to. After the exhalation ended, she breathed in, quickly, sharply, and said, “With God as my witness—”

As may be expected, that wasn’t what the vile creature slapping her wanted to hear. It wasn’t quite human. It probably crawled out of hell. What did it care about the man up top? It slapped her again, this time striking on the right instead of the left, and the grotesquely coiling fingers snagged on her cheek, talons sinking a mere millimeter into the skin and catching there. She let out a little shriek, which then deteriorated into a thin hiss of pain.

The incident, quite inappropriately, reminded her of a cat she’d had as a child, a nasty thing, like this monster before her. It had been a stray. It probably had a harsh childhood. It despised her. But there was something about its claws—they would sink into her flesh and stick like glue, piercing deeper and deeper even as she tried to disengage the cat. It never tore open the flesh so deep as a well or as wide as church doors, but it left little pinpricks of blood and lasting twinges of pain.

Unfortunately, the similarity didn’t last long; the creature’s inordinately long talons were stronger than the woman’s skin, tougher than it, much tougher than a cat’s, and they continued slowly on, over her cheekbone, arcing just under her eyelashes. Blood pooled in the gouges and painstakingly trailed dark rivers down her face. Tears dotted her eyes, but it was assuredly most unintentional. The woman hated crying. She hated hell, too, but she supposed she might as well get used to the idea, because she was going to die soon. And who knew what would happen then?

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” the monster muttered, and reached up its other hand to pry its twin from the woman’s face. It was quite inconvenient. It was quite unhelpful. What if she got an infection and died? Good riddance, it thought smartly, good riddance. She had been no help at all. Besides, she wouldn’t have time to get an infection, why had the thought bothered to cross its mind? In fact, it didn’t even think she was a devout woman. It could smell the lack of God in her like the lack of pie in an oven set to four hundred degrees and left to smolder. It smelled like burnt air, raw heat. Volatility, instability.

The woman, to her credit, was very tolerant to pain. She steeled herself, steadied herself, took another deep breath—which was thankfully not followed by any remarks about God, good grief—and let the creature pull its hand from her face. She was by no means grateful or complacent, but there was something akin to relief in the breath she released. An ill-founded and illogical relief.

It looked at its hand, palm-up, after finishing its removal, the blankly investigative expression morphing into a large grimace, as though its hand would never be clean again.

“Yes, well, you’re welcome,” it said with a preemptive clearing of its throat, hands folded politely behind its back as an afterthought, as though its own hand had not been at stake. It shifted a little awkwardly, tipping precariously on its feet—excuse me, hooves—and then realized it had absolutely no reason to be awkward and no sentiment with which to enact the emotion. It clapped its hands together with a large and genuine smile. “Hello, Margaret!” it cried, as though it had never seen the woman in the entirety of its long and pointless existence. The needle-tooth grin widened and, it seemed, sharpened.

The exact way the teeth fit together disturbed Margaret in a way she felt she could never properly describe and, indeed, never get the chance to. Her breath did not catch in her throat. Her eyes did not swell and her heart did not stop for emotional reasons. But she stared. She stared and she waited and it almost appeared as if it went on any longer then her breath would catch—her eyes would swell—her heart would—

Stop, it seemed. Like now. But she was so permeated with fear she could not account for it. The creature leaned forward, craned its impeccably straight back, nose broaching the tussled mass of hair that half-obscured Margaret’s face. She stayed completely still and did as she had always done: breathed, and nothing more. It closed its eyes demurely, the small and razor-sharp eyelashes it donned brushing dangerously above her eyebrows. She felt the skin part beneath them. Further, thinner rivulets of blood ran over her eyelids and gathered in her own eyelashes. Her breath sounded harsh and unnatural in the quiet. She smelled of sweat, she thought, and that is one of the last few things Margaret thought—she felt so lost in non-thought then, at that moment—

“You smell as wonderful as I remember, Margaret,” said the creature with a saccharine smile, lips pulled sweetly in either direction. It almost looked human, for only adoration and affection can make any and all creatures appear so. Cats, dogs, nameless and empty things.

It was then that she finally noticed her own breath had caught, frozen somewhere between her lips and her lungs, and her heart was beating fast and painfully and it hurt, it hurt more than the cut on her cheek did, and she smelled of sweat, she smelled of fear and disorientated panic.

The monster knew such unproductive fun was over. Without further preamble, though not without relish, it smiled soothingly and kindly and wiggled one talon into her throat, somewhere near the base of her neck. She gasped, then gasped again, then gargled and burbled as it brought the claw down her throat, past the collarbones, down the middle of her chest, almost as though it were performing a school dissection and she were the pig, the frog, the shark, slathered in oil and formaldehyde, and its talon was the scalpel. Blood, that dark red, such a lovely and awful color, it bloomed at the line of the wound, surfacing like bubbles in a swamp, simply buoying up like a bloated corpse. It brought the claw down and further, swept a perpendicular line at either end of it by which the skin could be pulled back and even cut off, if need be. It paused to furtively admire the expression on her face.

Her breaths kept coming, ragged and jumpy, her eyes wide and narrowed and her eyebrows low in something like horror and disgust and reprehension, in absolute shock, her lips parted and drawn into abstract proportions of some emotion, some feeling the monster couldn’t place, could never place, and had never stopped trying. The high pitched wheeze and the whoosh of air that was the breathing of a desperate and dying human never ceased to fascinate the creature. It was almost like music, but the sort of music only an animal made, something natural and significant and meant to be, but only in the dead of night, when crickets chirped and owls cooed tunefully. It was among those ordinary sounds that were equally beautiful, meant not to be bottled up or recorded to but sought out and listened to, listened to, as long as it was possible according to the circumstances.

The creature came back to itself with quite a start. It accidentally tapered the end of the line it had neatly slit with a jagged streak. She gasped fitfully. It blinked. “You’re quite distracting. Honestly. Why haven’t you died yet?”

Her skin jerked and seized and palpitated like a man having a fit or a fish suffocating out of water. Her legs kicked and twitched. No answer seemed forthcoming.

It hummed, eyes softening a moment as its eyelids dropped halfway. It had a sort of jaded look on its face. With an appreciative and distant sigh, it said, “Fine, fine by me, never had an audience before.”

It wrenched out its hand with considerably more force than strictly necessary, almost hitting itself in the face. It looked to the fingers, disbelief and then mild irritation etching across it features. “Really?” It asked the hand, then shook its head in distaste. “Could’ve done that earlier,” it murmured, eyes drawn skyward with nonchalance as it grasped the separated flaps of skin parting Margaret in two. It peeled them away from each other to reveal the Margaret inside.

Margaret looked half-seeing into her chest and made several unintelligible and nonsensical noises, something of a song in itself, but the monster thought it nothing compared to her breathing—which was now…slowing. The symphony was coming to an end. It was on its last legs. It drank the water. It was dying. So many euphemisms and so little time.

Margaret was dying, too, but that was hardly as important in the grand scheme of things.

It sighed again, and continued its work with the furrowing of the brows and the careful tugging at a lip—had to mind the teeth, you know—that only plagued a doctor in severe concentration during surgery.

“You’re not much of a talker when it comes down to it, are you?” It let the words fill the lapse in one-sided conversation, then tilted its head at that, as though questioning its own judgment in saying such a thing, shaking its head dismissively. “Sorry, that was a bit rude of me, wasn’t it? I suppose you’ll just have to forgive me. Right, Margaret?” Silence. “Yes, I see my own point. Hmm.” A sudden, beaming smile lit up its face as it peered down into Margaret’s exposed chest cavity, which was most definitely not what it sounded like. “Watch this!” it exclaimed in a sort of whisper, almost like a child who has the most wonderful trick to show his parents.

It tore apart the rib cage with a brutal snap—nothing like twigs, really, as far as the monster was concerned—and scooped up the weakly-beating heart in its palms. “Oh,” it sighed, in much less of an annoyed fashion. It leaned close and breathed in the smell of the heart—smelled moist and alive and warm. Malice crept up its face as it licked the thrumming flesh of the muscle and let out a small, muffled laugh, like a straight-laced schoolboy that hears a naughty joke and can’t help but find it funny.

It looked with lips pursed coyly to the woman’s eyes and wondered if she could still feel much of anything—her eyes fixed waveringly on the creature. It almost thought it saw a spark of a response then, something terrible and different, but it was an emotion the monster recognized. It looked appraisingly at the heart with something almost like skepticism on its face. That was it. That was the trigger, that was the critical hit. The heart, had it been free-thinking and sentient, would have felt embarrassed and ashamed at that look. The monster felt the pulse weaken even more dramatically than it already had prior.

“Don’t die on me yet, Margaret!” it ordered sternly, then smiled, as though it had only been joking, then carefully, though swiftly, bent further, curled closer. “It’s quite like the yolk of an egg,” it explained, with the skin of the heart pressed against its lips. It was practically kissing the heart—no, it actually was, wasn’t it—and a devious smirk curved its lips. “Not the taste, but the manner in which I eat it. I suppose you can imagine why.”

It placed the heart in its mouth, let the skin just begin to moisten for a few seconds while the teeth gradually began to delve into the muscle like needles into a balloon ready to burst. It couldn’t bring the heart too far away from the still-somewhat-breathing Margaret, of course, but it was quite tired of bending over. It wanted to be done with the matter.

Margaret clearly wanted the same—her eyes were heavy-lidded, and if not for the sweat and blood caking her skin and the issue of her torn-open torso, she would merely be a woman settling into sleep and sweet dreams after a long day at the office. That was the impression that the dazed and far-away look in her eyes conveyed.

It bit down. Blood gushed throughout its mouth—from a still-beating heart, it might add triumphantly, if a bit imbued with fatigue. It had been a long day, after all. It had been a long day for all of them. Mostly the monster, though. The blood was delicious, however, and more than made up for it, like a sip of fine wine tasted in the peaceful aftermath of…well, let’s say another long day at the office. The monster was completely lost in the exquisite flavor.

And Margaret finally, silently, thoughtlessly…died.