She breathes out Yeah yeah yeah yeah, her aviators glinting fire into my eyes. It’s not as though it was any kind of salvation on sale, she says, rolling the words around her tongue like a cherry pit before spitting them out, her lips painted reddest red.

It’s called Rouge, baby, she rolls the R like an impossibility, French-er than anything the French language could have dreamed possible.

Somehow, I always feel she looks incomplete without a cigarette holder, the kind ladies used to have their itty-bitty cigaretties encapsulated in, deadly ivory pins, suicidally (Honeybaby, please, say rather ‘serpentine’) oriental; real ladies breathing out dragons from dainty little porcelain nostrils. No nicotine-stained fingers for them, they murder and leave no fingerprints behind.

I could build altars to her (and their) dusky divinity, sacrifice screaming little girls until my bitch-goddess’s perfectly painted, luscious lips parted to swallow my sins whole, within her black tumour-ridden womb. She would birth a new me, a new sin-less being who would roar the truth of existence to any Man’s god, any Man’s offer of redemption.

Yeah, she smiles, sure.

She always smiles when I go on like this, pouring my dreams out into her tear-less eyes.

Tell me another one.

My reptilian monster, my diseased whore, your greed makes me vomit more words in vain.

I would call her Death if I dared. But even Death seems to be belittled by her.
I know.
I asked him.
He had smiled his stupidly apologetic smile and said,
you should’ve gotten out while you still had the chance.