Phantoms

Black. That was all. Just black. She was disorientated. She was sore. She was....FUCK!!! That word kept escaping from between her broken lips. She was confused. She was thirsty. OUCH!! She was in a box and had just hit her head trying to raise up. Fuck....the expletive was a little less sure of itself as it escaped her broken lips, dried blood making them feel heavy. Her mind raced, faster than usual, she was trying to figure out how it came to be that she was in a box. "Buried alive," she thought. Somehow she knew that wasn't right. The way her body was yelling at her with ache, made her believe she had been out for quite sometime. "I would've suffocated if I was buried alive," she said aloud to herself in a very fake way...an attempt to reassure herself.

She stared. Her eyes adjusted to the black so well by now, that she swore it had substance. Reaching out in what was the front of her face she thought that she had seen her own hand. "HMM....just a phantom." She was thinking of people who lost limbs and sometimes could still feel these missing appendages. She knew her mind was playing tricks on her. It was it's way of consoling her, "Yes....your hand is still there. Anything else you want to see," Her mind asked her.

She stared...she searched the black. She looked so hard that her eyes started to water (she never cried. her eyes just watered. Or she had allergies...never crying.) She became angry... Angry that this situation was getting to her. "FUCK!!!" This time her constant companion of a word came barreling out of her parched, swollen lips. She had been through worse than this. This-is-nothing.

Her mind slowed down to a speed she was familiar with. The breathing steadied, the heart shrunk back down to its regular size and pumped at a normal clip. She was starting to remember how she had ended up in a box. Him. HE-is-nothing. But she smelled him on herself, she tasted his salty but overly sweet semen on her tongue and felt the clammy shadows of his touch on her body. Him. "FUCK!!!!"

She noted that the difference in black from being asleep, from having one's eyes closed and opening them to complete black was different. It was a different shade....She was going a tad bit mad. Wouldn't you? Her body was sore from what must have been a pretty good beating by Him and of course the fact that she had been in the same position for at least 24 hours. She was trying to adjust, to get some blood flow to the thirsty parts of her body when she heard a noise. Voices. Two. One female. One male. HIM! She heard a noise...it seemed to come from above her or from above the box she was in. "Box springs," she asked herself. "Oh, come on. He has me under his bed? This is really too, too much."

She was right. Box springs for 800, MR. Gameshow host. The voices continued for something like ten minutes. Laughter, coercion and then a steady rhythm of the box spring orchestra. "Are they fucking?! OH, come on!!" She rolled her eyes in the darkness. She waited for his groan that always escapes him when he cums hard in one of his conquests. "This is really so very unnecessary," she said aloud honestly believing He could hear her, "so, very unnecessary.

She was finding a comfortable position when she felt the box move. She used her throat to catch her breath...her heart slowed down to the point her chest was barely rising and falling. Then the light came through the black like a sword...slicing its way through her eyes cutting into her brain. "FUCK!! God damn Alex!!"

"Natasha..."

Natasha didn't get out of the box. She sat up, feeling the blood return to the starving parts of her appendages. The needles and pins driving her crazy. She tried to turn her grimace into a smile. It made her look like a gargoyle on crack. Her thick, black hair fell around her as she took a sip from the mug Alex had handed her. She let it dribble back out of her mouth. It left a stain on her chest...she could feel the coffee leave a path down her torso..it was warm...and possibly, poisoned? Natasha looked up at him with huge, furious green eyes. She searched his face. He was laughing at her..laughing at her with his eyes, just like always. "Tash, it's not poisoned. I could've killed you so many times before. Why do you think I would go through all this trouble just to kill you off with a poisoned cup of coffee?"

Natasha and Alex have been lovers/enemies for the last six months. They met through a mutual friend. He thought she was beautiful but very violent and she thought he was beautiful the first time she saw him but found him to be quite insane and very violent. Two weeks later they were fucking each other like it was the end of the world. Then it started...Alex started by just letting his hand linger around her arm as she got up from bed. See, she couldn't sleep with anyone. She would stay over but she always slept alone. His lingering grip turned into screaming fits, pinning her to the bed, carrying her from the couch back to his bedroom. "Stop suffocating me! FUCK!!" The idea occurred to him when she had finally said this to him.

"Alex, this isn't going to work. What do you think? That all of this elaborate, childish, don't roll your eyes, you know its childish...This elaborate set up isn't going to make me yours. I am not going to wake up in my lil wooden box and realize I am in love with you!"

"Tash, you already are in love with me...I can feel it. Every time we are together. Then you try and push it away sitting in front of my TV...the morning creeping up on you...."

"I was in love with you...but the black stole it. Why don't you lie in the box? You might find it, lurking." Alex looked stunned. He hadn't thought of this. He thought perhaps she was calling his bluff...she couldn't actually be upset with him...not to the point that she would stop loving him.

"Tash...Natasha," his words stumbled out of his mouth, he had thought she would understand that it was an experiment, a joke. He had thought she would appreciate it, "Fine, I'll go in the box."

She was smiling. She was climbing out of the box. She was still sore but that she would get over. She was once again surprised at the power of suggestion. She was surprised by her own power. "How long did you have me in there," she pointed at the box. She was standing above him a hammer in her hand, the lid half way over the box, "A day, two days?"

"Five days, Tash," he replied looking into her eyes. He was searching to see if she really intended on making him lie in this terrible replica of a coffin. He stopped his search, she was. She was serious.

BANG, BANG....the final nail in the coffin so to speak. She pushed until it was hidden underneath his huge four poster bed. She looked around and smiled to herself. She scanned the bedroom, it would be the last time she would see it. Alex's last time had been a few minutes before...right before she placed the lid over his body. She walked to the bathroom, flicked on the light. The cheap bulbs made her look a sickly, yellowish green. She looked slowly up to the mirror. Trying to hide her smile...she put her hands on the mirror over their reflections. She leaned in close and kissed herself. Her hands were bloody. Gore dripped off her fingers. The eyes in the mirror looked down to the right side of the sink. A hand, cut of at the wrist, was lying on the red hand towel, still warm. She picked it up and fit her left hand into it, holding it as if it were the hands of a lover on a walk, or in bed, making love. She flung it from herself, suddenly. It landed with a loud, wet splash in the toilet.

She is walking down the street, body bruised but not broken. She wonders if he will miss his hand...if he can still feel it. "Pesky, phantoms," she says with a wicked grin on her lovely face.

She turns the corner and heads down the street, head held high, breasts full and bouncing expertly underneath her blood soaked, gore caked T-shirt.

She is on the make...again. She is on the hunt.