A Kiss before Dying

A Kiss before Dying

Her soft lips touched his with a shyness that was beyond endearing. Her warm, inexperienced kiss was truly beautiful. The way her small lips trembled ever so slightly, told him what he'd already guessed... it was her first kiss.

At twenty-five, he was ten years her senior; it wasn’t his first kiss.

The light of the full moon dappled the wet bricks of the alleyway’s walls in silver. They shone as the armour of Arthur’s knights might have shone centuries before.

He pulled her closer to him. Moved his hands up her body and ran his fingers through her long, thick hair. He grabbed her head and slammed her face into one of the shimmering walls. He was fast, so fast she barely had time to register he'd stopped kissing her before he smashed her face into the wall again. He turned her head toward him.

Her face was a mosaic of red blood and black dirt from the wall, splintered bone peeked out of what was left of her nose. Her eyes were pressed shut as blood from her forehead-where he thought the skull had cracked-flowed over them. The red of her beautiful lips was no longer discernible from the freely flowing blood. She had bitten her tongue nearly in half during one of the impacts with the wall and was vomiting up floods of blood. It was like a bulimic vampire trying to purge itself of all the blood of a previous demonic binge. Bulimic vampire, he liked that, he was amused at how satirically poetic he could be even at such a moment as this.

She began to make a horrible, guttural croaking noise from the back of her throat. It made him feel sick. She was trying to say something. Her eyes opened, their bright blueness contrasted her massacred face so perfectly it was beyond beautiful, beyond what any artist could ever hope to create. Her eyes said more clearly than her voice ever could. Why? . Her question asked, yet still the ghastly noise permeated the air. He answered her with the smooth swing of his knife, the blade blazed brightly in the moonlight for a fraction of a second. It cut her throat cleanly, the noise stopped. She gave him one final confused, questioning look and fell to the ground, dead.

He sat next to her for a little while, stroking her hair. He wanted to explain to her, explain why. Tell her it wasn’t her fault. Tell her he had to do it. Had to, because he couldn’t stop... he could never stop.