This Mortal Coil

Dahj knew that everything would start in a strip club.

It could have been clairvoyance.

It could have been a hunch.

It could have been a drunken premonition in between that precarious moment of blacking out and having one’s esophagus dramatically shorten.

Somehow, someway, he just knew.

Not that it was very hard to predict, taking into account that 95.7% of his life was spent cornea deep in some woman’s dairy pillows. And considering that was exactly how 95.7% of his trouble typically began, it was only inevitable that should a day arise where his life would suddenly be turned into a shit soup whirlpool in a crapper of suck, then it would all begin in his friendly, neighborhood nudie bar.

He had just spent the past hour and a half trying to coax a decent buzz off of cheap, watered down beer but wasn’t quite drunk enough to block out the fact that his best friend was snuggled all warm and cozy in a cocoon of strippers. She was up to her antics as per usual, her charm and libido in full swing. After ten years, Dahj knew Tajaki well enough to predict that she would be smooth talking her way into at least one g-string that night.

Drowning an envious male ego with the bitter remnants of his glass, Dahj stood and began his telltale drunken pee-waddle toward the bathrooms. He found himself alone in the men’s room, taking the first drunken piss of the night, which, arguably, was one of life’s many wonderful experiences, where a man could take a moment to reflect on his life as forty bucks worth of alcohol wound up as a little yellow puddle in the urinal. Despite this, Dahj was overcome with a deep sense of serenity and all was right in the world just seconds before his worst possible nightmare was realized in the worst possible location at the worst possible moment.

Even over the cochlea shattering pulse of music coming from beyond the bathroom door, Dahj heard the bells. To any other ear, it would have sounded like the footfalls of angels; sweet, pure chiming as haunting as it was beautiful. But to Dahj, it was nothing less then the sound of soap dropping as life prepared to fuck him twice over. His ass cheeks clenched and tightened. His testicles retracted and tucked in close. And his urethra cinched shut, leaving his once steady stream of piss to leak like old pipes.

If Dahj were a man of action, he might have at least made some attempt to scramble wildly towards the door where he could finish urinating in the comfort of the leather seats of his car as he did eighty five in reverse out of the parking lot. Yet, he was a man of knowledge and profound thought. Not necessarily at that particular instant, perhaps, but he could at least attest to having an intelligence quota equivalent to or greater than that of a fifth grader regardless if he had to lean against the bathroom wall to keep from straddling the urinal rodeo style. There was enough alcohol in his system for him to be dubious about the sound that he could swear up and down he had heard.

It had been a little more than five years since he last remembered hearing bells that sounded familiar enough to cause such a violent reaction. Confused, slightly inebriated, and still hovering over an unflushed urinal, Dahj scanned the restroom, knowing full well that it made no damn sense for him to hear what he had thought he heard.

Lucky for him, the blinding explosion that immediately followed knocked all kinds of sense into him, most of which tasted like blood and pain. He landed like a sack of bricks landing on another sack equally filled with bricks, his spine cushioning most of his fall. There was a thin stretch of time in between the internal repetition of four letter expletives and waiting for the rinse cycle of fluids in his skull to end where Dahj contemplated playing dead. Ultimately, against his better judgment, he slowly opened his eyes, suddenly grateful for the dim lighting in the building. Somehow, he was outside of the men’s room, which was actually good in a way.

Bleeding out in a crumpled heap on the never-seen-the-likes-of-a-Swiffer-mop restroom floor would really hurt his postmortem cred. At the very least, he deserved to go out with a little class; flat on his back with his junk hanging out, like a man. That was the kind of death that made a grand statement about a person’s last moments alive. And that statement being an emphatic “Suck it.”

The silvery tinkling of a bell and the staccato echo of a pair of heels walking over broken tiles and debris acted as an anesthetic, numbing aching bones and bruised flesh enough for Dahj to (reluctantly) zip his fly and prop himself up onto his elbows to face woman of mass destruction. She hadn’t changed at all in the past five years, he noted, unsure if the bitter taste lingering in his mouth was from his irksome observation or his busted lip. There was the same unforgettable quality about her, like an afterimage that never completely faded away. A satin, electric blue wiggle dress clung onto those dangerous curves for dear life as if she had stepped straight out of a fifties pin-up girl calendar.

The color of her eyes was that of a union between sea and sky, an infinite azure that drew everything and everyone in like tractor beams. Wavy tresses that were so blue they were almost black, swept up on one side by a simple blue poppy. Still lovely as ever. Still a goddamn psychopath.

“Long time no see, Dahj,” she greeted with bright, candy apple red lips. “It looks like I caught you with your pants down again. Brings back fond memories, doesn’t it?”

Dahj coughed a bit to expel settling dust from his lungs, replying, irritably, “If fond memories are supposed to make your heart feel all warm and fuzzy from the multiple aortic aneurysms at the sheer thought, then yes.”

He pushed himself up so he was sitting, palms planted firmly on either side of him.

"So, are you just dropping by to say hello or is this a continuation of your sadistic game of adding two heaping scoops of bitch to my life every time you smell even the slightest bit of joy or happiness on me?"

The woman smiled a smile that he was all too familiar with in the worst possible way. She cradled the end of the world in that smile, mankind’s ruin reflected in her eyes.

“I’ve just come to get what rightly belongs to me.”

In the time it took for Dahj to blink twice, she had closed the gap between them and was crouched down in front of him. She had lost her smile along the way as well as her previous playful demeanor.

“And I don’t want you to get hung up on this being some kind of heartfelt reunion,” she announced, her tone suddenly full of frostbite and venom, “so just let’s skip the b.s.”

A slender hand in short, black evening gloves inched towards him. Dahj’s right arm twitched involuntarily, yet he remained rooted with a stupid look on his face. He knew for a fact that once she put on her serious face that pain, particularly in the testicular region, was imminent. His first instinct was to surprise her with a fast, right jab to the boob then to run and find a child sacrifice to sate the beast so that she may return to the bowels of hell from whence she came and slumber for another five years.

While his self-preservationist nature called for him to haul ass like a hysterical, pigeon-toed school girl, the message became lost in translation and never quite reached its intended destination. There was simply an instant where part of him wanted nothing more then to press his hand to hers, skin against satin, until their fingers naturally melded together, letting that warmth rekindle emotions that had become lukewarm and stagnant over time.

But it was a fleeting lapse of sanity and he quickly shook it off like a bad chill. Regardless, a hand did reach out to meet hers though, one of a darker complexion and a far stronger grip than his. Snagging the blue eyed woman’s wrist in midair, Tajaki grinned like she had found the prize at the bottom of a cereal box.

“Good ta’ see joo, Aytee.”

The woman returned the grin as Tajaki hauled her up to her feet, nearly lifting her off the ground as she dangled weightlessly from the other woman’s grip.

“Same here. You look well. And as much as I’d love to catch up and chitchat, I have something I need to discuss privately with Dahj. Nothing personal,” she insisted with a “no hard feelings” expression, placing her free hand on Tajaki’s arm to convey the breadth of her sincerity.

The second her glove made contact with Tajaki, ink-like veins shot out from her fingertips and latched onto Tajaki’s bare skin before igniting, setting her whole arm ablaze. Dahj was unaware of his friend being barbequed and roasted over an open fire, much too preoccupied with saving his own ass and looking for the nearest, sturdiest object to either awkwardly wield in a desperate attempt to save his pathetic life or, ideally, cower beneath until Tajaki deemed it safe enough to coax him out with some gentle cooing and encouraging clicks of her tongue.

It was only when creeping, black ooze slithered past him like living cobwebs, causing tables and chairs within its path to be torn asunder in a burst of splinters and sawdust that Dahj realized the catfight was over just as soon as it had begun.

“Playing hard to get, Dahj? You know you were never any good at it,” goaded Aytee, a smug look on her face as Dahj resigned himself to a long, diaphragm-deep sigh and turned to face her. He rubbed at the sore spot on the back of his neck, gaze diverted off to the side to prevent making direct eye contact.

“Yeah, well, you were never any good at pretending not to be crazy bitch, so I think we can call it even.”

Aytee frowned. “After all we’ve been through together, that’s what you really think of me? Dahj, you wound me.”

Shaking his head, Dahj’s gray eyes finally slid across the room to meet hers.

“No, unfortunately, I didn’t. But she might.”

With the strength of ten alleged steroid using baseball players, Tajaki swung the stripper pole she had ripped out of the stage at Aytee, aiming for that sweet spot right in the middle of the right temple. Her arm was raw and singed and apparently that was the type of thing that pissed her off to the point where she wasn't even aware that she had renounced everything she stood for by ruining a perfectly good stripper pole. Aytee caught the glint of steel in her peripherals and raised a hand to prevent her neck from permanently bending at a perfect right angle.

The instant the pole touched her palm, it curved and curled around without losing momentum, piercing Tajaki in the dead center of her back and continuing to twine around her like a coiled spring. She and the pit of Dahj’s stomach dropped at the exact same moment. Dahj could not help but hear the sickening crunch of spine and the strangled gargle of blood gushing past teeth and lips as he road runnered in the direction of the exit. His hands pressed against the door and a warm body pressed against his back. He let his grip on the door handle falter as arms wrapped around him from behind, encircling his waist.

“Why?” asked Dahj, simply, grim-faced.

“Why indeed,” the woman purred into the small of his back, gloved fingers playing in the space between his seventh and eighth rib. “That’s a vague question, Dahj. Why am I here? Why did I leave? Or maybe… why your pain makes me feel this good?”

Dahj’s jaw clenched, grinding enamel against enamel. He wasn’t about to help her get off by letting her force a rise out of him.

“How about you start with all of the above?”

Aytee slid her arms from around Dahj, placing a hand on his bicep and slowly turning him until his back was to the door.

“Sorry,” was her soft reply as she gently teased wisps of his tawny brown hair.

Dahj knew her words were not to be trusted. Never again would he be deceived by that poisonous honey she let flow from those rosy lips. Her words were sweet, but he had tasted that artificial sweetener too many times before and he could not be fooled again with the cheap imitation. She spoke nothing of what exactly she was sorry about nor was there any attempt for her to make him believe that she hadn’t just said what she thought he wanted to hear.

A thousand times he killed that woman in his mind; strangled her, drowned her, set her on fire and pissed on the charred remains. And a thousand more times than that, he had kissed those lips that had once belonged to him, touched that body he had once had sole dominion over and gazed into blue eyes that could only see him as he lost himself inside of her. Yet now that she was finally standing right in front of him, the quarrelling between heart and mind would not allow him to kill or embrace her. He could only watch, his inability to act at such a critical moment almost laughable if it wasn’t so fucking pitiful. As much as he felt betrayed by Aytee, his own duplicity was perhaps the hardest to take.

“You once said that your heart belonged to me.”

Aytee’s hand skimmed over his throat and came to rest on his chest. The charm bracelet on her wrist jingled a bit as the tiny bells swayed with the motion of her hand.

“So I’ll be taking what’s mine now.”

She didn’t even give him the satisfaction of a head start on stringing colorful adjectives to the word “bitch” before plunging her hand into his chest and tearing out his heart. A viscous, writhing blackness ate away tissue and muscle, boring through his sternum until it collapsed. The hand Dahj had longed to hold pushed through the oozing cavity, strands of shadows pulled like taffy and snapping free as Aytee drew out the prize within. Though it only lasted a moment, Dahj’s pain lingered for an eternity.

Twice now that woman had ripped out his heart.

Only this time it seemed she intended to keep it.

The meaning of Aytee’s apology only made sense just as he felt himself drifting away, and the sound of bells, like the lullabies of stars, followed him into oblivion.