The Puppet Mistress

His heartbeat pounded against my fingernails. I don’t care, he doesn’t know. Life goes on, people say. I can see her in his expression.

Her face was as perfect as cream, with a delicate pink as though a rosebud had tenderly brushed her skin. Soft curls, so bright they were almost silver, spiraled from her head like morning sunlight in a bright room. Pale gold eyelashes brushed her cheeks as she lowered them, to hide her big blue eyes that glowed with a lust that burned to his soul. You will be my next, those eyes sing. You will be mine.

He didn’t realise, he had screamed at me from the other side of the door, he didn’t know. He came back to me without remorse, his eyes wide with fake regret, a handful of pitiful blooms clenched in one fist and wrapped in cellophane. Satiated, satisfied, memories of her perfect body swirling through his foggy mind. He had kissed my cheeks, my hands, my lips and cried that he hadn’t known what he was doing, she was nothing, she didn’t matter.

But she does.

He sleeps like a lamb, his heartbeat against my fingernails, not knowing that every time his shriveled heart pounds it brings his flesh closer to being torn, ripped, bled. My fist aches with the effort of not closing on his flesh as he breathes with an ease that almost mocks me, making me want to scratch his eyes out.

You know what they say- an eye for an eye-

I consider it, I really do. I imagine what it would be like, if my nails were to puncture his skin and slice into the throat beneath. What it would be like if his eyes were to snap open with shock that I had seen through his script, darkening with pain before dulling completely as that last little spark distinguished. The bright blush of blood, dripping down his pale skin in thick, dark trails-

His heart thrums as I pull my fingers from his skin, one at a time, admiring the crescent shapes left behind. A gift from me. He sniffs in his sleep, turning his face into my hand as though I was offering him some comfort from his guilt through my soft, soft fingertips. Oh, irony.

His heart thrums as I slip into a rose dress that flutters like silk, pull up fishnet stockings and rub a sweet pink on my mouth that says- I’m so sweet, I can’t help being this damn sexy. It thrums again and again as I walk out, down the stairs.

It beats as I toy with my hair.

It beats as I curl up on a sofa running one fingertip around the rim of a wine glass half-filled with golden liquid.

When he finds me I stare into his eyes in a way that says I care- how easy to fill a role, to stare lovingly and yet feel nothing. He could live his life not knowing, thinking he had it all up until his very last breath when I would say nothing into his ear, and he would never know it was missing, that there was nothing there. At all.

The phone shrills, the answering machine picking up.

“I miss you.” She whispers into the room, “are you there?” His eyes widened as he remembered that blue eyed thing, “baby? Are you there?” he clicked off the machine, more disgruntled than apologetic. There were three more calls that day.

“Are you there?”

With each ring of the phone, he stared at it lovingly. He became more distant and disgruntled with each, annoyed and smug as his inflated ego grew as he realised he had so, so many options. If that blue-eyed thing cared about him it would be different. I knew her. I’d met hundreds of her before. But him. He was an actor in this as much as I was, with his theatrical mask of indifference as impregnable as my own, without him even realising- part of a bloody romance that orchestrated itself. He was a corpse brought to life with make up and costume, a fool who danced in the limelight on strings, devastated at breaking poor weak women’s hearts who loved him so, so much. Stupid.

As the puppet mistress laughs at her own wit, at her genius, she brings the fool and his woman to centre stage, the fool all the while fretting over how to end his current romance without breaking such delicate a heart. The phone rings. “Please. Please answer.” She sobs, such a delicate flower, saccharine tears marinating the air between us.

The puppet mistress brings it to the climax. The blue-eyed woman waits in the wings, a smile fixed ready on her blood red mouth, the fool spinning, spinning, spinning. His heart beats.

“I think we both know this isn’t working.” He sighs, turning to me with a flourish, ignoring the woman whose voice rings through the room. I stare at him through tearful eyes. I can play the heartbroken lady scorned, the tragic role. I can hold the moral high ground, as I stand and tap to my bedroom again. His heart beats against my fingertips.

“Where are you?” Her voice murmurs as I leave, my head held high, an empty sad expression on my face as I smile inside. The puppets hang in mid air, as I freeze them, ready for the grand finale.

“Where are you?” I turn back to him, an adoring smile on my face. His heart beats under my fingertips. I don’t hesitate. The curtain falls.