A Killer New Year's Kiss
She’s sitting alone on the balcony, gazing out upon the sleeping neighborhood. All houses are quiet, peacefully dark. The trees whisper to each other in the soft breeze. A cat crosses the street. She desperately hopes it will be midnight soon, so she and her brother can finally go home.
A door opens behind her, allowing the blaring music from inside to escape into the night. She doesn’t turn around, hoping this will convey that she doesn’t want company. You step onto the balcony anyway and sit beside her. She’s beautiful. Her dark skin gleams in the moonlight, her hair forms a cloud around her head. Her eyes are wistful, the color of melting chocolate, framed by long lashes. She turns her face to you and you can’t help but notice her plump doll lips. Hopefully you will make her acquaintance well enough before midnight.
“What do you want?” Her voice is rough, almost husky in its appealing tone.
You decide you have two possible paths with this – bluntly romantic, or charmingly funny. “I saw you from inside, and you were beautiful.” You decide you will get further towards your ultimate goal at midnight with romanticism. She rolls her eyes, but you see a small curve at the corner of her mouth before she turns her head away.
You look out upon the neighborhood with her. To you the houses are ominous in their silence, the trees are menacingly plotting. The cat has long since crossed the street, but you hear a distant yowl. The beautiful girl beside you stretches and sighs contentedly, leaning back to lie on the ground. You are unsure whether to follow or stay sitting. She laughs and pulls your arm. It’s still several hours before midnight. You soon discover that you have a passion for literature. You talk to her, filling up the time with debates on the profound nature of books, incredible fantasies woven from thin air, hoarse voices and breathless laughter.
“I know what you’re trying to do,” she says at some point.
“And what is that?” you reply.
“You’re trying to charm me so you can get a kiss at midnight!” Her laughter bubbles up again. “And it’s completely effective!”
“Oh, good. I thought I wasn’t setting the proper mood, with all this talk of books.”
“But you must have known that books are the most romantic things on this planet.”
You shrug and erupt into laughter with her.
A shout arises from inside, loud enough to be heard through the closed balcony door. “12:50!” It sounds as if everyone is screaming in unison, almost loud enough to shake the house.
“Ten minutes…” she breathes in your ear, biting her lip. Your heart pounds in anticipation.
Ten minutes feels like an eternity. You talk softly to each other, but there is an unmistakable tension that wasn’t there before. You take in as many details of her as possible. Her beautiful face, her athletic physique, her halo of hair, her voice. You didn’t notice it before, but she smells sweet and spicy, like vanilla.
Finally, shouts explode from indoors once more. “TEN, NINE, EIGHT…” She looks at you through her eyelashes. “SEVEN, SIX, FIVE…” You shift your arms and begin to reach for her face. “FOUR, THREE, TWO…” She grins in anticipation. “ONE! HAPPY NEW YEARS!” You’re crashing your lips to hers. The kiss leaves you panting and warm, and is full of more romance than any book. Your hands are entwined, but she pulls one away to slide it up to your neck. She feels the pull of your teeth on her bottom lip.
She slits your throat before you realize what is happening.
“Finally…” she mumbles as she stands over your body.
She watches as your body reveals its true form. Your fingers elongate into claws, horns grow out of your forehead, spiraling into points, fangs protrude from your gaping mouth, your dying eyes burn a glowing green, and your skin takes on an ashen gray pallor. She creeps over to the balcony door as the screams start. You are left to soak in your blood as you die.
The girl slinks down the staircase to the main floor of the house. The walls are already coated in blood, most likely a result of her over-excited brother. Monsters of various shapes and sizes litter the floor. There are the giant, hairy beasts with eight eyes, and the slender, effervescent female visages that seduce and eat men, and the serpents that steal people’s dreams, and the muses that sing and drive people into insanity. None were exactly the same. None looked like her monster, the one she had just killed.
She finds her brother in the kitchen decapitating a serpent. He is laughing and screaming “Justice!” at the dead snake. She joins him in killing the rest of the monsters, with much less enthusiasm. The house is a bloody graveyard. She and her brother do nothing to clean it, as they know when the sun rises the corpses will dissipate into smoke.
They exit the house onto the quiet street. Her brother doesn’t look back, eager as he is to return to base. But she does. She looks back, and her eyes fall on the balcony. She sees your body and thinks of the magic of novels, the wonderful creation of fantasy with someone else. She thinks of your voice, your smell, your imagination. Not about your appearance – she knew from the start that it was fake. She does not think you were a monster, no matter how much she has been trained to do so.
Eventually, she turns and follows her brother. If there were anyone nearby they might have heard the quiet sob that she barely choked down. They might have seen the frail heart of a teenage monster-killer break, just a little.
The trees whisper around her as she walks down the sleeping street. No one stirs on this quiet New Years day, she and her brother made sure of that. A beaten and bloody cat limps across the street in front of her. She sighs. That was a New Year’s kiss she won’t forget anytime soon.
Comments