the apple of your eye, the rotten core inside; any.

[Pollock]

He is comfortable with death. Knows it so intimately.

He has watched it take over bodies, leaving them inanimate and uncared for as abandoned buildings. Dark. (Goodnight.)

He has seen it. It drips like thick, red sap in the spaces between eyes and thighs. It is bone-white and organ-blue. It is wide-eyed and bare-toothed.

He has heard it. A many-mouthed song – the crack of thick skull bones; the final, tongue-tied sermons of total arrest; the splitting of the atlas from the axis. (Goodnight.)

He has felt the way it prowls down the spine, each vertebrae lighting like a bulb awoken by electricity – that’s Fear.

He knows that well, too.

He knows it like a young boy in the pitch dark – knows it for the uncertainty it sows in soft, yielding gray matter. He dreams of it, in the blank and pupilless green and the clear, sharp ring of sleigh bells. (He wishes for ‘goodnight’. Sleeplessness comes in its stead.)

He knows it like a knight knows his greatsword – every inch the same sharp, pale blade; his comrade.

So, when depravity calls to depravity, he comes to it like an old friend. Comes to him, though those coal-black eyes still admire the dark stallion like a rabid dog – grace? They had never become acquainted; he was weaned on the sharp knowledge of his own mortality and the burnt offerings of what might once have been hope. Cruelty? He feeds on it, and he finds it in abundance here – mixed with the familiar tangs of sweat and seed and blood and he follows it like a wild animal on hunt for meatier morsels. 

He comes to a stop in front of him, golden-skinned and horn-crowned; his limp wing hanging from his side. His shame and his beginnings. He tilts his crude, unkind head, exposing some of the shiny, pink-silver scars along the bottom of his jaw to the sky.

“I would have said you do not look like you belong here,” some do. Some slip through the cracks and in that unwanted space, they grow weak and pale. Needy. (Easy.) “...yet here you are.” But he can see there is something there in this deadman. Something wicked and impressive – so what, pray tell, would draw him to this mire of desperation, if not hips?

Play, perhaps?

A hunt? 

The gift giver grins, crooked and perverse, “fuck this hellhole, mine’s better. I think you’d fit in there.” A deadman in a dead land. Poetic. “Pollock, of Pangea.”