BLOOD DAHLIA
I can’t understand myself anymore
But I’m still feeling lonely
Feeling so unholy
– Numb, Portishead
Elliott stood outside Carrie’s apartment building for the third time this week.
The apartment’s exterior was faded with age, overgrown with vines that crawled up its sides like thick, dark snakes. Street lamps cast pale yellow light amid apartment buildings and businesses cramped together for blocks around.
He inhaled the November night air, pushed his thinning, stringy hair from his face, and plunged his hands into the pockets of his coat.
Did he have the courage to knock on Carrie’s door and tell her all the things that had been on his mind since their first—and last—date at Applebee’s three weeks ago? He had shown up to the restaurant that night loaded on Maker’s Mark, his nerves like hot wires, his hands almost trembling.
His love for and encyclopedic knowledge of cinema left her underwhelmed; she was not into films. He bragged about his impressive fantasy miniature collection, also to no effect. She talked about her love of animals. He did not like them. At all. They were smelly and needy, although he did not tell her he felt this way.
Toward the end of the date, she asked him whether he had “fabricated” his online dating profile. He admitted he may have done so to some extent. But only because the dating scene was cold and inhospitable. What was a guy to do these days?
After she noticed him staring at her cleavage while she ate her Caesar salad, she promptly looked at her cellphone and remarked about how late it was and that she needed to be up early for work tomorrow. She concluded the date by telling him that she didn’t think it would be good to go out with him again. That she just wasn’t ready to date right now.
Elliott knew she was lying. They always did.
After she broke the news and left him humiliated and standing outside the restaurant, the words of his cloying mother, who never seemed to receive enough affection from him, no matter how much she wanted, seeped into his mind. The words were an acid that burned through the pitiful layers of his life for as long as he could remember:
No woman will ever love you as much as I love you, Elliott. Never forget that.
His mother drilled this into his brain throughout his fatherless childhood, as if she were performing a verbal lobotomy and sabotaging any chance of happiness he might have with a member of the opposite sex. And it worked.
Until now.
Carrie was different. Elliott got the sense that she didn’t really know what she wanted out of life, let alone what she wanted in a man. She seemed so delicate, so fragile. As if her whims could change with a gust of wind.
He could be that gust of wind that changed both of their lives.
After their date, he had followed Carrie from a safe distance until she reached her building.
In the days that followed, Elliott found her employer’s website—a veterinarian’s office— and located her headshot. He quietly masturbated to it a few times over the next week in his bedroom, interspersed with occasional online videos of German torture porn, of which he was a devoted curator.
He was careful, as always, not to let his mother hear him.
With each sad, messy orgasm, he became more confident that he deserved her and that having her—mind, body, and soul—made him a complete man.
Following work shifts at the movie theater–and sometimes before–he stood across the street from Carrie’s apartment. Hoping to catch her leaving for work. Hoping to spy her coming home with another guy. Hoping their eyes would meet, music would swell from somewhere, and she would realize that no other man could fulfill her the way he could.
But each time he stood across the street from her building, that sense of entitlement grew like a rancid seed blooming within. He had to have her. She belonged to him, whether she knew it yet or not.
Now, standing outside her place tonight, he recalled a line Billy Crystal said in the film When Harry Met Sally:
“When you realize you want to spend the rest of your life with someone, you want the rest of your life to start right now.”
He never appreciated the film and didn’t understand why Sally liked Harry. He was weak and wore tight-ass jeans like one of those twinks. But that line stuck with him after years of rewatching the movie. It was a perfect line of dialogue.
This line was now his North Star. He would convince her that their lives together were just beginning.
One way or the other.
He snapped out of this trance, not realizing he was mumbling under his breath, when he noticed someone exiting her building.
It was now or never.
Elliott darted across the street, narrowly avoiding getting creamed by a blaring bus, and reached the door before it closed, bypassing the call box. As the door slammed shut, muffled sounds of crying babies, arguments, yapping dogs, and droning televisions seeped through the walls. The air carried the odors of animals, fried cooking, and dirty carpeting.
He found her mailbox and apartment number.
A rusted sign hanging on the doors to the elevator declared DANGER: OUT OF ORDER, so he climbed the four flights of stairs to Carrie’s apartment.
He stood there, one hand inches from knocking on the door. His nerves were conducting his tension like a mad orchestral maestro. Only this time, there was an undercurrent of delicious anticipation.
***
Carrie finished putting the wax-paper-wrapped, freshly cut meat into the freezer and was washing the large, serrated, hand-me-down butcher knife from her late mother.
Looking down at the wet, gleaming knife, her thoughts drifted to one night decades ago that changed everything for her.
Carrie’s mother was standing in the kitchen with her only child. She was stroking Carrie’s long chestnut brown hair with a hand that was becoming stiff with coagulating blood, while her 10-year-old daughter’s sobbing subsided.
There was a dark, glistening trail of blood leading from the kitchen to the bathroom. The crimson-coated knife was on the kitchen counter.
“He’s gone now,” Carrie’s mother assured her only child, in a voice that seemed a million miles away. “He can’t hurt us anymore. He won’t touch you anymore either. Do you understand?”
Carrie nodded.
Her mother kneeled down and handed Carrie the knife, handle first. “I want you to keep this.”
She then kissed Carrie’s forehead and held her for a long time.
Now, Carrie was staring at the knife and initials, deep in a dark reverie, when a knock at her apartment door snapped her back to the present. She opened the door slowly.
“Hey, how have you been?” Elliott asked.
A look of shock stretched across Carrie’s soft, pale face, which was framed by her now short brown hair. This expression turned into a slight smile.
She couldn’t believe her good fortune.
“What a surprise,” Carrie said. “What are you doing here?”
“I, um, thought I would swing by to see how you’re doing. I didn’t like how the last time ended, and I wanted to see if you’re doing okay.”
“Well, you shouldn’t have. But thanks.”
She leaned against the door frame, crossing her arms.
Elliott stood there, biting his lower lip and staring at the floor.
After an excruciating moment of silence, she stood aside and beckoned him into her apartment, then smoothed her waifish hands over her dark blue veterinarian scrubs. They were flecked with spots of blood. She must have just gotten home from work.
Her purple-polished nails gleamed like a wolf’s eyes in the hallway’s harsh overhead fluorescent lighting as she slowly closed the door.
“Mind if I use your restroom?”
She winced, thinking of what her bathroom looked like presently. “Unfortunately, it’s out of order. You know how old buildings can be.” She shrugged. “Have a seat.”
He plopped down on the tired leather couch, folding his hands in his lap, and scanned her cramped studio apartment. The space was absolutely crammed with books, some with titles indicating her interest in human and other creature anatomies. There were also photos of cute dogs, cats, and other mammals, some framed, some merely pinned to dulled white walls. Portishead played softly from a set of speakers connected to a vinyl record player in a corner next to an unmade mattress on the floor.
His gaze lingered on the mattress for a moment.
Elliott yelped as a cat jumped seemingly out of nowhere onto a couch cushion and hissed long and loud at him. The creature’s luxurious grey-and-white fur stood on end. One of the eyeballs was missing. The eyehole was horizontally stitched up.
“That’s Lucky. He’s a rescue. Very interesting story about him.”
“I see,” Elliott said nervously, not caring about the cat’s story. He kept one eye on the cat and the other on Carrie. She looked so cute in her veterinarian outfit.
“He doesn’t seem to like you very much,” she smiled. She lifted Lucky and placed him gently on the floor. He hissed at Elliott again and disappeared behind the couch.
She sat down on the other end of the couch. “Take your coat off. Get comfortable.”
He removed the coat and placed it on the arm of the couch. It fell to the floor, but he didn’t notice as he continued to gaze at Carrie.
“So, Elliott. What really brings you here?”
“Like I said, I just wanted to check in and make sure you’re okay. The other night kind of sucked.”
“It sure did,” she replied, cracking her knuckles loudly. “Was there anything you wanted to say to me about that night?”
“I know that you were offended that I lied on my profile. I’m sorry. It’s just tough out there, you know?”
She laughed, cracking her knuckles again. This nervous knuckle-cracking thing was adorable.
“I see,” she sighed, draping her right arm over the couch and moving a little closer to him. “Anything else you want to say? You were staring down my blouse, Elliott.”
“Well, yes, actually.” Eagerly, sensing that he was starting to break through. “That was just a compliment. I think that women are too sensitive these days and don’t appreciate when a man finds them attractive.”
Her teeth gleamed in the lamplight over the couch as she smiled. “And?”
“I think we got off on the wrong foot. I think we could make this work. I think we need to make this work. Look how desperately lonely and miserable people are. How we are. I don’t know about you, but the isolation and vapidness of society feels like it’s eating away at my bones sometimes.”
She reflected for a minute. “That’s almost poetry, Elliott. It is brutal out there, isn’t it?”
“Yes!”
She pondered his words, then placed her right hand on his knee and squeezed. “You know what? Maybe I was overreacting a bit. How about a drink? I have bourbon in the cupboard. How do you take it?”
“Neat,” he said, his body shimmering with a flood of endorphins. He couldn’t believe how well this was going.
“While I get our drinks, would you mind playing with my cat? He’s been here alone all day while I was working and needs to get some angst out,” she laughed.
She tossed him a string attached to a chewed-up mouse plush and then moved to the kitchenette for some glasses.
This was a busy week, Carrie thought to herself as she poured two Bulleits. Elliott was even dumber and more pathetic than the last guy.
While Elliott picked up the toy with mild disgust and gingerly draped the string behind the couch.
Claws from Lucky’s paws immediately tore into the mouse, violently yanking the string and knocking his hand hard against the wall.
“Owww!” he exclaimed, more out of surprise over Lucky’s strength than pain.
“See what I mean? Lots of steam to blow off. I know the feeling. Don’t you?”
Elliott started to reply and turned around to find Carrie standing there holding two glasses of bourbon.
She handed him the drink. He accepted but tried to stop shaking.
A sudden anxiety swept over him. All through high school and into adulthood, he had imagined a scenario like this happening, but no dice. Spurned by girl after girl, all because they were too emotional, couldn’t take a compliment, or just weren’t as interesting as him. Now, for some reason beyond his understanding, it was happening. He was terrified.
He had never been with a girl before. Thirty-seven years. And now, after all the years of his mother smothering him and telling him he was no good for any girl, here he was. Just went to show that persistence and confidence paid off.
He drank the bourbon in one loud, deep gulp. His face turned warm.
Here we go.
“Your shoulders look so tense,” Carrie cooed, sipping on her drink and setting it down. “Turn around, let me work on them. I can do amazing things with my hands.”
Elliott chuckled and complied. His breath caught as she lifted his Slayer t-shirt up and over his head.
Her cold hands sent a shiver through him. They soon warmed, and he closed his eyes, leaning back against her. He could feel her breasts pressed against his back through the fabric. He sighed, losing himself in the moment.
“Carrie, I think I love you,” he whispered.
Losing himself to the degree that he didn’t notice one of her hands slip down into one of the pockets of her scrubs.
He felt the prick of a needle.
“Hey, what the fuck?!”
Elliott tore himself from this fantasy and spun around. Lucky mewed, watching with intense interest from Carrie’s mattress, as she stood before him, putting the cap back onto the needle and launching it into the kitchenette’s sink.
“Have you ever heard of a Komodo dragon?” she asked. “They’re truly magnificent creatures.”
There was an expression on her face—her eyes narrow slits, her lips pouting—that filled Elliott with deep fear.
She sauntered over to the record player and cranked up the Portishead album, then returned.
“Did you know that female dragons can reproduce without males? It’s a process called parthenogenesis. This enables them to reproduce in isolation.”
Elliott, stunned, started to respond as if he knew what she was even talking about. What stopped him was a tingling in his extremities. He stared at his hands, mouth agape, then looked back at her.
“Another fascinating thing about Komodos is that their venom can do absolutely fucked up things to the human body.”
Elliott’s legs wobbled as strength continued to drain from them. He fell to the floor, sitting awkwardly but upright against the couch.
Carrie went to the kitchenette. She produced the serrated hand-me-down from a drawer and a crisp new plastic tarp from beneath the sink.
She swayed and hummed to the music as she playfully spread the tarp out.
“I have my mother, who was also a vet, to thank for encouraging my interest in animals,” she said. “I’m also grateful for what we learned together about how to handle animals like you.”
Carrie pushed him onto the plastic and straddled him, grinding hard. She groaned then laughed.
“Damn, your tiny cock is still hard! That will change in a minute.”
She placed the blade against his neck, her face scrunched in concentration like a butcher deciding the correct cut to take. She blew a tuft of hair from her face and shifted the blade to his bare chest. Carrie sliced vertically from the collar bone to the navel as the skin peeled open, making a sound like wet paper.
Shock and poison clotted any pain he should have felt. His life essence blossomed like blood dahlias and cascaded down his chest. Elliott could feel the warmth pouring out of his body as it began to pool around him. He tried to scream but only emitted a loud groan, drowned out by the music.
She punched him hard squarely between the eyes.
“How we doing, baby?” she said in an enthusiastic purr.
Stars swam in Elliott’s vision. He tried to struggle from underneath her, but his body now felt very weak. He lifted his left arm to attempt a punch, but he couldn’t complete the swing. His arm fell limp against the floor.
Carrie tittered.
“Komodo venom takes away muscle control, which is why you couldn’t hit me. It’s also an anti-coagulate. Do you know what that means?”
She dipped a finger into the thick rivulets of blood pouring from his chest and painted a crude smile on his lips.
“It means you can bleed to death because your blood won’t clot, dipshit.”
“P-p-please, I’ll do anything you want, I’ll apologize. I apologize! J-just don’t let me d-die,” he muttered as the venom increased its hold. He felt his lungs laboring to breathe now as warmth spread from his groin. Piss.
She punched him in the jaw this time and knocked his head to the side, sending a thick line of spittle into the air. He strained to focus his vision on what was under the couch.
Several pairs of men’s shoes sat beneath the couch. Elliott started crying as his wheezing increased.
Her eyes followed his fearful gaze.
Lucky pranced over and started lapping at the blood pooling on the floor.
“Don’t act like you’re surprised. I’ve noticed you standing outside my building. You’re a sick little twat, buster. Just be happy you’ll be able to feed my cat for months. Now, I need to get to work on you before you lose consciousness.”
She tugged his jeans down, tore his boxers off, and guided the blade to his now flaccid penis. She yanked it and started sawing to the sound of the cat’s purring.
Horror Sleaze Trash 