Ink
Fetuses.
Thunk.
A tentative heartbeat.
A pain-filled gasp for breath; stale air drawn in by sore red lungs.
A rush of oxygenated indigo diffusing out from scarred, damaged veins to darken the blue-violet pool clotting slowly on the inside of translucent vellum skin.
Thunk. Thunk—
“Not in my fucking car.”
A ragged gasp slipped past trembling pink lips as Frank’s small body froze, left wrist now lying motionless on the worn grey rubber of the car dashboard.
“You want me to fucking break those bones too? Save you the fucking trouble?”
A whimper.
For Frankie, that first hour was the worst.
The unforgiving seatbelt edge biting a thin line of red into the skin of his throat… The intolerable scrutiny from hazel eyes, boring pits and craters into his ash-black soul every time they left the monotony of the road stretching out ahead… The throbbing, biting pain that stemmed from his fractured wrist but seemed to claw its way into his lungs and his chest and his eye sockets, gnawing and tearing at the flesh and muscle and bone like a starving velociraptor caged inside his aching ribs, crawling up his throat and gnashing its pearlescent teeth against the hard edges of his orbital rims. The red, the sultry scent of blood that sent adrenaline pumping through his veins like a methamphetamine high, was hovering somewhere he couldn’t reach, an ephemeral miasma of oxygenated crimson. It twisted tantalizingly around the ends of his nerves like a viper’s numbing tongue, teasing his mouth and nostrils with the faint tickle of an imminent nosebleed, the steady drip of a brain hemorrhage ready to detonate bloody scarlet carnations inside his splintering cranium.
Thunk.
Gerard couldn’t get the sound out of his head.
The hideous, empty, soulless sound of bruises forming, of flesh, tendons, veins and muscle and bone slammed against metal or rubber or composite wood, compressing into one solid layer of liquid agony before slowly expanding again; the sound of little tie-dye starbursts exploding, blossoming outwards into a garden of white violets, pale skin stained in inky tinctures of blue and purple and black.
The sound of breaking bone.
It lingered in the porous cavities of his skull, knotting itself between every fucking synapse of his brain, slamming against the snail-like curl of his cochlea as if it was still a physical sound; Frank Iero banging his wrist on the edge of that desk like a robotic cadaver, a fucking zombie, the sick little masochistic piece of shit that he was.
Bone. Breaking.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Fucking opportunity knocking.
Beside him, the motorized corpse pressed a hand to its chest; mouth open, ribcage heaving, Frankie trying desperately to force himself to inhale.
He wanted Gerard to just reach over and plug his nose, to crush his mouth back into his face in a smear of red paint and teeth, suffocate the life from his shaking body until it was over, something fast and violent and quick to replace the horrible waiting, the slow depletion of less and less and less oxygen until black nicotine paste had completely coated his alveoli and his lungs caved in and his pulse fluttered upwards and he just. couldn’t. breathe anymore.
Gerard couldn’t stop the bones from rattling around inside his mind, and Frankie couldn’t breathe.
It wasn’t fear, not yet.
The fear came later, curled knees-to-chest in the backseat of the old Nissan like a coma patient, a sick shivering fetus sinking deeper and deeper into the inverse reflection of his own fang-toothed nightmare, into hallucinations of blood and wet wax and the disgusting smell of old upholstery: dirt and semen, dead skin and charred bones. Trying to sleep with feverish chills scintillating down his spinal cord from his swollen cortex, surges of saccharine masochistic delirium, and Gerard’s body sandwiched so tightly behind his that there was no beginning and no end, no room to breathe, just three layers of chilled skin and two thudding heartbeats, sore muscle forcing the blood to keep pulsing through a complex network of carmine veins.
Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub. Like hearing the ocean in a seashell, really just the hot throb of salty blood pounding inside your own head. Skin and scalp and rind and cartilage, boiling red cells and water ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing somewhere underneath the skull.
Knees touching chest. Chest touching spine. Thighs touching thighs.
Fucking spooning.
Crunching, pulling, squeezing together. Searching desperately for body heat in the cold Jersey night.
Gerard behind Frankie, Frankie knees-to-chest; cold little fetus. Feed us. Fetus.
Abort.
Abort.
Abort.
No, it wasn’t fear this time.
It was the sun and highway lights reflecting in delirium starbursts off the tarnished curves of his retinas; the pain, the chokehold frustration that made him want to dig ten fingers into the disgusting flesh of his face, to peel away the skin and gouge out both tired eyeballs in a flood of pure, unadulterated red… the desperate hurt that made him smash those fragile wrists over and over into the hardest edge he could find, little blood vessels branched out like the minuscule deep-green veins in celadon-glazed pottery – all the dazzling imperfections making it so valuable – leaking eggplant and Lysol yellow and new moon midnight blue.
The way every glance from Gerard cut out his tongue and left him drowning in hot crimson liquid from the corroded insides out, because now…
Gerard knew.
“Miss your daddy?” he sneered, thin lips moving around the damp paper of a cigarette. “Miss your daddy, Frank?” The leather jacket he was wearing smelled like stale smoke or old Catholic ashes, and his hazel eyes sparkled like Fabergé eggs, disgusting, crusted with sick, sweet crystalline honey as they shone out from a gluey mess of shapeless skin.
Stomach churning acid over acid, palms clammy with sweat, Frankie looked away.
There was a white rosary hanging from the rearview mirror, cheap plastic beads clicking repetitively against the windshield glass.
One Our Father, ten Hail Marys. One Glory Be.
Click. Click. Click
One Our Father, ten Hail Marys. One Glory Be.
Miles and miles and miles of pale morning sky outside the window, heaven glazed light blue with a faint golden glow in the clouds.
Click. Click. Click.
Miles and miles and—
“Tell me you fucking miss him.”
Beating a dead horse.
“Tell me you won’t miss it.”
Green eyes flashed pain and anger and animal fear; vocal chords straining with crippling hysteria. “I won’t fucking miss anything!”
And as Frankie’s mind filled with sick, half-formed sensations, the smell of sweat, saliva, salt and urine, rumpled bedsheets and hands closing like manacles around his bruised wrists, a humorless smile stitched itself tightly across Gerard’s thin mouth.
A tentative heartbeat.
A pain-filled gasp for breath; stale air drawn in by sore red lungs.
A rush of oxygenated indigo diffusing out from scarred, damaged veins to darken the blue-violet pool clotting slowly on the inside of translucent vellum skin.
Thunk. Thunk—
“Not in my fucking car.”
A ragged gasp slipped past trembling pink lips as Frank’s small body froze, left wrist now lying motionless on the worn grey rubber of the car dashboard.
“You want me to fucking break those bones too? Save you the fucking trouble?”
A whimper.
For Frankie, that first hour was the worst.
The unforgiving seatbelt edge biting a thin line of red into the skin of his throat… The intolerable scrutiny from hazel eyes, boring pits and craters into his ash-black soul every time they left the monotony of the road stretching out ahead… The throbbing, biting pain that stemmed from his fractured wrist but seemed to claw its way into his lungs and his chest and his eye sockets, gnawing and tearing at the flesh and muscle and bone like a starving velociraptor caged inside his aching ribs, crawling up his throat and gnashing its pearlescent teeth against the hard edges of his orbital rims. The red, the sultry scent of blood that sent adrenaline pumping through his veins like a methamphetamine high, was hovering somewhere he couldn’t reach, an ephemeral miasma of oxygenated crimson. It twisted tantalizingly around the ends of his nerves like a viper’s numbing tongue, teasing his mouth and nostrils with the faint tickle of an imminent nosebleed, the steady drip of a brain hemorrhage ready to detonate bloody scarlet carnations inside his splintering cranium.
Thunk.
Gerard couldn’t get the sound out of his head.
The hideous, empty, soulless sound of bruises forming, of flesh, tendons, veins and muscle and bone slammed against metal or rubber or composite wood, compressing into one solid layer of liquid agony before slowly expanding again; the sound of little tie-dye starbursts exploding, blossoming outwards into a garden of white violets, pale skin stained in inky tinctures of blue and purple and black.
The sound of breaking bone.
It lingered in the porous cavities of his skull, knotting itself between every fucking synapse of his brain, slamming against the snail-like curl of his cochlea as if it was still a physical sound; Frank Iero banging his wrist on the edge of that desk like a robotic cadaver, a fucking zombie, the sick little masochistic piece of shit that he was.
Bone. Breaking.
Bang. Bang. Bang.
Fucking opportunity knocking.
Beside him, the motorized corpse pressed a hand to its chest; mouth open, ribcage heaving, Frankie trying desperately to force himself to inhale.
He wanted Gerard to just reach over and plug his nose, to crush his mouth back into his face in a smear of red paint and teeth, suffocate the life from his shaking body until it was over, something fast and violent and quick to replace the horrible waiting, the slow depletion of less and less and less oxygen until black nicotine paste had completely coated his alveoli and his lungs caved in and his pulse fluttered upwards and he just. couldn’t. breathe anymore.
Gerard couldn’t stop the bones from rattling around inside his mind, and Frankie couldn’t breathe.
It wasn’t fear, not yet.
The fear came later, curled knees-to-chest in the backseat of the old Nissan like a coma patient, a sick shivering fetus sinking deeper and deeper into the inverse reflection of his own fang-toothed nightmare, into hallucinations of blood and wet wax and the disgusting smell of old upholstery: dirt and semen, dead skin and charred bones. Trying to sleep with feverish chills scintillating down his spinal cord from his swollen cortex, surges of saccharine masochistic delirium, and Gerard’s body sandwiched so tightly behind his that there was no beginning and no end, no room to breathe, just three layers of chilled skin and two thudding heartbeats, sore muscle forcing the blood to keep pulsing through a complex network of carmine veins.
Lub dub. Lub dub. Lub dub. Like hearing the ocean in a seashell, really just the hot throb of salty blood pounding inside your own head. Skin and scalp and rind and cartilage, boiling red cells and water ebbing and flowing, ebbing and flowing somewhere underneath the skull.
Knees touching chest. Chest touching spine. Thighs touching thighs.
Fucking spooning.
Crunching, pulling, squeezing together. Searching desperately for body heat in the cold Jersey night.
Gerard behind Frankie, Frankie knees-to-chest; cold little fetus. Feed us. Fetus.
Abort.
Abort.
Abort.
No, it wasn’t fear this time.
It was the sun and highway lights reflecting in delirium starbursts off the tarnished curves of his retinas; the pain, the chokehold frustration that made him want to dig ten fingers into the disgusting flesh of his face, to peel away the skin and gouge out both tired eyeballs in a flood of pure, unadulterated red… the desperate hurt that made him smash those fragile wrists over and over into the hardest edge he could find, little blood vessels branched out like the minuscule deep-green veins in celadon-glazed pottery – all the dazzling imperfections making it so valuable – leaking eggplant and Lysol yellow and new moon midnight blue.
The way every glance from Gerard cut out his tongue and left him drowning in hot crimson liquid from the corroded insides out, because now…
Gerard knew.
“Miss your daddy?” he sneered, thin lips moving around the damp paper of a cigarette. “Miss your daddy, Frank?” The leather jacket he was wearing smelled like stale smoke or old Catholic ashes, and his hazel eyes sparkled like Fabergé eggs, disgusting, crusted with sick, sweet crystalline honey as they shone out from a gluey mess of shapeless skin.
Stomach churning acid over acid, palms clammy with sweat, Frankie looked away.
There was a white rosary hanging from the rearview mirror, cheap plastic beads clicking repetitively against the windshield glass.
One Our Father, ten Hail Marys. One Glory Be.
Click. Click. Click
One Our Father, ten Hail Marys. One Glory Be.
Miles and miles and miles of pale morning sky outside the window, heaven glazed light blue with a faint golden glow in the clouds.
Click. Click. Click.
Miles and miles and—
“Tell me you fucking miss him.”
Beating a dead horse.
“Tell me you won’t miss it.”
Green eyes flashed pain and anger and animal fear; vocal chords straining with crippling hysteria. “I won’t fucking miss anything!”
And as Frankie’s mind filled with sick, half-formed sensations, the smell of sweat, saliva, salt and urine, rumpled bedsheets and hands closing like manacles around his bruised wrists, a humorless smile stitched itself tightly across Gerard’s thin mouth.