Guilty Asphyxia

“Quinn… how?”
She’s lying sprawled across the ratty carpet of the living room, motionless as a decaying corpse, the dark dark brown eyes that shattered so completely in that one awful instant focused weakly on the water-damaged ceiling. She hasn’t said a word in hours; nauseated, I wonder abstractly why there are no silky cobwebs gracing her salty, tear-stained cheeks.

Quinn’s hollow eyes flicker upwards towards her face in one motion that seems to take all of his energy to complete. “How many fucking times do you need to hear it? They found her this fucking morning. W-wrists slit.”

“Accident?” she whispers.

“Blood loss.”

“Accident?”

The second time that pretty little throat forces out the tremulous question, Quinn is on his feet so fast with anger that it startles me right out of my exhausted apathy, sending an unwanted shiver down my spine as he spits “I don’t fucking know, okay?!”

“Sh-she would have left you a note.”

Both of them turn simultaneously to look at me, startled that I’ve finally opened my parched mouth. After all, it’s been, what, two horrible, grating hours since we first heard the news, Skye’s father’s trembling voice over the phone breathlessly forcing out the words like someone had driven a stake through his chest; She’s dead, and I didn’t say a single fucking word, even throughout the whole hysterical trainwreck that followed; Sarah collapsing to the wooden floor of her bedroom and sobbing so hard Quinn had started to scream that the sounds of her ribcage bending were making him sick.

“Y-you think so, Frank?” Her voice trembles; she’s leaning forward on the carpet and hugging her shoulders more tightly, with wide cacao eyes begging me to confirm what I just said, to reassure both of them that even broken little Skye would never have had the guts to cut that fucking deep with no warning, no goodbyes, if she’d really known that she was never going to wake up.

“It was an accident.”

Accident accident ACCIDENT.

A silent hour later, Quinn leaves to drink until it dulls the hurt; she curls into a tighter ball on the carpet; I shift anxiously and feel the little thrills of something like razorblades buried in my chest, the constant reminder of death.

It won’t let you forget; she’s gone she’s gone she’s gone gone gone.

And then “Frankie…”

She’s on her feet now, looking so small and scared that I get up too, wanting to comfort her, crush her into little pieces so she won’t feel the aching, raw, bloody emptiness any longer.

“Why’d we…” Her horrible beautiful tragic pupils fix on mine, and all of a sudden I can’t breathe and can’t move, because with her eyes red and her cheeks white and her face salty-wet from crying, she looks like I feel. Time warps and bends when you lose someone, slows down, speeds up, proprioception fails and you never fucking know where your body is in space. Up down left right sleeping awake fixed broken hungry tired doesn’t matter; it’s all about the smallest details now: eyelashes stuck together and little half-moons on her cheekbones from the way she’s been digging her fingernails into her face as she cries.

I know she’s saying my name, saying the same thing over and over and over, but I can barely hear her.

Her wrists are bruised, old bruises, yellow at the edges.

Her liquefied insides are practically bleeding through her tank top. White with little colored hearts, little exploded confetti fragments of the broken muscle beneath her ribs.

God is she beautiful, sad, beautiful.

God I know. I know it hurts. It’s killing me too.

“Holy fuck! Holy fuck Frank!”

She’s screaming now, doubled over, hands balled into broken fists which blanch her skin bone-china white.

“Why did we let her go?! How the fuck could we let her go?!”

She screams and screams, so much emotion wracking her small body that I suddenly realize why it sickened Quinn to see her splintering; she screams until she’s hoarse and shaking and raw, and then she just folds into my arms as if she belongs there, burying her beautiful, tear-stained face in my chest and choking wordless phantoms of pain against my clavicle, pulling, pressing, squeezing, crushing closer and closer until my jeans and her thin cotton pajamas are forgotten on the living room floor and we just melt into one throbbing, bloody mess of guilt and pain and sadness. And of course I’m not really the one she wants, but her fingers are tangled in my hair, her hot mouth wet and salty on mine, and she keeps saying it as if I’ll be convinced, I want you I want you I want you, God Frank I want you; I can smell the vanilla liquor of her legs, which are wrapped around me so tightly that where she’s cutting off circulation, slow asphyxia blue is painting the lining of my capillaries inch by inch. It’s trapping me, it’s making me crazy, and at the same time everything’s so slick and liquid with sweat and tears that I swear she might slip out of my grip at any moment, just spill hot and beautiful out of my arms like gushing blood and soak the shitty carpet, evaporating into the air until she’s nothing but a fading russet stain in a room no one uses.

Tendons constricting, skin melting into skin, atoms exploding inside her irises… I just can’t fuck her hard enough to stitch up the hurt, to hide it and bury it and lock it up in forgotten chests, to keep the wolves from closing in and ripping us apart bone by bone, leaving us lying in a bloody, hopeless mess of tooth-marked ribs.

Just feeling her here, like this, beneath me, is enough to realize that she’s just a fucking skeleton, wrapped in pain-saturated layers of muscle and blood and torn nerve endings, and I’m digging my fingertips deeper and deeper into that soft skin, desperate to see and feel and touch all the breathtaking bones beneath her surface, hip bones and pelvis, collarbone, shoulderblades, the eerily arousing ridges where her ribs merge flawlessly into her sternum, shifting into sharper focus as she twists her head back: Shit Frank fuck Frank I need you so bad.

And when she says it, I know; I know she needs me, no matter how wrong it is, endorphins are fucking endorphins, and if she’s screaming my name, that’s one less breath she’ll spend screaming Skye’s.

Deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper; her teeth leave marks on my fingers as she tries to choke herself into silence, martyred eyes go wide and muscles clench below the surface, throwing me white-knuckled into serpentine helixes of blood-red and turquoise and gold, grotesque carnival lights burning out the insides of my retinas.

When it’s all over, she crumples in every possible sense of the word, head hitting the sofa armrest with a dull thunk that makes me flinch, the velocity of her brain impacting the bone of her skull something like the bottomless rush of vertigo which asphyxiating me as I watch a flush creep across her burning plasticine cheeks. Tiny gasoline sparks still flickering intermittently at the bottom of my eyes, I’m struggling to think of the right things to say to her, all the apologies or excuses or reasons or promises, because she knows it was wrong just like I do, she knows her role as the fucking Venus de Milo – broken icon of beauty that no one’s allowed to touch, the porcelain doll frozen in place on the highest shelf of the cabinet, the glass friend whose brittle winter bones I was never ever supposed to see.

Picking her up when she’s broken on the floor never meant this.

“Frankie…” she whispers hoarsely, plaintively, drawing out the second syllable as if she thinks I’m as tiny and childlike and vulnerable as she is, trapped inside a ribcage of wire and papier-mâché. “You’re good in bed.”

God, that jagged smile, the kind that makes faces seem like an excuse to hold teeth, broken bits of carcass bone poking from too-bright cherry gums, reminding me like a cold knife in my guts that she isn’t a little girl, no matter how hard she wants to be or I want her to be or Quinn wants her to be when he lets her crawl into bed with him after nightmares and never touches her once.

She’s crying; I don’t have to move my gaze from her lips to smell something strangely reminiscent of the ocean in the air and see the glittery blur of tears glistening in my peripheral vision, and before I even realize what I’m doing, my fingers are twisted in her hair, the skin of her cheek hot and wet against the too-rough back of my hand. “Don’t- Sh-shit, please don’t...”

“It’s okay,” she says, low voice breaking, almost lifting her head to… to something, throw up, snap her spinal cord, kiss me? I can suddenly feel the pressure of her fingertips against my jawbone, giving me chills which seem hysterically ridiculous after what we’ve done. “I have to, Frankie… I’m so fucking sad.”

“I know,” I mumble awkwardly, pathetic and unsure who is comforting who.

“You’re gonna cry too,” she whispers, “Aren’t you?”

Yes no maybe; does it even fucking matter when someone’s just gone?, and I miserably avoid the question, lowering my head. “You loved her.”

“So did you, Frank…” Her eyes flicker with painful uncertainty and I remember that she doesn’t get it; no matter how hard she fucking tries, she’ll never be able to feel the limits, the line between love and love, the line between friendship and something more. Sex and making love. Fucking and kissing and hugging. Love and lust. Caring and wanting. Crawling into bed with Quinn at night and waiting for him to finally wrap his arms around her waist, telling her that everything is going to be okay, and pressing her tearstained face into my chest, crying and holding and hugging until suddenly we’re fucking each other.

Is all it takes one tragedy?

If it was Quinn who’d been alone in the living room tonight, would he be the one lying here, fingertips still burning with the memory of her skeleton?

In some ways, I’m so sick of her.

Sick of her rollercoaster emotions, sick of her fucking empathy and the way it destroys her. Sick of her being so scared and distrustful, never believing that anyone could actually give a shit, sick of her still falling in love with anything and everything that shows her the smallest kindness, like a bruised stray dog that’s been kicked under the fucking ribs too many times. Sick of the way Quinn and I both call her baby, like we know it’s only a matter of time.

She’ll fuck anyone that tells her she isn’t the fucking monster she’s grown up thinking she is.

But could I really ever hate her for that?

“She’s dead,” I hear her force out, barely, sobs splintering the words as sarcasm twists her voice. “She’s fucking dead and I still want her but I’m fucking you and tonight I’m just going to fucking cry and tap my wrists on a desk.”

By tap, she means slam. She means dark eggplants bruises and inky liquid diffusing visibly out of split capillaries beneath her cellophane skin. She means desperate thuds filling the whole apartment, making Quinn crazy and me sick. Choked cries of pain every time she hits just a little too hard, telling her friends that she fell down the fucking stairs, ran into something, accident accident ACCIDENT.

“Bring her back,” and she’s crying harder and harder, body shaking so hard under me that I wonder if her beautiful bones will scatter right in front of my sore eyes. “Just fucking bring her back!”

“Baby…”

“Guilty,” she whimpers, and the instant the haunting verdict escapes her lips, it fills up the room, my head, my chest like tangles upon tangles of tarnished barbed wire, deadly, flesh-shredding coils packed from wall to wall, packed beneath my skull, packed into my twisted guts.

We find the defendant fucking guilty.

I know why she wouldn’t stop screaming; I know and I half want to tell her that I understand, that she isn’t alone and it isn’t all her fault and that it’ll be okay, but I can’t find any of the words, can’t concentrate on anything with the sharp metallic stabbing inside my head, knotted up around my lungs and my heart and my kidneys, soaked in red oxygenated blood and renal fluid.

She chokes; I see her bare chest bones crunch; “I could b-breathe if it would just f-fucking stop-”

I want to tell her it will; I want to tell her that it’s not our fault Skye’s dead, but somewhere deep inside, past where the coils of guilt are snarled tightly around my guts, I know that’s a lie.

“I really thought I could s-save her,” she sobs shakily. “I a-always said I was t-too fucked up, b-but somehow I th-thought if she l-loved me…”

“She did love you.” It’s hoarse and quiet but it’s fucking honest; at least I can tell her that without lying, for two totally broken girls, they loved each other more than anyone I know.

“Then why – why the fuck – isn’t she still here, Frank?!” she snarls, so desperate and hurt and betrayed that it makes my stomach hurt worse and worse with every minute. “I can’t fucking kill myself because I’m too scared and too stupid and because I couldn’t leave her and I still can’t leave you or Quinn or anyone else, oh God, I just want to die so bad but I never fucking will!” With that, she starts laughing through her tears, awful, hideous laughter that can’t compete with the unending flood of water and salt from her smashed eyes.

“I love you too, you know,” I choke roughly through a mouthful of better things to say, “And you’re still here and I don’t want to see you hurting so fucking much.”

She goes silent, just staring at me with big dinner-plate eyes, shaking hard. When she finally catches her elusive breath, finally opens her mouth to speak, I can barely hear it, but I know she’s sincere. “I… I kn-know. I f-fucking love you just as much, I just- I miss her so bad already.” Her voice catches on the barbs of pain in her larynx. “F-Frankie… It should have been me.”

And because there’s absolutely nothing I can think of to reply, I just settle for tired silence, gently stroking her cheekbone with the side of my hand, over and over and over and over. After a few minutes, her raw eyes flicker tentatively closed, long lashes lightly brushing her tear-swollen skin, and to me at least, she looks something like an angel in the muted golden glow from the living room lamp. Her hair is messy, stray pieces glowing golden-red as they catch the light, casting spiky shadows across her pale face, and the way her bangs are clipped back gives her an inexplicably dangerous edge, like rockstars or centerfold girls.

And she is beautiful and for a minute she’s mine, and I have to take care of her, so I just keep holding her, touching her, slowly trying to rock her to sleep even though she’s shivering with guilt and pain and I know it won’t work; I just stay there caressing her delicate cheekbone jawbone neck until she squirms uncomfortably beneath me and mumbles “Frankie, stop it,” startling me into sudden embarrassment.

“B-baby?”

She looks a little guilty, like she’s seen my reddening cheeks, but it doesn’t stop her from continuing, nervously. “We should… stop.”

Stop. Fine.

I get up.

She gets up too as I pull on my jeans, avoiding my eyes as they try not to trace the contours of her body too sharply.

Pretty little hipbones. Pretty little scapulas.

She can barely get her pale legs into her underwear or pajama pants, that’s how hard she’s shaking, and as she twists into her tank top, the ridges of her ribs shift into view again. “Oh, fuck, Frank,” I hear her whimper, syllables fitting together like pieces of broken glass in her throat. “Oh fuck. She’s fucking gone.”

And then she’s gone too, locked in the bathroom, slamming her right wrist against the counter edge beneath our unforgiving fluorescent lights, the kind that tug out your bones from under your skin and make your fresh bruises look almost beautiful.

Seconds, minutes, seconds, an hour; I’m still crumpled on the sofa when the sound of a key in the door signals Quinn’s return, my feverish head sandwiched between the cushions in a pathetic attempt to drown out the robotic thudding sound filling the apartment, and even with the glassy tears-and-hard-liquor shine to his eyes, I know he can see that she’s dying, that I’m not doing anything to stop her, that we are anything but okay. Minutes later, I hear him outside the bathroom door, coaxing her out, telling her to stop hurting herself, and when he says my name, trying to persuade her, Frank and I don’t want you to blah blah, that’s when I stumble off the couch and drag myself into my room, closing the door behind me and collapsing facedown on the mattress.

Maybe I’m awake, maybe I’m asleep, maybe the universe is expanding at a rate of 0.007 percent per million years, but suddenly my heart jolts into my throat at the sharp sound of a door slamming shut, and I realize Quinn’s probably dragged her into the bedroom next to mine, still trying to get past his own nauseous hysteria and calm her down.

“Baby, listen—”

“Quinn, God,” I hear her screaming, voice constricted as though someone is standing on her fucking chest bones, just like the night terrors she used to have, the ones where she was so convinced she couldn’t breathe that the rotten mechanism of her lungs physically refused to function. “God God God fuck, I loved her, I loved her—”

Short gasps for breath take the place of words; if I strain my ears I can hear the low murmur of Quinn’s voice through the thin wall, even more desperate now; Stop, stop it, baby please, then the wet sound of his mouth colliding hard with hers. Lips, tongue, teeth that are nothing but wet bone poking through from two throbbing skulls; the soft rustle of fabric, I know her tank top’s on the floor, the tie on her pants undone, oh God and he’s pushing the pajamas down her thighs as my stomach collapses in on itself in a splash of acid and cherry-red.

He can see it all now, the icy structure of her painted skeleton, clavicle breastplate chest bone ribcage vertebrae sternum fibulas fucking coccyx all glinting awful white through her translucent skin.

He’s not supposed to see it; I’m not supposed to know it; she’s supposed to be curled in Skye’s warm embrace, not shivering against a cold bedroom wall with all of her bones exposed.

Then “Quinn, I can’t,” she whispers, and I swear the corners of her hoarse voice are soaked with sour blood. “I can’t do it, Quinn, just hold me.”

My heart implodes, explodes, constricts, prolapses, I don’t know; but Quinn’s shushing her now, telling her it’s okay, it’s all okay with tears in his swollen throat. He loves her, I love her, Skye loved her almost enough to stay; it’s our fault her fault God’s fault doesn’t matter, fuck, there’s too much pain in this world to hate anybody for being broken.

I can’t breathe, I can’t think, we’re going to make it, someday, even if it takes forever.

“Please just hold me.”