all the tortures (excerpt)

He slunk as he whispered it: “Don’t do this.”

“I won’t turn from it,” she slid through pursed, wrinkle-rounded lips, staring fiercely through every in-drawn wisp of brightness she had just inhaled, evacuating the room of all hope, suffocating even the balk of it.

“Think,” he quested on gentlest quiver, “of all that has been spent to surmount our challenges…”

She jutted her flat palm to the invisible mouse in the room and—stiffly, stiflingly, on furrowed and slam-clinched brow, through a rebar-reinforced scowl—muttered, “Absolutely nothing will remain.”

He wheezed on a shallow breath, an all too-stubby-burnt cigar of courage, “I remain…”

She repulsed, shoving years of suddenly unbound bitterness against the tiniest half-cracked heart-door, “You were never of permanent importance.”

In ravaged-recoil, then, he ghostly glid to the furthest corner-framed and filth-filled chipped-concrete of childhood shadow, that lightless alcove reserved for only purest pain, wincing with silence-in-saw-toothed-regret, buckled by wasted time in the unforgiving vice of timelessness. He almost choked it back, but somehow let it loose like the wounded, wide-eyed, guttural sorrow upon watching a spear-tip sink into seeking the aorta: “I’ve loved you, truly. I’ve loved you schoolessly. You’ve broken me cruelly, as a lamb relentlessly chased through bloodletting and barbarous wire…”

“I tire of hefting the hammer,” she raged on the thinnest air. “I long to swing it down, once, with everything I am and on everything I know.”

“Bring it down on me, but not love,” he begged like a burlap-legged, poorish-only boy. “Crush and grind me with it; don’t be threateningly coy with all that so teeteringly balances before us now.”

Ever the same, she gambled the way she’d always played the game, “Love is the name for a toy we’d eventually neglect, forget or destroy.”

He threw those knuckle-edged die immediately back, “Hammer hard, then, my lady; playlessly, do all three unto me—hot-hatefully smith my heart with an alloy worthier than you were ever prepared to be.”

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