– ( º ▌░ ✗ &. red velvet.
Tomorrow is Dolly’s sixteenth birthday. She is wearing babydoll socks and shoes with shiny buckles, hair cascading down her back in caramel waves, sun caressing her ivory skin as she opens the front door. The house is dead silent aside from the steady drip of the kitchen sink -- the one her father always says he’ll fix but never does. Drip, drip, drip. Sometimes, Dolly uses those drops to measure time. Seconds, minutes, hours. Drop, drop, drop. The kitchen is empty, but the table is occupied by a single clear package, its contents enough to bring a grin to Dolly’s lips, almost menacing in its buoyancy.
Pop. She smacks her lips once, then gain. Pop, pop. She peels the label from the packaging, slender fingers curling around her prize -- a single red velvet cupcake. Dolly’s cherry red mouth practically waters at sight of it, blue eyes going wide as oceans, unshakable pools of light in the otherwise dark room. Her lips part, a perfect o formed in the space between two plush rose petals. Her teeth are moments away from closing in on the edge of the cupcake’s velvety base when her eyes fall on the figure sitting across from her, a face she somehow managed to fail to recognize in her greed, in her haste. Her mother is always criticizing her, telling her to slow down -- at breakfast, at supper, at climbing in and out of her pretty skirts and tying up her hair. Always trying to slow her down, but Dolly was born to move fast.
Just across the clean white table, a man -- or something that resembles what might have been a man, once upon a time, years ago before the grim reaper ripped away his life far too soon -- sits, blood that oozes more black than red from the gaping slit in his throat, deep enough to expose the gristle of his windpipe. A piece of his cheek is missing, the skin there torn away by time and Mother Nature -- the two most powerful demons of them all -- revealing his teeth, brown and yellow, cracked and uneven. Where his eyes used to be now sit two dark, hollowed sockets, remnants of eyeballs oozing along the rims like slimy, split-open egg yolks, the spattered, soggy leftovers that remain stuck to the cooling pan long after her father has left for work and her mother has disappeared to the powder room to tend to her hair. Dolly is not afraid.
“Nobody else can see you, you know,” Dolly pipes up matter-of-factly, resuming her task of pulling back the paper from her cupcake and taking a bite. Red velvet melts in her mouth, slides down her throat like a river, rich and satisfying. She hums happily. “It’s only me.” Only me. Only her. The words echo inside the room, inside the spaces of her porcelain ribcage like rocks being pelted against her frail bones. She looks him dead in the eye as he drips gore onto the clean white tiles. Sometimes, Dolly comes home to find her pretty white bedroom carpet soaked crimson, bloody handprints dancing across the wall like a child’s finger painting expedition gone wrong, but her mother will walk in and says nothing, eyes registering none of the horrors that have befallen her darling daughter.
A piece of the man’s cheek slips onto the table. Dolly takes another bite of her cupcake. “Tomorrow is my birthday, you know.” If one were to walk in at this very moment, they would find a pretty blonde girl with red velvet crumbs lingering at the corners of her mouth, talking to nobody in particular, voice ringing too loud in the confined space that’s cloaked in an eerie silence that more than suggests something far more sinister than a teenaged girl talking to an imaginary friend, or even herself.
Drip, drip, drop. The kitchen sink drips in time with her heartbeat, sluggish like the hand on the clock on the wall. Time seems to slow at moments like these, or even stop altogether, leaving her stranded in the churning black waves that lurk in the darkest corners of her mind, the shadows that hover in her peripheral vision, always just a split second out of view. Dolly licks the frosting from the top of her cupcake, letting its creamy white presence linger on her lips, then the tip of her tongue before taking another kitten lick. There’s frosting on her hands and her mama will surely have her head if she gets any of it on the furniture or the floor.
The man drums bony, torn fingers against the table. Loose soil spills onto its surface. Drip, drip, drop. It’s not real, Dolly tells herself. It’s not real. Of course it is -- she can practically feel it, his presence in the room with her, long-dead heartbeat weighing down the walls, too all-consuming to be make believe. It’s not real. She licks another stripe of frosting from the cake, then jam the rest of it into her mouth. She sucks the frosting from her fingers and stands up. His eyes do not follow her as she walks away.
An hour later -- an hour spent hiding behind her locked bedroom door, back pressed to the wood and heart hammering in her chest, the sound ugly and too fast, always too fast -- she goes to investigate and finds he’s gone. The only traces left are the spots of blood and rotting flesh that litter the floor like candy wrappers. Her mama is washing the dishes, humming along to the radio. She steps in the blood twice.
Another hour later, her papa comes home from work and they all sit around the kitchen table for supper. Her mother lays her casserole dish over the spot where the man’s bony fingers tap tap tapped away like the leaky faucet, and her father sits exactly where he sat, right across from Dolly as she licked the remnants of cream cheese frosting from her fingers -- too young, too naive for it to be anything other than childish, but too scarred on the inside to be unaware.
She excuses herself to her bedroom early, complaining of nausea that isn’t anywhere near fabricated, leaving half of her plate untouched. One step into her room, and her bare toes touch blood. The man smiles at her from the crack in her closet door, a clownish grin from within his torn cheek.
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