Dust particles dance in a sallow beam of sunlight. Shouldn’t be, given Nix is half-soaked from bullet rain. Sun-showers are uncommon in Hell. She remembers a bruise across the entire sky. Could’ve been smog, could’ve been yet another storm barreling up the coastline. Probably a blend of both.
Arthur doesn’t need to glance at that cracked, dirty glass to spot his and Penny’s dead skin performing one last waltz. Harmony lies beneath it, filmed in plaster, black sludge, and moist subfloor that may just give way should one of them step wrong. How many times did he fix the grout? Now it’s veined and furry in places. Hollow cracks beneath their feet shift the broken tiles with him.
Nix mars her brow as her husband begins to sway.
The ballroom melody bounces in the way one enters a room without permission. It’s diffident, yet polite. The piano’s keys have become both slick and sticky from the same vitreous jelly that lines the bath. Light strings drift in pitch, then warble. It tries to swing in tune with this unit’s former occupant and the life that almost was.
Nix can feel her name scrawled on the linoleum. Perhaps it already is and lurks behind a peel. Wallpaper hangs like damp, tattered skin. Were they to pull those green flaps, they might just find more than the declaration Arthur’s writ in his own blood.
Another brown droplet escapes the bathtub’s mineral-crusted faucet.
The sink’s faucet remembers to match pace.
Combined with the gritty percussion of Arthur’s usually weightless steps crushing tiles too brittle to remain intact, 8J composes a siren song of its own…yet can’t wholly remember. The track loops.
Nix feels an artery in her own chest draw tight, then snap back in place.
Arthur senses that spring in his back somehow. He bristles. Melpomene weeps as a tremble he can’t kill betides him. He’s cold, but won’t say it. Smoker’s lungs are arid, yet stuffed with rot and phlegm he can’t expel.
She’s closer to the door, but Harmony’s calling to her from beneath the window. Part of her wonders if that’s the lure.
Arachnoid fingers capped with nails that have overgrown and chipped yellow entrench in the sides of her neck. They aren’t Arthur’s. His grip remains around her waist, burrowing in a waistline that’s too soft these days for her sanity. Had their life together begun when they were young, she’d be on their eleventh child by now. Likely more. All crammed in a hovel that offers no warmth, yet demands it from everyone trapped inside.
A scratch on the record neither spouse can locate drags a needle across the bathroom.
The handgun’s moved a hair to the left. Filmed in plaster and grayish stickers like they’ve lived here a week. The ‘sunbeam’ has retracted its performative balm, too. Deep blue competes with a sodium vapor flood lamp’s jaundiced gleam.
How long have they been here?
Arthur shivers, says nothing, yet sinks his teeth into his wife’s lower neck.
She wishes he’d break skin. Let the contamination flow from his throat and into her instead. Nix sniffles, wipes her nose against her husband’s wet collar, then kisses his nape just behind his ear.
For the first time in recent memory, he’s clammy. Waterlogged like his mother’s stiff, yet mottled skin.
Mold tries reclaiming Penny. The longer Nix looks, the older her mother-in-law appears. First, ten years weathered a face Arthur can never truly blot from his retinas.
Penny remains, she’s certain, the most enchanting creature Arthur has ever laid eyes on. Such is evident in the wraith's eyes, which have been earth-eaten and absorbed by this apartment so little more than faint pinpricks glow within her sockets. He’d put a pistol in his mouth if he knew.
Arthur does mould around his wife, though.
Nix bristles upon feeling his fingers sink deeper into her skin. She’d let him flay her. Nix drags her mouth behind her husband’s ear, where he tends to spray that amber-dominated cologne. Any trace of him has been replaced with a musty, damp, flat odor that doesn’t belong to him. Didn’t belong to Penny either. Opium by YSL was her favorite fragrance. Also amber-dominant. Aromatic. Sultry and seductive. Arthur, once he had the means, chose a cologne that mimics it in a manner that can turn every head in a room…because it loves his skin.
Nix pushes her wet nose behind his collar to see if she can taste where the water couldn’t soak.
Arthur noses her hair. Strains to breathe when the inevitable laugh shunts through. It’s a sharp, ripping sensation in his sternum that crying won’t alleviate. He shifts from foot to foot, blinking so the rotting pink tile and peeling wallpaper aren’t exposing more damp.
Black and green clouds have formed their own insulation, their own ecosystem that has been keeping his personal Hell warm for his return…and welcoming the third occupant who was stashed in that cabinet that now poorly hangs from hinges time forgot.
Compression-like pumps distort the diatonic harmony. Like the track’s struggling to recall its own existence, its own place in time.
Nix wilts beneath that crackling record, closing her eyes and allowing her cheeks to soak. She doesn’t know where the music is coming from…yet it hisses at her plain as day.
Arthur’s caught the harmony. His left side bumps a little more languidly than the right…aiding the apartment in threading a tune it can’t truly remember. He does. He still dances to the degraded ballroom loop.
Nix can only cringe at how often mother and son danced to it. Alone. In the dark. Where none but the television’s blue glow could watch her lips brush his and his fingers trail the curvature of her waist. 'Mother-son.' If only she could choke Penny twice. This time with her bare hands. Until the monster's eyes burst and her neck completely crushed like a beer can in her hands. Then she could let the maggots harvest her skull.
A dark frame shades Arthur’s periphery. He uses his own face to nudge Nix’s towards the medicine cabinet. ‘MOTHER FUCKER’ haunts him there, too.
Nix shifts her focus to that fogged glass, the dust that’s eaten away at it until it was given its pound of flesh. That sink’s enough to make her vomit, but Nix kisses the apex of her husband’s cheek and turns toward it.
“I don’t want to live here,” he reminds his wife, nose stuffy and vision too blurred to see her face.
Nix braces, duly aware that 8J has eroded anything the public would find beautiful about her into a fetid, tear-puffed mascara-smeared mess, “But...you won’t let her go.”
“I can’t,” the resignation in his stage whisper seems to flay him from the inside. He takes the brunt of an ache, buckling on himself and succumbing to a laugh that’s brittle and rooted in his core. Blood splashes the backs of his teeth and pools on his tongue from trying to contain it. He keeps trying. Bright red rivers bloat in his sclera to cement his failure.
‘Go back there,’ the music insists.
Arthur risks facing the bathtub.
Penny’s blank stare remains unchanged. She’s so cold. Probably still waiting for him to drape her in a towel and run a brush through her hair. One’s waiting behind the medicine cabinet if only he could bring himself to move.
