*:･ﾟ🦋┇ ❝ Are you blind?❞ Derisive — roll of eyes. The floor has become lacquered with red blotches like a Jackson Pollock painting, spread out and leading to a person — man or woman, hard to tell with their face and torso is raw hamburger meat — the smell is repugnant with metallic blood and feces and something else: akin to a rotting carcass left to bake beneath the dog day sun atop scorching asphalt. And the heat, oven like, forces dew drops to form above Maria’s brow and upper lip. With a hiss she gives the corpse a disgusted, disgruntled look, before she returns her attention to her companion.
❝They might have something on them that’s useful — ❞ , a pause, then, ❝ — what? I’m not touching that.❞
Dolores looks to Maria in sheer, exasperated disbelief. Surely, this woman must be taking full advantage of some keen intuition that, in spite of everything, her companion refuses to abandon her in the fog — how else could she afford to be both so disparaging and so completely unhelpful? Between her insufferable attitude, the hot, putrid stench, and those shambling things lurking around, Dolores’ toes hang over the edge of either bursting into tears, throttling Maria, or both. Yet she does neither.
“Well, it was your idea,” Dolores points out, her bitter voice pushing through grit teeth like bloody meat through a grinder, “but whatever. Since you’re so squeamish, I guess I just have to do it.” She lets her disdain hang in the air for a moment before approaching the corpse.
As Dolores stoops in front of it, her eyes strain against the macabre urge to behold the fine details of the carcass’ mutilation, gluing themselves instead to the stained wall at its hind. The stench is so overwhelmingly vile that she’s forced to either hold her breath or vomit, and pride won’t let her submit to the latter in front of Maria now. She needs to be fast. Fumbling hands shove themselves into every pocket they can find, at times caressing something warm, wet and pulpous. Dolores pretends not to feel it.
By the final pocket, hope is dwindling, but then her fingers brush against something. Fluid, yet not soft to the touch, like a metallic piece of string. A chain, maybe. She doesn’t ponder it for more than an instant, tearing her hand out to see what she’s found.
In her grip is an exquisite, platinum bracelet decorated with an array of charms, none of which have any recognizable shape. It is, somehow, immaculate. Every bit as pretty and utterly useless to her as the woman who made her rob this corpse to find it. Dolores' jaw clenches so tight her molars nearly fracture, and the tendons in her scrawny neck stick out like thin wire.
Then, she has a wonderful idea.
Dolores plunges her hands into the carrion and stirs them about in its filth, only having the stomach to do so because of the giddy anticipation of what she’ll do next. She withdraws — finally breathes again — and turns to face Maria.
“Here,” Dolores shakily presents the pristine charm bracelet with a spiteful smile, like that of a little brother chasing his sister with a fat grub. Before any protest can arise, she seizes Maria’s wrist and slaps the bracelet, along with the thick gore and foul muck coating her hand, into Maria’s palm. As an extra measure of malice, she gives her hand a brief, but crushing squeeze, which produces a squelch.
