As With Love So With Monsters

Flash Fiction by Andrew L. Roberts

His home was as far away as the farthest star in the night-black sky. And sitting there upon that dead shore, watching the last of the setting moon sliver itself into a thousand broken mirrors upon the waves, only made the gulf that separated him from his own world all the more unbearable.

I am alone, but not alone. I’m alive, yet not living.

Always the same thoughts pulling at him whenever she pressed in close, hip to hip, leaning against his shoulder, breathing into his hair and surrounding him with the scent of her ambrosia.

She cooed as she stroked his spine.

“I am hungry,” she said.

He trembled, nearly groaning, but forced himself not to.

He was not sure what it was about her, but there was something unnerving in how she so effortlessly enticed him. It was something hidden within in her heliotrope eyes, the way they drew him in, and how she could smile and look forlorn at the same time. It was something, something….

Raking back his long hair with both hands, he dug his feet more firmly into the crumbling rock.

If I can define her¼and that something, I will prevail.

This was what he told himself, night after night, yet the answer remained elusive. Still he pursued the question. What else could he do? It was his nature to hunt after all, and while one could negotiate with nature for a time, nature itself could not be denied indefinitely.

Nature?

Whose nature?

Mine?

Hers?

The boom of the surf against the reef half a league off barely touched his consciousness. Instead, the only sounds to which he was connected were her slow heartbeat, calling to him through the flesh, and his own pulse, which quickened in response.

Shimmering in the darkness, her expression was fraught with a palpable urgency, and an eagerness to love. Or was it camouflage, masking her hunger? He could not be sure. That was his only certainty—that he would never know her heart, nor she his.

On this rock, there was no room for trust.

And yet…he liked the way she spoke his name. And that too was a problem. Her sonorous voice and curious language, which with its smallest inflections, transformed his plain syllables into poetry and the rampant turns of song. He had never been music until they met, only logic, mathematics, parabolic equations and the cold geometry of intersecting lines in space. Now those lines were becoming strings, vibrating under the kiss of her bow. The movements of her fingertips up his neck made him weep and filled his chest with a horrible joy that drained him of all clarity and coldness.

Being with her was to be lost at sea, consumed with an unquenchable thirst, while surrounded by her limitless waters, the single drop of which would prove fatal.

Poison.

The word flashed like iron striking spark from stone.

She is my poison.

In that moment, he understood why he yearned for her in the same way in he used to yearn for the prickle of sunlight upon his skin, or the taste of warm fruit and wine on summer afternoons, and all the things he would never taste again.

She is my death.

Inside, he had always known this.

From the very start, they had been alien to one another. Their biologies, seemingly so similar, were in reality as foreign as sun to moon. Where one dragged itself each night from a hole in the earth, the other rose from the sea. Once though, both had fallen from the sky. Both had been stars.

Now, he was the ragged mariner marooned upon her rock, and she the nymph who had imprisoned him with “I love you.”

Words that were chains, always spoken in that chilled dampness before the dawn, whispered against his throat, so that he shivered beneath her teeth, even as she fed upon him in the briefest of sups, night after night after night.

 “I love you.” She could say it so easily, her warm tongue caressing his earlobe.

“I know,” he answered, his half-closed eyes still fixed upon the path of shattered moonlight.

“Don’t you love me?”

Such a question. So much danger. Any answer was a betrayal.

“Say it for me. Say you love me,” coaxing, seducing, always seducing. “Just once. Once for me. I want to hear you say it.”

“Does it have to be now? This moment?”

“Yes,” she said. “Now, while I eat. I don't want to wait any longer.”

But he shook his head. “I cannot do this. You seem so human, but...but…”

“But what? Tell me,” she whispered, her eyes full of hope.

“We are not.”

And even as the words left his lips, his own fangs pierced the supple, white meat of her throat, took hold, and sank home to find the artery.

There was no struggle, just surprise, and the embrace of two predators that could only end in surrender for one and release for both. She sighed as he drank her poison all the way to its final dregs, stopping her heart.

Then even the lapping sound of the waves below was silenced.

In that stillness, he held her close, gazing into her now sightless eyes as he whispered the things he had always held back, the things she had begged him to say, the things that were now so pointless.

He said them anyway.

Afterward, he left her empty upon that shore, followed the crooked trail and climbed the island’s peak to greet his final sunrise alone.

He had his answer.

Her blood was as sweet as rotten figs upon his lips, and as bitter as gall.

He would never go home.

He would never be music again.