Dead eyes

The moment the wooden oak doors open I miss the safety of the Hallway. Miss the comfort of the tiny bench where all the anxious feelings for the next few moments were only thoughts weighing on my shoulders.

I long to still be drowning inside the comforting sea of fear that has made its home inside the corners of my soul. My mind begs for more time. For more days, more hours to answer the questions I haven't stopped asking since she strolled into my life. The sound of my name echoing against the walls haunts my ears as I stand. I move forward a ghost wishing I could disappear.

Walking through the gallery every step I take carries me closer to a fate I've been running diligently away from. A fence-like barricade stands before me separating the court from the observing public. Stares from twelve faces bore into parts of my conscious I've tried desperately to keep hidden. Their judgments seep into my pours and infect my thoughts.

My monster's keeper sits ready to control my fate along with hers from high atop their lofty bench. The floor below my feet is annoyingly steady. I would kill for a shake or just a rattle from an earthquake. Something to hide the unsteadiness of my gait.

A uniform with a gun, I pray will protect me if the snake to my right strikes again, leads me to the stand where I will bear witness to her actions. Where I will recount the terror, she gave birth to inside of me.

The whole of my body flows inside a river of nervous fear. A river running with the current of a night long ago when the evil brimming just below her surface hollowed me out. She has made me into this empty vessel the jurors see walking toward the vacant wooden box sitting steps away. I am the Titanic cutting through the frigid water of the North Atlantic toward a waiting iceberg ready to sink to the bottom.

Dead eyes stare at me, searing me with images of the helpless moments when she carved everything from me piece by piece. My ears ring with an ever-growing louder siren blaring a warning. My world begins to go black. The corners of my vision grow darker as she peels back the protection, I've thrown over myself to cover the wounds that still bleed inside of me.

Please stop. I plead, with her the same way I pleaded with her that night. The corners of her soft red lips turn up. Her delicious voice whispers sweetly inside my head. Telling me to scream as loud as I can.

Two long fingers push streaks of blonde hair camouflaged in locks of darker brown behind her right ear the same way she did the night she stole the person I used to be.

A cold memory of her blade against my flesh comes to life. A twinge of phantom pain makes me think of my warm blood flowing out over the edges of the gaps she cut into my skin.

My ears hear the judge's voice, but the words sound far away like fog horns blowing on the other side of a murky haze separating me from the safety of land.

The tip of her tongue curls up and slides across the ruby color of her top lip. A shutter reverberates from the base of my skull all the way down to the bottoms of my feet. And again, I feel the soft caress of her mouth brushing against my neck. Feel her breast pressing against my chest as she recounts the lovers that came before me.

Looking at her soft features under the courtroom lights that hang from the ceiling above I think of her somewhere else, in a different light. Where her face is lit in the glow of a flame coming from a melted wax candle. I relive her tales of torture. Each one a gift she gave to torment all the good parts of me. Her words from our special night circle around inside my thoughts going round and round, teasing and taunting me.

There is pleasure in pain. Ecstasy in release. Like the praying mantis eating her copulating partner's head, the octopus strangling her mate with three of her arms. I take my lovers into my garden before I take away their light.

Flowing curls of the dark brown hair streaked with blonde that she used to lure me that night look sinister now as they fall in waves over her shoulders. Her lawyer says something, and she turns her elegant face toward him. I feel a sense of relief knowing her light brown eyes flecked with darker shades won't be on me for a moment. My heart freezes into a solid piece of cracked dirty ice when she turns her head slightly back to keep me in the corner of her vision.

It's then I know she knows what she's doing to me. Knows the fear she is wrapping her beautiful self around. Her sultry lips widen in a smile, and I realize she knows I know. She makes an audible gasp that catches her lawyer off guard.

She is enjoying the fear I feel now as much as she enjoyed spreading my blood over her bare skin when she made the morbid love, she made to me that night. Her atrocities pile up in a mountain rising out of the darkness she placed in my mind. Her horrors play across a cinema screen standing behind my eyes.

Two of her perfectly manicured nails trace a pattern over the darkly stained wood of the defense table. The same pattern she cut into my flesh from my neckline to the soft skin below my navel. The same pattern that stretches in a scar beneath the fabric of my shirt. A spider with an hourglass on its abdomen.

From the corner of her eye, she gives me a little wink just the way she did the night she killed the person I was before. I watch her turn to look fully at me, again. In the iridescent glow sparkling in the horizon of her eyes, I find the same enticing allure that made me want to fall in love with every part of her. The innocent smile she likes to wear as a mask flashes across her face. And, again I feel myself being pulled into her web.

Her elegant hands go flat against the wood beneath her palms. Her sultry fingers spread out from each other as her forearms slide forward toward me. Her mouth falls open slightly. She holds my gaze an instant before she lowers her head down between her arms. I continue to watch as she stays there long enough to capture the other eyes in the courtroom.

Then she lifts her head back up to look at me with dirty blonde hair falling in front of her eyes. Behind her hair, she wears a look from our night together that she knows has been seared into my memory. A silent moan escapes her lips. A moan, I heard at full volume at the climax of our night when she dug her nails into my chest hard enough to draw tiny rivers of red.

Her hands shoot out to each side in one quick motion. Her hair whips back in a long arch coming to rest behind the back of her chair. Upright her posture rigid and perfectly straight she drops the innocent disguise from her smile. Her dead eyes dance in a manic ocean as her uncuffed hands lift slowly up into the air above her head.

An audible slap echoes in the courtroom as she clasps her hands together. She blows out a breath of hot air to move away the last strands of defiant hair from her face. A world passes between our eyes. I feel her silk wrapping around me as she dances her spider dance.

The courtroom all around us devolves into chaos. The bailiffs begin to move toward her. The judge's gavel bangs down heavy on the mallet resting at the corner of their bench. Her hands, mimicking the way she held the knife that night come down in one swooping motion smacking hard against the defense table. And again, I feel the heavy thud of her kitchen knife plunging deep into my chest.

I sink instantly back down inside the lake of blood I felt pooling beneath my body that night. I feel her hands pressing down on my chest again. I hear her soft voice whispering she'll be back later to wrap my body in plastic. I feel the loss of her lifting up from where she straddled me to stand above my ravaged body.

The courtroom disappears and I only see the portrait of her naked body tinted in red with my blood. I watch again as she walks away from me. My eyes again, move with the rhythm of her hips. My vision traces a line down the center of her back, past the round curves of her backside, and all the way to the bottom of her long legs.

Hands touch my shoulders. More hands grasp her arms. Her dead eyes never move from mine as they force her to stand. Her evil lips blow a kiss in the air. And somehow, I feel that kiss on mine. Two arms shake me. Concerned eyes take me away from hers.

The eyes look at me with the same unbelieving shock I saw the morning I stumbled from her door wearing an image of a spider tattooed in blood, along with a gaping hole in the center of my chest, and a line cut across my throat.

A commotion captures my attention. Her dead eyes find me again as the bailiffs wrestle her to the floor. From somewhere far away I hear the voice of the doctor in the hospital who didn't bother to look up from his clipboard when he told me she missed my carotid arteries by millimeters.

Looking into her dead eyes with my own living ones I think I see a hint of sadness and desperation.

They lift her up with plastic cuffs restraining her wrists. Her wheat-colored blonde hair with dark undertones shoots off in all directions. I can’t look away from how wild and free she looks. Her once neatly pressed blouse and skirt hang wrinkled and disheveled. All of her masks are gone. And, again I see the honesty of her.

She is as beautiful as the night she attempted to take my life. I see her body relax and she gives me one last look before they turn her away. I feel an emptiness begin to grow inside me the moment her dead eyes are gone from mine. The bailiffs on each side of her start moving forward. She turns her head back once more to look at me. I watch with a fast-beating heart as she mouths the words. I miss you.