Slightly inebriated.
Another night of aggressively carousing with other abrasive businessmen. Showmanship. Solidarity.
Choruses heralding how much he was having to go through as his wife selfishly laid in a hospital bed that no one in yet another banquet had any clue he’d put her in.
He drunkenly mistyped the key code to his new office three times, no mind paid to the small atrium outside of it that reeked of the stench of his arrogant, abusive malevolence even when he wasn’t there.
A cloud of bad energy preceded him like the smell of cat piss into every space he entered where he didn’t have to kiss ass for accounts anyway.
He was a predator, to be sure.
A cloaked, fawning when it fit the bill one, always.
But this was his lair.
Rage sync’d her breath to his in the dark as she watched him finally get the numbers right and violently shove the door to his recently upgraded executive digs open, still riding high on the narcissistic wave of supply that came with stomping his wife into a coma.
She looked up at the sky.
Everything that had been screeching at her to stop while she still could boomed in the dark, things that she knew didn’t belong to her. Things that actually thought they could protect him…from her.
She cut her eyes back towards the entrance. Everything otherworldly around her fell silent as the embattled door connected with the wall and stayed open. His little shows of force against it had happened so often already that he’d bruised the virgin walls of the new build.
He drunkenly sauntered towards his bathroom, oblivious.
His beleaguered wife flashed in his mind. The demons in him slithered up to the surface of his countenance for him to see for himself as he blindly looked in the ostentatiously gilded mirror.
“…Fucking cunt-” he muttered and spat into the gold plated sink that only made sense with the gaudy mirror he’d had installed after liquidating Phuong’s life insurance to supposedly cover medical bills he hadn’t bothered to pay.
“Bad enough I had to put up with you, “he growled to the corners of the room. “Fuck made you think you were gonna leave me! That I wouldn’t kill you first?! Stupid cunt!” he barked as he absently flung an arm back to close the door behind him.
She slid across the threshold and shut the suite door behind her sync’d with the swing of the powder room door that hadn’t connected.
Holding himself in front of the custom urinal he’d recently acquired, even drunk the distant latching of the front door made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. He screwed up his face, leered over his shoulder and saw six inches of space still between the bathroom door and its doorjamb.
“Nani-” he slurred roughly like the angry lush he was when no other men were around and turned all the way towards the door, flaccid penis still in hand.
She kicked the door open before he could finish his sentence in his mother tongue, slamming it into his inebriated body. He crashed into the gilded sink, cracking its seal and taking it down to the newly tiled golden floor with him.
“Anata-YOU?! NOo-!” he hissed, shocked as he peered up at the teenaged girl in head to toe black that loomed over him. Her face was streaked with foundation too ashy for her skin on purpose, with black kohl smeared around her eyes and snarling mouth. Disoriented, he tried to struggle back up as she rained punches down onto his drunken head and obviously dislocated left arm.
He grabbed at her leg as they cursed at each other and she pivoted and violently knee’d him in the face. His head swung back into the gaudy urinal that crumbled upon impact.
She stomped him to within an inch of his life in the chunky, dusty detritus of it, an eye for an eye style.
The demons riding him flung themselves out of him like rats escaping a sinking ship as she broke every one of his limbs with her steel toed boots.
He started to black out.
“Here, let me help you with that,” She growled.
She pulled a white cloth out of the front pocket of her hoodie and doused it with chloroform. His eyes fluttered as she rammed it into his face until he passed all the way out on the bathroom floor. She ripped his half undone shirt all the way open and the dumped the last of the vial of on his chest, then dropped the cloth on top of it before pouring a second vial of chloroform across it to soak it up and gingerly backed out of the bloody, destroyed bathroom.
She scanned the executive office for something to underscore her point and saw the conical world’s best husband award glistening on the shelf so front and center that it must have been placed there by him ironically.
She smiled darkly, swiped it, went back into the bathroom and knelt beside his broken body. She sat down the award, pulled duct tape out her hoodie pocket, grabbed the chloroformed rag off his chest, wadded it up and rammed it in his still unconscious mouth before duct taping it shut.
Kanala picked up the award and ogled the smooth tip it came to like the tumbleweed child she technically still was. Just as fast, all the light went out of her eyes as she smashed the shaped glass onto the floor to break the tip and then slowly carved kanji so old into the center of his inflamed chest that it’d barely be able to be translated, whispering the old Japanese nursery rhyme Phuong and Naoko used to sing to her as a child to calm her jittery nerves when she was overwhelmed.
Kagome kagome / Kago no naka no tori wa
The bird in the cage, **bird in the cage** When, oh when will it come out? In the evening of the dawn, The crane and turtle slipped, **they slipped** Who is behind you now?
Itsu itsu deyaru / Yoake no ban ni
Tsuru to kame ga subetta.
Ushirono shoumen da are
Huffing, she got up off of her knees and peered down at her handiwork.
“There won’t be another one after him,” she snarled, translating what she’d written in kanji aloud to herself.
She stepped over his prostrate body and washed his blood off of her in disgust. She paused, momentarily rapt by the water cascading down the mangled sink onto the floor and opted to leave the brutally exposed tap on, purposely, as his still somewhat conscious body occasionally shuddered in pain behind her. The leak into the atrium would lead to him being discovered before it’d be murder. If he was lucky.
Turning to leave, she paused due to a rainbow prism on the puce colored hallway wall triangulating off of her now bloody crystal writing instrument and the warm light fixture swinging like a pendulum above the broken sink. A vicious smile splayed itself across her face as the wold she’d just fed inside of her lured her back into the bathroom.
She stared down at his already bloodied and bruised package and smirked. “It’s useless to do anymore damage to that, but…”
She laboriously flipped him over onto his carved up chest, the lip of his pants already assuming the position below his cheeks and scooped up the award his boys had given him once he’d finally gotten married to his dishrag of a wife. After daintily rinsing his own flesh and blood off of it, she gingerly placed it against his taint, turned around and roughly rammed it into him with a swift kick back of her heel.
His broken, gagged body convulsed as she roughly pushed him back over onto his back and left him in a puddle of his own blood, urine and feces, the water cascading down over the broken sink onto the floor around him and beginning to make its way towards the atrium like a waterfall.
Kanala ran to Fushan’s house and destroyed the last things that belonged to her vain grandmother, a woman whose stupid actions had stolen her father, mother, and now one of her best friends from her. She paused in front of the wicker balls on the mantle that used to be her favorite toy, her first gift from Phuong that had ever made her smile.
She gathered all of it up and tossed them into the bottomless pit Putri had plummeted down in the backyard, screaming.
“Fucking snakes! Women are supposed to help each other!! Not set each other up to die!!” she screeched into the hole until she was breathless.
Emptied out, she sheepishly ducked back into the house and swiped the smallest wicker ball, shoving it in the front pocket of her hoodie. Kanala looked around with tears in her eyes, saw herself in the mirror over the mantle and dragged her finger up to her lips.
“Shhh~” she whispered to her Self.
All of Kanala-amala’s tears were instantly gone.
That girl no longer existed.
All that was left of her was Her.
Kagome.
She took the wheel with a grunt and a grotesque grin and ran away under the cover of darkness.
Elysum, a Grievechronic excerpt by Angel Brynner.