Euranthe

(Sorry for the crappy set up.... I'm too lazy to format and yeah... so this isn't done. I'm not quite finished transcribing it yet from the original crap binder paper... Blogged for safe keeping. <3 TO BE CONTINUED. Lol.)

The night was bloodied with stars, glowing faintly beneath the torn and yellowing lace of the chemise that shrouded the two figures beside the burial crypt. The bells atop the chapel tower struck the hour, the vibrations and echoes of their baleful voices striking their trembling fingers, their legs already pricked by the breath of the surrounding darkness...:namespace prefix = o ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

From beneath the chemise Euranthe stroked black hair, sighed deeply and pressed knuckles to lips. "And that is why I wait here on my own every night, so that if he were to come for me, he would find me."

"But what if he doesn't…?" the boy asked gently, shrinking a little as those violet eyes fixed on his. Beneath the torn cloth draped over their heads, the shadows of the narrow face before him made the creature appear to be overwhelmingly feminine.

"I will wait until I die," Euranthe replied fervently. "It's not so much that he loved me, because he didn't… no one's ever loved me… It was because he cared for me, treated me with kindness when no one else would."

"But…" he was at a loss for words. He rest his head on the tops of his knees and peered over the creature, took in its small breasts, the well defined arms, the muscles of its calves and then the finally he forced himself to peer into the crevice of shadows between its thighs.

"It's alright for you to look," Euranthe said. "I don't care if you think I'm a freak or not. I'm so used to it, it doesn't hurt anymore."

The bell tolled.

"You are what the Romans, the Greeks…" he trailed off, blushing slightly and averting his eyes despite his curiosity.

"Call a hermaphrodite," it said, finishing the sentence for him. "One of both sexes, both male and female."

"But how?" he asked, rather boldly.

"A defect of birth." Euranthe ran a hand through long golden curls and its eyes took on a far away light. "I was a drug child, I was supposed to be aborted. My mother was faint of heart and couldn't go through with the procedure, said that I was a gift, that it was wrong to kill a child. When I was born and she looked at me for the first time, she couldn't stop screaming. It was a home birth, I was thrown out back in the dumpster with the trash, or so I'm told. My 'father' saved me and took me in. He was a dealer by trade and we lived in a flat not far from here on 4th."

"A dealer?" the boy wondered. "Like drugs?"

"He managed drug deals and was very sought after as the manager of an escort service." She nodded. "He wasn't my blood father of course, but he saw me as a profit and one of his whores had a strange fascination with me and said she would leave him if he didn't let her care for me. Big Mama was the best prostitute in main line business. He didn't put up much of a fuss under the bargain that I would be put to use. After all people, sick people, would pay extra to bed down with the girl of two sexes."

"Terrible," he muttered. The lace scratched at his hair and pulled it back from his face, showing his distant eyes. He was near speechless.

"As I grew older I grew more and more bitter towards him and towards all of those men who paid for me. I was more then a common whore. I was a side show attraction. Every room that opened up to me, though I was clad in silk camisoles and lace drawers, opened into another airy room of what would first be a sublime tenderness and then inevitably would decline into the raw impassionate curiosity and humiliation. It was a curiosity shop of horrors.

"When I was young, I used to think of myself as a noble, a princess in a distant land with many men who wished to court me. Every night and every morning I would be dressed in the most expensive and delicate fabrics, clad as royalty. I made believe that each of these men were just princes who were so enamored of me that they wanted to know every inch.

"As I got older of course the sham began to melt. I was bitter and angry and I began to cause problems for my clients, stirred things up for the regulars. I was no longer the innocent little toy doll that I was before. I was full of anger and I lashed out at them. When they sough to drive into me I would take them and force them to their knees and pinion them from behind myself. They were livid. I've been beaten, stabbed, shot… I've been through it all.

"Working my father's deals had made me tough, street smart. I ran away at least a dozen times, living on my own for a while, stealing, breaking in to places… And I always managed to come back, of course, because really, where was I supposed to go? It was the only stable place for me, the only place I knew… It's hard to explain, but I always came back. I always gave back in to that world of lace and cologne and smoke. I hated it, but it was where I belonged. I felt as though I had to give.

"And don't think for a second that I was any gentler to the world outside of the 'harem'. Outside of the bedroom I was even more violent, more short tempered. I remember one day when a man refused to sell me something for a sale price I lit into him, beating him until he was nearly dead."

"What stopped you?" the boy asked as Euranthe paused slightly.

Fingers knit over the white stomach, "He did… The man that I am waiting for. Matthew."

"Matthew," the boy repeated, testing the name on his tongue.

"He pulled me off of him and dragged me out to his car where I went literally crazy, screaming, biting, ripping the leather seats. I was throwing my first real tantrum. People must have thought that I was being kidnapped, but no. Though I yelled and spit in his face and growled profanities at him, he forced a cardboard Starbucks container in my hands and proceeded, through all of my screaming, to read me C.S. Lewis stories until I calmed down enough to ask him very bitterly if he was a new client.

"The look on his face was priceless." The boy watched sides shudder with laughter. "He was perfectly bewildered and he waited very patiently for me to recklessly and angrily recount the events of my life. Needless to say, he became a friend, a very eclectic and strange friend, but someone that I could talk to, who didn't want sex. Who didn't want anything."

"There are people out there like that," the boy said softly. "People that don't want…"

"Here? Never here. There are few… but not many," Euranthe scoffed, automatically dismissing him. "But he was a very strange man… Matthew was a writer. I had been the pet of plenty of writers and I thought myself an expert on them, those morbid souls who mixed so often work with pleasure. Writers are all a very self absorbed breed who don't believe in boundaries, let me tell you…. But Matthew wasn't interested in any of it. Even later on in our friendship when I had broken into his apartment after an argument and collapsed in his arms, weeping and kissing him and telling him that I was sorry, he never expected anything of me. He was just there for me, someone who listened."

"We all want someone to listen to us, don't we?" the boy sighed, looking at Euranthe with eyes that were open a little wider. Truly marvelous to look at.

"Yes and Matthew listened," Euranthe said softly, leaning back so that the chemise completely covered its face. "Matthew let me run to his flat whenever I had a spare moment. He read to me the classics because I couldn't read myself, he taught me shorthand, how to use proper table manners, how to type on a keyboard and play Greensleeves on the piano. He would let me lay by his fire and stare up at the stacks of manuscripts that piled nearly up to the ceiling. He would make me warm food, fresh food and though he protested he let me cook for him.< FONT>

"He was married, but separated. Had children, but I was always sure to be absent when they came for their weekly visitation. I saw the love that he had for them from the corner on 21st , staring up through his windows at their smiling, laughing faces. He was so open with them. There was never that dreamy, distant look on his face that there was when he was with me. He wasn't writing novels in his head when his children were around. I was jealous, and I realized that I wanted very very desperately for him to love me.

"And I showed him love the only way that I knew how. One night I showed up at his door and fell into his arms with kisses, hundreds of kisses all along his arms and shoulders and neck and face. Though he would not make love to me or let me make love to him, he let me do as I wished and he stroked my hair. He did not even look at me strangely. When he looked at me, he looked at me as though he was looking at anyone else. Like I was normal…. Do you know how that felt?"

"I can only imagine," the boy said softly, guiltily.

"I trusted him and so that's why he was the one there for me when I committed my first murder."

"Murder..?" the boy whispered, almost as if the word held a strange stigma within its syllables.

"You knew I was a murdered the moment you met me, my hands dripping with blood, my chemise all in tatters," Euranthe said with a little chuckle of amusement. "And you remind me so much of Matthew right now. You became wildly paranoid and anxious, helped me hide the body, and then become thoughtful and subdued.

"Though when I shot my first man and then my father, the deaths weren't quite as bloody. It seems that I've developed more of a taste for blood as time has gone on. I was so new to death back then that it still vaguely horrified me, though not quite so much anymore. I think that I was thankful my first time.

"I was angry when I shot my first man. I was tired of working such a terrible trade and this man wanted to video tape me being screwed by an animal. I was disgusted and upset with the idea and my father was trying to force me. I was sick of being constantly sequestered by the old man's orders and when he pushed me naked on all fours before the animal, I snapped. I took the gun from under my bed and shot them both.

"Matthew, realizing that I had forgotten one of my books in his car, had just walked into the flat for the first time as the gun went off, and he helped me dump the bodies in the ocean and clean the bloody mess from the carpet, from my fingers and face, and hair."

"What then?" the boy asked, eyes wide.

"He told me that I had done something horribly wrong, that he was damned for helping me… and then he helped me another ten times of the forty odd murders I committed over three years."

"Forty murders," the boy breathed as though he could not really comprehend it.

"Yes… soon to be forty one if Matthew doesn't come for me soon," Euranthe said almost a little aggressively, making the boy shy away. "He always comes for me."

"How have you gotten away with all of this, all this time?" he asked.

"Well, I'm not in any records. As I said, I was a home birth, no one knew about me except for my father, but well… since he was dead… and who would believe the word of a drug dealer or a pimp anyways? They're all leads that led nowhere. From where I slept each night in a secret cache of my father's on Main, I was as good as invisible. It wasn't even under my father's name, it was with a fake ID. It was perfect."

"You're a killer."

"It's revenge, for all the dreams that those forty men killed for me."

"They didn't deserve to die," the boy said. "You still have Matthew after all…"

"I'd die without him," Euranthe agreed. "That's why I'm so careful… I'd never want anything to happen to him. I love him."

"You said that he doesn't love you," the boy said slowly. "But that can't be true… You were intimate with him and he helped you hide the bodies."

"He's barely a lover, but that doesn't mean that he loves me," Euranthe said. "We're friends, in his eyes that's all that I am, a friend with benefits, an adopted son. There's love yes… but not true love. The love that we have only goes so deep."

"Skin deep…"

"I like that," it said, running hands through blonde hair. "Our love is skin deep… Like this body is only skin deep. It makes me feel invincible. Like no one can touch me."

"Don't you want to be loved?" he wondered. "Isn't that what everyone wants? To be loved?"

"No," Euranthe said softly with the touch of a little smile. "That's not what I want. I might've wanted it before, but I don't want it now."

"You've given up on love?"

"Yes. I guess you could say that. I've given up on love."

(Unfinished)