The Stranger entered my gaze from the left - a figure threatening and familiar, not unlike a sinister brother. His black eyes conveyed nothing but knowing a potential corpse when they saw one. Scattering the fire and grabbing my wrists we were in the water. The Stranger knew Sterne and the visions I held. The Stranger desired the denial of a man - an act of destroying was the only expressed pleasure of this half life to force a man unwilling into his greatest, and final, opus.
You can't drown a body in an incoming tide.
One rock - more barnacle than anything else - contacted his face and I was free. Idiot kid couldn't possibly have known the extent of power held by a shaman. Water, saltwater infecting The Stranger's bloodstream. Sterne appearing above me as I sank beneath the surface. I felt his sharpened fingers entering The Stranger's flesh. An intrusion of holes where no holes were before. And with little dashes he spelled my name.
He never looked the same. The term 'Destroyer' could be placed under the name plate of the Creator. The taste of saltwater kill is rarely, if ever satiated. He grew sand in his hair, making his body a mess of my fingers.
Leaving Palos Verdes we drove straight to LAX - I would never know Sterne's immediate surroundings, though I could distantly envision a stark one room apartment littered with modulators, pedals, microphones, and ceramic cats. The clouds rolled down the valley as farewell. I had married him knowing full well the consequences of our lives, we had long accepted the deliriousness of disillusionment and distance.
'Let them have prawns!' he would say at the airport. But Sterne was nothing but the sweetest man 4000 km away from me at any given time.
It wasn't till I was back in the harbor that I realized the extent of his truth. My laughter falling like cracked ice cubes through the headstones. My home would never be his. From the days of nightfires to sleepless solitudes, it was getting harder to bear. I was starving cherries and vodka and 10 000 things that couldn't distract me from Sterne's serious mouth and disheveled misdemeanor. Never smiling - too milk and honey, surprisingly light and sticky skin absorbed my Montreal haze like a landslide. Hours spent rolling in the thyme, arms tangling the violent violet flowers fed by the rotting bodies beneath me. There is not enough magick in the world to conjure anyone close to the Mister and the missed.
Under a mandelbrot set sky of simmered constellation tea, pining for his now foreign limbs. Drawing blood before incantations, unwilling to waste any time to return to the fields of water, saltwater, back to fistfuls of bloodied hair, to rob him of his bones and store his blood in my fridge.
Every sip filled me with acidic agony that would last throughout my required absence. Trembling in every limb, at least as many as I had when I was 17, I lived on, milking every emotion of him in order to create, Heartbreak makes the art grow stronger, self induced torture careening towards The Destroyer.
'You can stop this at anytime.' I tell my selves on one particularly long evening of stitching. 'This can end tonight.'
Formerly The Destroyer, it was a hard profession to give up, though it isn't really something anyone leaves behind forever.
The acid rising in my nose, I felt the mucus sliding down my throat - thick and metallic like a haemorrhage - a revenge for the lives I've taken, the lives I've attempted. The red circles appearing at my feet were blood - it was coming from my head.
'Mmmhmmm,' shaking my head, 'I don't think the pills are working.'
The last thing I remembered was a dawn on the hillside. A smut of clover hovering silently over my night shark spinning an opportunity of spacefucking in the pale green light over the water. Plucking the purple buds I crushed them under my incisors, sucking their sweet veins dry. Braiding the remaining stems together like tentacles, I dove and found him there, sleeping in the arms of The Stranger.
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