Anonymous Story: Fire in His Eyes

He lamented to me the fears of his future. Love, philosophies, his trials and his tribulations. I opened my heart and accepted his pain, his worldly strife. Though he was a complex man with worry in his heart, he had a smell of confidence about him. There was a fire in his eyes and assuredness in his his smile. I wanted to be there for him; I trusted him, only to be a constant. To be safe. To help me understand the world as a passerby.
He then stood and slipped out, while my head was turned. His brother sat down, and I looked back at him to see the same man. This man had no fire in his eyes, however. He didn’t want to challenge the world, he wanted to own it. He wanted to dominate the world, and to kill the men he wanted dead. He wanted to kill me. And I wanted to be killed. I wanted to breathe my last breath, to set my soul to the clouds. However I tried, my tries for the tomb had taken leave. Empty promises of nooses and needles had left me terror-stricken and alone; I was craving a whiff, a drop of that sweet, sweet taste on my tongue. Still, my tongue remained stale, the air in this vastness, devoid. But now he tempted my taste buds with words that flowed as honeyed venom, vows of gashes through my neck, fire through my core. His fingertips traced my collar, where he would draw his dagger; his touch on my ribs, where he would lay matches.
He breathed to me, how he needed to kill me. He wanted me to bleed, he needed to make me bleed. He described to me every way he would damage every part of me, how there would be no part of me that wouldn’t be scarred and devastated. I didn’t cry out. The man with fire in his eyes was who I talked to. I told him I’d never had a bruise, a scratch, a wound, laid to my skin. He took his knife, drew lines of blood up and down my thighs, my back, up and down my body; he took my quaking skin in his hands and made it bloom with crimson. There was no part of me that didn’t sting. The pain was numbing; with the blood seeping out of my body, came my troubles. I wanted him to take me to the point of no return, to the brink of the cliff, and drop me over the edge. But he could not kill me.
No. Only the man I knew could. He was far away, in a deep sleep. He had other men to kill, men he would shoot with golden bullets when it came their time, men he would give happy endings to. But his brother couldn’t kill me. He could only tear apart my skin, and hold my heart in his hands, my heart that he would never take. He instead took the hearts of the other men, the ones the good man was destined to kill. He took their hearts, and fed them to the fire. With this, the brother left. His gaze promised a return. But the man I knew, he cried and cried over the men his brother killed. He cried over my wounds, let the salt run into my blood. He scratched open his wrists, let his bereaved blood weep into the earth. I tried to give him my own heart, my own blood, but he turned his face; he could only take from the dead men he would never let go.
I moved to the streets, and begged for blood, holding my heart in my hands. Any and every passerby regarded my life as a warning, told their children to be wary of the ones who carry knives. Some walked by, told me they wish they had given me the scratches, they craved to contribute to the disfigurement. Others asked me if I regretted them. Their faces turned, from confusion and pity, to resentment and sickness, once they saw my eyes.
I was just about to go to sleep, when my own brother sat down on the street next to me. He pulled a needle and thread out of his pocket, and began to stitch me up. I sobbed with gratitude, and he mourned at the sight of my gashes. He sits with me, he lets me look into his eyes, and not those of passerby. Sometimes the man I knew comes around, and laments to me the loss in his life. He comes with a flood of tears, and each time, the fire in his eyes is drowned a little more.