Her room smelled of bitter, stale things; old newspapers and trash novels, yellow pages stuck together with sticky juice stains. At a distant period of time, the walls of her one room apartment could have seemingly been painted white, but now in the corners, a yellow stain could be seen, heavily transforming room the color of burnt bread. Her bed lay unmade against a wall, shoved into a corner, pushed back, the only sheet bunched down at the end, a pillow lying at the floor.

She knelt in the middle of the chaos, her heel crushing a thin paperback book: Written on the Body, by - a black smear, a boot, some torn fishnet. Her leg shaking uncontrollably, her rubbery-cold skin; sweat-like with a dash of peppermint twist turned about on the cover of the book, disgracing it with her addiction. Her pink hair strung out across her face, her eyes wild and uncaringly animal. They screamed, those eyes, in a heroin-coated hazy afternoon remembrance:

She had left the coffeehouse in a daze, stumbling against the outside buildings, her chewed nails clawing at the red brick, the passing coats and lazy Monday morning suits. Few people tried to stop her, to ask her what was wrong. Few people stared as her breath became sharp, and a gossamer layer of sweat spread from her upper lip to cover her body.

The sun began to feel like a thick blanket, curling her flesh up into a crumbling leaf as she twisted among the pedestrians. Her skin becoming sweaty and cold, so cold that she felt like burning into the sun - and dancing in the street and among the parked cars. The people convulsed with her, arms above head, teeth clenched close together. The water in the gutters became yellow. Hanging gardens burnt up before her eyes, and she laughed as a white liquid ebbed from her mouth, over her gums and down her chin. She danced along, melting underneath the sun, breaking stride from the multitude and finally crawling into the shade of an empty alcove, the door to her apartment.

She lay against the cold cement, letting her legs shake until the key to her apartment found its place into her door. And then she was there. A sweep of movement up the stairs - she couldn't remember how it had happened - and she was in her room, a needle to her arm, her heel to a book.

Oppressive. Her body convulsing around the metal point, her flesh closing together as the burn spreads up her arm and fills her vein. Her head spinning, her eyes rolling back in her skull as the heroin shoots through her body. She falls back to the floor.

Her hands curl, and chewed out fingernails try to prick the insides of her palm as her eyes glaze over and she slips down inside her shell, and her shell shatters against the wood floor, and the floor shakes burning each and every live-wired nerve in her body.

Sinking and breathing. With her eyes closed she doesn't see the movement all around her. The air trembling and beginning to thicken like soup, and the subtle shadow play on the walls. From under the bed, the mattress begins to shiver, and the shadows grow like the branches of a tree swaying to an invisible beat. They swell, and crawl from beneath the bed and the sink; they blanket her room. Some begin to separate, and take on the form of small fish swimming in the thick sea of air, and sick birds that crawl among her sheets and table.

She opens her eyes to a dance of dark, shadows on the once sickening walls, and convulsing clouds stretching upward, as if parts of the ceiling had been ripped out. The murk plays among her spine, and streams through her hair. She starts to rise, and the darkness begins to dance, the tendrils to wrap around her limbs and the floorboard as it begins tying her to the floor. Sticky web-like strands fill her mouth, and choke back her sobs. Tears begin to prick her vision as the shadows pulsate against her spine and arch her back; the room throbbing to the sound of a silent lacrimation.

She looks to the dark conflagration above her, to the swarm of gossamer beings swimming through the air. Fish creatures with small genitalia cultivating in between the blades of her fan. Their small puckered lips are the color of a decayed-bruise, and each time they meet to kiss small electric shocks blow from the plexus of shadow-clouds above her, and drifts down to her face, filling her body with the smell of dead roses, burning leaves. The birds swoop to tear at her body, but break the decent just before touching her skin. Their beaks gleam with an unknown blackness, and they perch on the top of the counters to shit. Each calls out her name in shrill bird-chatter.

Berk-Berk! Lesla-Berk!

Not Sugar, but her real name. The name her parent's gave her on the day of birth. The name she whispered to not a soul except the poor highwayman who gave her a ride to the retched city of New Orleans: Skeleton.

Wincing, her eyes tear away from the birds and focus on the fish above her. They seem to be transparent skeletons, husks of varied colors that at one time could have held meat, but now only buzz with the electric happenings of sexual fervor. And it also seems to her, that if she could somehow untangle herself from the constricting binds, and reach above her to lay hand on the creatures, that they would crumble at her touch, fold in upon themselves, and give up all hope of life and resistance as their crisp exoskeletons tumble out of the air and down to the floor.

Like her life, her memory. The creatures falling down as so many failed plans, so many failed lovers, failed designer drugs flying through the air in glossy sheath. So thin, so breakable; delicate to taste and touch and coming undone; her mind unraveling beneath that thin, thin skull. Her fingers snapping back, she tries to twist from the shadow's grasp. Her sickly hair becomes tangled further by her desperate struggles. Eyes wide, pushing up with her tongue against the knot in her throat, she watches as the clouds above begin to tighten as if aware of her pain, her struggling. Dull light pushing up her fingernails, slicing into the thin layer of skin, dry feelings as it parts her legs and dips into her loose cunt. Pushing shadow against her, dry as a bone, as a desert, grating inside of her like sharp, acrid sandpaper.

Sobbing -- tightening against her. The gloom piercing every fiber of her body, unaware of the pain it causes and only seeking sweet pleasure against her face and thigh. Running against her nerves, jumping those crisp synapses, traveling into her brain, finding, seeking, letting loose. Visions of a childhood, a father, a glass, pushing, harder, father and pus -- again, the holes in her memory covering the pain, the shadows feeling and filling each empty space in her mind. Crawling inside the, curling against the, licking against the inside walls of her, inside mind of her, inside memory of her life.

Lesla... a voice inside of her. Snapping against her - no...

It wasn't a snap. It wasn't a break. She just feels inside her a melting sensation as the darkness seeps into her eyes and the voice inside of her womb crawls into her brain. Wrapping around her, suffocating her, playing mind into the drug, dipping into the drug. Pain. Chaos.

The gloom tightens again. And:

And through the gloom of fish and bird, cloud and shadow, a prick of light as small as a needle shoots down to the floor next to her body, and treats the gloom as if it were merely useless fog. The birds silence, the fish turn and stare up against and into the thunderhead. Everything is calm for a moment.

Then more rays of burning aurora falls down in shades of pink and blue, leaving small glowing pools of light on the floor and in the clouds. And each stream that melts through fish and bird alike causes them to burn in a flame of brilliant white, and fall to the ground, bursting into a cloud of dust as they touch the earth. The birds try to turn over in air, and grasp at her hair before breaking apart. The fish twine themselves around each other, making passionate love until the last breath has been burnt out of their poor lungs.

The Thing inside of her hisses, the shadows try to trap her, tighten down upon her. The Thing beats against her body, the shadow pushing out her skin at all angles, breaking, bursting, blood vessels.

The holes above her widen into gaping maws of burning light. Through the clouds she catches hold of a wonderful sight; the lights spinning around and catching each other in a violent love-tag before crashing down through the heavens. The residue left in their wake of lovemaking seems to tear apart the sky, and she watches through the holes in her ceiling as each zipping star rips reality through and through, a thousand knife pricks, slices over and over into the darkness that was her mind.

She opens her mouth to try and catch some of the falling stars. To let them destroy the Thing inside of her, burn it out of her, ash it out, smoke it out, for surely that's what they are trying to do. But the shadow pushes back against her, opening her mouth just enough for a gasp of air to be released, for a tiny dash of dark to pull out of the night. A pool of ink, red with her own blood, pumping out of her mouth, flying against the roof. Red and white, as it spins against the stars, painting the walls, and carpet.

Dashing against the walls, spinning the room, invading the reality that was once her apartment. She screams, as in the middle of the deep blue of conflagration, the sky dark to a deep black and a scene plays over and over through the holes of ripped space the stars made.

She screams against the weight of the blackness, the weight of the laughter that bubbles up from around. She screams as her eyes are covered, and all she sees is that scene, played over and over. She screams as a man's voice whispers into her ear: You taste... my dear, of Spider Silk and Nightshade

She screams as her body sinks into the floor beneath her, as it crushes her body, as it remakes her skin.

He stands in a room, and listens to the sobs of the woman beneath him muffled by the newly designed carpet, by the floorboards caked with blood.

He stands in a room, and is remade into something far more beautiful.

He steps out into the night air, the room along with the woman beneath cry out as he leaves.