Eating my Experience (23)

TOME 24

We woke together from a long nap, still entwined and seemingly in love. I smoothed her hair as a smile plastered itself on my face. "I think I'm falling in love with you" I say nearly in a daze.

She responds with a smile and a glassy look in her eye with "I'll always love you, you're my baby" I could feel something unfurling inside me, an unease that would not lay down again. I stood abruptly, beginning to pace.

"Where have I heard that...where have I heard that?" I murmured, walking a set line into the hardwood flooring, the dust scattering about me as I bit my nails obsessively.

Lilly stood gracefully, hair glowing in the last clinging rays of sunshine. She walked beside me, hands clasped behind her at her back lackadaisically, a out of place smile on her face "don't worry, I'm sorry if I said something wrong, sweet pea." She stopped me, to look into my worried eyes, "you're so beautiful, itty-bity." An almost painful smile crossed her face as I began to recognize that look, the look of joy mixed with longing and loss. The same look my mom had given me all those years ago each time she would look at me.

I lunged backward away from her grasp as I wheezed in the first stride of a panic attack. Lilly left the room only to return a moment later with an inhaler which she pressed into my mouth, the same mouth she had just explored. "Are you okay, baby?" She asked in a familiar sing song tone. How had I not seen the resemblance sooner, how had I allowed myself to be wrapped into her world so deeply. I had fallen in love with someone so alike my mom it was grotesque, akin to if the corpse of my mom's personhood had occupied a new body.

"What are you?" I sputter after accepting the life saving medicine into my lungs. "You're...like her." I'm crying now, pounding at the floor with my fists, when Lilly grabs me by the hand.

"You always were a smart kid, I'm surprised we got this far," she paused to sit me up and look into my face "always so attractive. I loved you, I just didn't have the strength to keep you safe, I do now. I have so many people's strength. I did it for you!" I slid back on the floor as I began to realize what I had done, unable to wrap my mind around her existence. "I came here to see you, you know, all the way from Sacramento, I ate her and her longing to be with you was so great I had to find you. I love you."

"Oh god, you're...you have my mother in you, and we just...why would you do that? That's so wrong." I was screaming now, and uncontrollable.

"Because that's what she always wanted, she wanted to be as close to you as possible, she always thought you would be fun in bed." The reality of the situation was too much for me, I decided to find Alex, find Zach. The woman I had grown to think the world of had inside her the same woman who ruined my life. My own mother navigated the world wanting to be with me in such a sickening way. I got halfway down the stairs when I fainted.

I woke to Alex and Lilly beside me, I was laying at the base of the stairs with Alex's jacket under my head. In the daze of low blood pressure, I had a moment of bliss, a moment of seeing the love in Lilly's face, and wanting to reach up for a kiss before the memories of just moments prior flooded back, leaving me reeling. "Get her away from me." I said turning to Alex as nausea overcame me and I vomited on his bare feet. Lilly saw herself out of the room before I continued "Alex, listen, she's a zombie and she ate my mom. We need to get rid of her..." The reality encompassed me as I realized I would have to kill my own mother, kill someone who had innocence in them as well. Kill someone I had loved, however briefly with all my heart.

I stood unsteady as I went, heart beating strong and fast, pushing up my throat, when I saw her, staring at the setting sun on the porch. I grabbed hold of the bat near the door with a heaviness overtaking me. "I'm sorry, Lilly. I did love you, a lot more than I ever loved my mom." I raised the bat as her beautiful eyes overflowed, I had hurt her as she hurt me in that same corner that was my mother.

I shakily raised the bat in my hands before bringing it down with a heavy crack on the top of her skull, her right eye bulged out, making what was once the most beautiful thing I had seen grotesque and painful to look at, she garbled out "please just finish it." I allowed myself to break down for a moment, while bring the bat down repeatedly, cracking her bones and breaking my soul with each pass.

She was reduced to little more than a lump of flesh and bone when I finally left to find a knife, slowly, numbly, and blubbering, I sliced through the flesh surrounding the fragments of skull that held her brain before gathering as much of it as I could to cook over a flame, cook away all the experiences. I didn't realize till I was in the kitchen over a burner filled with rancid lumps of brain that I was splattered in her blood. The woman I once loved, slept with, and would have died for, I had taken the life of. I just killed someone who I thought meant more to me than life itself, and I was unsure I would ever be the same.

TO BE CONTINUED....