© All rights reserved to the author, Scarlet Danae.
No part of this publication may be reproduced without prior written permission of the author.
Illustration by Federica Rossi.
Translation of the book by Marzia Ruju.
Sommario
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CONTACT
WARNING!!!
Curse words, puns, obscenity.
In short, the anti hero is not a cutie princess. So...
... Once upon a time…
…a very different story than the one you heard so far.
CHAPTER 1
THE APPLE
I was hanging upside-down looking at their faces, as their bloodshot eyes garishly twinkled within the dark room, like wailing sirens. They were watching and raping my body wrung out in glitter and straps, whereas I felt like smothering beneath that latex mask. It wrapped up my face as if it was my only precious part, as if it drew a sort of boundary between what they could touch and soil, and what they had to leave immaculate. Through the eyeholes, I could see the mocking smile of that woman. She stood there surrounded by the ruddy sweat-soaked faces of her swines; which waved their dripping-sweat money over her breasts, while grunting and drooling.
«I will kill you». I thought, my body shivered getting numbed. «I will. Sooner or later». Thought I once again, feeling the veins underneath my face swelling and throbbing.
I opened my eyes wide and woke out from that memory, from that part of my life that didn’t fade even in my dreams.
What it’s true and false is balanced upon the slender surface of the world. The wind is warm and the sand is cold, as well as the wind is cold and the sand is warm.
Every thing can be counterposed.
Everything tightens upon the string of Time, woven by seconds, minutes and hours. It’s so tough the easiness of our world; as when we have a row with ourselves, or we get angry with the phone in our hands because we can’t unlock it. We’re so frail and fickle. We think we’re moving on, when we’re backing up instead. We betray to be loyal. We fear God, but we keep on sinning.
Heaven and Hell. Resurrection. Life and Death.
We’re frightened by the “after” but we live in the “now”, without figuring out that the “after” is a “now” indeed. We despise corrupted politicians, but we vote them for this. Thoughts are blurred, they are so odd and make us quiver as we wonder: «Why do I exist?», «Who has shaped me?», «Why am I here?», «What’s next?».
These same questions I posed myself as I stared at the wintry grey sky; as my mind faraway wandered and I suffered the biting and tender cold all over my skin. I knew it would have rained, but my eyes still wandered, dreaming, amongst the clouds.
My body was heavy. It was sinking into the ice-cold floor of the balcony, I felt it. When a drug’s effect comes to an end, you feel like going back from a long holiday. Or so it seemed to me. And it was like the distant memory of when, as a child, my father and I would travel together for his job and after months we came home. I can’t remember what he’d do to make a living ― and why this made him earn a huge amount of money ― nor I can’t remember where we have been. I can’t even recollect the scents, the flavours nor what I’ve seen. Of all those travels, there is nothing left by now but the memory of my father, for he lived at that time.
To me, drugs were a sort of VIP-pass to a party where you pretend the world’s a better a place with no worries or pain. I used to be pathetic and mean. I was the typical good-for-nothing gal who loved to pity herself with her dramatic tale; someone who acts on the outside of her own world, but not from the inside.
My mother died as she brought me into this world and my father ― who didn’t want me to grow up without a female figure ― chose to tie the knot with another woman: a ravishing lady deeply obsessed by her own self. However, it didn’t take long before my dad left me as well: he deceased when I was only ten years old. «To decease», I really like this term. Honestly, I like it better than «to die», as it gives a shade that’s in a way more concise than mawkish.
My relationship with that woman ― namely my stepmother ― has always been strained from our very first glance. But it was only when I grew up that I gained her deep-rooted hate, since I blossomed into what people described as “a rare beauty”.
The day my hair was shortened and my parents’ pictures burnt, along with everything I owned, that was the day I realised my whole life would have covered an extended slope into despair.
I knew that I couldn’t flee, since she would have found me as it happened many other times before. Nonetheless, I was the only one to blame for it would have been enough to stick a dagger in her chest, or a gunshot in her brow, to put an end to it. Despite that, each time I looked at her ― or rather ― when she stared at me with her murderous eyes, more frightening even than the death itself, I really came to think she was immortal. I spent every single day begging that ruthless desire of destroying her to give me the guts I lacked of, the strength to tear her apart even though she’d turned out to be a fucking vampire.
Still, the days went by and nothing really changed.
I tried to raise up from that coating of ice. My knees struggled to come off from the ground. My freezing neck’s bone seemed to be cracking when I turned the other way. I lowered my eyes down and saw the shape my body had left printed upon the floor, previously discoloured by the cold. The figure looked like a Swarovski swan on the brink of beheading, whose shards gleamed all around in a shimmering rainfall. I tried to raise me up but eventually lost my balance. I felt my body growing overly heavier, if compared to the infinite buoyancy the Goddess of drugs offered me each time it ran through my veins. I slipped up to the creaking railing. Holding it tight, my hands perceived a stabbing and burning pain. My skin seemed to tear itself off from my body.
I looked beyond the bars, my hands were blazing, my knees were shaking. I stood there watching all those people walking and the cars speeding along the road. «It’d be enough to jump to end it all.», said the living being amongst my thoughts. I would call him Cogito.
However, I’ve never meant to die for I was too much scared of what I would have found next. All I wanted was to fall asleep and never wake up again. I sighed, then I patiently waited for my hands – as if they were strangers to my body – to unclasp the cold railing and my fingers to stop shivering as they belonged to somebody who’s about to pull the trigger for the very first time.
My anger was a beast I held caged within my body; it roared and struggled, but I tightened the chains and didn’t allow it to show up, as far as I craved it. There was something that kept me from doing that.
My temper, a puzzle made of several pieces that didn’t match each other. I had not the slightest idea of who I was. I had changed so many times and I felt so bipolar to believe I had more than thousands of other personalities set up in my brain. I knew nothing about my hobbies or my taste in movies, fashion, literature; whereas I seemed to be perfectly aware of what I hated, instead: romantic novels, gross-out films, fried food, my stepmother’s perfume and those tv ads too long. But I had got so used to that mental dissonance, that I no longer cared about the reason why I could only hate and not to love. Therefore, I inferred that if I merely perceived things I couldn’t stand, perhaps, there were not things I loved. And that’s that.
All I needed were: drugs and that anger that seethed inside of me keeping me alive.
I left the terrace and for the last time I took a look at my silhouette printed on the hoarfrost which overlaid the floor. Mayb
e, a part of me kept on sleeping there lying down in the cold, as many other “me” forsaken in different places, streets, beds and bodies.
I came down the white-marble stairs, letting my hand to slip dimly along the polished banister. Step by step, I reached for the lounge: a large room whose black and laminated hardwood floor made it look like an insidious swamp of petrol; there, lots of pieces of ancient furniture were floating previously refurbished and then painted afresh. My stepmother would consider of the utmost importance to call the entire furniture’s style by her own name, that is to say: Black Shabby Chic.
Two leather sofas had been placed facing each other, and they were so shiny, so perfect, as the Anubi’s statue curled up at the feet of the couch. Behind this latter, a huge glass window raised and put on view the urban landscape slowly engulfed by the murky veil of the night.
I sighed. That house, the basement where I lived, they were similarly cold and the fireplace - she never used - stood at the bottom of the room as an umpteenth ornamental element. Lots of both large and tiny loveless items that played their part despite everything: to delight the icy cold guests of my stepmother, right there, amidst all that pageantry. I thought then that if that house was a Purgatory, then the basement should be the Hell with all the horrors I suffered there, in the dark. So… Where was the heaven?
On the bottom of the long corridor, enlightened by the dim lights inside the floor, there was the leading door to my stepmother’s rooms. I swallowed and move a step ahead going through that path that would make my head spin, constantly. I felt like choking, almost as if the walls could crush me at any moment. My hands trembled for both rage and abstinence which had already come back haunting me. Despite that, I managed to knock at my stepmother’s door with a feeble tap, barely perceivable. When I heard her voice calling me in, I took a long deep breath: if you crave to break out the abyss, you’ll have to be able to not to drown. When the eyes of the shark will fix on you, you must pretend you’re unafraid.
Her eyes. They were of an unnatural dye akin to the Rock crystal quartz; so glassy and clear that I could almost see right through her head, whose skull was certainly made of crystal. Eyes like hers couldn’t recall but those of a shark ready to hunt. As I passed over the threshold, I immediately felt in danger: her rapacious irises were staring at me through the mirror in which she was flattering herself.
«Here you are, Bianca!», she uttered with her falsely-gentle voice, «I was wondering where you were!», her lips bent in that usual idle smile, which shamelessly showed her deceitfulness, all wrapped in those fine lines of flesh, whereas her labial seemed to hint a soundless: haven’t you died, yet?
I told her I had hung out the washing and then I had ironed the black-dress, which she planned to wear that evening, but she hushed me with a disapproving wave of her finger.
«No, no! I did not tell you to iron the black dress, but the red one by Versace!», she said, spreading the red amaranth lipstick on her lips, still crooked in that grin I couldn’t stand.
I swallowed. «But… Ma’am, you told me to take the dress to the laundry, yesterday mornin’.»
The stepmother sighed growing a serious look, her tapered fingers ran along the lipstick tube to bring the bloody tip back inward. Her shark eyes, at first turned downwards, aimed at me almost making me start.
«Oh, Good Lord, dear! How can you be so nasty?», she asked with a blatantly distraught voice, as her eyebrows bent drawing a dramatic expression upon her face. «Taking to the laundry the dress I wished to wear and to iron the one you were supposed to take to the laundry, instead. All this just to spite me!», she turned wholly towards me and, in her desperate gestures, I noted an amusing look. «How can you be so mean?»
She stood up and began to swing up to me, swathed in a lustrous dressing gown her sinuous and naked body glimpsed from.
«I kept you with me, Bianca, didn’t I? According to my beloved ex-husband and also your adored father, right? So, why don’t you follow the rules of this house, Bianca?», the more she approached to me, walking unnaturally, the more her voice became shrill. She opened her eyes wide and her pupils seemed to be shrinking in a slit like those of a cat, while cruelly looking into mine: struck by moist streaks of dread.
«If you don’t like here, then you’re free to go, Bianca. You can always leave if you wish and earn a living as a cubist or as a whore, Bianca. Or, again, you can go live as a beggar in a den with all your crackhead friends, uh!? Bianca? Don’t you agree, huh? Bianca? Well then? Speak to me, Bianca! Speak to me! Bianca??», her eyes turned into a whirl that pulled me down a spiral of chaos, from which I thought I’d never get out again. «Speak to me! BIAN-CA? Huh? Biancaaaaaa!».
Her eyes, there was something wrong with them.
I could punch her right in her face, I could pull the whole house down. I could rip up all her most expensive clothes, stealing her jewels to resell them and then blow forever.
I could kill her…
Yet, there was that thing in her eyes: as if there were a part of me chained up within; a part of me that was so important that it couldn’t be left behind.
«I’m so sorry! I’m so sorry!», I burst, winking my eyes so hard to not see hers anymore, «I’ve been mean! Pardon me! I was jealous, I didn’t want you to be so stunnin’! I’m sorry, I’m so sorry». I fell on my knees and the tears ran down my cheeks.
«Oh, Bianca!», with a lingering glance, she brought her hands onto her rosy cheeks, «what a good girl! Who owns up her blunders!», a giggle slid out of her mouth.
With my eyes dampened by the tears I laid my gaze upon the blurry outlines of the room’s furniture: a large wardrobe, a four-poster, the curved feet of the dressing table and that damned mirror.
«Look at me, Bianca!», she passed her cold hand below my chin forcing me to raise my face and looking at her, so once again I found myself tracing with my eyes the shapes of her flawless body.
«You know, you’ll never be as beautiful as I am for you will always be an unreliable floozy!», she said grazing the three teardrop-shaped micro-dermal implants below my right eye. «Not even these thingamajigs have helped you to shine more!», she added tartly.
I watched her lips wringing into a sneer, the umpteenth one, as I bit the inward side of my cheeks peeling off pieces of skin that tasted like iron.
«We haven’t been playing together for a while, are we?», she asked, whilst her nails fondled my neck’s skin, whetted as prickles ready to hit me out.
«It’s true», I answered back and her claws pierced me slightly.
«What are you, Bianca? », asked she.
«A bitch».
«And what do bitches do, huh? ».
«They’re on all fours an’ bark… »
And as she asked me why she did not hear any baying, Cogito said something inside my head gnashing his teeth, questioning me the reason why I hadn’t killed her yet. The answer I gave him was the same: her eyes. Nevertheless, before I could change my voice in a dog’s cry someone rang the doorbell. Her eyes, however, they didn’t let me up: there was something slimy in the way her irises moved.
«Go open the door, Bianca. That must be Hunter», with a grimace of dissent, she unlaced her nightgown. «He’s not going with me to the party, yet he has the gall to come here! Get him something to eat, though. Why the hell you’re standing there, yet?»
Few seconds later, I felt like petrified when Hunter’s opalescent eyes lied on me, as the smoke of the cigarette he clenched between his lips hovered aloft, crowning his grey hair.
«Hello, Bianca!», greeted he with his sharp voice. «Where is she?»
«She’s ge’in’ ready». I answered allowing him inside.
I slowly closed the door, when I turned around he was already sitting on the couch: he perfectly knew what my stepmother meant for ‘getting ready’, by now; that is spending about an hour admiring herself in the mirror.
Hunter asked me for a glass of red wine, then he put his cigarette out in the ivory ashtray,
garnished with gilded floral ornaments and placed on the black marble table. The precious furniture suited him, it made him look like a full-fledged English gentleman gifted with carriage and charm.
I walked towards the cellar to take the wine and Hunter’s eyes came after me: they studied my every smallest movement, scrutinizing me, probing charily every action. He was undressing me with his gaze, I could feel that. As I also felt my whole body boiling and the arousal between my thighs, that I rubbed against each other. I hopped when he asked me what I would’ve done that night. «Are you meeting your friends for your traditional Society trip?», he said sarcastically.
The Society trip was named after “Society – The Horror”, a movie by Brian Yuzna whose final scene reveals the protagonist’s relatives are all cannibals. Together with their high-ranking friends, these flesh-eaters break up into different parts but joining each other in a sort of immoral orgy.
The Society trip was, therefore, a moment during which all the druggies would shut themselves up in a room and lay on the floor, trialling various mind-blowing states. After that, they would share what they had felt or seen with the others through their tales or a single touch, influencing each other.
«I’m broke». I told him tersely, handing him out the chalice.
«Why are you so cold?». He touched my wrist, slightly, with his tapered fingers. In that way, he could feel my heartbeat resounding in my anxious veins. A more intense sigh poured out of his mouth, for he just realised my angst amongst those beats which stepped over each other.
It took less than blink of an eye, as always. I kissed him lustfully yearning for his tongue, his teeth, his drool, his lips. He, instead, held me onto his chest whereas I buried my fingers between his silvery hair, like creepy snakes crawling throughout high brushwood.
I sat astride him, precariously holding the glass: if one drop alone had stained the wealth around us, I should have had to serve a painful sentence… And this turned me on. Two tears of wine glided along my arm, but Hunter gathered them with his tongue, which walked the crimson path up to its spring caressing my fingers narrowed around the chalice’s crystal-like and thin neck. Faithfully I followed with my fingertips his well-formed jawbone, then the arch of the upper lip and, in the end, the perfectly-shaped line of his straight nose.
The Dreadful Nightmare of Snow White Page 1