Dumb
She watches him across the white strobe of a dancefloor. Its checkerboard tiles pulsate with floor light in tune to a sweaty, alcoholic beat, silhouetting a nameless crowd. Every second-and-a-half it under-lights her face. Her stare is even, half-lidded, nearly unblinking, locked on him as she mindlessly stirs her drink from a barstool. She presses her nail into the drink’s skinny black straw and kinks it, bending it over her finger. He’s dancing, across the way; he doesn’t notice her. She throws back the drink and starts towards him.
Her dress is black, frilly like crows’ wings ripped apart and nailed to a goddess statue. Skimpy. Something metal jangles under her skirt, unseen: something black is strapped against her leg, hidden in plain sight among garters. The revealing aspect of her costume draws sexual stares, unbeknownst the unrevealed. She’s within spitting distance of him. He wears a plaid button-up and jeans with someone’s drink spilled on them.
He notices her, grooves towards her inside a step. He smiles and bites his lip. He makes boyish little hip gyrations she’s watched him do to other fems tonight. He looks down, himself the taller, seeing her coy smile framed under sharp black bangs.
“You dance?” He has to yell over the music, and his breath is worse than shit.
“No.”
She whips the black thing out of her garters, a silenced pistol, and shoots him through the knee. He falls. His immediate scream goes mostly unnoticed under bass and electronic wailing.
He drags his eyes back up towards her, struck with fear, a string of profanities circling his lips but likewise muted by context. She’s gently replaced the pistol. Her hands go towards the bottom of her dress, picking up its frills, slowly pulling up the front of the skirt to show him what’s underneath. Her perfect legs, thin underwear. A cleaver. A carver. A gleaming knife. He can smell the clean metal. Her coy smile is wicked now, split ear to ear, like an awful, hungry dog.
“You don’t have to do this…” The scythe of a death omen reflects in his pupils.
She picks the knife, letting it drag through the frills, and bends down to just by his ear.
“You’re so fucking dumb.”
She kicks him over, straddles him, and starts the stabbing at his midsection. Her hips rock on his body as the knife plunges in and out his belly, blood hot like fucking. She gets the knife under his shirt and rips open the buttons. He struggles to hold her back. His chest is naked, flushed red; she gets the blade under his skin, filleting, opening him up. A dancer finally slips in the blood. Others turn and see a red pool underlit by the dancefloor strobe, liquid creeping towards them. They run. The floor clears; someone dials an emergency. She draws the carver. A devilish, sultry sigh escapes her as she serrates his neck and lengthens the cut up the contour of his jaw and cheek. His face peels away like vinyl. His exposed arteries spurt as he bleeds to death, splattering her arms, dousing her chest and the bust of her dress. She flicks the carver up and a ruby arc of droplets sparkles in its path. Again, she stabs with quick, pulpy thrusts all along his chest and the leaking remnant of his stomach, delighting in the gore, dropping the blade and rubbing her wet palms on her cheeks and through her hair, eyes rolling back, euphoria in exsanguination. His murder fills her and overflows. Blood trails stick to her knife like orgasmic fluid.
Eventually, flashing blue lights counter the club pulse still running. She has already gone. Late police see the checkerboard white tiles smothered by a red spill, slathered Pollock, skin splayed and undone of a man eviscerated in artistic dissection.
