All stories have a beginning. All stories have an origin, an initial collision. Some are immense, some are explosive, some are more vast and intense than all this world.
But this not one of those.
This story begins with a girl called Claire. Claire and her Mania and her dragonflies.
All stories have a beginning. All stories have a place. Some have palaces, some have garden mazes, some have beaches and infinite seas.
This is not one of those.
This story begins in a small, cramped apartment, full of books gathering dust and jars of broken psyche. The story begins in a tiny sitting room with only one single window facing a garden with only one single bush, blooming fuchsia flowers. All the twisting, writhing vines of the fuchsia flower bush crawled their desperate way up the ancient brick walls around the window, enmeshing themselves and blocking Claire’s only portal to the outside world. They evolved and grew into a trap, letting through only the barest bits of chlorophyll-drenched light.
All stories have a beginning and this one begins in the most unlikely of times for something of such macabre – this story begins buried deep in the midst of summer’s suffocating heat, when the dragonflies were in bloom.
Each and everyday that summer, Claire say by the one single window, patiently quietly watching and waiting. Her tangled web of fuchsia flowers smirked with her and served its purpose well. For Claire, each day, it ensnared a dragonfly. Just one single little fragment of the beauty Claire had not seen in so long. The beauty she longed for. The beauty she obsessed over, the one thing she devoted herself to. Each and ever day, a pair of iridescent wings would beat frantically, faster and faster, caught in the jewel-green net of fuchsia flowers. Always hopeless. They never made it out. It always made Claire smile.
When the little slice of the outside world finally forfeited and gave itself to death, Claire would weave her long, slender hands through the vines and grasp it – but never break it. Claire preserved beauty, hated and loved and stalked it with a passionate fervor. She would hold them in her childlike hands and study them and speak them and know them. And then she would give them names.
This particular one she called Scorpios. She liked that name, and was saving it for the last one. And as she looked into Scorpios’ metallic gunmetal eyes she knew that with him, her collection was complete.
A small, twisted smile spread quietly across her face. She pulled a needle from her favorite hiding place – the back of her long, delicate neck, and adroitly threaded it with a strand of her ocean-colored hair. Just as she did every day before. Her fingers tingle with pleasure as she pushes the needle through Scorpios’ tragically thin exoskeleton.
She liked to think that in dragonfly-hell, he was watching her and smiling.
With her hair, she ties Scorpios to Alasea, yesterday’s beauty. She had a chain of dragonflies, a string of small glittering things, a chain of no chances, a chain of soulless, compassionless undying love.
She slipped the chain about her neck and left the tiny sitting room to find Mania, her brother. Or lover. Or possibly both (no one ever really knew). He was, as usual, in the miniscule kitchen, perched with his hands folded on the chipping Formica counter.
“Mania, dearest,” she whispered. Her eyes were wide and so full of truth any human would die of shock just to behold them. “Will you bring him now?”
Mania climbed off the counter without acknowledging her in the least, without even opening his eyes.
“Bring my pet, please,” Claire requested.
Mania nodded and went off on his way to fetch. Keeping pets was Claire’s favorite (well, in all honesty, only) pastime ever since forever claimed her.
Mania led up a young one, Claire’s newest, blindfolded. He looked just barely 15. Not much older than her, she noted.
“Hello,” she said to him, “My name is Claire. And your name is Pet, because that is what I have decided to call you, dear Pet,” –she paused. The pet shuddered. “Mania, if you please?”
Mania only nodded and deftly lifted the boy-pet up onto the counter. He pulled from his wrist a small knife and handed it to Claire with a deep, submissive bow.
Claire kissed his hand and curtsied in return. Mania left her to her fun.
She climbed up and knelt beside her pet. Her lace skirts fanned out about her legs like the whitest of clouds. The knife gleamed silver against her palm. Sharp.
“Now, then, pet…” she spoke more to herself than to him. She lifted the knife and let it trace slowly down his chest, leaving in its wake a single line of bloody red. She almost wondered if he felt pain. But not quite. She smiled as the knife in her hand slowly dismantled the pet, first carving away his legs, then each of his fatty fingers, at finally slicing away his arms – working quickly so he would be alive when she finished.
“You’re beautiful,” Claire whispered as she made the final incision in his throat, “And now you will die a death just as glorious,”
She leaned forward and sank her teeth into his throat, relishing the acute sensation of layers of flesh and muscle giving way, blood flowing into his windpipe and choking him.
This was beauty, Claire thought.
She lifted the chain of dragonflies from around her neck and placed it about what was left of his.
“Shush, dear Pet,” she murmured in his last moments of life, “You look so very lovely.”
And she took a match to Scorpios’ wing. Red, orange, and all shades of fiery demise consumed the pet, and Mania re-entered to watch.
“We must procure a new one soon, wouldn’t you say?” Claire mused. Mania nodded. They stood transfixed by the flames until a single spark dared to leap to the hem of Claire’s dress and set her ablaze. She stood there, quite still, and died laughing.
It was an expected suicide. No one had ever expected Claire and Mania to last long faced with this world’s warped values.
But I assure that Claire has since raised and tormented many a pet, even in death. In fact, you yourself are quite lovely looking. Perhaps you should be destined to be Claire’s next pet. Or maybe mine. Will you come walk with me?