Here's a short story I wrote. It's rather creepy - hope you enjoy!
A Beautiful Love
The complex figure fissured into two bodies as he withdrew his hand from underneath the girl’s shirt. The crisp, spring breeze ruffled the girl’s hair into waves of mahogany beauty. She smiled at him, and he at her: it was love.
“Isn’t this wonderful, Lazarus? Is this heaven?” the girl sighed. Her pearly teeth illuminated between her slender, rose lips. Lazarus gazed upon her youthful visage: yes, this was heaven. Heaven was here: beaming into her brown eyes. The rest of the world did not matter, for the world reflecting back at him through her gaze was the only one that he cared about .
“Yes, yes it is.” He responded, blinking twice from the lumps of coal hiding beneath his grey-speckled beard. His age was showing as wrinkles crawled from the slits holding his dark eyes down to every visible part of his face. Sixty-five years young, he always said.
The couple collided once again. And as a cloud eclipsed the sun, a feeling of concern overcame half of the huddled mass. Lazarus pondered, “C-clara? You know, I read the obituary the other day… I hear God is dead and we have killed Him. Heaven… Heaven is not real. But this is, right?”
“Of course this is,” she moaned, moving her hand down his thigh, “now dance with me, my love! Dance! Enjoy every part of my existence with you! For it is here, in the now!”
And as if conjured by the grace of Cupid, a flock of birds perched themselves upon the white picket fence that separated the garden of Lazarus from his neighbor’s house and began to chirp a sweet song. The couple swung about, lovingly caressing each other as the world spun out of focus. Everything blurred. Lazarus closed his eyes. Solemn but youthful, Clara’s voice echoed throughout the darkness, “You know, they say in order to get into heaven, one must make great sacrifices. Do you believe in that, my love? Do you believe that, if God is dead, we could make heaven here? Because I do believe in it, Lazarus, I do. But where is our Isaac? What have you done to show me you believe? What have you done to show that I can have faith in us?”
“Yes Clara, I believe in it because you believe in it and I believe in you. I believe in us Clara. What can I do to make you believe in us Clara? What do I need to do?” he sobbed.
Cackling, Clara contended, “Is it so difficult to wrap your elderly mind around? You must kill her!”
Lazarus opened his eyes. His love: gone; the birds: gone. Reality and the two words his lover left with him were all that remained. He stood in the garden, bearing his dirty gardening jeans and ripped “I Love
Next door, tears welled up in Mrs. Mayfield’s eyes. She had been watching Lazarus zone out for the past twenty minutes from her window. She knew it was him: he was the one who took her daughter away. He was the one who had taken away her only reason for living. And he would suffer. She was sure of it. “Mr. Benedict, could you come over for a second?” she yelped from her patio, swiping the tears from her face.
Lazarus gazed at the pesky mother of his lover; Clara had said to kill her. Mrs. Mayfield, the woman who had birthed his precious angel, was always the barrier between a true relationship between him and Clara. Tonight, oh yes, tonight he was going to eradicate that barrier once and for all. And then all his wildest dreams could once again be reality. Maybe then he could feel her touch, her soft skin once more.
He strolled through the gate and into his neighbor’s yard. Straining to bear a smile, he answered: “Why hello Mrs. Mayfield. Excellent day for gardening, it is. Did you need something?”
Mrs. Mayfield fantasized momentarily about fetching her 12 gauge shotgun from the bedroom and blasting the geezer’s face in. But being the good Christian she was, she frowned and said, “Have you heard from my Clara? It has been two weeks and the officers have found absolutely nothing…”
Lazarus interrupted.
“Now now, Mrs. Mayfield, I will tell you this for the fifth time—Clara seeks adventure outside of our suburban neighborhood! She is only sixteen after all. And surely you remember how you were at sixteen: a free spirit yearning to venture into the world. But she will come back. They always do. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have business to attend to, but is there anything else?”
Mrs. Mayfield grunted: he was lying. She walked into her house and climbed up the stairs—she needed a nap. Before laying down for what would be her final rest, she gazed out her window. Lazarus was carrying an unlit torch as well as two plastic canisters that looked to contain gasoline. Mrs. Mayfield made her fatally final thought: Lazarus Benedict was just an odd, old man. She was being paranoid. She was a good Christian woman and had no need to spy any longer. A gust of wind howled outside and witht that, she closed the blinds, shrouding the last rays of sunlight she would ever see in her all too lonely abode.
The fire climbed high into the sky. What was this feeling Lazarus felt? Was it guilt? Was it relief that he could have his everything? The fire certainly got him feeling hot and bothered, but it was unlike any eroticism he had experienced before.
Trudging into the foyer, his soot laden boots left tracks of ash as he stride to embrace his lover. Clara wrapped her youthful limbs around his body and then stood back, admiring the aged man. She wore a magnificent red evening gown that evoked the most perverted of thoughts within Lazarus’ imagination. “Oh my love, can you hear the sirens!?” she shrieked with pleasure, “They are so wonderful! Oh Lazarus! You did it!”
The couple’s lips touched momentarily, but then Clara broke free. “ But I must show you something, Lazarus. Then forever we can be together!”
She danced to a side door, swung it open, and glided down the stairs to the basement. Lazarus sprinted after his true love, but tripped down the rickety stairs as they crumbled beneath his feet. There was no escape. Not from Clara and certainly not from the basement.
It was dark; old furniture was shoved against the walls with the smell of something grim staining the air. He froze. In front of him was a path of light from the solitary window in the basement. The light, made of flashing red lights from the fire trucks next door, revealed an opening in the stone floor. A large part of the floor rest upon the wall. Within the hole lay the corpse of his love: her hair no longer mahogany waves but rather muddy masses clumping together; her face no longer youthful but broken, the jaw crookedly ajar from the brown, scarred visage revealing bloody gaps and chipped teeth. Her lips, no longer plump and rose with beauty, but stained with crusty lumps of congealed, dried blood. Her eyes closed, sleeping forever. Lazarus sobbed. He scanned the rest of the mangled corpse, bare of all clothes with only mud and blood covering her body. Arms and legs were crushed and angled in inhuman directions from the force of the stone that had concealed her resting grounds.
Reality finally came to Lazarus—he remembered life before Clara, life before he realized his love, life before he offered her a ride, life before he confessed his love, life before he was rejected, and life before he slay the girl who refused to acknowledge his feelings. As tears trailed down his face, sweeping the soot into clumps at his chin, he recalled the feeling of the rope burning his hands as he lashed Clara’s arms together in the back of his car, the shredding of her clothes, and the bludgering of her tender body with a metal pipe.
He rest his head upon her breast. “Oh Clara, my darling Clara, why did this happen? Where is heaven? Where is love? Why did you leave? I thought this was real! We were bringing heaven here, my darling! What is this?” he moaned.
Embracing her tightly within Clara’s grave, his question was answered by a loud thump; the stone propped against the wall collapsed upon the hole containing the sullen old man and corpse of a bad romance, closing the final gate between fantasy and reality. The thump, followed by the cracking of bones and the severing of Lazarus foot from his leg, echoed momentarily but was drown out by the sirens next door.
Within this room on this spring night, there was nothing in the air but love and the stench of rotting flesh. Simply put: it was beautiful.
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