Los Angeles Monologue

Los Angeles, 1957.
The bone crypt that cages my veins feels of something rotten. It was as if during my sleep, my veins were lined with lead and the air weighed with a rare darkness that felt strangely familiar. I descend the staircase but halfway down, I stop.

He’s here. I can feel it in the marrow of my bones.

My heart begins to violently thrust against my chest. My ears fill with the sound of static. I arrive in the den to find him stretched along the velvet chaise, the creamy smoke of his cigarette dancing around his head. I could feel his teeth cracking from across the room. Clanking, clenching, sharp and ready for the kill.

He is the devil. He is my husband.

He stares at me in silence. His eyes are dark and whirring like locusts.

His hand feels hot and quick against the flesh. My head rattles in the darkness as it hits the floor.

I wake up cold. Am I dead? I can taste the blood on my mouth and feel the ache in my skull. Arms. Hands. Legs. Feet. Neck. I’m breathing. Oh, but how I wish I weren’t. The room is cloaked in a black so deep I am unable to see my own body. I move my hands across the ground and realize it is the cement floor of the cellar.

“Don’t move, Mary. You’ll hurt yourself.” I freeze. The voice slices through the air. It’s close and sounds like a man, almost like my husband, but there is a warmth and depth to it that seems foreign. I can feel it moving towards me. I can feel its mouth curling into a carnivorous smile. I can feel its skin. I can feel its eyes staring from across the room. I can smell the venom secreting from its pores. I desperately try to scream, to move, to do something, anything. Please, oh God.

I squeeze my eyes shut, praying it will disappear. That it is some elaborately vivid construction of my psyche. But I can sense its movement in the silence. Closer. Closer.

On the first tier, I find his lifeless body floating face-down like a dog delicately on the water’s sparkling surface. It’s my husband. The water is quickly reddening, the blood flowering out of his body in thick ruby plumes. I turn him over and his eyes are hollow and grey and calm and perfect. I can feel the black static behind me now, the weight of its presence hovering over my shoulder. My mind is uncorrupted by fear or even by thought itself. In this moment, all I am knowledgeable of is the warm tinge of its