Saving Evan

I remember the one time my roommate Evan raised his voice to me. Tonight, precisely one year after the occurrence, I can still distinctly recall every detail of that evening.
"What have you done? What in God's name have you done?" he'd shrieked.

In those days, the existence of God was a notion even more abstract to me than home-cooked meals or loving parents or hot showers with perfumed soaps, so I laughed at him. I laughed reflexively, used the still-smoking revolver at the end of my arm to wave him off, not knowing the reason for the terrified flaring of his nostrils.

I know now.

Sure as hell, I know now.

Describing Tasmin is difficult. One might as well attempt to gauge the color of love or the sound of fear. It is enough to say that a night does not pass that I don't dream of her and wake up screaming.

The word "Faceless" springs to mind as a fitting description for her. "Carnivorous" is another good one, I think; also, "Deceptive".

The more thought I devote to the lady, the less difficult finding adjectives to ascribe to her becomes.

I suppose I can’t say Tasmin never did anything for me. I do owe her a debt of gratitude for at least ridding her mouth of Evan's penis before greeting me for the first time. Mine had been the misfortune of walking unannounced into the bedroom I'd shared with him for three years.

To his credit, Evan had demonstrated decency enough to look sheepish upon my intrusion. After all, it was my bed they were using, despite the presence of Evan's less than five footfalls away.

"Pardon me," I'd offered once my shock and umbrage abated.

"You must be Aaron, the roommate," she'd said, her lips glistening grotesquely as she smiled up at me from where she knelt between my roommate's legs, "Under different circumstances, I'd kiss you hello, but I doubt you’d favor that right now".

She wasted not a moment in filling my shocked silence, adding "Or would you?"

I nearly screamed at them both. Evan looked so absurd lying there on my bed (on my bed, damn it!) with his jeans pushed to his ankles. I left the room without closing the door behind me and spent the afternoon at the movies. On my way out of the apartment, I made sure to pause in the kitchen long enough to eat the last slice of chocolate cheesecake out of the refrigerator. It's Evan's favorite.

"I have to know, Evan. Where did you find her?" I said to him that evening after she'd gone and I'd returned home.

"Her name is Tasmin. Picked her up at that rave you were too busy to go to with me last night," he replied, not looking up from his newspaper to meet my eye.

There was no misreading that wounded-kitten tone of voice. Had it been me and not him who'd been subjected to desertion at the altar by a fiancee of two years, then I too, would revel in company whenever I could find it. This would hold especially true, had my best friend chosen the last possible moment to break plans made days in advance, as I had done to him.

Hardly was I without my own problems, though. Sometimes I resented my friend for his neediness. Sometimes his behavior tempted me to remind him there are other unhappy people in the world who do just fine for themselves because they've got no choice. I certainly had no choice in being born addicted to heroin just like my dear sweet mother who'd started using at age fourteen and continued abusing us both throughout her pregnancy. I damned sure had no choice in the half dozen foster homes I passed through between ages nine and sixteen. And I fucking well didn't have a choice with regard to the nervous breakdown that took me at age twenty-two. I've never retreated from life the way Evan sometimes does, though. I’ve never willingly acted as a burden to those around me the way he sometimes does. Not for a moment.

Aware that no good would come of interrogating him about Tasmin, I left Evan to his reading.

"I'm sleeping in your bed tonight. You can have mine," I told him as I headed toward our bedroom. He didn't have to respond for me to know he'd heard me.

Evan surprised me the following day by seeing Tasmin again. On first meeting her, I would have figured the tanned, boyishly slender woman for more of a one-night conquest than a relationship prospect. Everything about her, to my eye, said "Rave Chick" and said it very plainly; the close-cropped indigo-colored hair, the frayed-hemmed hip huggers, the spiderwebs painted on her long, pointed fingernails, the platinum bicep bands and the garish inkings strategically tattooed over a fair third of her body. When it became apparent that Evan did not share my view, I grew to tolerate Tasmin's presence in our apartment.

I experimented with arranging to be elsewhere on days when I knew she'd be visiting, until avoiding her grew too tiresome. I said as little to Tasmin as I could on days when exposure to her was unavoidable, not so much because I disliked her, but because I feared her a little. Ludicrous though it may sound, despite my standing a full head taller than she, despite my outweighing her by at least forty pounds, she frightened me in the most inexpressible way. She seemed well aware of the disconcerting predatory quality in her eyes, and ultimately, pleased by it.

"Hey Aaron," she said to me one evening in our living room. I tend to sleep late on Saturdays, and had awoken unaware of her presence in the apartment.

"Hey," I replied, observing no reason to be rude. "Where's Evan?" I asked.

"Went to the city to bring back some wines," she replied, uncrossing exquisite legs on our sofa. For all my unrest in her company, Tasmin was supremely easy on the eyes. She gave the unoccupied cushion beside her a pat, inviting me to join her. For the first time, her eyes suggested nothing of the carnivore I'd taken her to be. The predator in her seemed caged for the moment. Still, I was unprepared to trust her fully. I offered her an excuse about wanting to take a shower, then turned to calmly flee without outwardly appearing to flee.

My ruse seemed to satisfy her momentarily.

Then she called my name, and I began to feel ill.

I regret having ignored my initial instinct to run without shame. It startled me to find Tasmin standing directly behind me, her body so close to mine that I scarcely avoided a collision as I turned. I hadn't heard her get off the sofa, which lie no less than fifteen feet from where I stood. Had I not been concentrating on the coolness of her hand as it cautiously ensnared my wrist, I might have appreciated the impossibility of her stealth and swiftness. Instead, I began trembling, still wrestling inwardly with precisely how she'd traveled nearly twenty feet in under a second without producing a sound.

Not a sound.

She smiled. "Before your shower, there's something you should see. Outside."

I offered her neither response nor resistance. I’d abandoned attempts to account for her baffling transit in favor of struggling to remember whether her lips had moved when she’d spoken a moment earlier. I didn't think they had, despite my having clearly heard every word she said.

Tasmin led me by the wrist through the living room, pausing once to select a large carrot from a fruit and vegetable bowl that Evan and I kept upon the kitchen table. Then she brought me out into the backyard where a crescent moon hung low in a deep lavender sky. The moist heat of the evening felt wonderful against the bareness of my chest and arms, but fell just short of conquering the chill that Tasmin's touch bred in me.

Observing nothing out of the ordinary in our yard apart from Tasmin herself, I asked her purpose
in bringing me there. I was only now coming aware of the wrongness of my situation.

Pressing her lips tightly against my head, Tasmin whispered in my ear, sending an involuntary thrill along the entire left side of my body.

"I know you know," she said, confusing me.

Stepping away from me, she held up a fist, revealing to me a thumbnail terrifying in its jagged thickness. I watched her, my disbelief rooting me to the ground as she sank her thumbnail, which appeared to gain height by the second, deep into the flesh of her inner wrist. I ‘d moved beyond wondering at her ability to carry this out without any expression of pain. I felt as if a poorly chosen word would act upon my soul as a razor blade laid across my tongue would act upon the softness of my mouth.

Tasmin said, "I mean I'm aware that you fear me. I'm aware that you know there's something different about me. I've brought you here to show you very plainly where we stand,
you and I." The predator was loose. God help me, it was loose and firm-bodied and I could not outrun it even if I'd wanted to. However, the desire for escape was draining from me, forsaking me against my will. Perhaps something in her voice and smile was robbing me of it.

Using her thumbnail, Tasmin opened her wrist. Her blood welled thick and black, overflowing the terrible chasm she was opening. The sight of her parting flesh was nothing compared to the loathsome sound that accompanied it; a torn, ragged hiss as the shiny painted nail carved soft meat. Under ordinary circumstances, I might have retched on the ground, but something prevented me from doing so.

I watched Tasmin splatter the soft carpet of grass with blood like ink. She did this with calculating intensity. Still no trace of pain furrowed her brow or pinched her lips, and that frightened me more than anything I'd seen.

My emotional dam burst at length and I yelled at her, demanded to know what in hell she was trying to do to herself. Ever unflappable, Tasmin smiled at me and said simply, "Wait. Watch."

So I did. I watched. We stood there and watched her blood pool for several moments, while she held my hand. Her skin still felt cold, despite the humidity of the night.

Her blood seeped into the grass and moist earth. I'd never felt so marooned as I did standing there with Tasmin.

"Wait? Wait for what? What are we supposed to be watching?" I demanded to know, "You need medical attention."

"No, you must wait and see all that I can be for Evan. . .and for you."

When next my gaze fell in search of her pooled blood, I found in its place a tiny, spreading patch of wildflowers. They clustered proudly, venturing outward to cover every inch of ground that had been touched by Tasmin's blood. If I observed them without blinking, I swore I could see the flowers growing taller straining upward as if in greeting, their indigo-colored petals unfolding as explosions of the plants continued to spring forth from the blood-soaked earth.

"I can be sweet, so sweet to you, to Evan. . .if given the chance," Tasmin told me. I said nothing, unable to think of any suitable response to the sight of her offering taking shape. Struck dumb, I could only watch the stems thicken, the leaves uncurl, born of her blood, nourished with her gaze.

"I can be kind until I'm forced to be otherwise," she told me, and brandished the carrot she'd lifted from the kitchen table. She placed its point against her navel, nestled it there firmly. Then she laid a finger against the opposite end of the carrot, and pressed the vegetable toward her body.

The almost total lightlessness did nothing to conceal what was transpiring before my eyes. I watched Tasmin slowly sink the carrot, watched her urge it gracefully into her. And as the thing vanished in increments, so did what remained of my sanity.

From somewhere deep inside Tasmin's body, I heard a sickening crunch as she pushed the carrot home, devouring it not through her mouth, but through her navel. I cursed my legs for refusing to carry me away, sparing me view of this woman’s self-immolation. I resented her for having me witness such a grotesquery.

"You want it all, don't you?" she whispered once the entire carrot had been fed through her navel. I neither moved nor spoke. It was as much fear that kept me silent and immobile as it was my utter inability to command my muscles.

Only when Tasmin whispered "Go into your bedroom and undress, Aaron, and wait for me," did my legs remember how to walk, and once they were in motion, I could do no more to stop their progress than I could to stop my hands from removing my sweatpants and underwear. Searing pain attacked my heart as I saw Tasmin step into the unlit bedroom with me and lock the door behind her.

Her face had changed. Her eyes had dimmed and shrank into a reddened pair of sticky, clenching anal pores. A moist, smooth vulva had usurped the space ordinarily occupied by a woman's mouth and nose. Its folds pouted suggestively at me under the cold white stare of the moon.

"You'll have it all," She assured me in a phlegm-thick tone not entirely unpleasant.

And as she closed those puffy vertical lips on my mouth, clutched me by the shoulders, and ground the swollen clitoris against my nose, I finally grasped what was different about Tasmin.

She spent what seemed like hours tasting my most intimate physical locales, and did this utilizing at least three separate tongues, only one of which held residence in her mouth. I can elaborate no further without trembling. I will simply say that on that evening, Tasmin taught me more about the kinship and intimacies between rapture and agony than I would have thought possible. She taught me a great deal, cruel, succulent beast that she was, and I can remember several points throughout her lesson when despite my utter revulsion at my circumstance, I had to envy Evan.

My memory of my several couplings with Tasmin is not without its holes. One thing I do recall is that in all that time, be it all twenty minutes or all nine hours, my body was never mine to command. Only when Tasmin directed me to move or utter did I find myself capable of doing so. I couldn’t even shed a self-pitying tear in the dark without permission. I'd been robbed of even that slightest of emotional releases by whatever strange sorcery was keeping my penis erect for my unwilling participation in Tasmin's game.

Once she’d grown bored with my subjugation, Tasmin knelt beside me and whispered into my ear. Her human lips glistened obscenely by moonlight spilling through the bedroom window.

"I promised I could be sweet, angel," she told me as mastery of my muscles was gradually relinquished to me. I struggled to turn my head, needing to see her. My voice had yet to resurface.

"Evan hasn't experienced me half so thoroughly as you have," she said. Her tone of voice suggested I should feel honored by this admission. I could also tell that she was grinning at me in the dark. I wondered how many sets of teeth I might find in her mouth, were I able to turn fully and look.

Tasmin sat back in front of me on the bed, her legs folded underneath her, and regarded me with eyes of frigid jade. Moonlight pearlized the flawlessness of her skin and I fought to ignore the endless stream of blue images flooding my mind despite all I'd just been through.

"Rest now," Tasmin told me as she climbed off my bed and dressed. Immediately, I slipped into obedient slumber.

My first thought upon awakening was of the revolver boxed beneath my bed. I'd kept this single memento of my suicidal years a secret from Evan. In truth, I'd not thought about the gun in over a year. I'd never had reason to, until now.

Within seconds, I was out of bed with the loaded revolver, streaking nude toward the lewd sounds of lovemaking. Passing through the living room, I noted several emptied wine bottles upon the polished oak trunk table. A half-eaten cheesecake had been abandoned as well, along with a shattered wine flute and several articles of torn clothing. It seemed I'd slept for quite a while.

I found Tasmin and Evan naked together in the yard. The beauty of her rocking astride him defied description, and I warred with myself inwardly as I stepped onto the soft grass. Never had I seen a woman so feral, so ethereal as Tasmin. Never had I known such pain as she had visited upon me in that bedroom.

The night still burned as I crept toward them and lifted the revolver at the end of my arm, aligned it with Tasmin's face. Her eyes came open and through the tears filling my eyes, I watched her smile at me as I pulled the trigger. My bullet struck her just above her right eye, punching through her skull in two places as it departed through the rear of her head. Then more thick dark blood flowed, spraying out of the smoking holes I'd opened. Still glistening with sweat, Tasmin slumped to one side, struck the grass with her shoulder and lay still. That was when Evan began to shout and I began to make sounds akin to either laughter or crying. Maybe it was both at once.

"What have you done? What in God's name have you done?" he demanded of me.

I didn't bother to answer him. I knew there was no way I could tell him what had transpired in his absence. In his current state, he would never believe me, although I hoped that in time, I could sit with him and be believed when I told him my motives. I hoped he would realize some day that in committing this act for which I was sure to be jailed, I'd saved him from a lifetime of indignities of the sort to which I'd been subjected.

"Don't you know what she is?" I asked Evan later at the police precinct as a decidedly ornery officer fingerprinted me. I told Evan of her smile as I'd leveled the gun at her. I told him of her last words to me as I'd knelt over her cooling body to ensure that the damage inflicted by my bullet was not likely to be repaired.

"I don't die," she'd told me. Evan did not believe any of it. I supposed I could not blame him.

I haven't seen Evan since I was imprisoned. As I've said, tonight marks the one-year anniversary of the night I murdered Tasmin. I am told that the entire yard where Tasmin fell has been overtaken by indigo-colored wildflowers. I am told that there is not an inch of grass left uncovered by the blooms, which in time, grew up, over the house. So far, I hear no herbicide or chemical reagent has acted upon them with any effect…

Many a night has passed since then that I would not have been surprised to awaken and find her standing over my bed, the bullet holes in her shattered skull still smoldering. Many a night have I expected to open my eyes and watch that obscene rictus grin unzip across her face, or see her other face, the one composed of twin assholes and a vagina, descend toward mine and smother me to death with a kiss. There have been nights when I have hungered for her until my tears darkened my pillowcase, until my stomach cramped with my sobs. I believe she will return for me one night soon. I believe she will kneel upon my chest one night and inhale my soul as easily as a man sucks the smell of his favorite meal into his lungs.

Earlier tonight I found a flower sprouting between the stones in a dank, lightless corner of my cell. Its petals were the color of Tasmin's hair. The smile has not left my face since then, nor have I stopped crying. She will come for me, and I will resent her, I will fear her, I will beg her forgiveness when she returns. If I've learned one true thing from my dealings with Tasmin, it is that what this lady wants, she usually gets.