Suspended In Dusk Read Online Free PDF Page B

first in a long time. She knew he wouldn’t be the last. It wouldn’t even matter if she fled. Sure, she could hide away from herself—hide away from this life—but, in the dark, Esther was afraid she would become nothing but a relic, a shard of a creature split away, split open and devoid of what little humanity she had left. She would become a ghost whispering in the ruins, kissed by the moon and desiccated by the sun, part of nothing but her own amorphous madness.
    She didn’t want that. Didn’t want to sink below the surface and leave no trace of herself. She wanted change.
    Plenty of people—plenty of girls like her—believed in new starts. She heard those whispers time and again from the desperate and the optimistic. Dreams of cleanliness, rightness. New beginnings. Maybe it could happen for them—she doubted it, but maybe it could—if they could leave the taint and the rot behind. Most of them couldn’t. Once the darkness bloomed in a person, its petals opened out like a great lotus, cupping souls like raindrops, swallowing them whole.
    It wasn’t fair, of course. It was always the same, everywhere, every when . There was never going to be anything different, anything easier, or anything better. Anyone who thought different was a fool. People like her—those rare, infrequent few, fashioned from another flesh—were not given the same grace. For monsters like her, there was no acceptance, no tolerance. No entitlement to the riches of normalcy. Believing anything else was just clinging to a fairy tale.
    Esther sucked in her cheeks, sucked on her cigarette and let the gritty burn of it fill her up, drawing in the smoke just as she drew in the beast, remaking her body in a shell of innocence. She hadn’t intended to kill him. This crumpled remnant of a man with his clothes awry and his limp dick hanging like a sad, lost sock… she’d only meant to take his money. One brief suck, one fleeting business transaction, and that would have been everything she needed. Even the dead had to pay rent, after all, unless they were prepared to waste away in the shit-stained, cardboard-walled hellholes that offered sanctuary for the penniless whores and crackheads. Men like Radouane kept their acquisitions in line by those methods: powdered white lies and cheap backhand blows, a dozen girls to one flat, hot-bunking or sharing space on the floor. You let him do you one favour and then you owed him, and he would never allow you to forget.
    She supposed she should have known better. Perhaps she had. Perhaps she’d never trusted him in the first place. Perhaps all of this had simply been a choice. And this life did serve its purpose. It gave her the things she needed, the pretence at functioning within a part of the world, but it should never have lasted.
    Now, she looked down at the body, and wiped the last flecks of blood from her cheek. Her time of penance was over. If it wasn’t enough anymore, what was the point? Why keep pretending to be his pet, if he didn’t keep her safe from herself?
    No. It was over. Radouane Sehere could go and get fucked. Esther was leaving, and he could not stop her. He would not stop her, whatever she had to do to get away. She owed him nothing. Not anymore.
    The light still painted her grimly, though now the shallow glow of the streetlamp outlined a face more human than not, the twisted shapes of hunger and need hidden beneath dull skin and an empty gaze. She put the cigarette to her lips again, tasting tar instead of blood, and she gave one more glance to the dead man by the wall, his throat ragged red lace and his left eye gnawed away.
    Perhaps she should have felt guilty. Perhaps, once, she might have been able to, but there was nothing left in her now. No guilt, no shame. Just the dull ache at her centre, punctuated with the screaming pain of need. It filled her, gave her life where life had once been, and it drove her onward.
    Esther zipped up her jacket, despite the night’s warmth,