karen

hunger is her best friend. her confidante. her constant companion. she knows what lies next to bones intimately. she dreams about peeling this layer off in long razor straight strips and throwing it over her shoulder as one would discard a garter in a slow tease. the cushion gone. nothing left between her and the one she wants. the friction of sculpted calcium, the cringe and twinge of uncomfortable skin running the length of yours. "my costume is itchy," she whispers, and your hips bruise from getting personal with hers, that twin set of knives holding you hostage, "help me take it off."

you search for hidden zippers but take your time in the endeavor. after all, once you help her transform, this particular vessel will no longer respond to you. you'll be holding a pile of protein. a mess of muscles and mass. a meal rapidly speeding towards room temperature. one she would pass on.

that's why she starves. she's above it, the ugly need for the tangible. she's been craving the inedible. licking ghosts off of dream forks. she's collapsing into herself like a star.

she wants you to watch her implode.

you undress her and your hands have never been further from fumbling. a slip of material slides off her shoulder like curtains parting, the preview before the show. you pull this second layer over her head and drop it onto the floor, reaching around to the back of her, feeling the famine of her frail frame underneath your fingertips, the outcome of strictest self discipline evident in her sharp scapulas, reduction the result of reaching. her breath catches between her teeth, a little too big. her eyes sick and gazing sweetly and making more sense than scripture. you run a finger down her spine and find it, and tooth by slow tortuous tooth you part her trappings, opening her reverently like a favorite book you haven't read in ages. the urge to skin her, to violently skip ahead to the end stills your hand.

"please,"

the void brightens backwards. the dot her map has led her to is inverting, whispering the secret psalms of pitch black obscuring rainbows. every color shimmying into one as you rip her reality wider. she steps out of her skin as something else entirely, having become next to nothing, a student of lack so she can explode outwards. her ravenous heart stops wanting. forever changed, a few inked feathers fall.