There’s something Vincent always thinks about.
The water in the bath is a warm feeling caressing his skin in its pleasant surroundings. It smells like everything sweet, everything nice, everything that Vincent likes. The scent of a saccharine decaying in his mind. Rotting his brain like cavities on teeth. Vincent wants sugar again, he thinks. He wants to go to a patisserie with his maman, he wants to walk with her around town, and pick out the tastiest, sweetest things as he walks by her side, his hand swallowed by his maman’s hand. Timid little lamb, how pathetic, Vincent says to himself internally. Studying among the greatest in his class and yet he walks next and, or behind his maman at any opportunity.
Soap covers Vincent’s body in a thin sheen, barely visible on his skin anymore. Blood trickles down Vincent’s face, trailing down his nose and pale cheeks in uneven streaks. Light red stains his skin, almost brown.
Don’t think about it.
The taste of death is too lethally delicious. Delicate on Vincent’s tongue, a wretched and vile twist in the palm of his hand. A knife. A knife is what he striked with. A knife. Cold and sharp, digging in between the very strands of fiber that make up flesh.
Vincent is his father’s son.
Don’t think about that man.
The waters feel infinite, on all sides. Converging into this concoction of an icy coldness of a dead body, blood dripping from the open wounds, sculpted like thin lines brought on by a blade; then mixed with the comfort of home. The warmness of an abode that Vincent safely returns to.
(And Vincent wonders what it is like on the opposite end of the knife.
In another way, in another hypothetical world that Vincent can only chase after in his deepest slumber— he turns the knife on himself. He wonders what his father’s look will be when Vincent drags the tip of the blade across his own throat and rip open his skin and expose his throat fully.
“Do not lift your chin too high, child,” Says father. “enemies will slash your throat if you expose yourself.” Says father again.
Vincent is his own enemy in this hypothetical world. In which he tastes what the other end of the horizon tastes like. He wonders, what would it be? The comfort of a home? Or a desolate solitude? Or something liminal that terrifies yet loves?)
The taste of blood lingers on Vincent’s warm tongue, the faint taste of iron covering the surface of his taste buds and cornered in the back of his throat like medicine he’s forced to drink, mixed with his spit (the blood of another human mixed with his own spit), settling on his pretty lips. The echoes of a choked, gargled sound reverberates in the back of his head. The empty sockets of hollow eyes bore into Vincent’s memory like an old friend, a nostalgic reminder, yet so twisted it becomes a clawing in the back of Vincent’s throat.
(Deathless, cold void. There is no way out of this dreary prison that spews nothing but the deceitful messages of a wrathful demon leaning on his shoulder, whispering nothing but the faint ideas of violence that plague his head so early on.)
Vincent is his father’s son.
He wants that blade to touch his skin, and dig into the very flesh that makes his being. Vincent wonders where he should start when he makes his exit. By the throat or by the heart?
He looks out to the cold sunlight of the window, the sun— though grey and frigid, graces him still in its beam pouring down into his bathroom and on the checkered floor.
He submerges himself, head leaping under the surface of the water. Water fills his ears, and the smell of vanilla cake and sweet strawberries becomes nothing but the empty smell of water filling his nose. Vincent doesn’t take a huge gulp of air beforehand. His lungs slowly start to hurt, confined against the cages of his ribs. Caged within his flesh.
Vincent is his father’s son.
The water is empty. Yet infinite. It feels infinite. Vincent’s body sinks, brunette hair flowing around his face. Water is peaceful. This is what death must feel like, Vincent thinks. Blood lifts itself off of Vincent’s face and diverges into the cold abyssal surroundings.
Vincent is reminded of the sounds of gargled choking. Knife drove into a man’s throat, slit open and the skin flayed out and his neck split by a knife lifting the skin. Pharynx wide open, and Vincent remembers the visceral look in this man’s eyes, don’t kill me please, a begging that Vincent doesn’t get to hear among the choking of his own blood. Vincent recalls the harsh squelch that came with stabbing him again, and then again, and then again,
before Vincent drops the knife.
A maid knocks on the door. Vincent quickly gains sentience like a sort of revenant digging himself up from the bathtub. The trance of his vile nightmares stop.
Vincent finds air again, pulled violently from the liminal flow of the void of water.
There is blood on his teenage hands.
The physical form of blood stains his hands in a feeling, a lingering touch. There is no more deep red that has flooded the creases in his palms, and no longer is there the splash of murder that is on his skin.
Yet, it lingers. Rippling away at his core.
