Silvery Kua

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Shilo considered the gun in her hand. She put it in her mouth and closed her eyes. Boom. It would’ve been easy, so easy, to do that. All alone in the house, no babysitter, no reason to keep living, and the tears were steadily stabbing at her eyes. Instead of blowing out the back of her head, she took all her pills at once with a bottle of wine. She had time for two documentaries before she left, and really it didn’t surprise her that her eternal reward did not deliver. Her bedroom was on fire. All of her belongings were in danger: her stuffed animals, her bugs, her beautiful tomes. Her skeleton! They were licked up and became ashes, and the ashes sprang into lively fires, and the heat frightened her. She pulled hard on the door, the metal knob burning her hands. Her palms were a mass of blisters, spreading up her hand, along her arms, down her spine and up her neck until her very eyelids were scorched. She screamed, her throat raw. Shilo tried to convince herself that she was dreaming.

She never woke up.

There was a reprieve. The fires, after some ungodly number of hours of suffering, dyed down, devolved into cinders, a mountain of finest grey dust, and Shilo on top of the heap. She slid down, and the ground ate her up. A tunnel was under the floor, a long, frightening slide that deposited her into a damp cavern. A cloaked figure waited at the dock, the boat festooned with bits of body parts.

“Where can you take me?” she asked.

“Out of the fryer and into fire,” it rattled, and a skeletal hand came out of the sleeve. “Coins.”

“I have no money.”

A knife was held out to her. Shilo shook her head and gave over her wig, and then her mother’s necklace, both of which no longer held any meaning. She felt nothing, and she said nothing on the trip through murky water. There were eyes in the water. Fog in the air. It was cold and she could not shiver. She could not feel.

It was a strange world, and when word got around that the new arrival was a seventeen year old virgin, she was invited to the carnival. The carnies spun her about, jeered questions at her, demanded she tell her sins. All she’d wanted was to escape the awful pain, was that so wrong? Self-murder was still murder, a mortal sin.

Lucifer himself strode before her, looked her over. “Died a virgin. What a waste,” he said.

She loved him right away. He told her there was a place for her in his carnival of the damned.

“As long as I don’t have to be me anymore,” she said, and signed her soul away. The transfer was complete.

Wick was that sultry marionette, and when she danced, she felt the act take over and remove the hollowness that lived inside.