《Anna-Marie With Her Shotgun》


 Part One. Anna-Marie

    The sky under the Paris commune was surprisingly sunny, considering that it had rained for weeks. I was used to the smell of hot tears, when I had cooked for my family, but not cooked my family, before I murdered them in what felt like one large rush.


    In the streets, there were feminists who were tap dancing, although I wasn''t one for the dance. And with the wooden shoes I wore, this would not have been possible without hurting considerably. It had been many years since I met Ursula, as we had no spoken much since I poisoned most of the rest of my family that was still living, with my mom six feet under after a bout of consumption. The assumption, though not one I made, as I was much to young, was that it was something that she contracted when she was my current age. I am currently ten times four years plus nine more, having spent time working as a hooker for vile men. But even this was better than the flavor of baguettes, for what seemed to have been mixed with vile paper pulp, just to feed myself during the coming Winter Months.


    The battle was bloody, as much as I hesitate to use the British term. But by this point, I have no loyalty toward anyone, as most people would simply reject me if they knew my real life story. And even now I hesitate to defend myself from all the assault from large penises the bourgeoisie thrust into me, as I know what would happen if I tried it again. I had already seen some of my feminist friends, publicly beheaded by "The Widow", although we have won the battle, there was a considerable price payed for allowing women to have abortions, but now the wins we gained seemed all for naught by this point. Even with the finest code breakers, the spies of Napoleon the third were always a step ahead, and rendered many of us rolling heads in the street, with the soles of our Sabots pointing toward the sky. Above the rows of Catholic architecture, I wanted to go back home. But I wasn''t sure if my sister wanted to see me.


    And yet I miss her so much.


    Now on this boat of boats, I bring my grand kids, Ursula (named after my sister), and Pate onto the boat with me. It didn''t want to become involve with any more anarchism, at least not yet. I''d rather spend time tending to the giant bows of my daughter and grand daughter. To think that having kids would completely change your life. For me, this meant getting back into cooking. When you poor, you can''t afford the best living quarters on the ship, but at least the Pate D''Alsace was good enough.


    I resisted the temptation to vomit.


    It wasn''t just the coming sea-sickness, but all the memories. I had briefly dated one woman who would be decapitated after Napoleon retook Paris. She was a short girl, no more than about five foot nothing. She would tell me stories of the time her father would give her prized horses. At the time I had nothing but envious feelings, despite the fact that I knew, in truth, the fact that was I was even alive to see my new friend was nothing short of a fluke of nature. I knew that if I had been any other young lass, my head would be placed on a pike for all to sea. Without the benefit of a pardon from the King.


    It still took a while to become comfortable enough to talk about my own life with her, as years of sexual abuse has the tendency to build up like a large amount of uncleared wax. I wanted to know what the new world would be like. I want to become a journalist, but I haven''t even written a poem in months. In those months since I was out of the commune, I went through periods of suicidal idealization. Only being released from my torment when I saw the arch angel Michael, whom held out his hand out of affection, and asked my my name on all those years ago. His voice this of a true angel, and not an abomination:


    We live in a secret Kingdom.


    Yet the kingdom is known to so few.


    A kingdom of endless strawberries.


    Where one can retire those wooden shoes.


    It was difficult to find myself talking to any man, but there was something different. My grand-daughter Ursula, woke me up, and told me that my daughter arranged a "gift" from the chef, who wanted to know the real life story of the great anarchist whom once was a serial murderess. But I simply wanted to forget that aspect of my past, and simply move on.


    And retire my wooden shoes.


    When I had finally settled into a new apartment, originally it was going to be in the North East, but do to various factors I ended up settling under the Mason Dixon line.


    It was never an easy thing getting used to living outside of my home country. I remember growing up, smelling the baking of fresh bread, and the various flavors freshly picked sold in various shops. But now in the US, it was in a period of reconstruction after the civil war. I''ve heard that living in Seattle and New York were almost completely different worlds. Smack dab into the center of the Earth, and you''ll find the demons here bickering on which cultural heritage was the best. But it was never something that I completely understood. After all, it was all the same soil. But I''ve heard certain things about Lincoln, and some are worried that he may end up being lionized, although this is mainly a fear that I''ve heard expressed in less enlightened circles.


    Sometimes we would visit Louisiana, close to the Coast. It used to be considerably larger than what it is today: for a considerable period of time, France was leery about selling off the land. But when they started overreaching like a bad case of British arrogance, they were more eager to narrow down their assets and stick to African regions where they were severing people''s arms and legs, as they had built up something of a relationship with the Native Americans, in contrast with the British culture beginning to take center stage. And now, with people thinking the death of the horse and buggy is looming on the horizon, the only way forward is to go up.


    But there was no visiting lady Liberty.


    I didn''t want to be reminded of France.


    It''s now 1874. I realize I''m a grand mother, but I still feel like a kid. It seemed like every other woman my age is studying to become a school teacher, and my daughter is still in high school. After a point they started requiring schooling for both genders, so I spend less of my time with my daughter and grand-kids. In theory I could still date, but it''s difficult to find someone my age who wants to fool with someone completely washed up. At fifty two, you''ve seen almost half a century, and this can involve significantly more than you might then. I''ve heard many people don''t live past the age of sixty seven, so I don''t have much longer left to live. I could get back into activism, but that means not spending any time with my grand kids.Love what you''re reading? Discover and support the author on the platform they originally published on.


    I''ve heard that there was a communist party, although whether that''s true is not something that I know for certain. And what they may call communist here may not reflect European communism, do to diverging world views. And whether they would welcome a woman who murdered almost her entire familla. I haven''t even told my husband about it. Though I suppose him knowing that I helped to contribute to the Paris Commune, he might be more willing to forgive than most people. When you''re young, you tend to think irrationally, especially when you''re in a fit of panic. Or at least, when you''re very drunk and bottomless on a dirt road in the black forest.


    Sometimes my mind goes back there.


    When you''re riding a horse, generally you want to hold onto the saddle as long as you can, but eventually they finally manage to invent the stirrup. It always stirs me up not being used to having to grip as tightly, so I often upset my horses whom don''t like being gripped to hard by a tight rope. It''s not that I particularly like strangling horses or anything, but it''s something that took a considerable amount of time to get used to.


    The black forest was dark and gloomy, much different from the constant glow of oil lamp lights. But sometimes I miss the flow of shadows on the wall of my old French cottage. Sometimes I have nightmares of going back to my family home, and reliving the memories of watching my brothers slowly die from the poison that I had slipped into their bread. My husband noticed this penchant as well. Not to make any excuses or anything, but it so easy to accidentally poison someone. Back then there was anything remotely resembling what they call health codes, so sometimes some woman may have her head chopped off simply for accidentally dropping the dough on the floor, and watching it off to remove the bits of hair clumps and dirt.


    All that nonsense, and in reward a blood squirt.


    Then we all fall down and become dirt.


    These days I''m learning different forms of code making and breaking. Cryptography has been around for years. The Caesar cipher shifted letters in shifts of three spaces, and is generally considered to be weaker than than even other basic substitutions.


    Currently, I''ve been working on having a different mixed alphabet key per single character or digit, and having a different reciprocal quality: the reciprocal nature of one alphabetic row may only be this way for one letter, but not the other. But when shifting it using a different mixed alphabet, this solves the double encryption problem that comes standard in Rotation Thirteen Shift. Normally in a rote thirteen shift, simply encrypting it again flips it back to the original plain text. This is where the mixed alphabet comes in. Suppose there was an alphabetic shift based on my name:


    A N M R I E B O G L C D F H J K P Q S T U V W X Y Z


    H J K P Q S T U V W X Y Z A N M R I E B O G L C D F


    The effect will only work on an individual letter basis, but if one had thousands of different mixed alphabetic shifts, one could theoretically assign a different reciprocal shift. And in some cases, if you also did a Two Square equivalent of having a different reciprocal quality per letter, you can drastically increase the security of a reciprocal cipher. You would have to have the specific two mixed alphabets by letter couplets. Generally you will want your plain text to be as short as possible to reduce the likelihood of double letters. And simply pad out the plain-text with letters that did not occur previously in the text, lining it up carefully in rows of five letters, then doing one final shift of a block transposition. And you end up with cipher text that doesn''t repeat any letter, and beats all attempts at frequency analyses, but it can still be brute forced with time and effort, or if perhaps one may know the key.


    All this to say, I''ve had considerable time to do more things with my life than crocheting and having soup boil in the kitchen. And having the husband find a cobbler to carve my grand children new wooden clogs.


    I wonder if he''d put ciphers on them.


    Maybe not.


    When it had become eighteen eighty four, my daughter was off to college. My eldest grand daughter took care of my daughter''s son, so it gave me a considerable amount more time to stay busy with my own things. At sixty two, I''ve seen many of my friends die from syphilis, among other human diseases. There are times when I want to go back to my youth, back to the Black Forest. Yet I know that back in my old home town people still hate me, and wanted my head to roll into a wicker basket. My head kissing the sensation of death. Yet as I sit here today, I''m left wondering why it was I never showed any fear in the face of the words "You should be sentenced to death." Perhaps I knew that it would eventually be overturned. But most people never had their sentences reduced or eliminated.


    When I had spent time in the asylum for misfit children, I remember the time that I spent in dark rooms, for want of bread. I wanted someone to talk to, and yet nobody would speak to me. On some level, I had wanted to do in the loop between Heaven and Hell. While people in the US were slinging revolvers, I was busy eating nothing but stale soup and dirty water. I talked with shadows on the wall. To think that all of that was over now, and that I could have a fresh start. I imagine my severed head being cut off, placed on an examination table, and tended to by permuted men who have nothing better than to study the way the my mind worked. And then eventually the rest of my corpse cremated, and my severed head kept in the museum of oddities along side Marie Bassaud''s death masks, while my soul still searched for another body to reincarnate into.


    Now here I was, just trying to make it through.


    Just trying to listen to the sound of American style folk music, and writing poetry while I wait to go to the New York coast line with my family.


    And simply dream of better days.


    After we had went to the beach, we took a brief trip to New York. When I had finally glimpsed lady liberty, I looked at her with a mixture of disdain and nostalgia. Disdain because to me France represented the most logical and complete extension of sexual assault, but nostalgia because of the friends that I had left behind when trying to make for ourselves a better society, where women could get abortions and universal health care, among other things. Even as Europe gradually heads in this direction, it is difficult to ascertain whether the United States will ever get to this point.


    I met girls in cowboy hats, with toy shotguns.


    I imagined what it would be like, if perhaps I had chosen to use a shotgun against my father, rather than choosing to poison. Perhaps maybe his death would have been a little bit faster, even if I had to watch him struggle for breath with a bullet in his lungs. There wasn''t many deaths that were slower than dying of poison, as you have to use that carefully: if you give them to much, then they will eventually barf it all up. Give them to little, and the body will act like there wasn''t any poison in the system at all.


    The only reason that I had gotten caught, was because my sister pretty much knew what I was up to. While she was willing to visit me in the asylum, her visits from her grew steadily fewer until eventually we never saw each other again. Yet to this very day I dream of us playing in the pond, only clothed enough to cover our breasts, and telling different British Goblin stories that our mother had used to tell us, back when she had visited England. The mother that we had both missed, and who had died from a lung disorder.


    And now as I work on paperwork for my secretarial job, carefully falsifying my personal records to not account for whether I had committed a crime, often I would see various CIA and NSA officer exchanging letters from the war front, sent in by morse code.


    Codes I could never possibly crack.


    But there was never going back.


    No more France for me.

 Part Two. Hemato-Tomato

    My name is Hemato-Tomato, I have a thing for blood.


    I used to think it was for decapitation, then I met the love of my life. I wanted to be her shining knight, sing her soft lullabies at night. But I had my own issues that made this difficile. I once thought I liked dead girls, but it wasn''t their rot and stink that appealed to me. It was the idea of being able to hold and embrace them, even if we never met. If not for the fact that I wanted to see their severed heads roll off their shoulders. But I think I''m cured now, for the most part anyway.


    But there was a time when I wanted to use them as bowling balls in some imaginary game of bowling, imagining others clapping to their demise, tap dancing in their bowling shoes. But more importantly I didn''t like the idea of being rejected by someone I liked. I thought this was because I didn''t want to be alone, that dead girls could not reject you. But the only one rejecting me was myself. For I only, in all this strange new world, had myself.


    I wept tears beyond mortal tears, beyond the ones that most people will ever have to face. The tears of shame and guilt, and falling in disgrace. Falling down into a put down below, away from the Kingdom by the sea. And for me, and my Bride Anna-Marie, there was only death. I wanted a special kingdom for my beloved pride, far beyond the cruelties of this world we call Earth, in some country called France or the United States, or what had remained of it, when the French had taken over what the remnants.


    Lost in my own digital sexuality, I prepared for the fall.


    But this girl out of time, who would let let me die by her side in this tomb of all tombs, had something else in mind for me.


    This is our story:


    And in this Kingdom by the Southern sea,


    Where sand was white and green.


    Beyond the pale horse, with his scythe,


    Slicing you in your spleen.


    I wanted something different, partially to satisfy my own sexuality. But there was some part of my that didn''t want to admit, that I had fallen in love with this girl that I had grown up with, whom had rejected me, based on this accursed interests in the dead.


    I wanted something more.


    Not just her head. "Don''t look at me like that Anna. I don''t date girls simply to cut their heads off." She gave me one of those looks, as if she knew, but was horrified by the idea that I would even have to mention it.


    "Maybe not, but look at the stars tonight." She said, pulling out a joint to puff into the wind. "Isn''t that curious?" She gave me the middle finger, and then went on her way home. We had had issues for some time since I had turned fifteen, but we began seeing each other less once I reached eighteen. What I way to spend a final goodbye.


    But I still wanted her.


    Even if it was just her head. Or so I thought.


    It was twenty sixteen, and you wouldn''t think there would still be decapitation. They went through various different kinds of capital punishment methods, none of which really matched the degree of humanity that they once claimed they would a achieve. Some states went so far as to ban the death penalty completely. And most of Europe had already banned the practice. But there was a new tide, revealing some dark secret kingdom that was best left hidden from the world. The Anna-Marie I knew in high school, was very much a different one from the one in Alsace. But she would still have memories of the time that she was beheaded by guillotine, her crying out to me asking me to save her neck. And even still I wondered, what it was, even thought I could go into her dreams, what made me stop.


    And now I live with the regret.


    I puffed a joint into the starry night.


    I didn''t think I''d fall in love with a parricidal girl, but that was the deck of an uneven fifty two given to my lap. A lap that months previously I had preferred replaced by the flow of gentle tongue around my shaft, but sometimes life doesn''t deal in such easy wins.


    But that was my luck.


    All over again.


    I didn''t even think a cis girl would have a think for a trans woman. Being trans wasn''t exactly a convenient thing, or trendy, if you''re living in one of the more conservative states of the union. We had met in our freshman year of high school, though eventually she started seeing boys. But the boys started demanding things from her, so she was quick to break off from unhealthy situations. I was never quite she how she was able to easily switch from one lover to the next, but in all cases she always came back to me, sobbing.


    And she knew that I would be there, to give her a shoulder. And she would talk about what happened. I knew that her father was a douche bag, and from time to time she would have trouble with law enforcement. And being an immigrant, it put her in a tricky situation do to Obama''s and later Trumps immigration policies. But I was one that she knew she could trust. She knew that my dad dropped his job working as a short order cook, when he was offered lots of money to cut people''s heads off for the state guillotine familla. Eventually it came down to this, we trusted each other more than anyone else.


    And, out of anything else, was what bothered me the about having her gone from this world. The lust, overpowering. The sensations of mixed feelings, then overwhelming despair. That feeling of hopelessness that only ever achieve full fruition when you realized you''ve met the love of your life, and simply no longer have the option to express it. Weeping, weeping, and weeping till one could weep no more.


    It was time to die:


    Danse, the rhythms of death,


    In this Kingdom by the hidden sea.


    For me and my Anna-Marie.


    The final epitaph of the damned.


    I heard the sound of my father screaming in the kitchen, then he jerked me to the sound. He didn''t much like the idea of one of his daughter, dating someone that they would eventually have to execute by guillotine. It was one of the most difficult decisions of my life.


    But I wanted her, I wanted her now.


    I wanted her as my wife.


    There were things taught to me in my early high school years, that if they became true, it was uncertain how much longer the United States as an empire would continue to exist.


    Already in my life at that point, I had seen the withdrawal of troops from the middle East. Donald Trump was trying to start an economic war with Mexico, and nobody really quite knew what he would do next. I just hoped the he would not try to keep me and my Anna from moving back to Alsace France. There would limits to what European countries found acceptable, and many countries were beginning to reject new people into their countries: already there were several groups of wandering Indian tribes that were deported from Romania to France, which caused a large stink, because it violated EU protocols.


    Say what you want about large economic institutions, their seemingly infinite propensity to roll back people''s freedom made it an increasingly grim alternative to move to Europe. Even for Anna-Marie, she had lived in the United States long enough, her parents first generation French immigrants, that it might be a hard sell to go back to her old home country.


    For those, there was only one way for her to go.


    Her head into a wicker basket.


    British isolationism overseas further triggered more animosity in the European Union, and it made other countries that had also have issues, want to also leave the economic bloc.


    The only result seemed inevitable.


    And me and Anna-Marie lived in the after-math of this great war, the third in the series, trying our best to make it through another day. But one day, there was simply no alternative.


    And now I live with the guilt.


    A few months during my Sophomore year, I had offered a ride for her, because she wasn''t sure when her father was going to come to school. We had had dinner time when we were at school club, it was Dance Dance Revolution Night. We both split a Lasagna together, noting the awful irony of a French girl eating Lasagna rather some Crepes. She had shoulder length black hair, but bits of a blond her, reflective of her Alsatian heritage, were beginning to show through. But she still insisted on covering up the color.


    In the parking lot, we waited for my mom to arrive, and I told her about the situation in which we faced.


    "I''ll give you a ride this time, but after I never want to see you with my son again." My mother was the worst about mis-gendering, and didn''t think anything of the fact that she was trying to tell me what relationship to have with people that I went to school with. But now, looking back on it, I look at my mother''s death as somewhat of a relief, even if Anna-Marie was not here to see it. And yet part of me wants to be with her again.


    We had played various kinds of games together, from various Japanese Role Playing games. We also learned how to ride a black horse together, which was among her most favorite of colors. And yet now the actual feeling in my heart began to move toward less a redness for Anna-Marie, and yet a great deep blackness for my mother that tried to separate us. And since then, blond women reminded me of women who were possessive, whether that be protective of their children. Or even more possessive of their husbands.


    But with me and Anna, there was nothing separating us.


    She showed me a childhood lake that she liked swimming in when she was a kid. And we both used the night time to savor the feeling of darkness we both felt for our parents, even if we had not completely known each other yet. There was a certain level of trust we had that simply was not there among our family members. It was one of the few months we got to see each other, and some nights I would worry about her, do to the little bit of information that I knew about her father.


    Because we both saw in each other, something more.


    Something we didn''t want to admit. Because we both new, despite our different backgrounds, that nothing would separate us by our own volition. Even if that meant dating a common criminal, and my father... Oh my father.


    Who was a headsman and a half.


    I grew up with Final Fantasy 7 like a long of kids that grew up between 2004-2007. I had more complicated feelings about those characters, possibly more than any other work of science fiction and fantasy I''ve played or read.


    I used to really fucking hate Tifa, because she reminded me of my next door neighbor, whom ... was probably one of my first exposure to someone with Narcissistic personality disorder. So I was a bit harsher than what some may view as natural.


    But from my perspective, I had known one British and one Spanish girl that reminded me heavily of the Tifa character.


    In both cases, I had grown extremely cynical about girls in general: in particular I distrusted the idea of someone that used to hate you, suddenly having a crush on you later. I always wondered if women like this were secretly carrying a stiletto to stab me in the back.


    From an early age I developed heavy issues of distrust of other women, and being trans did not help matter.


    I saw in Cloud, something more. Some better part of myself, that I didn''t want to admit. And he was able to tolerate Tifa, despite loving the girl I loved in the game.


    For me, when I met Anna-Marie, my feelings for her were an odd mixture of Aerith Tifa, and I was never quite sure which one it was.


    It only took a moment to fade to black, when I was hit by an oncoming bus. Strapped into a broken motorcycle, cycling their the air like an airplane. I expected it to hurt for more than how it manifested.


    Previously, I had tattooed a new kind of bar code, that had only come out when people began to rapidly use smart phones. QR Codes took the planet by wild fire, much like how the world wide web was expected do. It unable sharing off grid micro blogs in a way that was more wireless and seamless than originally intended for the purpose of tracking purchase histories inside of a box of sugar coated cereal. After a point, people started tattooing to their arms and legs, and other parts of their body. It became the new it fashion among other high schoolers and those just entering the university level of education. It didn''t matter if you were a grandma on a bus, or a wife with her husband having a fuss. It was all part of a deranged social rave.


    I was one of the few that had not switched to using such means of tracking directly upon my person, in the most literal way possible. But I do use it to exchange off grid micro blog posts about the nature of Communitarianism. While other people''s identities continued to fragment, mine achieved a certain level of mental clarity, that to others observing seemed in certain ways like someone with a brain disorder. This meant being careful about what I told to certain people, even if in previous generations such information would have been something I''d tell them. Because there was no way to really nobody on an intimate level, this made trusting other people something of a challenge. A challenge that I still face today.


    I tried killing myself several times: once by poison, one time trying to slit my throat. But no matter what I tried it was never enough to wash away the guilt of the lust for people blood squirting on my body. Jacked into a virtual reality headset, my interactions were mostly with digital three dimensional rendering of scantily glad ladies. Unable to trust others because of their proscriptive phrases for certain orientations, it made it difficult to find someone who could deal with eccentricities. Personal anxieties, personal sins; personal ways of dreaming and hallucinating of cute girls getting the chop on the guillotine blade.


    To this day, I remembered her face.


    And it was a face I could never forget. We had split briefly, before briefly uniting once more. I didn''t consider to invite her over to the bookstore, back when such companies were still in vogue, and the country had not degenerated into a certain level of extreme lawlessness. But I was one of complete social anxiety, masked by gatling gun of puns. Some people, of a less genial nature, were inclined to refer to as: "You just can''t help yourself."


    Part of it was a way of coping with anxiety. I still remember the blood that was spattered on my face, and her the flow of my girlfriend''s tears as her neck was slid into the stocks. And the looks on her face when the angular blade came down. A mixture of lust and sorrow, such was the nature of my dance with death.


    Yet here I am, trying to die again.


    But this girl, will not let me die.


    High school was like a boxing match while dancing in the nude, deranged men wanting touch you all over, despite being of the opposite sex. No mater how much one may be perceived as male, there was no escaping the similar feeling that other girls experienced when dressing like men, and the male protagonist not being able to explain why they were turned on by you. This was part of why it was so much easier to court men, and not ladies, despite my obvious sexual preferences to the contrary. And the seemingly contradicting caring nature I possessed, not wanting to burst into the room when Ashley was getting dressed for the prom.


    There are good things and bad things about those perceived as women, as the gender that they were suppose to be; there was no reason to be jealous of the beauty of other girls, although this did not stop the traditional feelings that other girls had for wanting to be the prettiest. By up to my senior year it was like going to the cafeteria would blood on my face. People were not sure whether I wanted to cut their heads off and eat them, or take them out and suck their dick. So I spent many years dining alone, as there was no Anna-Marie, there was only Emily Duncan, whom had similar appearances, and yet did not possess the same degree of innate charm that existing for the girl "out of time." On some level, it felt inevitable that I would only date Anna-Marie, despite my contradictory repulsion of love and hate for French culture.


    But there was something about Anna-Marie, whose total beauty was beyond the mortal sphere, a goddess on the throne of Olympus, throwing down a cupid bow right into my ... trans lady parts. But there was more than this, something that I had no wanted to admit, something that continued to plague me.


    When I interacted with most girls, there was an inevitable feeling of lust.


    My body a decaying suit of metallic rust, falling apart in the wind. Turned to powder and dust. Leaving behind the remains of some demonic skeleton. Yet there was something about Anna-Marie, something more vulnerable, that she had seen in me. Something that I had not even seen at the point before her execution by the state. She knew my secret, in some vague fashion, before I expressed my interest in decapitation. Her severed head sitting in my lap, me embracing it as if it were dying sibling love.


    My tale of forbidden romance.


    A dance of death and beyond.


    It is never easy to discuss one''s own vulnerabilities. Whether that is for the death of your beloved pet, your favorite uncle, or your wife from a malignant cancer. Some deaths are inevitable, and yet others feel less preordained because of the overwhelming sense of the present moment. While it was easy for me to not grasp this when I had tried topping myself so many times in my young life, somehow when it involves someone else, the feeling puts you in an even greater depression than if you had never met the girl. That feeling of total helpless, that total lack of the innocuousness; the overwhelming feeling of being the only one left in the world. For me, I was a vampire who lived with a family of humans. You may think I''d let this get to me.


    But I''m not that kind of girl.


    If only life could flow like sweet rose metal, and not like the thorns. And yet sometimes the rose petals are mixed within, that feeling of pain and regret all over again. At sometimes I would see the spirit of the wolf in my dreams, and wake up constantly with screams and breathlessness. And I reach out for some hidden hand of a love that is no there. Instead it is the hand of death and despair, the knowledge of the passing of someone you life. The feeling of constantly seeing a lover''s execution over and over again. Yet life never gives you second chances, even when one wants to bring their lover back from the dead.


    To think, instead, that the real world treats us like monsters. The villains in old western movies; movies of young damsels being ran over with a train. Yet my mind feels like I walked right into the train tracks from the get go, my world not letting me die in peace to once again be with my beloved. The feeling of earthly estrangement drawing nearer and nearer with no end in sight. The feeling of being a pawn in a game of chess.


    My relationship with Anna was not the best.


    Nor the worst. It was what we had with indifferent parents.


    And sometimes the indifference is the worst.


    What people call a split personality, is simply extensive compartmentalization; everyone does it, some better than others. For me, this manifests as different applications, on a local machine.


    To save me from the websites, that make me want to rip out my spleen. For life and death, a recount of a story in between. For French girls, my relationships were always different, even from other girls within my class periods. Most other girls I had a vague hope that I could someday love them, but the closest to this I''ve ever gotten to a girl from France is to be able to say "This girl, my friends, is a beautiful young girl that I cannot hate."


    Sometimes it''s easy to forget the past, and perhaps that is why I choose to resent the nature of French girls above all other girls from Europe, despite having more negative interactions for those in other places in Europe. But this is like telling an African not to hate a French infantry men, when they''re under occupation. For me, the interaction was not anything so direct. Rather it is more in the specific of not interacting. Howe we choose to interact with others, says much about who we are as a person; how we don''t is much the same way. Although it should be noted that my interactions with either Germans are French has never been the same as it was in high school; I like girls in Birkenstocks, whether that be Arizona style or Boston Clog. Whether it is them dangling their beautiful manicured heels, or other quirks of fetishistic desire.


    There was a blond who would do things to try to get my attention; but I was so stuck in my own personal anxieties that I never considered interacting; often then meant off hand random phrases about how I never really fit it with Punk or Goth girls; I danced so far to the beat of my own drummer, I was all the way to the Communitarian end. Communitarianism, specifically of the hacktivism variety, is a form of libertarianism that focused on communal needs; but in a world where people are stuck within their own individual concerns, even for myself, it was difficult to even get a word in, in the face of the onslaught of multiple cars being tossed under, to the rhythm of cybernetic motorcycles, and total disintegration.


    "Oh shit now, I knew I shouldn''t have cropped my hair."


    She was a very different type of voice from Anna-Marie, who stayed in the side-lines never speaking to anyone. It was almost as if she was a kind of ghost in the class. This was most note able in art class.


    She was the only one I ever spoke with.


    Maybe she was a better word smith. While I ground invisible axes.


    Made by deranged blacksmiths.


    Anna-Marie would always give me a heads up about the girl, with the hair color of fairies slaughtered by battle robots. Their heads falling off their shoulders, the crimson noticeably from the blue in which it came.


    Perhaps there is a lot I could go into here, but to be honest, I''m not a hubzilla or friendica profile. This isn''t the first draft of somebody''s trashy romance novel, written on a pop fiction website for hopeless romantics. I may be a hopeless romantic, but I''m not so hopeless as to lower myself to that, while subsequently uploading the same content in which I rant, on its very bandwidth. It is a story of my own sensuality, with everything between love and hate. Even if that means it''s time to masturbate.


    Because we all do it people.


    But all this to say, French girl had their own allure.


    For Anna-Marie, this allure was in death.


    What they call loneliness, in the world of the net, is really a symptom of addiction. Some call it addiction to the social life, despite all the evidence to the contrary based on its unsociableness. The symptoms a manifestation of a larger disease more toxic to humanity than the fetish for blood and decapitation. For me, I find as I move toward using more federated network, I find that I can actually get more actual interactions that I need, that I''ve never received anywhere else. But on some level this is a mechanism of coping, not unlike the girl on the street who is doping. Yet not third world enough to grant sympathy.


    One of the main issues, some may call self-fulfilling prophesy, although I simply call it being realistic, is how it seems like you never really can really on reliably a European to teach you the language. This is especially the case among girls of that country; there seems to be this unspoken rule that if someone mentions wanting to learn a language, then maybe it''s a good idea to say in a false promising way "Oh maybe I can show you one of mine?".


    But then you just kind of know, like people from Seattle, the reason they never really through is their tendency to be flakes. This isn''t an issue of political correctness, it''s just an observation about how French people seem to treat people of American heritage.


    This was one of the reasons I was unsure whether I really felt comfortable meeting Anna-Marie, although ultimately there were other issues that made whether or not French people were reliable at much of anything largely a moot point. Because you were the only two who trusted each other enough just to get by in this strange world. A world where when a French girl doesn''t get along with her own country, and an American with hers, ultimately it becomes a very toxic game of hate fucking and anti-desire.


    It consumes you in entire.


    Like being ran over with tires. Splatter. Pop goes the weasel. Boom box bursting the voice box. Radio night streaming, skeleton man screaming, Dreaming of another time when one could break up far sooner.


    And yet there was something else.


    Something to make you hold on.


    I''ve had issues with blond girls ever since I met the one French-American and Spanish-American girls back in fifth grade; the impression I had gotten was that in general, while both Latinas hated attractive people (although don''t mistake this for assuming I consider myself attractive), they both liked "Ugly Men".


    There were several reasons why this was an issue, but let''s first begin with the statement and judgment call we call "Ugly". In American contemporary usage, and this permeates across various fields of life, including fashion; the word ugly carries the meaning of being unattractive. The word homely began being used in the same way during my era, even though it had originally meant "someone I want to take home with me." It didn''t seem like there was enough of their immigrant background for them not to realize the very American context. It was one thing for Bianca to treat me this way, as I had once confused her for a Mexican (kids say that kind of stupid shit all the time). But with Stephanie, there was no possible way for her to think I was confusing her for anybody. It was a grudge I had hidden for all the years of my life.


    Around the same issue, blond girls, which Stephanie was almost, became increasingly associated with bitchy behavior, doubled with the fact that one girl I knew in high school, essentially rejected me using my best friend as a proxy; it wasn''t that I wouldn''t have accepted being rejected, but rather I was already dealing with gender identity issues, often being referred to as effeminate. Apparently I was so feminine, like one of the girls, that Emily decided to reject me in a backhanded fashion, highlighting some of her own issues. Mom was also becoming increasingly narcissistic at the time, and it all set the stage for my issue with petite blond girls with cat eye glasses. I was prepared to think of French girls as one way, and not this other way that turned out to be incorrect. But then, and why I jokingly refer to them as Latinas, was what said the stage for the other misunderstanding, and allowed me to be victimized by my ex.


    There was a book web site I read a long time ago, that labeled France and being Latino. I already had developed issues about Latino girls, based on my limited interaction with Spanish girls, and why I chose for many years not to learn Spanish, do to associating the language with Flamenco and whatever genre of song the word La Paloma was, which was later adapted across the Latin European world, and was beloved by the Belgian princess. As someone who had for many years hated Folk Music, it made me that much more determined to hate Spanish thing. As someone who was willing to give French girls a chance, and having been somewhat of a Francophile to begin with, ultimately everything seemed to come to ahead.


    I felt totally betrayed, because I liked French girls.


    I wanted to reject all Romance languages. My ex, whom I had known in trans support group, emotionally manipulated these issues further, and wanted to manipulate me into being something of a Francophobe.


    It took at the strength I had.


    But I also had a darker secret.


    Love crashes into you like an oncoming van, crash victim speeding on a motorcycle fueled up on nitroglycerin; the dangerous game of deranged chess masters warring for to win a round of blow jobs and doggy style. A game of blood, necks, and teeth; the angular blade hitting similarly to a headman''s sword. There was a time I didn''t think I''d ever date, preferring to recline in a private jet and masturbate; watch nothing but porn stars on holographic screens, textured with various kinds of cell shading.


    It was then, as I lay thinking I was dying, remembering the smell of sweat and tears by my ex room mate Kat Mac. "Have you ever thought of writing for erotica magazines, you sure have the sex drive for it." Alone, my body returning to the midnight forest, where wolves hunt the deer, and beers for the fish.


    My life of one dying wish.


    To see Anna-Marie again. Instead I dreamed of snoring on the motel bed, the texture of fallen hair on the floor, and the uncleaned dishes that were only washed in the bath tube. "Or am I renting to much head space." I woke up in the hospital, in a daze. The doctor said that I had been out for a week; I was more worried that they could peer into my mind, using a dream-scanning machine, my dreams of silent hills and ghosts of another past, merging into a collective group of various government entities in the verge between life and death. For some people, what they see is a tunnel of light, but for me it was always night.


    Except for me and my angel.


    My Anna-Marie. The girl who wore a lopsided bow, and at other times a flower in her hair. As we snuggled under the moonlight, dreaming of fireflies and lady bugs. A dream of being with her again, as I lay beyond the mortal life. "No, I''m just thinking about something else" I would say to Kat Mac, who was not my Anna-Marie, but some monster from my past whom I had hoped to leave forgotten, like dust in the wind.


    Because for me, there was only Anna.


    As opened her coffin, and kissed her cheek.


    And dreamed of being with her in death. Instead I grabbed my shotgun, which I had purchased on the black market, outside of the oversight of my parents, whom were now hopelessly bought into the state; even for dad, whom had lost his prostate, among other organs. Yet for me, there was only me, the whole me, and nothing else.


    Me, for my Anna-Marie.


    And I dreamed of severed lady heads, laying beside me on my lap. The last moments of their life fading into total darkness, while simply no longer wanted to feel alone. So I could be with somebody, into eternity.


    But life is a guillotine.


    You have to be cut throat.


    When I had met Anna-Marie, one of the first nights we allowed her to visit my place, was when she had various cuisine styles she wanted to teach me, because she knew that I liked to cook. She introduced me to Pate D''Alsace, and when I lovingly spoke French to her, she would always correct me on the grammar. But I always took it in good cheer. There was some reason I knew that she didn''t want to come back to her place, so when I was visit with her outside of these occasions, she would hang out at the local bookstore, focusing primarily on foreign language. Of course, the language she chose would be French.


    At night, when she once cooked for us, she made a dish that we all really loved. although it was closer to Italian than French, because mom''s rebel streak kept her from being willing to cook in a French fashion all the way, which meant including a tomato sauce in recipes that called for cream, among other variations. One night, Anna-Marie was gone for a little to long, and I wondered why she wasn''t there to teach me how to cook. Then the restroom flushed, but the soup was still boiling, and the tea was brewing.


    "Is everything OK Desiree?" I asked.


    Desiree had been my first girlfriend before Anna-Marie, though we mostly dated online. "My name is Anna, who is Desiree?" she asked, flabbergasted. "You''re not seeing other girls are you?" she finished.


    "No, it was someone I dated before you."


    "But you said I was your first date."


    "Anything to get you in my pants."


    Anna-Marie pushed me out of the way, determined to finish the cooking that I started. "I''ll make you a soup to prove how much I love you." I wasn''t sure what this meant exactly, but I knew that previously she had had troubles with law enforcement, because other friend''s familla she visited had gotten sick. "Because I''m you''re girl, no Desiree."


    Nothing seemed to come of it at first.


    At the dinner table, we eat the soup. I was the only one in the family, besides Anna-Marie, that didn''t seem to get sick. My parents were polite enough not to say anything, but when Anna-Marie had not visited one night, mom told me "Next time she comes, it''s long pig for dinner. Say goodbye to the French girl."


    Our relationship had never been the same sense.


    And now I long for a day when I can cook like Anna-Marie, because her cooking was no bad at all. My parents were just narcissists. They pretended to be sick, just so they could get my darling in trouble. Have her dumped overboard into the sea.


    So much for Lobster night.


    For my darling Anna-Marie.


    Despite the ill will even if we both take pills, slowly we turn to the inside of the mind. Rear u turn, unwind. Enjoy the car crash enveloping into flames. Death in a flash, two times over. Deny ones inner lust; enjoy the seatbelt turned to rust. Savor the pulsing sensation of inglorious feelings having their way. Reality changes with age; Enjoy the car crash enveloping into flash, killing you at a tender age. No more vigilantes, no more rescue from rust. If only I had never met Desiree, the girl that kick started my anxiety, when it had once died. My issue with French girls was indirect, and not the easiest to follow, although my assumption had never been that they were blond, which an entirely different issue.


    For me and Desiree, we had met each other on Quizilla. I was fifteen and she was thirteen. She was the second French girl I had ever known. We used to watch together, movies like Godzilla. We dated for about a year, but for me it felt like many a year.


    Desire did not kick start my issue with blonds, but was a contributed factor. But she was never prime enough to multiply by fifty nine; I certainly was not her modular inverse, to unfold her life''s puzzles. Yet she created many quizzes, similarly to this other place that models itself more after another writing site, but still has personality quizzes. This was before the French had invaded the decaying United States. For me, I had already had issues with Bianca and Stephanie, but had just gotten out of the swing of detesting Flamenco and masked vigilantes. I understand the irony of my hunting after other vampires. Our love was temporary, finite. She treated me like my hair was covered in mites. But I justified it as being already. We split because she was an awful kink shamer, and I simply wanted to be stoner.


    "So when you see you like girls in Birkenstocks?" she asked, briefly holding back the second portion. Then resuming, "Do you mean you like girls because they wear Birkenstocks?" At the time I had been unaware of French fashion, and the French had had long term issues with Germans, which I would learn later they were associated with.


    "I don''t, but what if I said I did?" I said.


    Needless to say, she didn''t take this challenge to well. So I built up this suspicion of the idea that in general girls who were of French heritage didn''t like to be challenged. More so they any other person of female gender. Me begging the question, good will was never dealt out like even thinning rose petals. I simply wanted pour down her throat molten metal. But, the idea, despite the thought, gave me something of a sour throat. I had resolved from that point onward, which Anna-Marie challenge inside me, to never again date a French girl. I tried finding more Celtic girls to date, and developed a fancy for Swedish girl. But most of these problems finding dates, came down to this particular disdain for crepes and chocolate flavored Flamenco, near the Southern edge of Spain.


    My body was object, rotten meat,


    I caved into my own desires.


    You may wonder, if the technology were available, why I would personally choose not time travel; the reason is simple, whenever I wrote about time travel at a young age, it was a matter of allowing myself the witness the execution of my beloved princess within the pages of a digital LitRPG novel. There was something about the flow of blood, draining from their severed neck. And the feeling of fluid that once gave life feeding my inner core. In traditional Vampire lore, the vampire is the one that drains the blood.This content has been misappropriated from Royal Road; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.


    But with the execution of a French girl, her neck slowly lowering into the stock of the guillotine, it was the idea of not having to kill them myself. For deep down, I knew that, as I watched in horror as my father raised up the blade on Anna-Marie, that part of me did not really want them to die. But there was a part of me, despite the desire to not see it happen, that reveled in the eye of seeing ones dark brown almost black locks fall inside the wicker basket, where other revolutionary heads of women have been before. In my own personal lore, I dream of vampire queens, and werewolves Kings. Yet in these dreams of dreams, I knew that, despite my own inner lust for the darkness, that I would never been one of the demons. Midnight eclipse falling, the rotation of the Earth, allowing for a certain gravity lunar frequency for lust. The lust of sharpened bloody axes and angular guillotine blades gone to rust, the flow of gentle B cup breasts covered in genial tears. The best beheading of a French girl I had seen all my years.


    But the reality was, I was not a vampire.


    I was only one in the desire for blood. But I always hated others, whom never thought twice about killing French girls, my father adapted nicely to his new job as a headsman, after working as a short order cook. "What can I say? I like cooking pork." -- In reference to him sending beheading girls to the dissection chamber of lore. This was not the chamber of disillusioned chamber maids, or the flow of severed braids as younger ones entered the orphanage to sing Roman Catholic hymns inside of a decorative dome. This was not Rome, nor was this France. Now it was the old United States, where France took its place.


    We beheaded women in their underpants.


    We beheaded them in long flowing dresses, we tore to expose the neck.


    And everything in between, disillusioned poodle skirts. The flow of gentle blood squirts, that came from fare ladies whom were once flirts.


    We didn''t need a hell.


    I was already in it.


    Anna-Marie was the first to understand our language gap, that kept me from being able to make myself try to deal with being around Spanish and French girls, and other Latinas of the European continent. After the French take over, we kept a low key profile. We only met once or twice a week. Even then I had a feeling she was doing things that she never bothered telling me about. Would you be willing to tell an executioner, you were trying to poison your father? In this time, he became increasingly frazzled.


    We finally broke up, when I told her, jokingly, that I liked dead girls more than ones still breathing. Even though I didn''t like dead girls, what I liked was blood play, the entire misunderstanding made our relationship gradually fall apart. We didn''t have a yelling match, but she was constantly afraid to be around me, because she thought I''d cut her head off at any moment, despite doing that would essentially mean going rogue. But I was rogue among other rogues, preferring to sling dagger blades instead of shotguns.


    I only got a Guillotine Gun later.


    A guillotine gun was a special form of bladed projectile weapon. The projectile would not have as much freedom in trajectory as a regular bullet: the blades were for decapitation, the victim restrained by a portable Lunette. Strapped to a portable board once the body was paralyzed, the preist would guide their soul into the afterlife, if they were not already atheistic. Whether Anna-Marie was Spanish or French, it no longer mattered: she was a child, and so was I. Despite not wanting to watch another girl die, my paralysis allowed her to leave me behind.


    A left my only love in hell.


    In a world behind.


    She was such a quiet girl, and I never understood her tendency to avoid talking to me during the hours in which both of us would be up. We were both insomniacs, but lived in somewhat different time zones. And much of the time she was visit family up in Montagna. These were the hours I would spend writing, or imagining myself riding fictional horses under the sunset, with her riding behind on my back. But instead we both rode the rail less train tracks across different parts of the united states, splitting off our lives at the knee. Why she chose to come back to the old country of Tennessee, was never something I ever understood.


    The Americas, after the war, borrowed significant amount of French culture, one of which involved executing foreign nationals au contraire to international law. This meant she was at constant risk of being recaptured; like an outlaw in the wild, robbing different banks across the country. Anything to keep her from being apprehended in her own home country, where the corpses of her dead brothers and father still lay behind, and her sister Ursula never forgiving her for this sin. There was a chance she would be murdered again.


    While I still masturbated, to girls being beheaded on the guillotine. But not really wanting them to be dead. I watched movies about alien invaders, and wondered how much, if people knew the reality of my own fetish and kinks, whether I would be treated in the same way as her. Despite her more numerous experience in the deserts across the old empire. The empire that once housed an land far more expansive than the Roman empire, and yet lasted for a shorter time frame, do the greed of man, and the coming of the Nuclear Bomb. Much of the world, after World War III, became a vast open desert expanse.


    When back in Tennessee, we would go to bowling alleys, go to movies together. And very occasionally she would give me a foot job with her Birkenstock Boston Clogs she wore barefoot, and give me lovely blow jobs under a mistletoe tree when our parents were not home. We had just graduated high school. And I knew that my mom would not be back in town for a while, so I thought. One blow job would not hurt. Unzipping, tee shirt ripping. My wrists tied to the edges of the bed, the feeling of masturbation lotion in the homestead. But no dog collars, under the flow of soft L.E.D. lights.


    She only stood in the pillory, when she stole those pair of Birkenstocks, and that''s when they finally pursued the other investigation, that resulted in the death of most of her family members. Thus my family was called on the scene.


    If I could describe myself, it is something similar to the offspring of Elizabeth Bathory crossed over with Camilla. I didn''t use to think I could date a girl outside the web. Given the nature of my condition, for loving women with their heads cut off, their heads rolling into a wicker basket, you might not think I''d love a girl outside of Le Guillotine Familla. I live just a few yards into the twenty first century, and I can still here the screams of women pleading for their lives in the various revolutions of France.


    And yet the idea of a girl, whose head would be on a metal slab in the mortuary, was never something I''d think would bother me before. I spent so many nights and days after school masturbating to severed necks, the flow of blueish fluid gradually becoming as dark as a crimson sky, the flow of Flamenco on the piano, to sinister rhymes. Yet the song of the lost children, played in deranged melodies, the song of madness; the song of decay; the song of the damned. The song of a girl crying, while holding the severed head of her once true love. It was with this, that I had made my decision. That I could keep her severed head, and treat her as one of my own children, and run as far away from town as I could.


    But the real world was a no man''s land, a land where secret police stalk the street. A world where girls wore wooden shoes on their feet, for lack of stores that could sell normal foot ware at a decent price. This was a land of giant cock roaches, the return of hair lice. The return of the old classes in earlier centuries.


    I wanted my world to end.


    Yet I wanted to end my life on my own terms. I wanted to finish the obligations that I had left as a fiction writer, even if it was only a few autobiographical shorts. But there were some autobiographical facts that people almost never share. A world with no self-realization. That there is a part of us, just like Dracula and Carmilla:


    Where the new Bastille was rising,


    The land of total uprisings.


    A land of dirt and decay.


    The dead is arising.


    And there is no bread to share.


    I grew a total resentment for the mortal life; the life of crawling into ones own inner cave. A cave where only the good die young, the bandits die younger. And those in between are tossed into a hell in between. I wanted some vague nation, of a distant love beyond masturbation lotion. A girl I could travel Europe with, leave the United States behind. And travel her old country of Alsace. Where the flowers were always blooming, even if it were not the land of the University Of Flowers. Ride on airships and and hot air balloons. And think of soft fluffy teddy bears.


    I wanted my life to be beyond anything I ever known.


    Anything, but this sense of hate.


    Anna-Marie''s severed head was not traditionally beautiful.


    She had very long curly blond locks, with a flower in her hair. At times I think I see life in her eyes, and yet I can never be certain. Is that what a severed head looks like? I thought, because it was far more beautiful, and yet more tragic than I ever imagined. When I stared into her face, seeking comfort and love, I thought of the times that we could have had together. At times I do her make up for her, even though I''ve never been good at putting it on myself. God damn, do I miss her. I miss everything about her.


    And yet now, she is here with me always.


    You might be surprised how easy it is to hide a person''s severed head. Especially if the state already considers them to be dead. To think that I could finally fulfill my desire, and yet this desire feels so empty and sad. There are times when I wonder, quietly, as i write notes to my publisher, why it is I chose to waste my life. There was a time when I had wanted to go horse back riding with her, but we lived in a time when there was no more need for the chevaul. When I was hiding from my parents, I visited the lack that we used to spend together, and I would keep her severed head besides me, hoping that there would be something that could bring her back. I brought my favorite sub sandwiches, but I could not be genial to a severed head.


    Is this the point that we all come to?


    When I''ve seen the dead.


    Previously, in an extra measure to extend the suffering of those sentenced to decapitation by guillotine, when France had taken control of the once United States, they had created a special kind of guillotine prior to the invention of the Guillotine Gun. This method of decapitation, had special rests for the arms, such that, prior to the victim being beheaded, they would drive blunt screws into their wrists, much in the same way back in the middle ages, torturers would use thumb screws to extra confessions. This was generally used for specific political crimes, such as those involving espionage and information gathering from rival American states. Even if the guillotined continued to be relatively quick, the executioner would delay their execution as long as possible in order to make the ordeal as painful as possible to extract the most information. The only reason Anna-Marie never underwent this, was do to the grace of being female.


    Receiving special treatment on account of being female, is hardly a unique thing for the Twenty First century; during the middle ages women were generally burnt at the stake, rather than drawn and quartered for this very reason. Often, in cases where sentences were commuted, this would mean that women would most frequently be commuted to merely being beheaded, back when drawing and quartering was on the book. When it came to around the long nineteenth century, women continued to get largely preferential treatment. This continued into the great war era, when France would commute most women''s sentences to life in prison, while the men were still, in some cases, even publicly beheaded by guillotine. This meant that, up until the Vicci era, women were largely immune from having their heads taken off.


    This changed when Marine La Pen became La Presidente, when The Far Right wing began to take control of the French government. She had initially lost in 2017, but ran took control of France in a Coup, leaving much of the Left Wing establishment in shambles. She undid much of the Pro LGBT legislation that was on the books, resulting in many Gay, Lesbian, and Trans women sent to similar containment camps as Muslim people, as they would often fight against the treatment of such people. The old slang term for French People was Frog; Marine La Pen was a gigantic demonic toad, whose ice cold blood could cut through you like a stone. Such was the reason the Anna-Marie was glad that her family had moved from France when they did; she was never sure how to tell her family that she was into girls.


    My case was equally tricky; for many years I had mostly considered myself into women, but recently I had become more open about being into guys, resulting in considerable confusion as a trans woman about the kind of people I was into. And by this point, though it was often treated as a way of being anti-French, I was more against the practices of the French death penalty, although technically I was against capital punishment everywhere. So it made my already frazzled personality worse, as I was unsure of whom I could trust to communicate my real feelings; especially when I knew that in reality, I loved French girls more than anyone else. I tried hiding this by trying to find Dutch women to date, and I still like them very much, but to many there was something about the light olive skin tone, and lemon juice dyed hair, and the gentle shapes of their tender throats, as I wanted to gently bite into their soft juicy necks.


    Anna-Marie used to wonder if I''d bite her in the neck. Instead the blade of the Dreadful Climb did. Spraying her blood into the wooden basket.


    And leaving me alone to my thoughts.


    "Oh hey Anna-Marie, what''s up?" I asked. I remembered the first time that was had dated.


    "I told you not to let your mind wander around me." said she. She hopped on top of my on the floor of my room when my mom wasn''t home, all my worries fading away as if they were merely nothing to be concerned about. "I can''t date someone who likes dead girls." She noticed the look of horror on my face. "Sorry, I''m just kidding."


    I didn''t like dead girls, what I liked was blood. Not sure what this girl''s issue was, who sounded like she came from the hood. But I knew that she would always be there for me, or at least I had hoped. Because she was my Anna-Marie.


    My Anna-Marie, who was always there.


    To set my soul free.


    In high school I would visit the ero guro latte machine, purchasing a copy of gorno anime along with a nice cup of vanilla hot latte. Ero Guro was a literary genre that came out of Japan, the original idea being the "beauty in the ugly." But had gradually came to mind the fertilization of mutilation and other graphic content. But for me, I didn''t care for the disembowelment, for a multitude of differing factors. But the main one was that generally I only liked severed necks, and the blood that would gush out of them.


    Anna-Marie would never say anything, but it was a topic that we always tended to avoid. We would talk about other things, like the most current movie we watched on a Saturday night, such as Another Man, Another Chance. I never liked westerns growing up, but made a special exception for French girls.


    Yet inside, there was a darker reason.


    Something that I had kept from the innocence of the world. I would fantasize about ordering a side of severed French girl''s head, recline with it on the bed. And dream dreams of sweet little angels screaming, before their heads drop. Yet the Ero Guro latte machine, would always be a whirring, when my old man was stirring. And I knew, despite the darkest nature of my myself, that I wanted to protect my girl from my dad.


    The girl as by Annabelle Lee.


    And those seraphs I would I beheaded on a guillotine, would visit me in dreams, and give me sweet teddy bears, as a form of peace offering, as wedding gift between me and my Anna-Marie. It was then that I had decided, against all the loss of my hope.


    That we were married in death.


    I would get constant erections from blond girls with cat eye glasses, getting it in the neck from a guillotine gun. Shot with a paralyzing agent, I shot the blade as quickly as I could, to minimize the amount of pain that my vampires would experience. Because unlike these monsters, I actually had concern for their well being. Even if that meant putting their heads on a wooden stick, sticking it in the ground, and watch as others paraded it around town. But in my minds eye, there heads would roll in my lap.


    I would remembers the sweet angels scream.


    And I would feel like ending it all. Anna-Marie never did anything to be beheaded for, and yet I had let my father kill her, and there was still a part of me that could not forgive myself for her death. Even if in the legal sense it was not my fault. There were hints, in my early years, that I may become like this. But I didn''t want this to be my destiny.


    I was a shell without my soul.


    I wanted to be under the knife.


    When you attempt suicide, some people assume the world will stop for you. The reality is, when you''re lying down, bloody on the floor, there is a part of you that wanted to die more quickly, so it''s basically a non issue. Instead one lingers, inside of the dirty floor of a motel room, with your hand reaching out ... searching for someone to take you to the hospital. But being treated as essentially a non person.


    Ultimately, I began to make peace with the idea that I would eventually bleed to death. Made peace with the fact that I would never see Anna-Marie again, and simply make my death more comfortable. But I was dizzy and tired, and I couldn''t stand up straight. I had not cut my own head off, but injured myself. I needed a bandage, but I was several miles from the hospital. Hope fading nightly, lying on the floor. And yet in the darkness, was the spirit of Anna-Marie, who reached out a hand guided me into the light.


    But as I walked outside, there was nobody there.


    There was only the sound of my own inner madness.


    For my lost Anna-Marie.


    It was like a ghost town, with almost everyone inside, to hide away from the vampires. But the only one I knew, curled her finger as if it to call me. I walked forth, with hesitation, with my guillotine The loaded. But when I got within range, she ran off. Behind me I could here the sound of growling, and it sounded like some sort of freed animal, much like a being in a laboratory breaking down the door to eat a person.


    It tried to bounce on me, and I tried firing the blade at its neck.


    But I missed. Instead, I heard the sound of a shot gun. The silhouette of Anna-Marie firing her weapon from beyond the grave. I flinched, something that had become something of a habit. The animal died quickly. I looked closer, in the alley way. It looked to be one of the law enforcement''s special modified canines, merged with decades of wolf genes, into something more muscular, and much more fierce.


    I grabbed my guillotine gun, and aimed.


    I put it out of its misery. The sound of yelps coming in the distance. I could here sound of cybernetic enhanced police robots. Quickly, I had behind a dumpster, as one of them checks to see what happened. The robot then goes back to look for more wrong doers. The decapitated body of Anna-Marie nailed me to the wall.


    "Hey Hemato, I need my head back." she said.


    I grabbed her severed head outside of my fanny pack. It was one of those hyper stretchy bags that I could fit almost anything inside of it.


    "I thought you were dead?" I asked.


    "I''m still dead, my dear." she said.


    Then disappeared.


    I had just started meeting my new poetry publisher James, a little before I met Anna-Marie. I needed a father in my life, and not a girl whom I wanted to give the knife. Or thought that I had wanted to, given my sheer mind fuck at the time. I was a mess of my own contradictions, having recently become an Atheist; I refused to listen to Benediction. I gave religion the middle finger, and gave that tenant an eviction notice. Now the tenet holds out their thumb to catch a ride, requesting a ride toward Virginia.


    James, who was also of The Satanic Temple, knew my own personal issues at the time, and when we were not busy finding editors and cover artists, would talk to me about my issues, related to my trust issues related to French women. We had known each for a few months, and I knew that he himself was of French heritage, but was one of the few that didn''t hold my Americanism against me; if French women were like this, I would go to bed with them right away, and give nice bottom fuckings on a water bed. Instead, generally I had had less expectations for French men over French women, with the men generally just being happy there was any woman that was willing to be nice to them, or at least not run away from them.


    But for me, I had already ran away from my own life.


    I was born at a time when it had been about eight years after the French banned The Guillotine, a hold over device from the late 1700s. It was a device that was indeed, quite humane for the time period, considering that everyone else was being hung, drawn, and quartered; but by the end of the nineteenth century, the electric chair was already being invented for the same purpose, and used actual technology to get the job done. American banned capital punishment technically before the French did, and that was why the French banned the practice in 1981, but then the United States thought it be such a great idea to bring back the electric chair, and replace it with Lethal Injection. It was only a matter of time before Marine La Pen, would want to bring it back.


    Marine La Pen was a National Front Far Right wing party, that wanted to ally with Donald Trump once he got into office, but when she lost, left the country in a political void when Macron started being technically worse, and joining the United States in a war of dominance in a new war against the middle East. France made decapitation illegal in their own country, but decapitated many more people using bombs overseas.


    Previously France had controlled various countries in Africa and the Caribbean, and some places in Asia. But now, aligned with the decaying United States empire of destruction, they began to wonder, like Cosette for Sire Willy, why they would continue to subject themselves for being under the thumb of the United States; the only reason the United States had control of as much territory as they did, was because France allowed them, with their help, to control as many countries, as they could afford to bomb.


    For the United States and France was an regretful allies, like Hawaii to Washington, as the empire that once was made their last dance.


    The EU tried a peaceful, kidnapped US politicians.


    They were tried in international court.


    Yet now in this political void, France and Germany wanted no United States again, so they used martial law to capture the United States, and make them be ruled by exactly their laws. And that was how we, as the United States, have the Guillotine.


    Despite it generating into the Wild West.


    I had dreamed that one of the girls I knew in grade school, visited me at night wearing a summer camp outfit and Birkenstock sandals; I developed the association with girls who were mean to your face in front of their friends, but were creepily nice to you when they were not around. I probably had more girls crushing on me than I wanted to admit, do to my lack of self-esteem at the time. "You know, I would like you. But you''re kind of ugly. Not that ugly, but kind of ugly." She was the one wearing Jesus sandals.


    In school I largely tended to keep to myself, avoiding most friendships. It was a time when I still had to wear boys clothes, despite early indications of my gender issues. A unique issue for trans women in general, yet this girl in Birkenstocks, with her long raven haired ponytail, and her beautiful smile and the dimples on her cheek, left lasting feeling of hatred for cis women in general that I still struggle to come to grips with.


    A blond girl who would always smile at me in typing class in my Freshman year, there was something about her that I couldn''t trust. While I had sexual fantasies of unbuttoning her type b cup bust; spreading my seed from New York to Paris. I couldn''t put my finger on what it is that made it me hesitate to ask her out, except for the fact that there was some part of me that wanted the government to black bag her at night, take her to underground facility, giving her only bread and water. Then, without telling her where to take her, she would be shot in the back of the neck with a guillotine blade right at midnight.


    I developed my first hard on.


    Freaked myself out the first time, then at other times it became common for me to fantasize about her being beheaded by Guillotine in a government prison. And yet there was a part of me that never believed in Capital Punishment for anyone. Because I knew deep down, we were all little girls chasing after the light. But she would always smile at me, and I hated when girls smiled at me. I hated the tap dances they did, making fun of my shoe fetishes; and other personal desires. They were simply unaware of how much it hurt me.


    All one needed to do was pull the trigger, lock them in a Lunette; there life would soon come to an end at the edge of a knife. Ones final stare into their innocent expressive eyes, watching as the blade falls down. It was thought that the Guillotine was the most humane way to go; but this did not influence my emotions much, when I knew that Charlotte''s death was a breach of justice, a practice that continued to this day.


    My high school years changed me.


    I longed for the dead.


    Until that is I met Anna-Marie.


    Who gave me an actual chance in life, and yet the government took her away from me at the slice of an angled blade. At night I dreamed about the memory of hers eyes continuing to make around. Her eyes would constantly crying do to some pain she only has in her neck but cannot vocalize. When I saw her head in the basket, I was lost and didn''t know myself.


    It was the first time I ever cried. The girl that died feeling heart broken, because of my sexual interest that she found out about me. I found out for the first time in my, the state did not care about humanity. They only cared about vengeance. Vengeance against who you might ask? I had no clue, I simply wanted to go and off myself somewhere, so I could be with my darling Anna-Marie again.


    I remembered the pictures in cyberspace, grabbing pictures of anime girls getting it in the neck. I remembered the women who would be paddled in school, I wanted everything to melt all away. I tried writing about this experience the first time, but it was suggested I get rid of it by my father. He didn''t want me to became a famous writer, if I ever could, and didn''t want me drawing undo negative attention on our family. It wasn''t like we already got great attention, with the news occasionally drawing attention to physical abuses down to my brothers and sisters.


    I held it all inside, stayed away from the world.


    It was the first time that I felt truly alone. I felt that my life had no purpose to existence besides to rot. I began to neglect my own body, and staying in bed for so long after high school. I began to dream of blond women at night, haunting the nature of my reality. I began to rot and become psychologically prone to suggestion. Among those was coming to terms with the question why I had not yet decided to dig up Anna-Marie''s body and fuck her.


    Well obviously because that''s morally wrong. As I said, there was some conditions society refused to talk about. For long time even homosexuality and gender non-conformity was considered something rather taboo. And at times I would be alone imaginary little fairy girls and elf girls saying pick-a-boo. I would role play in my mind little stories about fairy girls getting it in the neck.


    There was something deep inside me, that wanted something different in my life. It was difficult to articulate. I had always wanted to write middle-grade novels, but my parents would always tell me how books for children were not considered art. And they knew that I had briefly dated Anna-Marie before she died. But I knew that for her there were some aspect of her childhood she never told me herself. Over time I gave it up, and learned to restrain my tears.


    I just wanted people to be happier.


    Even if it meant writing a novella about a parricidal killer. I would change her name slightly, toiling on the project nightly. I would work all the way through my despair. My condition was subtle, and yet apprehensible. Yet over time I found there was something inherently different about me and my relationship with other people that could not simply be described as a mere case of necrophilia. I wanted to be with Anna-Marie in death and the afterlife.


    I just didn''t want to open her tomb.


    Not pry it open with a knife.


    It was one of those days I had a hard time finishing lines for one of my beheading reference poems. O the short girl walking up the stairs .. but I had no lyrics for the poem, of the tragic life of a fisherman''s wife.


    I wanted to write a short tale about a fisherman who comes home to find his wife has been decapitated by the ax. I had this way of taking semi-autobiographical elements and turning it into a science fiction and fantasy story, although I refused to associate with science fiction and fantasy magazines and other aspects of that particular culture. Yet I had no experience being on the sea. I had only sailed briefly with my dad, when he would take a break from his work. After all even if he killed my girlfriend and I hated him for it, he wanted to somehow bring me back to his side.


    But then I thought of the poor Anna-Marie, something other than myself. I remembered when she told me about the death of her mother, and how it gradually drove her father insane. He would always comment before she died, about how he was never quite the same after her decapitation by the ax in another country she was visiting, and so he never got to return her to France. I suppose criminal intent was a family lineage, yet I saw something in Anna-Marie that wanted her families side to have its story.


    And so I tried to think of yet more lyrics:


    O the short girl walking up the stairs,


    Is turning gray, mixed with dirty blond hair.


    In her wooden clogs that abruptly come to a point,


    With her arms behind her back, she''s offered a joint.


    She dies beyond the scaffold stairs.


    It wasn''t quite what I wanted it to be, but it was something for now. I wanted to come up with even more lyrics.


    So I went all out:


    With a German dress she leans on the block,


    Waiting, waiting for the ax to drop.


    When the blade goes a lop,


    Tumbling curly dirty blond hair goes down,


    I wanted something was was more about the husband, so I didn''t want to focus on her mother''s death for to long:


    Here lies the broken thief, who stole a coral reef / on a fisherman''s boat.


    She tossed her husband off the boat, not intended him to drown,


    Before drowning in her own sorrows, becoming a clown.


    I felt like I was getting into the rhythm of the poem, though I wasn''t exactly sure what the concluding lyrics would be. But I decided, I going to finish it:


    Here is the thief, Whose life came to a stop.


    Together they join hands in Purgatory,


    Beyond the light in a pop.


    The tragic life, Of a fisherman''s wife.


    "Can we just decapitate that one, she''s French."


    It was the words my dad uttered in order to save my life, but on some level I felt responsible for not dying beside my true love. My dad incorrectly gendered his only daughter, who about to die under the widow gun, the gun of the guillotine. It was then I remembered the memory I had before we both got caught, threatened by decapitation.


    "Waste of energy, just slit their throat. A few seconds, it''s all over." It was a feeling I wasn''t used to having before. All my worries, all my fears. It was all coming to an end. I felt I was about to die. It was a reality I turned turned to, when I thought of those who hurt my Anna-Marie.


    "It''s OK papa. Don''t worry now, this will only hurt for a second." The sound of a young girls laughter. Then everything fell silent. Everything came to an end. "What''s wrong Hemato, why are you so scared. Why are you so erect. Hemato, get away from me. You''re scaring me."


    "You''re the one that stabbed your father." I said.


    She gave me a look as if she was was heartbroken, forlorn. She didn''t want to see me like this, on some level ... she wanted to protect me from herself. "Hold me Hemato. Please don''t hurt me. I don''t know what''s happening to me. I feel like I haven''t been myself lately. I normally hide the real me from you. I''m sorry. I failed you."


    Then she was gone in a blink of an eye.


    They spared me that day, but not my Anna-Marie.


    My sorrow I wont lie. "I understand if you hate me for killing him, but you''re the one jacking off to me losing my head." A common misunderstanding of my condition, one that set my last days with her forward.


    I don''t like it when people die, I simply have an attraction to other people''s blood. "I don''t ever want to see you again." she said. She never got the chance to, the bladed widow took her life. We were merely kids then, her being seventeen and I was nineteen. At first I thought that our love, chosen by the stars, would last forever. I suppose I was wrong. At times I felt my life had never started at all, and I would not be here if not for James.


    "There is so much in life to live for. Don''t stand on the edge." I lived my life constantly on edge, and yet he wanted me off of it. He did not quite understand the depth of my disorder, and my guilt. But he truly wanted to make me happier.


    He knew that I felt I had failed her, and yet when I tried to take my own life months before, he stood beside me and comforted me. Although I was a lesbian, and he was straight, I found some attraction in him that was different from the one love I had for Anna Marie. He wore a pair of stylish virtual reality goggles, and would toggle different aspects on his analogue computer. It was like completely changing cultures. I was lower middle class, and yet found myself in the grasp of Steam-punks.


    Society still has a long way to go before accepting sanguophilia¨Cor in more scientific terms Hematolagnia. I earned the nick name Hemato as a reference among friends. Homato Tomato, the dark red sauce of life at its end. The attraction of blood, as the world believes you are attracted to acts of cruelty.


    And yet I am apposed to death and execution.


    Before I had met her I went through my whole life wracked with guilt. My original assumption was that I was interested in beheaded girls, and not just their blood. This caused uneasy relationships among friends, who always treated me as secretive. But in a world where homosexuality becomes increasingly accepted into mainstream society, people that actually have paraphilias are left in the dust.


    I am a blend of metal and flesh, the rusted robot of our time.


    As I come to terms with my own humanity.


    I am unassuming, some might saying extremely so. Some other may find me raving mad, it depends largely on who you talk to. We all live in our own personal controversies, and yet there is nothing more sacred than the blood of life, it''s fluid the power to give and take your life away in an instant.


    Me and Ann would have frog legs for dinner, and French bakery bread. For me the only positive thing to really say about the French were fashion and food. And yet here we were supporting the French at the edge of the world of massive advertisements and general ubiquitousness. As ubiquitous as the fascination for blood. When I saw the blade drop through her neck, I found myself having a mixture of different emotions. Although certainly this was not the start of my sexual attraction to blood. I felt a mix of attraction and repulsion I couldn''t explain. There was some unspoken rule of not going up and hugging her decapitated head.


    I merely hug and consume the bread of life.


    Beyond the dreamer''s edge, I find myself in a strange fantasy world of overgrown leaves. A world where there was still childhood, and the sacredness of youth was still there. In the darkest corner of the human mind, I found myself alone and wandering the dark. I could hear the giggles and the music box melody of Anna Marie''s favorite children''s song. Like an old fashioned country song.


    I remembered her hugging me tightly at a Parisian bar, as if apologetically on her last night. Yet no words were spoken between me and her. Like Edgar Allen Poe''s Annabelle Lee I found she was a child and I was a child in this game of life and death. I found in my own personal dream world self hate and pity. And yet I knew that her life was worse.


    I had known that her father would beat her senselessly, although reluctantly at first. Isn''t that how all child killers are born? And yet, and yet I became more like James. As the images of me and Anna Marie were kissing as my vision faded into the world of darkness. The darkness of the burnt out light bulb.


    I remember seeing her hobble along the road as she walked in her wooden shoes. There was something in her poverty, in her despair I found someone I wanted to try to make happier.


    At first this effort seemed to be working.


    We were both runaways.


    She was now a runaway from life.


    I tell James I will be going far away forever, that I''ll miss him.


    The thing about friendships, it''s never been an an easy thing for me. When you find yourself constantly befriending other people with questionable morality, you find yourself constantly doubting yourself, doubting whether you really are not just like them. Doubting whether they really are as you perceive them to be. Often one finds themselves no longer trusting anyone, assuming that every one you know is some kind of serial killer, or at least a molester. And yet do to your self-doubt you constantly stay quiet, and learn to take things as they come to you.


    While one can never guess the true goings on in a killers mind when you aren''t one myself, though I''ve wondered this about many of the friends I have made, if one has any amount of empathy in them they may try to rationalize the killer''s action if said murderer were young enough and female enough. For me, this used to always happened whenever I read about serial killers. There were several things going on in my life, and largely I chose not to become parricidal¨Cbecause I like eating Broccoli beef to much. Hey a girl''s got to eat your know. Obviously there are other reasons, but I simply liked eating Chinese food way to often.


    But on a serious note I found myself trying to rationalize the behavior of Anna Marie largely do to my own upbringing being similar in nature.


    Certainly my own father was almost never around, and much of the time he was around he would largely spend this time spanking me with a belt, or strangling me. Among other things I''ll leave to your imagination. Point being the matriarch of the family always chalked it to him having a bit of a temper, but didn''t mean to hurt me. It was this process of gas lighting that made me begin to doubt my own perceptions. My mom would always say I was at risk of becoming someone evil myself, asked me if I was a pedophile despite her own weird ... things about her. While I don''t think this was the case, what I do know is I was raised since birth to doubt myself.


    So when I met my darling Anna Marie, she was the one that was able to remove the doubt from my eyes, and make me see things for how they really were. When we would go for the morning newspaper, me being well enough not to wear clogs, she herself digging her finger in them to adjust things to make sure her wooden shoes fit, we would pick up a newspaper from our friend James. She was part of the time be raised by James, who she had grown to trust. She introduced me to him as well, where we spent half the time when otherwise we could never meet.


    We became mended broken birds, at least for a time. And so she never told me exactly what was going on with her, although do to certain body language I always assumed she had similar issues.


    So for the first time when she died, I needed a box of tissues.


    I ejaculated and crying at the same time.


    There are some women who give off an aspect of the innocuous. There are some who give up the vibes of complete disdain for humanity, and yet in reality things are much more complicated


    The thing about me and loving women, I find that my first instinct had always been for so long to hate and distrust them. Often this would get me into trouble emotionally, as I would later freak out and try to late to kindle friendships. So often my friendships with girls were few and far between. At the time I was still dealing with my own issues about the status of my own gender.


    Guillotine Families were not exactly liberal families, with a financial incentive on maintaining the death penalty. Thus I already felt alienated from them anyway, so I would never tell them about my gender issues. The matriarch would just use it as a another excuse on how they never should have had kids. So here I was isolated and alone, wandering through the world reading the diary of Anna Marie lest the state should seek to obtain and burn it. For there is much about Anna Marie I do not know. She could have been a tap dancer, a rodeo girl, or an actress in the play of life.


    Yet on some level isn''t everyone''s life a kind of play, to learn to smile when you are sad, alone, and forsaken. I imagine myself picturing Anna Marie in her bedroom in her closet crying until she falls asleep. There is much within us all that we choose to hide from the world. Certainly I''m one those. I had first acquired the taste of human blood when watching movies where girls were threatened by execution. The inevitability of these movies is that none of them show the depression that lies within the darkness of human heart. I had grown my interests over time as someone who already had issues with women anyway. And thus I wondered if her own issues were exacerbated by some cause that we still have yet to truly understand.


    In our society if I try to empathize with her, I have blood on my hands. For her sake I shall not masturbate and perpetuate my own cycles of misery and despair. For me and her were beyond sisters in the game of life.


    And so as my life loops all over again in constant repeats of memories I wished to forget, I found myself longing for the lost Anna Marie. A lot of my mothering-girlfriend feelings in a way stem from witnesses all those years ago, seeing someone who inside was really a little girl, far to young to die at the age of seventeen. Lost in life, in a pit of despair, she would have chosen to kill herself just as once as did I before. I saw her with tears in her face all alone in a prison, being mugged by starving children in a universe where there is no longer sunlight.


    On some nights I saw monsters stalking me, and I wonder whether she had some of her own night terrors. I dream about her own fantasy world, where somehow I had not truly grasped the implications of her statement about forgiveness. And that I should first try to take care of myself.


    I found myself masturbating to images of beheaded princesses and queens, I found myself engaging in a self-destructive path. It was my personal path, and I wouldn''t change it for the world.


    I would indulge in the fantasies of the flesh in pictures on cyberspace. Yet nothing would take away the feeling of being alone. Every time I masturbate I imagine that some lost young woman had to lose her head for my own core inner desires. I constantly relive the memories finding some way to cope with what I have done. I found that I withdrew further into myself, as I watched my family capture other malcontents in the street scrounging for food and stealing others clogs.


    Yet at times I wondered that it would be like to live among them. My interactions with James, who had become something of a father figure more than my own dad, became fewer and fewer. And I continue to play the music box Anna Marie once gave me as a gift before she had said her statement that made me realize I was unwanted. And yet I suppose on some level everyone is unwanted at some point temporarily, and yet she never had the chance to change her mind, and come back to me another day to try to apologies.


    She may have left me for good, but the point is a girl like a sweet flower girl had to die at that particular morning in the rain, and toxic clouds overhead made breathing impossible in this particular section of the city. As I hugged her severed head, and said goodbye earning the ire of my family.


    Because masturbation equals heaven, and ejaculation a kind of mental redemption from of my personal sorrows. It was a way for my to cleanse my mind of tears that would well up inside that nobody else could see. And yet nothing in my mind could take Anna Marie away from me, my darling and my bride to be.


    We all have things that we wish to keep hidden from the world about ourselves, whether it be our depressing childhoods, or even for some the lack of a childhood they have lived. Some people have different definitions about the definition of childhood, from those who live in the slums and the hood, to those who live off their parents wealthy estate rotting in their bedrooms alone and never coming outside to play with the other children. Because they felt alienation within themselves that is hard to verbalize, hating the fact that every aspect of their life has been a lie.


    We all have pains from our past, and most people may wish to undervalue others experiencing, because for the most part mankind are inherently selfish bastards. And yet even the bitches among us have happier adventures in their youth, even when said adventures are only in the mind. For me when I had met the executed Anna-Marie, I found myself living her life as if she were myself. I adventured with her are sailing ships, explored the children''s books she had read in her youth, for my love for Anna-Marie was a love beyond mortal love. And yet over time our adventures became fewer and far between. I tried to rescue her from her brothers that would sometimes spank her instead of her father, who also whipped her as well. For like me her family treated her as if she were a demon spawn from hell.


    I remember when we would explore ancient ruins, explore the inner kingdom of the mind, while feeling all over each other to make a connection across the many plains of human consciousness. At at once my memories went back to when she was led to the scaffold, and I saw her trembling with fear and loathing for man. And on some level there was something in her that I could recognize. That distrust on others that made her flinch with agony and despair.


    For there were only strangers there.


    At times I visit the executed Anna-Marie in the graveyard. I visit her her particular headstone. I sleep at night carefully avoided the night keeper, who would knowing my own sorrows would give a blind eye to me. As I was a trans woman and I was a nobody for this world.


    The man knew that Anna-Marie despite her faults above everyone''s faults that Anna-Marie was my world. That I stay in the cold, and ate bread with mold, not caring if I became sick and died. For I have tried to date others, and have failed in my mind. And yet for her I saw something in myself. That I should have went to the guillotine and was decapitated by her side.


    I opened the grave, while holding a crow on my shoulder. And the crow said, "Watch out for the boulder." The crow pushed the boulder, and it fell. The crow got smashed by it to save some miserable life of mine, when it startled me to move out of the way. Who am I to be worth saving, for I am nobody else but a worm crawling through the grave. I think of the lonely old man James, who treated me well after she was gone.


    Delirious, shuddering.


    I reached out for her hand in death.


    We married in death.


    I''ve never been on a date before, but there is nothing like a ride on a hang glider. I sometimes worry about whether Anna-Marie may fall. But I have confidence in her abilities. And at this point, it''s not like either of us can die anyway.


    We watch the world above us as the clouds of darkness converge. Yet for us there is a kind of hidden rainbow, where even the most broken of lost children can find some happiness in their new life. It wasn''t heaven in the traditional sense, but also might as well have been. When your mind has been completely copied and your life force transfered over to a computer, the difference between actual paradise and electronics is unimportant. I pointed her in the direction of the stop, and we flew together holding hands. I wondered what kind of new stories could be told between me and Anna-Marie.


    But for now I leave you with, please consider carefully the value of taking another person''s life. Anna-Marie was my friend, and my life would have completely lost without her. She may be scared of you and as much as you to her, but there is something level of sweetness even in the most broken of cyberspace heaven''s children. Because at the end of the day we are all depressed and scared about something. Over time in heaven I''ve found something of responsibility to help Anna not end up her own existence, if no other reason than it would get really lonely. I find that may trauma about holding her decapitated head gradually melt away into the distance. Whatever past she had makes no difference to me, and I find myself crying tears of joy.


    She helped me forgive myself.


    In my mind I see horrifying futures, I''m not sure what I could do to help the world meat space. I worry about my siblings, who I have seen the future birth of the computer hacker Nadine and Vella. I''m not sure what future the world holds, but I picture myself level electronic paradise forever, holding hands with my true love and always. As we walk together into the light.


    She smiles at me, as we hold hands into forever.


    Don''t hate the bad girls, cause we are all children at heart.

 Part Three. Hemato-Tomato

    My quirk was a mix of sexual pleasure and depression. I could go all day masturbating to decapitated heads of French women and not blink, yet there was something always there that make make even an adult cry. Some girls had similar life stories to my own, and I fall asleep as I cried. I wanted a day when friends didn''t wander off alone into the dark, on a suicidal bent to destruction. I wanted at least some girl I knew from my hometown that would survive long enough to have a family with.


    Then they could take her head off if they must.


    I was inherently against the idea of capital punishment, suicide even more so. Except for myself, whom I had never tried to prevent. I was left wondering what could have made a sixteen year old girl all those years ago, choose to poison her famille. Go on a hell bent penchant for destruction, a path that she knew would eventually end her life. I wandered around wondering what her life was like. It wasn''t every day you found a girl threatened by beheading, as I stood in the crowd letting it happen. But I was inherently against the idea of rescuing people that could not rescue themselves. If she wanted to die, that was her business; I certainly had no interest in stopping it.


    I used to want to court girls who I wanted to rescue, but would would prefer being shot in the back of the neck with a guillotine gun than court me. It developed the habit of generally avoiding French girls as a rule. And I developed the idea in my head that any of them were actually nice to me, they would stab me in the back. So it was just as well this was happening, as she would betray me later on. For Anna-Marie La Mort, it was assumption that she would have shot herself with her own Guillotine Gun. And as her neck was slipped into the stock, after being lowered on the board, I was more preoccupied by how sensitive I was to the sounds of the drum roll.


    The angular blade sliced through neck in three seconds. The head dropping into the wicker basket, the blood dripping onto her face. As her head was picked up for all to see, I could see her fading expression on her face.


    The face of Anna-Marie La Mort.


    Between this lifetime and the next, in artificial heaven, one may meet their true love again. I met Anna-Marie Boeglin under different circumstances. It''s funny how the circumstances of your life don''t change one lifetime to the next.


    She is the only girl I''ve ever truly loved.


    There is nothing like having a spoiled beef with somebody. It was the year 2133 A.D., and I still haven''t gotten a digital television. My family might as well ride on horse and buggies.


    The thing about family holidays, is that I very rarely ever actually got to enjoy them, as I would so often have to catch up on schoolwork. Why bother catch up on work, if you''re only going to get half credit for it, it''s really more of a teacher''s benefit than it is to the student''s benefit. Christmas and Thanksgiving were the only holidays besides traditionally Irish ones I got to celebrate with any regularity.


    If you''ve ever seen a slab of corned beef, you''ll know exactly what corned beef and cabbage looks like. My mom used to make this for dinner from time to time on Irish/Scottish holidays although her own family was Welsh. Usually it would come in the form of a soup, I suppose as that is what is considered traditional. Can you blame me for initially expecting it to be my dad who would poke his fork sometimes, and just saying I just got less than I was expecting? The corn beef in the bowl would eventually go completely missing, and dad would just keep saying he wasn''t doing anything. Obviously I was to docile at that point to really say anything.


    So one night I checked the inside of the fridge, as it turned out the corn beef was seemingly dissolving. So that''s what they put in that meat these days, I thought. Once again, as docile as I was I never made a sound about it. Well it turned out a few years later it turned out that studies would show that with some cows in a specific date, had almost an immortality gene. And so the beef would choose to eat itself rather have humans eat upon it.


    So next time you get beef at the grocery, check the label.


    You may have just eaten an immortal cow.


    Now I once knew a girl who claimed to visit the arcades, however at times she would get locked inside those buildings when she was in to late and the staff had went on home. Her parents didn''t seem to care whether she went missing. So her life was largely doomed from the start. She would tell me how at times various tap dancing ghost girls would haunt the facility, and that was part of the reason the staff would often leave early. So there would be her and these girls that would hang out. Unfortunately none of the girls seemed to like to much, at least initially that she would go into their home at night and try to continue playing those girls.


    She told one night, how she wanted to play this game, that she had heard was taken off the available game list. The game involved pillories and guillotines. Heads up, you''ll need to avoid sharp pains. Well eventually she managed to score some pink Teddy bears, she would give this to her little sister when she returned home. She would always arrive at home by bedtime, and so her parents never made a comment. They assumed as long as she got good grades then all was well. However one night, a particular girl wanted to challenge her.


    So she tried to play this game.


    Well lets put it this way, that''s how I know ghosts can kill you. The blade humanely cut through her neck, and her head gently rolled off her falling body to the ground as she bled profusely remaining conscious for the next thirty or so seconds, mouthing words of something related to "tell me sister I love her."


    But nobody would get the message. I found this out from scoring a job there once, and shaking my head is dismay watching a security camera. It wasn''t like I didn''t feel sorry for her, honestly if you didn''t you were human. But there is something bizarrely amusing about watching a runaway die so young in a "OMG I want to bleed my eyes out" sort of way.


    Her parents dropped her severed head in the grave. It was unmarked by their house, which they say her spirit still roams around looking for her parents.


    So I thought I''d go visit her.


    Maybe offer a bit of some corn beef.


    I went to visit her grave-sight, and her mother came out with a shotgun, shouting specific curses in a language that sounded a little like French. Her family was marked by a particular matriarchal structure, so I politely raised my hands up.


    "Sorry miss, just paying my respects."


    "You were one of her friends right. Why weren''t you there when she died. We were so worried about her." She was able to fall down, pushed herself up, heaved, and had a hard time not restraining tears. "Sorry, I know you didn''t know she went missing. Here take her pocket watch, she wanted you to have it."


    "But it''s a family moment." I said.


    "Just take it, ... we were going to burn it anyway." she said.


    Her family, other than her sister, was only emotionally involved in her loss, only as much as mourning the loss of any other beheaded human being, although her mother really did seemed to be bothered I wasn''t there to rescue her. But believe me, I had my own reasons for this.


    But I hugged her gently.


    I didn''t want to see anyone cry.


    "Here, have my corn beef."


    How was I suppose to know it was mildly offensive to share food between an Irish family and an French family. But that''s exactly how it is with my body language, as I ... roll my eyes, roll my tongue, and do everything else in a nuanced and personal way that makes things hard to communicate.


    But I was human to, I drunk out my own sorrows.


    And then finished a pack of cigars.


    My quirk was a mix of sexual pleasure and complete depression. I could go all day masturbating to decapitated girl heads and not blink, and there was something always there that would make me regret that decision. Some girls I knew had similar life stories to my own, and at night I would cry till I fall asleep. I dream of a day when friends didn''t wander off alone into the dark on a suicidal bent to destruction. I wanted at least some girl I knew from my hometown that would survive long enough to have a kid with.


    Then they can take her head off if they must.


    But I was inherently against the idea of capital punishment, and suicide even more so. And I was left wondering what could have made a sixteen year old girl those years ago, choose to eventually go somewhere she knew would end her life.


    I wondered what her life was like.


    It wasn''t every day you found another girl threatened by beheading, and as usual I kind of just sort of let it happen. That''s how things tend to be with me these days. I used to court girls who I would want to rescue, but they would slap my face. Others would stab me in the back, and then decapitate themselves with their own guillotine gun. And she only was the exception, because she found some interest in me beyond romance. She had read my autobiography about having originally having the desire to masturbate to girls having their heads cut off. And she wondered what could possibly motivate a change in me.


    Well as usual, I didn''t have an answer to that.


    It wasn''t like I tended to not give answers to French girls anyway, as they were the ones that introduced beheading into the family that took away my cousin, who I had fallen in love with at the time. It was her people that threatened Anna-Marie, who would go on to briefly meet my presence. I never spoke to her before, but from my understanding she was never completely the same after being initially sentenced to death in her home country. But here out here, where the zones are always decentralized and anonymous, she could be anyone.


    She could be a tap-dancing ghost girl in a dark arcade. She could anyone at all. So from time to time I still visit her. I think she was the only girl I''ve ever met that didn''t die on me, and she had a figure that made me ignore my mommy issues. So after walked over to visit her standing in the pillory after visiting the black smith, I took a lock of her hair, and then kept it in my pocket watch I remember my first girlfriend by.


    "So what brings you to the US."


    "I have no family, nobody. Who the hell are you?"


    "I am Hemato Tomato, nice to meet. Will be seeing you later." I tried walking away after saying this, then found her shudder. "You OK, those things are fun."


    "Shut up, I don''t trust you."


    "Perfect English, they taught you well."


    My sex life was like a deflated air balloon, constantly being reminded of my mother. And the thing about my mother is, I could even consider doing her unless I didn''t see her face. As if her head were removed. Girls reminded me of my mother, and girls who reminded me of my mother needed to have their heads removed. I certainly wasn''t going to do it, that would absolutely kill me inside and out. So I walked to the dock, to board a faerie. She fluttered away along the lake like a miniature cruise ship of the human girl variety. I heard faerie girls give free tit grabs. Not that I was going to go around doing that either mind you.


    So then went I got off, Anna-Marie caught up with me. She purchased herself a shot gun, and a few rounds of ammo.


    "Why didn''t you rape me?" she asked.


    "Well loaded question, was I suppose to rape you?" I asked.


    She had that long yard tear, "They always rape me. My father, my brothers, everyone I ever knew. And yet, you stood beside me."


    "I didn''t want to see you cry." I said.


    "But I''m a criminal in my home country."


    "Sweet heart, we''re all criminals here."


    I took a few week to get her to completely trust me completely. It took some work to make her understand what being trans is, because ... well she is French. But for once in my life, I found someone ... I could trust.


    She would tell me how her father would sometime touch her, I refused to tell her how they brought back memories of when my father did, but I was there only for her. And you just don''t talk about your own problems when trying to console someone. I may have a thing for decapitated heads, but it wasn''t like I didn''t have a heart.


    I just wondered, how long would she poison me.


    "Anna sweetheart?"


    "What do you want."


    "I''d like to do the cooking."


    "I''m just glad I have a home."


    In a way I could finally love again, even if someday she may poison me. I found that, despite my refusal to admit feeling sorry her on that night all those years ago, I found myself crying true tears of joy. I no longer failed my first best friend.


    If only Anna-Marie knew.


    The thing about dating a parent killer, particularly a young one younger than your own at nineteen, you need to treat them with kid gloves. After all they aren''t fully adult; you don''t want to piss them off, and you also got to be firmly gentle with them. Being someone who had been part of a slightly upper crust family, I came with a certain level of an ability to read. On the hand with her, her family was poor. She only managed to avoid decapitation by matter of luck, the jury in that nation was so awestruck about the case they had to spare her life. A few centuries earlier and she would have hung by the neck instead.


    Unfortunately other girls her age were not so lucky.


    Most of them got the chop. There was one lady who was just a little older, twenty two a the most. She was unfaithful to her husband (well considered Anna-Marie''s experience with men, I couldn''t possibly imagine why), but eventually she would eventually go on to stab her husband to death. Unfortunately that country didn''t seem to make the distinction between serial killers and crimes out of petty spousal revenge.


    So they put her head on a stick, waved it across in the air, and then burned that body to toast in an oven that can burn metal. So Anna-Marie was once again in a state of shock from losing her personal friends.


    I guess killers make great bed mates.


    Now you possibly wonder why it is I''m not killer, and yet seem to manage to avoid being murdered by one. Well I''ll tell you a little story, I was riding on a electronic train going faster than sound. I was riding on a sleeper train, running away from my family back down in NashChat, Tennessee. I remembered the feeling of panic I had having attacked my father with a knife, and almost would have gotten him if my mom didn''t put sense into me.


    She wasn''t exactly immune to being pushed into walls either by me, and I suppose in her mind she wasn''t sure how far I would go. But keep in mind they were the ones belting me if I ran away from home, not the other way around. I wanted some other place to be, some place that was not home. Some place that wasn''t there.


    So me and Anna-Marie formed our own family.


    The Marie-Tomatos.


    At night I would have dreams of blood on Anna''s face, I would here her crying faint tears. I would snuggle in her arms, and try to console her. After all it was the least I could do. It wasn''t easy finding someone you thought was a man at first you could trust, and then only find out later that what you know about the relationship was a lie-insofar as what gender she thought I was. But eventually it became a normal family.


    I could have a family again.


    She could have a family again. And there was love to go around.


    At nights we would go to the water parks, shoot at things at the fare, and eventually console her from time to time to assure her father wasn''t there.


    Because at the end of the day, she''s just a bad girl.


    She is a child at heart. A broken child, a girl who was never treated as a child, except insofar as being spared from execution by a single thread.


    On some level she felt she already lost her head.


    So give her this country song.


    The thing about relationships, whether it''s with French girls, American, Japanese, or the great nation of the beer brew festival. Sometimes you build an image in your head of someone you would like to know, though from time to time those images in your mind can turn out to be right. At other times they turn out differently in the real life and be ... dog ugly. And yet when you stand by trying to comfort someone as long as I have, there isn''t anything turning back. Your heart is to invested in their well-being your needs being trumped by the desire for only them that you are willing to forgive a little bit of homeliness.


    And yet there is a kind of inner beauty in masculine girls. One not often seen by more shallow suitors, there is a heart of gold not often given a chance. Sometimes they build trust issues with others, finding images in people they hate. I know I was there once myself, I would shamefully lump everyone who was blond under the same brush. Yet now whenever I see a blond girl be beheaded, it weighs down on my soul. It is this great indescribable feeling.


    On some level I find myself scared to lose Anna-Marie, and yet I write my stories imagining some other kind of Anna-Marie. For a long time this was why I tended to avoid dates, as I didn''t trust whatever girlfriend I would date that I still loved them no matter what, and no matter what version of them I created in story in a book I would love them more than the artificial life. And so I never chose to even entertain crushes.


    I feared being alone.


    And yet now as I join hands with her at the local cart stop, I simply think of all the thoughts I used to have imagining creepy men admiring me as a bearded lady when I forgot to shave, with that Irish red. And think...


    I''d rather live my life with her instead.


    It''s my new life.


    The thing about the nature of my sexuality, I''ve always tended to prefer girls from a long distance relationship.


    This was part of the reason I was initially reluctant to befriend Anna-Marie. The thing about the word befriend, is all to often I tended to confuse the words behead and befriend. Do to to the nature of the relationship with my mother, and the fact that my illustrations tended to involve girls in captivity or with their necks on a headsman''s block, the general association I made for friendship with other girls tended to also include sex.


    I was beginning to draw those illustrations in a time I was beginning to sexually develop. It wasn''t like I wanted to actually behead them, it was more a case of wanting to die with my beloved that was in a case of strong denial for the longest time. And so most of my fear for the longest time had been that they would assume I wanted to kill them. When that wasn''t the case at all. No at all.


    I wanted to die right beside them and never leave their side as I''m caught by dream-scanners who are able to spot our locations, finding out exactly where we live and our daily living habits. Things in the town would be tailored for our least convenience. So the fact that Anna-Marie would even consider giving me a chance was an idea I wasn''t completely used to. So when we went to shooting matches, and then rode horses under flying cars, it made broaching any conversation about sex a difficult topic to approach. Especially knowing her parents were dead.


    So whenever I have thoughts of a warm embrace by a bad girl, my mind immediately switches to them stabbing me with a knife, and then licking the blood off my corpse.


    And for Anna-Marie, I wasn''t sure if she''d die by my side.


    And yet, she was just so cute.


    Unfortunately I''ve never been one to voice things, and yet on some level I think she knew my feelings for her. And if there was a single common thing about abuse survivors, often one has a hard time sorting out their feelings for other people. I''m one to assume even poisoners have feelings for other people. Almost to an exaggerated degree. You find yourself growing gradual disdain for the guardian that was suppose to take care of and protect you. Remember, I was there once. I just got out of the house in time, and never had those desires since. And so while I don''t exactly approve of slipping cyanide in someone''s coffee, it is an understandable feeling to me when someone continuously spanks you and never letting up.


    And yet, despite my insistence on cooking, and her more strongly insisting I haven''t died so far, although I might give it weeks at the most.


    Yet whenever I am home she is happy to see me now.


    A very different girl from the one I met. She was a lot dirtier then, but now if I describe her appearance her skin tone is paradox of tan and pale, she looks as if someone who could be more dark skinned like a Spaniard, and yet do to lack of exposure from sunlight she is so pale. And her hair is as dark as a black rose. Her body was a petite skinny hour glass shape, with the larger end around the bottom and smaller on top. Her hair the gently trimmed shoulder length darkness one associates with a guillotine cut having grown out over the last six months. I asked her why she kept her hair at that length. "It reminds me of how close I came to losing it all." And I knew exactly what she meant, teenage girl there really did.


    Even their heads.


    Hey don''t look at me like that, I tend to pay attention to what I like. Even if they aren''t a good person. Especially guillotine cuts. We embrace for the midnight bed, under the glow of the lunar light shining over the mountains.


    You know how it is when you date an ex poisoner without the ability to poison.


    I hear her loading up a shotgun, so I wake up. But instead of pointing that gun at me like I was expecting (I will not kill in most cases, but will out of self defense), she is instead putting the shotgun in her mouth.


    So for the first time in my life I was forced into the situation of having to talk somebody down from suicide, not exactly something I was experienced with. I had poisoned myself about three times before meeting her, and I was barely in a mental state to help. And yet the adrenaline rush made me take the shotgun from her hands, and she fired it to the ceiling.Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.


    "Why were you going to do that, I was going to miss you." I said.


    "Nobody misses me, I have nobody." And then she passes out onto the floor, convulsing and hoping that I wouldn''t spank her. And I didn''t, that''s just not how you treat anyone in that kind of a mental state.


    And then I hugged her gently.


    I allowed her to cry in my shoulders.


    There were things she finally confessed, when I promised my beloved that I was not the type to judge someone based on their past.


    Anna-Marie remembered when she had first took an airplane to the US. She had just barely been acquitted for her serial murder of her two brothers and her father. Her father would try to reserve sexual favors for himself, her becoming a kind of surrogate mother after Elizabeth died.


    Her brothers tried to hide the fact that they threatened to hit her after she refused to get a sickle for their farming. "I''m not your servant girl, no you fuck yourself. Your smile penis does not compare to dad''s." Her brother Jacques was not happy about this, and would eventually, with the help of his and Anna-Marie''s younger brother, stalk her and drug her with wine. Then they did was many disorderly brothers would do, that for sake of good taste shall be left to your imagination. So it was a simple solution, after she woke up in her bedroom she shared with her two sisters.


    She would poison her brothers. She murdered her first brother with rice soup, and her youngest brother and her father by a fight they challenged others in order to try to win sexual favors. They both died in the fights. Her sisters felt guilty about turning her sister in to authorities, so she tried to be super nice to her after she was acquitted.


    Anna-Marie only cried for what she did to her sisters whom she had always loved, but did not cry for her brothers and father.


    She cried in my shoulder, partly out of joy and partly out of regret.


    I was simply happy I could give her the shoulder to cry on.


    Anna-Marie dropped off contact with her family, leaving a suicide letter and a farewell with an I love you and an apology for the stress of almost having lost another family member. "Don''t forget me, I want to come with you." Ursula said, but Anna-Marie insisted she preferred to be alone. She could never go back to her old society, not with the crimes that she had done.


    So coming to US was a mix of fear and emotional triggers from her old life. She wondered if she would see her sisters again.


    Anna-Marie wore a cowboy hat, got herself a shotgun, and headed for the new digital frontier of the North West. Things had changed in the US after the French take over, and she wondered if she would be known her. But society had changed considerably since the former half of the twenty first century.


    Perhaps she could start a new life. There was only one certainty.


    She missed her mother Elizabeth.


    She would tell me of difficulties she had adjusting to the new life here in the United States. Things were never really the same.


    Anna-Marie had difficulty sleeping. She had constant memories of the guillotine that never came to be. She would at time wonder what it would have been like if she had her neck placed into a loop, and then it was all o''er. Her last remaining vision being the the crowd of the new twenty first, who became increasingly vicious for blood after the election of "The Ink Pen" who resigned the Guillotine back into law after the rest of Europe was dealing with the Post Nazi Restoration Party''s advance. Japan always renewed their imperialist fervor.


    The Guillotine Gun. The new national razor. The second widow. It was all part of the new right wing''s game.


    And poor Anna, the girl who trusted no man, almost died.


    She could have been lost in the game.


    I had heard about a similar criminal case who, while she was not exactly the contemporary of Anna-Marie, she was of similar type of criminal case. She would eventually come to poison members of her own family.


    Really more of an Irish-American friend I knew, they called her Betty even though her real name was Bette. In case the daughter they adopted turned out to be completely psychotic in later years, they did not want their beloved classic to end up being libeled and never read again. Betty would at times deliberately change the name of the house name board on houses along the coast of the North West, out of a sense of mischief and to see whether this would manipulation local fire trucks from coming to her family, that would occasionally be called because of accidental fires her brother would cause in the kitchen.


    "How many times have I told you boys to be careful in there?" said their mother, who said it in a more playful way than she would have if Betty had done so. Betty had always been the outsider of the family, and so she would often receive generally harsher treatment overall than her older male siblings.


    "Sorry mom, it won''t happen again." one brother said.


    "Make sure of that guy." Betty said, being slapped in the face by mother.


    "Only natural born MacCuffins can lecture them." her mother lectured. And this became something that Betty would come to take for granted.


    Whenever they would have the local seafood, she would always hate to offend them and their cooking, and would at times find some excuse to avoid eating whatever it was they offered do to their mom refuses to cook. So eventually Betty moved beyond merely changing the name of title board of the beach house. Part of must have hoped that changing the name of the board would make them confuse houses, and so she would make her escape to a kind her family.


    Her fears of being beaten for not liking their cooking were not exactly unfounded. At one point a while ago she had been paddled by one because he was some offended by one of her remarks. So she decided there was only one certain way to stop the beatings once and for all. But her family had to be gone from the beach house, and she had to offer the cooking for the following evening.


    She made seafood like her family, and her brothers commented, surprisingly how particularly interesting and fantastic the fish was this evening. And despite feeling somewhat ill, in fact requested to their mother to perhaps let their sister help them with the cooking more often. This gave Betty some guilt.


    However by the time bedtime rolled around, bother her brothers fell gravely ill. Eventually they fade out of existence the following morning. She had strained relationships with her parents, but her parents by this point were to afraid of pissing her off that they said nothing. But Betty started to get paranoid.


    So she stabbed both her parents.


    When the neighbor heard screams, the neighbors got involved. Law enforcement did not particularly dealing with cases dealing with child abuse, but had particular disdain of the old majority that ruled this country, even if perhaps the evidence suggested that Betty''s real mother was French.


    Betty had a quick trail, some suggested judicial error.


    She was taken to the courtyard, held in confinement for a few days. And then taken out for her execution. She walked up the scaffold stairs in a nervous wreck, and almost couldn''t make it to the center. They closed the loop on the guillotine gun around her small frail neck, and then counted down.


    The trigger was pulled, the angled blade flew through her neck. Her head fell down onto the scaffold floor below. Because there was no board to hold her upright, the execution largely being rushed to avoid detection by children''s rights activists from human rights international being involved, they wanted the case to be as over quickly as they could possibly make it.


    The executioner held up her head for all to see.


    And then quickly prepared funeral arrangements. I only know so much, because I could have been an apprentice for said events, but had luckily gotten sick from the idea of killing a girl that could have been a friend.


    So they had me watch her demise instead to learn.


    And I sure did learn quite a bit. That in this country we call home, it was a vastly different from the old world where childhood was sacred.


    Kids lost their heads like anyone else.


    I cried myself to sleep that night, vowing that I would someday completely eliminate everyone from the French government in my country. That I would use the toothpicks I owned to torture them, and never let them die.


    To poke them till they leave the country.


    I was reminded again, of how much I valued meeting a girl that could have been executed. It was the first time I comprehended how opposed to capital punishment I really was.


    There was a white mug spilled on the pavement of the parking lot. The manager didn''t seem to pay attention, as he was to busy picking fights with other motel tenants.


    My sexuality was like a constantly moving train, no matter what stops you have you will always come out ahead. The lady lump was beginning to develop into a sore subject. The desire for human contact fading nightly, and yet some calling need to find out where Anna-Marie had gone. Anna-Marie was the opposite of a digital cyberspace dream girl. I had known others only briefly outside of the inter webs. I clung to the idea of some vague notion of human innocents from game console flower girls in science fantasy games. And yet some or the lack of it had become a moot point.


    I never found myself willing to hold onto relationships. They were a burden I simply did not even need. The closest I ever came to a relationship was being sucked off by a slightly homely but not altogether ugly girl. I didn''t want to break her heart as we both knew it was arranged by some other slave master.


    As I wander to find Anna-Marie, I am consumed by my inner thoughts and worries about whether she might do something stupid. I wasn''t the type to rescue girls.


    I merely wanted the entrainment.


    I hadn''t seen a beheading of someone I liked. I had mixed feelings of whether I wanted it to happen at all.


    As I allow her decapitation to happen I am in a state of shock, the angled blade cutting through flesh and bone reverberating across my junk. I have a mixture of sexual feelings and depression as I say goodbye for the last time, watching blood spill into the basket.


    My digital cyberspace dream girl was gone. Originally my feelings of Anna-Marie were that of shameful reluctance for love. She would become my Anna-Marie. Cyberspace girls cant be hurt or broken. There is only digital innocence on the web.


    I wondered when the dream scanners caught her, I just needed somewhere to be.


    Glad I wore three extra layers of jeans. A mixture of some horrible eroticism and sadness.


    Dating girls had always been a tricky prospect for me, after all I had issues with girls ever since I first came out as trans. In my mind I wanted my own cyber pet dream girl, yet I always had one girl who would always follow me around to talk me as I felt down about Anna-Marie''s death. She was a short girl, a little under five feet, yet her proportions were like that of a smaller person rather than someone who was suppose to be taller.


    I never could quite tell what region she was an immigrant from, but it almost definitely was not France or Ireland. She had the longest black curly hair, and black eyes you could stare into all night on a lunar evening under the stars. Looking back on it I should have taken the opportunity to date. Yet I was so lost in my personal sorrows without a worldly care.


    Yet she was always there.


    "So what''s your name?" I asked.


    "They call me Dog, Dog Snacks. It''s a long story."


    "Oh I love those."


    She rested on my shoulder, her bare feet dipping her toes in the artificial lake, artificial in the sense that it was a lake crafted by engineers when building this here hotel. "Well I once accidentally ate dog treats confusing them for cocoa puffs when I was a real young girl. Family hadn''t been able to let go of the idea sense."There were many aspects of Dog I didn''t know. I just saw her as some annoying cute girl that would follow me everywhere she went.


    We would go everywhere together, she would notice my boner when girls tap danced. It seemed to take a lot of will power for her not to masturbate me on stage nights. But one day she went missing. She kept hoping, hoping, and hoping I would rescue her. She got angry when she scraped by being guillotined.


    And yet she stood with me till the end. Forgiving me for not going to games.


    She became the girl that would eventually lose her head in the arcades.


    No wonder she never told me about her family.


    Her family sucked.


    And yet here I am feeling like I failed Anna-Marie and my girl named dog. My dating life would never be the same.


    "She sounded like a great friend to you." the wine glass washer said.


    "Yea she sure was." I said. She was more then a, friend.


    She a girl named dog.


    Devoted until the end.


    It was a few months since I lost Anna-Marie.


    After she died I heard about a Guillotine gun street gang. They were the most feared gang in from NashChat to Seatak, traversing across the country at the speed of an electronic train; they could ride the coat tails of corporate men, and slash the throats of ladies held for ransom. They killed close to ten thousand women, the trail of severed heads paving the road like new marbled floor.


    And yet the time I met them, they didn''t seem to pay any particular attention to me at all. They didn''t seem to care about the fact that I knew they were after a particular artifact from the old era of the US. I was minding my own business, trying merely to live my life, as I''d never been one for gun fights. After all in my opinion gun fights were things macho people did to prove their worth. But when you get to where I''m at, you''re just trying to live your life as a writer, jotting down personal journals about your experience across what the Japanese called the west--the United States as a whole. So I didn''t think I''d ever been in the situation where I''d even consider saving someone''s life. That was until I saw the Rattle Snake Insignia.


    The thing about Rattle Snakes, is they were like spiders to me. They could pop in and out of existence at their leisure. At night I would have dreams of giant spiders and rattle snakes attempting to bite me while I traversed the wild woods of the mind, scattering sanity like shattered glass. But I wondered what Anna-Marie would have wanted, certainly there was something in her eyes that trusted me like nobody else ever had before. I wanted some way to return that favor, even if I didn''t like the French girl that I was going to save and--at the time was entirely uncertain whether I''d guillotine gun her myself. After all a kink for decapitation was part of my human nature, as natural to me as for you you might consider breathing.


    And there was something in those eyes that softened my soul, and made me realized all my personal issues from that point. There is something about looking straight into someone''s face, and finding despite unconditional love they find in your eyes someone they fear greatly, and through their own trust issues have a look of total betrayal. And they continued to love you despite your faults. My first girlfriend Dog had this trait, and to some degree also Anna-Marie. With Anna-Marie it was even more special, because I finally managed to succeed at something I never thought I could before she died, as she gradually came to trust me.


    I saved her from killing herself.


    And that makes all the difference when you hate yourself. Therefore I needed to find a way to tempt the gang when they came to my town. I didn''t want to save whatever girl they captured, as that simply wasn''t my thing. But I was willing to allow that to happen if the gang were more tempted to decapitate me, so that perhaps I could be with my Anna-Marie.


    If not for her than for Anna-Marie.


    "Go on, save yourself. Don''t worry about me." I said to the dark brunette, likely of French immigrant origin.


    As she ran her bare feet glistened in the sun like manicured hands, her heels forming the shape of hairless puff balls in the wind as they bobbed up and down in her Jesus sandals. I found that my lady junk was beginning to become a lot wetter. I managed to attract the attention of the gang, and they managed to get the loop around my own neck.


    Then a bullet was fired. An actual bullet. Not a flying guillotine blade, not shrapnel. But the actual old time bullets left over from before the French take over, before they outlawed gun altogether in French controlled regions. I''m surprised the French did not take over the inter webs, but I suppose that wasn''t their thing. I may be cyber sexual, but I am romantic--almost to a fault.


    A second shot was fired.


    Everyone else besides her ran.


    "Nice to meet you, Francisca is the name." the cute girl said. Evidently she was less reluctant to save me than me to her, I hate it when I owe others my life. But I suppose that''s how it goes.


    "Why didn''t you let me die."


    "I couldn''t resist the mix of joy and sadness."


    Wow, the bitch enjoyed my sadness. We were outlaws beyond the dreamer''s edge, so I couldn''t complain. The life of me being a mix of reality and non-reality, the conceptual life bleeding into the real. I wasn''t sure how she would take my cyber sexuality, or my inability to trust her. But she didn''t mind. Not enough not to go down on me.


    I''ll fuck anyone who hot who will go down on me.


    Quand Anna-Marie was sentenced to death, everybody seemed sorry. The judge had a particular disdain for rape victims, or so she told me. She poisoned someone else. An estranged family member that came to visit. But this isn''t a Thomas Hardy tale. Instead it is a tale of a French girl who only trusted me little, yet enough to give me a chance. So it wasn''t a surprise she left me so as not to hurt me. She didn''t want to see me cry.


    But that''s how it was there, and even here for those so young to die. She was spared once, but guillotine gunned the second time. I remember the feeling of regret when saw my reaction as the blade fell through her neck, as her head tumbled away. And I am left with only the remnants of a love that could never be. We all become as obscure as Jude. A new tale of cyber sexuality unfolds.


    Life restarts all o''er again as I carry a lonely umbrella in the rain.


    The French were as ubiquitous as ants, like boogiemen. There was a young girl in tap shoes, possibly of English/French descent. Her schoolgirl outfit reminded me of penguins. Her cane matching her Steampunk goggles in black. Her taps covered in mud.


    You can''t just leave someone cold in the rain, it''s not human. I checked inside after asking where her mother is, but she was nowhere to be found. "Haha, got you. I come to save the adults." She got me there, I slapped my knee. Kids these days. I fist bumped her and went on my merry way.


    It wasn''t like I didn''t think I needed saving, I just didn''t trust a kid to do it. Everything melts away in the rain.


    I needed hope.


    I needed death.


    I also needed to be by someone''s side, I just didn''t realize this at the time. My life like shattered plexi-glass into bleeding shards.


    I grabbed her hand and shouted to the sky, "Does anyone know where this girl''s mother is?"


    I tried going elsewhere away from her, but there was not escape from her net gun. She tossed me into the sky like a rodeo rope.


    "You''re not going anywhere, mommy dere." she said, doing a little tap dance. "You will not have your dance with death, I am her daughter. And I only love."


    She was older than she looked, with her being seventeen. With Steampunk having become something of a local fashion, Lisa-Marie had a thing for trans girls thinking of her as thirteen. Yet there was something in those eyes that drew her to me. It made me shudder and cry.


    It revealed all her lies. Her mother used to shame her for wanting to be a little princess. She never had many playmates, and she was always left alone. "But I want a princess dress." she said to her mom. "I want to be the beauty for my beastly girl."


    Her mother would tear off her dress, making her confess to stealing it even though she payed for it with her allowance. Made her wear rags and stockings and wooden sabots. She got her taps after mom died.


    "You will be your brothers Cinderella." her mother said.


    So the little Cinderella girl that wanted youth and to play was jerked by her wrist to hard that she wept raining tears.


    She wanted to strangle mom with her rags.


    Instead her mom was guillotined after robbing a bank.


    So I gave her the country song, and said "Why would someone tear off your dress?" It was the same shit Anna-Marie went through, why was the world so horrible?


    She held me tight, and we said goodnight.


    She wiped away my tears. "But you are mommy now. I want a hamburger."


    I laughed while crying.


    I had looked at the human race as unredeemable. Most of all I hated women. I didn''t want their genocide. I wanted them to be locked in immortal constant abyss. I hated how pretty all the girls were compared to me, and how their souls were lost in a tireless immoral void. I wanted everything in my life to end. Then for once everything can begin all o''er again. Even the total scum of the Earth is so much prettier than the world. I could be Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin, and Vicci. Yet none of their disdain for their chosen race compared to the hate I had for Lisa-Marie''s mother.


    I could have been a necrophiliac headsman.


    At least my mother made me think so. It was all a deranged game.


    And yet I loved this girl and Anna-Marie. Because my love for them was deeper than all my hate.


    They of humanity that warmed my heart.


    And yet Anna-Marie is gone.


    "You talk in your sleep Hemato, are you OK. Something must be bothering you." Lisa-Marie said.


    "Nothing that you didn''t melt away."


    "Then lets make a new world together."


    Lisa-Marie did not know her father well. Even when he was still in the United States, he would hardly ever be home. To this day she still wondered what he would be like, if she ever went to see him. After her mom died, she turned to the streets. She was finally able to switch to wearing princess dresses again.


    She purchased herself a net-gun, that shoots out a large fishing net. She didn''t believe in killing others, but would sometimes be an occasional pest for militarized law enforcement. The remnants of a larger culture of mainstream police brutality. It was a struggle to maintain some semblance of anonymity, a think that she would eventually come to desire quite a bit. So when she had met Hemato, she had sorts of mixed feelings coming into her head at once.


    There was a kind of identity crises. On one hand her mother was a French immigrant, and on the other hand her father was British. There would be constant fights of petty political issues; she never caught a break from yelling, and it would be a struggle just to have basic medical needs followed because they would be so caught up using her a token figure for their own political gains. Her house was like a miniature version of world war three.


    So she came into the world largely unsure what to expect. She tried to maintain a semblance of friendliness. But not being used to the mean streets, the reality of it all hit her hard. Most of the people she encountered wanted to take her head, being partially of French origin. Others saw her as some kind of sexual treasure, and she became introduced from an early age the lusts of carnal desire.


    Over time she lost her fire, that innocence.


    That feeling of love.


    Instead what remained was a girl that was a shell of her former self. She wanted to search for someone who could replace her mother, someone that had been missing from her life for many years. She became psychologically broken beyond the point of complete breaking.


    She got involved with fashion cultures.


    One such culture was what would become known as Steampunk. There was a loving atmosphere among these people that was distinct from her experience with her peers in middle and high school, which was still required of people her age. Because of the family structure, people protected each other. Even if people dropped out and became homeless, there would still be a home. None of them cared where you came from. You could be British or French. Everyone was friends.


    This lasted for a while, then she stopped going. Being one that largely preferred to be alone, it made social interactions difficult to process. Everything was like multiple rows of obscure binary code, written in languages more arcane than Ruby and C++. The operating system of the social life.


    So she came to the world with new eyes.


    And net-gun to find her mother. So she could be loved again.


    The thing about immigrating from Tennessee, you still have certain baggage from the old state you left behind. Luckily I''ve never had a strong accent in any direction, but when you grow up in a culture you still have certain lingual-ism that marks you as having from a particular territory in NashChat.


    Although Lisa-Marie never seemed to notice or care about this, it was always something that I feared would mark me as being strange. Surely you figured something was off, but perhaps this all in my mind. I would have had the same fears for Anna-Marie, except she herself had come from France. If you''re from France, you can''t exactly complain about cultural markers. Especially when you''re the one from hick town who invaded the US. Part of the issues came from the fact that as someone from Tennessee living in the North West, there was still a lot of element of shame from the association, and their tendency toward being conservative.


    This includes determination in maintaining an unworkable capital punishment. In many ways if you like in Tennessee, there was a good chance you would like in France as politically they were relatively similar. At least more so than Seatak and France. As much as I hated Lisa-Marie''s mother, I was also never a fan of capital punishment. To save an anti-death penalty discussion, lets leave at the fact that at lot of my vocalism against the invaders is partly from me picturing NashChat invade Seatak. Now here is the thing about NashChat.


    You might have isolated pockets of people that are against corporal punishment of kids in school, but for every Nashville in the NashChat area that was always Smyrna, Tennessee. In Smyrna, or so I heard (I was only threatened by it at Blackman High, keep that in mind) you could be paddled on your jeans for wearing something as arbitrarily incorrect open toed Jesus sandals. And when you''re a lesbian like me, well you tend to wear Jesus sandals. Though generally black. There was a certain association of paddled girls in Jesus Sandals or Potato Shoes with sex that became stronger over time, and I knew that paddling anybody was unacceptable. And yet I had that kink I could not quite explain, I suppose I was destined for cyber sexuality from the get go. I would picture in my mind little dark hair brunettes paddled to guitar tunes.


    Did I mentioned I hate country music? Yea when I give "a country song", I don''t mean a literal country song. Usually it''s a way of me visualizing smashing a guitar over someone''s head who hurt my friend.


    At times at night I find myself getting enthused all of a sudden, I can''t help but let my mind switch to Lisa-Marie that takes away all my sexual pleasures for hurting my beloved who reminds me of the kid me and Anna-Marie could have had rather than someone I''d want to give me head, even though now if Anna-Marie had lived Lisa-Marie would be about the same age. Neither did nobody any wrong, and yet in my mind


    I imagine me spanking their bottom.


    It just fucking kills me.


    With Anna it''s worse, I know exactly what she went through.


    ... I''ve been there myself.


    I think eventually I may in fact actually move out of the United States, and move to somewhere very north of Canada. I''m not sure if Lisa-Marie will go with me, and I kind of feel funny leaving Anna-Marie''s grave behind.


    I haven''t visited Anna-Marie''s grave actually. I suppose that will be the last stop before I leave the US.


    Or I may hang myself from a tree.


    I suppose I shall see.


    So after Lisa-Marie gave me a very awkward head job, because she likes giving me a head job sometimes, I pack my bags when she is away. Her Jesus sandals make my lump inflate, so I suppose that''s something I''ll have to go without. However when I arrive at the train station to visit the graveyard, I dropped my bags looking at the long line at the station. Where trains constantly whistle.


    I merely thought of Lisa-Marie.


    She had nobody. She wouldn''t have me.


    She would have nothing. But then I am shot with net from her net gun, and then things go smoothly from there, as she says "You didn''t tell me you were going on a trip sweet heart. Take me with you."


    So I bought her a ticket when I was released from the net.


    On closer inspection she was dressed particularly innocently, and I immediately felt awkward about the head and foot job she gave me before. I couldn''t believe that someone dressed so much like a Christian girl in Jesus sandals, with a yellow flower dress and a yellow flower cap. "You decided to go with me." I said.


    "You decided to abandon me." she said.


    "I didn''t want you to leave your family."


    "Fuck that, I hate my family. I have nothing here. My brother has just killed himself because of his guillotined girlfriend I had. All I have is you. You''re all I have left. Yet you felt you had nothing left to give." She covered her face in a tearful shame and regret. She got me there I suppose, I just never had a felt that was as devoted like my first girlfriend named Dog.


    "I suppose I could give you a shoulder."


    "That would be great."


    "So where are we going to go first?" she asked, as we boarded the room. The waitress gave us breakfast for the morning, and for me I had always tended to drink my coffee nice and black.


    "To the local graveyard, an old friend is buried there." I said.


    "Your executed girlfriend?"


    "How did--"


    "You really talk in your sleep. But if I could be like your Anna-Marie, that would be really great." I wasn''t sure how to respond to that, I didn''t have a conversation like that sense I had last moved to the North West. One of my friends I knew, that was my room mate briefly when I was fleeing my parents, would talk about how I would never ultimately compare to the friend she had known for fifteen years. So as you could probably imagine, I didn''t have the need to break my new friend''s heart.


    Besides, I loved her like family.


    She was me and Anna-Marie''s child. Even if she was close to our age, there was something about her innocence that made me feel very protective. She had the aura of someone you would to take care of and mother.


    But not like my mother. A mother like me.


    She kept me from ending my life.


    I was lost in a sea of digital sexuality. I would decapitate French girls without a second thought. My sex drive rivaled the armies of Genghis Khan, the ladies fallen Chinese warriors who I slammed the knife down on their necks. Yet in the endless fog of dream-time, there was a light in the forest.


    There was the sound of a innocent little girls voice, who held out her hands for me and gave me a smile I have never received in years. It was the face of the spirit of light in the dark, the face that combined Anna-Marie and Lisa-Marie both like angelic sisters after sundown. And yet there was a stitch marks on her neck, and her head wobbled as if she were beheaded by a guillotine gun. And yet there was something about her that could transcend other people''s dreams and hopes sharing ideas. I simply wanted my internal nightmare to end.


    She was almost psychic. I feared the worst for my angel. I was a demon lost in inferno. Lisa-Marie woke me up, and gently shushed me. Then offered to rub my shoulders, hoping it would take my night terrors away.


    I thought moving would change things.


    It only made things worse.


    And in the morning, she sang children''s rhymes.


    I felt no need to rhyme today.

 Part Four. Anna-Marie

    I could hear the sound of cars passing by, speeding like the wind. And various sirens from them blaring like the sound of trumpets.


    Above was liquid, green colored slime. I thought that I would die the day my body died. Now here I am spending time, with nothing better to do inside of this tank. I''ve heard many dead girls end up here, who committed various murders, their life force preserved into eternity, guillotined for crimes of passion. Cut throat world, a world of blood bleeding from the wound, to the guillotine blade in the neck. People say being beheaded by guillotine is instantaneous. But they''re wrong, but not dead wrong. In the hallway of the lab, I saw other girls whose severed heads were kept inside of healing tanks.


    Even if my body was gone, it still felt as if my body was there, like a sadistic game of phantom body. My body was a phantom of apparent deserving, according to the mores of the new Napoleon in chief. Floating, eternity falling. The suspension of gravity, a neck in constant free fall inside of a liquid tank. When your a severed head, it gets lonely. Sometimes doctors check in on you, to see if you''re alive. But the loneliness always stank. The doctor''s pants looked like they were suppressing a giant ass wank job. One looked terribly dank, the other was simply a yank. That''s in both the Northern Fractured United States sense, and the other sense of yanking one''s penis. For my murders, to myself, that is whom I have to thank.


    And it was with this, I remember why it was I came to trust Hemato-Tomato, the vampire huntress whom showed me, that not all people were evil, and would give a murderess, they poisoned most of her male family members, a chance. I remember the time that led up to our moment of immersion therapy scissoring. It had been years since Hemato Tomato had seen me die a lonely death, at least to her I was dead. But for my I was simply a head of the curve.


    A head of the game called life.


    Nobody what people tell you about neighbors, there was something different about knowing one who kept talking and talking, and never seemed to stop. Beverly was the type of woman to visit the offices of each scientist in order to tell them how to do their job, and never seemed to stop talking until it got to lunch break. There was something hidden drive in this woman, it was always a pain to listen to, while my severed head floated in green liquid coolant. But knew ways to dig right down into your soul, and inquire deeply, something that, while mom was able to do, always had certain objectives in mind rather than simply paragraphs of audio speech, rather than hemming and hawing all the day long day, blurting out like rail road cross-bars.


    Beverly had wanted to lose weight rapidly, never ascribing to politically correct ideology, but had been overweight for many years. All those years at the swimming pool, all those years of my neighbor''s childhood spent by bringing friends over, and only just now was this spent cutting down on the birthday cake. Every day was a break, though it was never absolutely clear what she did for work during the week. My guess was that she worked at a blue collar job, like most in my and Hemato''s neighborhood. Yet the hours seemed to go by faster than usual, when Napoleon''s forces invaded the gated community of Chattanooga. A community now that barely resembled the old one our childhood, and not even a French city.


    Most people were idiots.A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.


    They hummed to Convier Twisty. Flowing like apparent old music notes, but singing about things most Western singers would be embarrassed by. Part of it was that Chattanooga had not originally been considered part of the west, rather western culture largely came out here, during the global warming expansion.


    And now we live after the flood.


    The zealots sang to Jesus.


    Although this was an issue with Tennessee in general, during the eighties the state became an urban trash burn and burial pit, this explains why all the home-grown tomatoes, seemed to taste like shit. The same tomatoes used to make Tuna casseroles, as suggested by the same delightful neighbor, that tends to my severed head. I suppose our relationship had always been tangy, but nothing like the weird tango Hemato had with her daughter. I suppose it wouldn''t have been better to grow a tree with mangos, whose theme of life is another tango, another opera loses its star performer during its midnight opening scene.


    Sometime in life you''ll meet people that make you want to rip out your spleen, but they never seem to compare to the very familial horror that was your family, that never seemed to ever give you a break. Whether it''s being almost ran over by a truck, being told that your best friend was a necrophiliac, and them turning out to be the best person you''ll ever meet, none of them seem to compare to the very intimate horror that was the very familial sexual abuse your father and two brothers seemed to perform on you.


    I suppose for that reason, I''m not entirely sorry. What I do regret is the amount of emotional hell I put Hemato-Tomato through. People justified the guillotine in the 1800s as mercy, and yet they never seemed to include all the tortures on prisons they seem to always include as part of the punishment no matter the crime. Although in my case, during that particular century, it flowed slightly differently. I didn''t get those tortures until the end of two thousand sixteen. The nineteenth century was decidedly genial by comparison. Whatever laws they had on the books against torture, never seemed to matter all that much.


    But the worst torture was different.


    It was painless, and subtle. It was being merely a floating head, in green cooling fluid, with simply nothing to stare into, but empty space.


    One of the security guards, who had known me for a while, would occasionally interact with me. Do the obvious fact of my severance from my vocal chords, I am unable to vocalize words to him. But knows that I am alive, and I am aware of everything that I see around me. A few months go, he used to talk about times he went out to eat with his ex. But how interacting with them was never quite the same as talking with me. After a point, it seemed to become something of a crutch for him, as he simply had nobody else to talk to. Because of his knowledge, he would read me different bed time stories, ones that were taught to him during childhood.


    His personal favorite book was See Spot Run, though I knew that he liked reading more complicated material. There was nobody that really wanted to break into the lab, so we developed somewhat of a relationship.


    Now here I am, resting on a wall in the streets of Chattanooga, wearing wooden clogs, with my head attached to my newly grown body from a vat. For once I could feel what it was like to have a body again, after my head had been struck up with a Guillotine Gun, as punishment for murdering my family. It wasn''t so much that they had deemed me fit for release. They wanted to empty the tag for another lady whose head was taken off. And they didn''t like the idea of the security guard crushing on me.


    Yet in the streets, people stare at me. I can''t vocalize my assurances, that I am not a killer. That I''m not a bad girl at heart. I simply want to live my life, in my long flowing tattered dress, wandering the streets of obscurity, trying to find some way to leave the state, so I can be with my beloved. Yet the electric carts were not always on schedule, and I had no money to pay for a taxi.


    I supposed it was another cross-country.


    In this country no longer my home.

 Final Part. Famille

    "Hemato, there is somebody here to see you." Lisa-Marie said, she was holding her luggage to go off to college, while I stayed at home to tend the house.


    "Who is it? Who could possible want to see me?" I asked, giggling a little bit from the ridiculousness of my self-pity. When you get to the point where I''m at, you no longer want to focus on the past. Only the future.


    "It''s a surprise!" Lisa-Marie said.


    She opens the door, and it''s Anna-Marie. Her head was stitched back onto her body, and she shuffled in my direction. She wore a similar dress to the one when she died, or I assumed that she died. Instead those eyes indicate a new kind of life, a new life of life form like a zombie but not quite. While she had a hard time keeping her head straight, it being stitched on, she didn''t seem to understand why she wanted to see me. She was not rotted at all.Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.


    On some level I felt sad that she was still alive. If she had any memory of the indecent from before her head was taken off, it was probably scattered in all directions fading out by the second. "I know you don''t remember me, but I remember you. I never got to tell you how sorry I felt for you."


    There was a slight smile. And then she came in for the kiss.


    We exchanged glances and soft gestures, the moonlight hour being when Lisa-Marie arrived to see her new family being reborn again.


    We could be a family again. I thought I heard words from Anna-Marie.


    "Hemato. Hemato. Hemato." she said. Apparently the doctor that rebuilt her was an experienced surgeon. He repaired the vocal chords, but it was relatively new technology. She was kept in a tank for months.


    "That''s right, Hemato is my name."


    We all group hugged.


    "Famille!" Anna-Marie said.