A-Sides Read online

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  Jenny rose painfully to her feet, hot tears streaming down her face. Her breath gathered in short, hiccuping gasps. A steady buzzing vibrated inside her head and the house canted and yawed before her.

  She steadied herself on the door frame, trying to stand on legs that felt like wet sponges. With every rubbery step she took, the broken and sprawling heap of her sister grew larger in her eyes until she stood immediately over her.

  Jenny knelt beside Lisa and let the true weeping start. Tears of fear and rage and sorrow and what should have been for the black princess. As she reached out a trembling hand to touch Lisa’s still body, an overpowering affection smothered her and she moaned aloud at the injustice of it all.

  “Oh, Lisa,” she sobbed. “It’s not right, is it? I never wanted it to end like this. I never wanted you dead.” Jenny moved her face forward and kissed Lisa’s toneless cheek, but Lisa lay still with her eyes closed. Jenny was overcome by the recognition of her own mortality and the unconsidered words spilled out of her mouth in a scream before she could call them back or reckon what they would do.

  “You can’t be dead! You can’t be! I won’t let you be dead!”

  Jenny touched Lisa and an immediate yellow glow flamed around her hands. A heavy silence collected in the silver gloom, ablaze with the shining metal of moonlight. Along with the silence, a tension built in the haze; an intangible force that was electric and vital. Jenny felt the hair on her neck rise.

  “Lisa….?”

  Lisa’s grip tightened on the knife handle. She whipped it violently upward, catching Jenny just beneath the chin. The blade sliced through flesh with an incongruous whisk sound that belied the damage it wrought. Blood spurted in a gaudy, crimson flood. The metallic smell of blood was in Lisa’s nostrils. Blood was in Jenny’s hair, Lisa’s hair, on the knife, their clothes, the floor. Jenny never had a chance to cry out. She simply slumped backwards on her back.

  “So!” Lisa trumpeted in wicked triumph. “Thought you would get by with that didn’t you, you little whore!”

  Jenny’s body was slumped backwards, her back folded over her lower legs where she had knelt by her stricken sister, her blood-matted blond hair pooling stiffly on the floor. Lisa towered over her, raving in an obscene parody of victory. Her own body moved in grinding lurches, powered by surreal animation. Jenny’s glassy eyes stared upward sightlessly as the tirade went on.

  Now unchecked by Jenny’s magic, the demonic horde was at last visible. Lisa finally saw the eyeless imps and dancing devils with scaly red skin and huge, orange eyes that glared like twin incinerators. They grinned at her with their sharp, white teeth.

  Taking it all in -Jenny lying dead and bloody on the floor, the dancing devils, her own implausible reprieve from death- Lisa started to chuckle, then to laugh. She ran her fingers along the knife blade, softly at first, then more firmly. More blood ran through her fingers and splotched on the floor in crazy, Rorschach inkblots.

  Headlights blared through the windows, picking out the carnage in an unflinching, white spotlight. Gravel crackled, a radiator fan spun and stopped. Jack and Jill were home.

  Lisa stopped laughing and turned to the light, her eyes shedding their dead sheen and taking on the grisly glow of the imps’ eyes. She gripped the knife more firmly, ignoring the pain in her hands. There could be no peace now.

  A lunatic’s grin cracked her face like a hard blow as she took up a position behind the front door, the one her parents would come through. Even before the door handle turned, the walls were filled with bellowing and shouting and evil laughter, rattlings and poundings that shook the house like a wrecking ball.

  Lisa’s knife glinted in the moonlight as she took the final step into the black valley.