Leilanie Stewart

Death to an Idol

Leilanie Stewart © 2018

I worry. I worry a lot. I worry that my story will have no direction. I worry that the story I’m about to tell you doesn’t make any sense. I’m too pedantic. But not too pedantic to stop telling my story. No, never that pedantic.

The moon was high in the sky. It hung behind a thin veil of fog. Not fog; fog is on the ground. This was cloud. It hung behind a thin veil of cloud.

I looked at the moon and I wanted to reach it. I stretched my fingers towards it and it slipped between my index and ring finger. It fit snugly in the V. Snugly. Smugly. Snugly because it sat comfortably on the web of skin. Smugly because the moon mocked me. It mocked me like the prostitute who was ten pounds too dear for my miserly budget.

I did it. I did it again. I’ve made myself worry. I was getting into the groove of my story and I worked myself up all over again. I told you too much. I told you about the prozzie who was out of reach.

She was out of reach and she mocked me, like the moon. Her teeth were white, like the moon. And the bruise on her thigh was yellow; piss-coloured. A faded, piss-coloured stain as yellow as my cat’s eyes.

My cat will probably eat me when I’m gone. Cats eat meat, and when I go, I will be meat. There’s no reason that I can surmise as to why my cat would not eat my decaying remains after I’m gone.

Now I’ve done it. I’ve put you off. I don’t know you, but I can tell I’ve made you want to stop reading my story. Or maybe I’ve got you wrong; you know my true nature now, but still you want to keep reading. You know I’m weird, so you’re willing to see where this is all going.

Alright. So here it goes.

I read a story once about a girl who took the moon out of the sky and had it mounted on a necklace – or so she thought. I’d never want to keep the moon all to myself. I’m not the type of person who would think of myself as selfish like that. But am I as selfish as that? I suppose if I’m thinking about it, I must be.

I looked at the sky and realised the moon had gone. Venus was in its place. Or maybe the moon had never really been there in the first place. Nothing in my life was as it seemed anyway. I hired the whore because I was worried that I was a thirty year old virgin. I’m a virgin and a loser with women and I had to know what it felt like to fuck a woman. But, like the moon she had gone. In place of her, I found a white stairway.

~END OF EXCERPT~

This story is included in Diabolical Dreamscapes: Strange and macabre short stories.

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