Dig Your Fingernails Into My Chest and Pull Out My Heart

Place Your Palm On My Chest

Steven Patrick Morrissey considered himself normal. Not by societal standards, but by his own. See, what he assumes to be normal doesn't translate over to what "normal" actually is.

From a young age, he was sheltered by his mother. No new fangled technology. No sexual or violent content was allowed to flash against his eyes. He was meant to be kept safe; not allowed to view anything potentially harmful. It didn't work, though. Obviously.

One morning, he had come home and found a stack of books upon the coffee table. They spoke about murderers, whose victims had been that of street whores; prostitutes, who had gotten pregnant with some man's child. They spoke about possessiveness, poising it as something that people shouldn't fear, as "we all feel possessive towards one thing or another". Obsessions, sex, violence. He'd been exposed.

From that day on, he could only focus on the morbid things in life. He saw a rabbit brutally murdered by a passing car at the ripe age of eleven, picking at it's remains on the side of the street before some old hag chased him off. He saw a man leap from an iron bridge at fourteen, watching as gore washed up on shore next to his dress shoes. At sixteen, he took interest in The Moors Murders, going as far as to travel and to lay in the lavender field in which the children had been buried, with only the thoughts of finding their missing bodies from below the soil. He reveled in the smell, giddy with the thought of discovering those corpses.

When he was eighteen, he got in his first fight. While he was never well versed in fighting, in fact he despised it, it had done him well, his morbid curiosity on the human bio. The minute that brute of a man dropped to the floor, a ripple of terror had gone through the crowd. 'He's unconscious! Unconscious!' they screamed. If only they knew. Lord, he's getting tingly just thinking about it.

All of that had led to where he was now; in his room, a sketchbook sat in front of him on his desk, filled to the brim with images of death, gore, fantasies he put on paper to stop himself from doing. Notebooks lined the window sill, documenting his years. Each was filled with information on a different person. James Dean took up about two of them, of course. Steven would break his back for that man. He'd kill to touch him, even if he was six feet under.

The other couple of leather clad books were less detailed. The oldest was about a rugged boy on his secondary school's rugby team, who Steven had first laid eyes on in gym. They spoke a bit, in the beginning only because he was decently fit and could run quickly. They started to converse more when Steven took up track and field. It was ruined the minute that selfish prick got some girl knocked up and he left his opportunity of becoming a star player so he could go get a job downtown to support his new family. Steven still sees him sometimes, when he goes to get groceries. He's uglier and repulsive and he feels as though he dodged a bullet with that one. Or maybe that formerly handsome sports star dodged the bullet instead. God knows what Steven would have done to him.

The one on the far right was the newest. He started it about a month ago after spotting a young chap at a diner just a couple minutes down the road. He was pale and skinny, though not thin like he himself was. This boy looked like he ate regularly, while Steven had to deal with being asked if he was hungry ninety percent of the time, with the other ten being questions about an eating disorder he didn't have. No, this boy he had seen was stockier, but shorter, with milky white skin. His hair was longer, reaching over the collar of his shirt, his right eyebrow being covered by his bangs. When Steven had saw him that day, he had been wearing a leather jacket with a unidentifiable band t-shirt on underneath, tight jeans and a belt with a guitar belt buckle. Steven didn't have time to scribble down the shoes he was wearing before he and the group of obnoxious men that accompanied him left.

Ever since then, Steven had made it his goal to find that lad. Call him morbid if you must, but he felt as though they were meant to be. A sort of fate or intuition, he supposed. He wanted to run his hands through that hair of his. He wanted to feel every pore on his body, find every weak spot. He wanted to take hold of his soul and chain it up and lock it down to keep under his bed. He wanted to caress that linear face of his and hold it close to his own. Steven wondered to himself if it'd be easy to entrap that boy. He'd hope not. He loved when they put up a bit of a fight. It sent shivers down his body.