Licking Red #DigitalAMAWithRheea

Licking Red

I could tell something was going wrong.

Or very very right.

Because her hands were visibly shaking. She gripped the park bench tighter than before and her legs began to squirm. I panicked. I almost took a step forward, wondering what was going on. Did she need help?

But then she got up and suddenly whipped the dupatta off herself, tossing it to the ground. She stood rigid. Still.

Her shoulders hunched to the side.

I began to walk closer... I was getting scared. I didn't like what was happening, whatever was happening. I'd go to her, just ask if everything was okay. She'd know I was spying on her but it's fine.

But as I neared her, knowing my soft footsteps on the grass would now clearly indicate my arrival, in an attempt not to startle her, I saw other things...

Things I wish I never saw.

I saw her fingers crooked and digging deep into the sides of her thighs, thin trickles of blood leaking through her skin and down the length of her legs. Her gaze was fixed on the ground below, as if determined not to look up at the stranger approaching her. I stopped.

I stood there for several seconds, horrified out of my mind and internally screaming for someone to come rescue me because I knew something was wrong. No I couldn't help her, no. It wasn't her that needed help. I glanced around- there was not another soul in the park at this hour. It was dusk and I should've noticed something was strange about a woman so elaborately dressed on a public bench at this time in the morning.

I was trapped.

I knew it.

Both of us just stood there- her determined not to look at me, me terrified to look anywhere but at her, barely separated by ten feet of grass and mud.

Alone.

My head was pounding as an over-fertile imagination popped horrifying images and scenes into my head of what would happen next.

But none of it prepared me for what actually did.

"Come sit next to me!"

She looked up.

She had the sweetest voice.

I was disarmed.

Almost magically, ethereally, I forgot the blood dripping down her legs and approached her. I was blind to the red fingernails as we both sat down next to each other.

She picked up the yellow dupatta off the ground and dusted it.

"Well now, we can't have that, can we?"

I was mesmerized.

She was so close to me, this angelic beauty. I couldn't speak.

She tenderly tossed the dupatta over her shoulders again and turned to look at me.

With a smile.

Too saccharine.

"I'm leaking memories from my body,"

"Oh..." was all I could find in myself to say.

"They're not nice ones," she nodded, "That's why they come in red. And have to be forced out."

"Your flesh holds them in, doesn't it?"

"Would you like a taste?"

It was captive flesh.

Imprisoned and sculpted.

I knew its torture.

We all did.

"No... but yes."