you're too young & eager to love

I am not dead! I just haven't been doing much writing lately. Here, though, have some now. <3

I was playing around with the idea of a daughter and mother dying in a car accident, and then a demon coming back in the form of the daughter to taunt her father. Who is a priest. … I've been reading a lot of Lolita lately.

My tenses bounce around a bunch, I'm sure.




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“Was she really beautiful? Was she at least what they call attractive? She was exasperation, she was torture.” – Nabokov.


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Curiosity, cats, satisfaction, resurrection stories.


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Elle used to have a boyfriend - the real Elle, that is, the Elle-That-Was - the one who died in the car accident, not the thing she was now, the perversion of her old self. He went to her private school and lived on her same street, a boy with dark hair and sad eyes and hands that were too polite to wander across her body. The sum of their relationship had been mostly innocent, inexperienced kisses against the poplar tree in her front yard, the heat of summer swelling and pressing in around them, making their skin flush and the dainty cross around her neck feel unusually warm.

Her father had minded, but her mother had not. Her mother used to smell like jasmines before she smelled like blood and crushed metal. Elle doesn’t remember what she used to smell like, except she thinks it was fresh cotton and honeysuckles, a touch of lemon for the bitterness of adolescence. (Elle isn’t real, not truly – even she forgets that sometimes. Being contained in so much flesh makes her feel trapped, from time to time. Temptation is difficult for everyone.)

The boy’s name was Adam. Elle finds that hilarious now. Sometimes, she puts herself in front of him again. She says his name like he’s some cute little dog she can turn her attention to when convenient. Like he didn’t go to her funeral eight months ago, with his eyes larger and sadder than ever. He’s stronger than she anticipated – he’s not a character from one of Shakespeare’s plays; he won’t be her spaniel; he won’t be her perfectly coiffed, trained little pet.

“What do you want?” Adam cries.

But Elle knows. He’ll sit at her feet, half-feral for her, always.


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The dead don’t usually put much stock in dreams, but she likes to make exceptions.

Her father knows just how sharp and brutal the cap on her back molar can be, knows that it makes her tongue sore after she rubs at it for awhile; it’s a habit he knows. He knows because it’s bruised the base of his cock and left a pleasant pounding ache for days, making the memory of her hot mouth and eager tongue take up persistent and permanent space in his brain like so many bits and pieces of her speech and sounds and the shapes their bodies make while pressed in and up against each other.

But that didn’t really happen, did it?

So, he wakes up in sweat and shame with the taste of Bourbon on his mouth instead. The sweat is very real, but he’s not completely sure about the rest.


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‘I love you,’ he thinks – he knows.

He loves her, his daughter, his madness. Not in the questionable, unsure way that he has come to love God, but in certainty, with all the forceful rendering of his heartstrings. But he doesn’t know if he’ll ever say it now. He’s too scared she won’t ever say it to him again, and then his memories of her will be tainted. The fragile, hopeful, careless way she used to say it before bed or quickly when she slipped from the car at school, worried her older friends would find her juvenile for such parental affection. He’s scared if he does say it, sweetly, tenderly, when he’s inside of her, that her eyes will go wide and stay open when she comes, that she’ll slump back into the pillows and the bed and just smile her cruel, little smile up at him. Like he’s offered her his soul and only then realizes she’s going to eat it instead of keep it safe.

She never used to smile like that.


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There’s a comfort in touch that can’t be duplicated by words.

Nothing comes close to skin or blood or breath.

Elle tangles her fingers into his hair when passing him in the kitchen, humming a song that he finds familiar, a song for children. He thinks of ashes and flowers, but he can’t fully bring the words to mind when her fingers stroke, however fleetingly, down his neck. He has the strangest urge to grab her by the wrist and bite her fingers, the strangest thought that they will taste like dust and bone and death. Not real, he thinks, impossible that she is real.

When he looks over his shoulder, following her with his bloodshot eyes, she’s drinking milk from the carton, her hip canted to the side. Their gazes meet, and he thinks she’s laughing.


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He might be losing his mind and his faith, but he’s still a pastor - for now. He’s still (mostly) respected by his neighbors and his friends, although the sympathy in their eyes and voices has started to turn to concern. He isn’t required to attend to the church every day – they have been respectful and considerate during his mourning – but he makes himself go. The steps leading up to the doors are steeper every week.

His desk is the same, like the church, and the windows, and the chipped paint by the last pew on the right. Maybe God doesn’t need him after all. He’s thinking about that – the possibility that faith might be an illusion or the fact that the Holy Father might be distant and uncaring – when Elle slips her small fingers over his eyes from behind. He hadn’t heard her come in, hadn’t smelled her, but he can feel her. She’s warm.

“Surprise.” She murmurs, honey on her breath, before perching on the edge of his desk. She’s wearing a summer dress, soft and light around her thighs, and it’s the color of alliums - weeds that nature has made more appealing but not appealing enough to be truly pretty. It’s a good color on her; it mitigates her paleness with its own delicate, washed out shade.

Elle smiles. Her face is rapturous, pink cheeks and glassy eyes, her chest flushed and her nipples sharp and straining against her dress. Her father stands so quickly that he knocks aside his coffee mug, the one his wife bought him five years ago for a birthday or anniversary or was it Easter? He can’t remember. He’s too busy staring at the front of her dress. “Pull it,” she says when she sees him looking, a lazy mumble against the inside of his elbow when she turns her face into his arm.

He might have groaned a little, like a boy rather than an adult man, like a lover rather than a father, and he felt his cock stiffen. His right hand – he used to give the Blessed Sacrament with that hand - curves over and rubs at the hard little nub until she makes a sound of displeasure.

“With you teeth,” Elle tells him, sounding more like a woman than a girl.

He knows he just groaned for real. She pulls the front of her dress down and leaves the straps trapped in the folds her elbows make when she leans back, her breasts small and exposed and he mouths at them hungrily. He leaves a bruise from his lips on the curved underside of one of her breasts. She presses up into his mouth, wanton, and holds his hips between her thighs, her dainty dress rucked up over high against her legs.

When he thinks he might come just from the sounds she’s making, the knock at his office door startles and terrifies him.

The other pastor, Eric, friendly with his harmless smile, sticks his head in. He has plans for next Sunday’s sermon, but he stops talking when he sees the other clergyman flushed, sweat across his skin, and his hands shaking.

“You all right? You spilled your coffee.” Eric says, motioning to the broken cup on the floor. “That’s going to stain.”


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There’s something deceptively sweet about children that makes it easy to forget that they are without empathy.


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She used to be different. She used to tell him things. She used to be soft in the way that little girls were supposed to be, without the taste of lipstick or the flash of another woman’s ring on her slender finger.

In that normal, typical growing-up way Elle had begun drifting from her father. They had been two people with secrets they wouldn’t share, about the other, in the same room, close but never closer, still too close. The secret is about forgiveness or lack of it. The secret is about love or lying about it. The secret isn’t what matters. It’s the proximity that counts - secrets against secrets and how little they matter against someone else’s.

And then she had died, her blonde hair matted with blood, and her eyes open.


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