you're too young & eager to love

This was supposed to be a “5 Ways” style type of piece. But then I couldn’t do the fifth idea. I figured two not-so nice ways and two nice ways balances out, right? So, we get 4 Ways instead.

1,144 words. Woo!

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4 Ways Addison Grant Could Die
( And 1 Way She Might )



1. Murder

Like the boastful son of Lacares, he had come to plunder the fallen, like a vulture, a foul hyena.

Addison sleeps, soft and pliable and easy to steal.

She does not recognize him, not when the sudden panic of being awoken jolts her, not when she feels his fingers on her neck or when he easily pins her slight body to the bed. She knows him when he uses his nails to shred her thighs, the soft juncture of skin that Mischa so intimately claims, when she tries not to cry but does and a malicious glint enters his eyes.

She loses blood quickly, and he doesn’t even taste her. It’s not the point, he wants her to know. That she will be a symbol for something, a lasting impression for Mischa to find. A gashed wreck of what once was beautiful and human and, thus, destroyable.



2. Necessity

Mischa feels the pull of her blood. Her will is exhausted. But with his teeth in her throat, he calls for her heart, searching for it, desperate, as though hunting through a labyrinth without the thread of Ariadne.

He has her gathered her to him and even close to death her limbs are elegantly limp, as though she might arch her crushed wrist any moment and curl it around his neck. As though her shattered legs were only arranged crooked, intentionally, for this is some opening to a dance of broken dolls.

The alley is dark, the air cold, and he is frightened. A stark, sharp emotion that he hasn’t felt in years. The car accident was brutal; she has more broken bones than useable ones. The other two passengers – a red-haired contemporary dancer that Addison spoke fondly of and a man Mischa recognizes as being from the ballet company – died instantaneously. The drunk who hit them busted through his windshield and, vaguely, Mischa is aware of him dying somewhere close to them, somewhere near his left.

He is worried about the blood. About hers and how much of it slipped, carelessly, from the wounds she received. Not enough, the quiet, monster-voice in the back of his mind taunts, not enough to use, not enough to blend with his own, not enough to save her. Drink, it says, drink her away.

Faintly, a shrill noise, like an alarm, makes him wince. He fastens his mouth closer to her cold-turning skin, hungrily. It takes the faint shudder of her heartbeat to make him realize that the noise is Addison. Screaming. He has lifted her at an odd angle and her broken legs have jolted her with so much pain that, blessedly, she caught on to consciousness and held it.

“I can fix it.” He tells her, breaking away from her throat, and he does not think that her unfocused eyes can even see him.

He opens his wrist and forces it to her mouth. He gives her too much, weakens himself, then must draw it all out again from the spot in her neck. She cries, but her hands grip his arm when he holds it to her for the second time.

It only takes an hour; her heart halts, and then he restarts it for her.



3. Ordinary

She has had children. She has had a husband and a life of warmth, of sunlight, of simple and good pleasures. She has danced and then taught the art to children, supporting their stretched limbs and tight, balanced poses. She has lived.

But now she is dying, slowly, but with minor pain. The weariness of an old body, her organs simply refusing to continue, and her mind slips some. Her family visits her in the hospital, waiting, and sometimes she tells her adult daughter about a boy she knew once. A pale-skinned boy with the blondest hair who had the sharpest mouth. She can’t remember why it feels important, the memory of him.

On the last hour of the last night, when the doctor is delivering the news of what is her nearing death, preparing her family, Addison thinks she sees a teenaged boy in her doorway. Gaunt and, though he seems upset, she thinks he smiles.

She dies trying to remember lost things, surrounded by those who have loved her. She dies normally.



4. Deliberate


When she is thirty-five, Addison decides that she is ready.

Her dancing has made her, to some degree, popular and financially well off. She danced in Europe for a summer and returned to the States with a feeling of accomplishment that, she thinks now, settled her. Her talent will be remembered, she is sure, and she tells Mischa in the softest of voices that there is nothing more she needs now.

Soft lines have formed near her eyes. There are details to her skin that, when he knew her at twenty-three, had never been there.

“I can feel my body dying.”

“Addison, you don’t feel that.”

“You do, then. You can feel it.”

She is not sad. She is not angry or fearful or impulsive. She simply is and that, Mischa realizes, makes him accept that this, now, is right. And he knew that it would always come to this, that he had planned this moment somewhere in the deep recesses of his mind and had only been waiting for her.

When he agrees, she thanks him. Presses her mouth to his and realizes that there are differences she will not be able to comprehend. He has her prepare herself the way bodies, she thinks, must be prepared for the coffin – files her nails, cuts her hair. The small details that she will have to live with forever.

They choose a night, and she rises to watch the sunrise. She watches the sunset too, wrapped in a warm blanket because the dusk brings a chill in the air, and is surprised when Mischa appears so early. The sun still lingering on the horizon, he sits with her on the balcony, and she can see the way the last remnants of light burns his skin. It hurts his eyes to watch the deep red fading into purple.

He touches his fingers to the back of her palm, and Addison feels a cry catch in her throat.

It does not hurt the way she thinks it will. Death, as it turns out, is a quick, fleeting moment of nothingness. A brief second of panic, her body willing and refusing and fighting in that usual way, before an abrupt calm.

The blood that follows is more shocking, reanimating her.