Maenad

The flowers of her wreath looked fake in the glare of the strobe lights. With each beat of the music, they flashed from green to purple, then from purple to green, the edges of the petals fringed with pinks and yellows. They were probably made of some fluorescent plastic. Cheap party décor repurposed as an outfit, the haze of smoke machines masking how trashy they really were.

She danced along to the beat, head swaying and arms reaching for the ceiling. The lasers cut through the haze about her head, her short skirt twirling in the smoke. With each flash of the light she was frozen in time, like a snapshot stolen from the darkness. A cascade of such snapshots erupted from the dance floor. In one of them she looked my way. In the next our eyes met. In the final one she smiled.

She disappeared behind a sea of ravers. The hardstyle beat like a second heart in my chest as I waded through the dancers to find her. Behind where she had stood loomed the ThymotiX goat, the centerpiece of the stage. It was a leering presence of wood and neon, smoke pouring from its nostrils and unto the dance floor. Beneath it stood ThymotiX himself, bald-head glistening above a ginger goatee. His fist pumped the air above the mixer table, striking the same rhythm that my own body obeyed.

Another billow of smoke drowned the dance floor. The ravers around me were replaced by a menacing red glare. The scarlet gloom pulsated with light as the drop approached. My second heart beat in tune to that light and it felt as if the whole dance floor was pumping torrents of blood into the night. I prowled that gloom looking for the girl. Half-formed shades emerged from the smoke and the light to tear at me, stare at me, leer at me. They clotted the way to the girl, a cardiac arrest on the dance floor.

The lights dimmed and the darkness was thick with sweat and smoke. The only thing I could clearly see was the eyes of the great goat. Red lasers trailed from them, strafing through the crowd. As I approached the place where the girl had been, it started to feel like I was being hunted. A voice boomed from the speakers.

After death, life.

My second heart skipped a beat when the drop came. Strobe lights shot through the darkness as Molly crashed against my nervous system. My first heart pumped wave after wave of red-hot euphoria into my limbs. Then the thousand snapshots in the dark melted together in the roaring heat of my brain, a chimera of bodies quivering against mine. A single golden streamer of light flashed through the smoke, tasting like honey. When the synths screeched, a finger of ice ran down my spine like an orgasm.

That’s when she found me.

With the swishing of a skirt she stepped out from the mist. Leopard patterns played on the fabric, illuminated by the strobe light. She wore low-cut canvas shoes, the laces shining in the dark. Then, as the dance floor exploded in purple light and a shower of golden lasers, I saw her eyes once more. They glittered with feline mischief underneath a mane of curly auburn hair.

She pounced from the mist and took hold of my hands. I couldn’t hear her laughter, but I saw it and felt it ripple down my spine. Her fingers grazed my arm and I could feel my skin melting, like cotton candy on the tongue. The beat rose in tempo and it felt like my heart was killing itself in an orgy of its own making. I couldn’t stop moving, couldn’t stop dancing! Inertia had become like a kind of death to me. My muscles raged like the ocean in a storm, shivers rising and falling like waves across my body. I held onto the girl like a man drowning.

Her body was so firm, so warm, so charged with life. Lithe and sensual, she danced like a snake swimming across the waves. Her skirt rubbed against my leg, the bite of pleasure flaming across my skin. She pressed closer and closer to me, her hair caressing my cheek. Gyrating against me, panting and writhing, my whimpering lips running down her moist neck. Her scent was that of woman’s sweat laced with amphetamine.

Holding her was like submerging my body into molten love. I felt like I was pouring into her, like I would never stop sinking into the heat of her body. Every nerve tingled at the thought. When the next drop came, she seized my hands again and tore me away. She locked her fingers with mine and I noticed how my palms were dripping with sweat.

We waded through the hazy crowd. Arriving at the entrance, she pulled me out into the night. The air was tepid and fragrant, smelling deeply of forest mixed with the sting of tobacco and the spice of cannabis. She raced towards the tree line, smirking at me as she did. Her eyes twinkled in the darkness. I threw a glance behind me at the old factory, a rotting edifice of concrete and rust at the edge of the forest. Lights in a thousand colors were flashing through the boarded up windows. I turned my back on it and followed the girl beyond the trees.

The branches cracked and whipped around me. As I stumbled forth and swore, I could hear her lilting laughter through the ringing in my ears. The music still pounded through my body, but softly now. Fingers locked with those of the girl, she led me into a small clearing away from passersby. I shivered through clenched teeth as I saw her turn towards me, flames of love licking at my brain.

The moonlight lit the small clearing. In the silver light I could see that the mischief was gone from her eyes, replaced by leonine intensity. Her sudden kiss was without softness or love. A leopard’s canines hid within the silk of her lips and the taste of hot blood mingled with the taste of her blueberry chewing gum. Kissing her felt like being devoured.

A fever of lust awoke in me as she tore at my lips with hers. Molly was still searing my nerves, melting me like chocolate in the grasp of the girl. I wanted to mix with her, to mingle spit and spirit, to plunge into her. I burned with the need to love her until even the heat of love in me was spent.

The cloying night air barely cooled the sweat on my chest as I pulled off my shirt. I felt slick, as if the night was running in rivulets down my back. She, too, felt slick in my hands. The darkness made her skin look like marble and her heat made it feel almost liquid. It was so soft, like satin on glass. She pushed me onto the flowers and the weeds with the same murderous intensity she had kissed me with. I lost my breath when she pulled up her skirt and straddled me, lungs silenced by drug-fueled shivers.

I had never felt more naked than under her hands. My moisture mixed with hers, our wet bodies writhing like serpents in the night. Her long nails ran gently up my chest as she rode and whimpered. The light of the moon played through her wild hair, the fake flowers in her wreath seeming to be made of silver. Then the pain began.

I gasped, shivered and bucked against her when the first agonizing sting shot through my body. Her nails were buried into my chest, blood pooling on my pale skin and running in rivers down my ribs. It was warm and sticky. White-hot pain mingled with the wet feeling of our bodies mixing together. I roared like a wounded animal. Half of it was from pleasure, the other from pain.

But the scream died in my throat. A vice had closed around it. Though stunned by pain, I could still hear a sickening crunch escape from between her teeth. I gasped for air and clambered at the girl, once more the drowning man. Instead of air, I swallowed a lock of her hair. The blood pooling under me was like glue, flowers sticking to my back as I heaved about. She chewed again and again, the crunching becoming wetter and wetter. Blood seeped into my mouth. I tried again to breathe but could not taste the night air. Only iron and hairspray.

Panic first hit me when the darkness began closing in. I kicked wildly at the ground, heels sending tufts of grass flying and feet slipping in the mud. I tried to push her off me, but her muscles were like steel tethers. Beyond the curls of her hair I saw the moon dim more and more with each hopeless thrash of my body. The shock and suffocation had robbed my muscles of all their strength. When I finally took to hitting her it was already over.

From the closing darkness came another sensation, rising to meet the pain. It slithered forth from the wetness between our bodies, first hissing, then roaring. My violence had whipped her into a savage grinding, her whimpers replaced by a shrill moaning. We each approached our own completion – hers a banshee shriek, mine a dead man’s rasp.

At her peak, she threw her head back with a savage tug that tore out my windpipe. With it came my own end, a last violent wave of heat thrown into her ocean to be quenched. As my life emptied into her, I could see black drops falling from her chin. The beat of my second heart grew fainter and fainter until it quieted forever.

In my hand lay her wreath, torn from her head in the moment of climax. It rested gently in my palm. One last spark of awareness lingered in my fingertips, savoring a final sensation before midnight.

The flowers were real.