Fiction: Ada, Adalynn

By Maria Barnes

    I killed Adalynn, my nineteen-year-old lover, by repeatedly stabbing her with a fruit knife. It was not because of a flash of jealousy or blunt dissatisfaction with our relationship. The deepest, darkest despair was the only reason for my actions. But first, let me follow her shadow to the kitchen, for neither of us has had our coffee today.

    Look at this cold, indifferent room. The first thing you see here is the chair Adalynn used to sit on when she stayed the night. One morning, I pressed a hot teaspoon against the back of her neck, and she lurched forward, almost fracturing the chair. She cursed until I unbuttoned her shirt and stroked her rigid spine. Later, pacified, she let me caress her soft breasts and bury my face in the mess of her brown hair.

    Do you see the table before us? There is a dark stain in its round center where the wood absorbed atoms of Adalynn’s brief existence. Every time I look at it, the stain pulses like a drum. And it’s getting louder.

    Once the sound overwhelms my senses, I haul a particular memory out of my fevered mind, not to take pleasure in it, but to prolong my suffering.

    And here she comes.

    Ada, Adalynn, my hopeless darling. You often shouted at me for spending too much time on my phone because you thought there was someone else. You accused me of unfaithfulness and spouted the vilest words I have ever heard.

   “You are insufferable,” I would say in the end.

   I recollect the day when I grabbed your hair and, with full force, hit your head on the table. A single glittering thought span like a car wheel in my mind; I wished to drown your vulgarities in your blood. You went quiet at last, so I disentangled my fingers from your hair.

    You look at me from our mutual past, and my suffering amuses you. But let me return to my memories once more, for it’s not over for me yet.

   You kept asking what the name of my fictitious lover was. And even evidence of my loyalty did not halt the destructive course of our arguments, for you refused to believe me. The unabashed need to fuck me day and night rose from this jealousy, and even my menstrual blood couldn’t prevent us from having sex.

   Your tongue slipped in and out of me, and after a while, you reached my mouth with your wet lips, leaving a crimson trail on my stomach and neck. You muttered promises as my warm blood filled the space between us, and after I had finally orgasmed, you said you wanted me to come again.

    I place my coffee on the table and watch the light play in the cloudy liquid while I wait. But it’s not your ghost I expect to see. It’s your solid form, all flesh and bone wrapped in the sleepy fabric of the universe, that I try to summon over and over.

    My aspirations and regrets are irrelevant from now on. All that matters to me is your dear face and my desire to abuse it repeatedly and violate your very being until we are both barely human. I kill you every night, but you never stay dead for long. You resurrect your slender soul inside me through a series of nightmares. Yet, you are my only impossibility.

    Then the truth, like a fruit knife, slides into my heart.

    Adalynn, my darling, we can never slaughter our delusions completely. They grow and flourish in our minds, and the only way to free ourselves is to commit the ultimate crime against them: suicide.

    But Adalynn, I still want to fuck the hell out of you.

Maria Barnes is currently studying Literature and Philosophy online. Sometimes, she writes dark fiction. Her work has appeared in Variant Literature, Samjoko Magazine and A Thin Slice of Anxiety, among other places.