Requiem For a Ghost Note - Part III

I’m not the kind of girl you take home, but I want to be. The kind that’s strong and proud and someone you want to be with. But I’m not. Instead, I do things to myself that I don’t understand — inflict pain as a punishment.

My name’s Mary Chester, but people know me as Dirty Mary Black. I’ve always wanted to be a star, but settled for a life in adult film. Not even normal porn – BDSM. Vinyl, torture, and humiliation. It’s the one place where men adore me, even if they are freaks. Even if I’m a freak.

I wear vinyl like flesh. It holds all of my insecurities together to keep them from spilling out. It covers my weakness while showing off the one thing that I know I have—the only thing I know I have—my body because the pain that I feel is real. It’s the one thing that lets me know that I’m the center of my lover’s attention.

There’s a void in my soul I try to fill, thinking I can somehow take a little piece of every man I’m with. One flick of the whip. A tug on my hair. A man’s hands around my throat. Any bit of attention.

The abuse I endured as a child ruined me in ways that I don’t even know, and right now I’m feeling like I’m about to die from all of the drugs pumping through my fragile frame, but that doesn’t scare me.

What scares me is the man who showed me this world. The man who made me his submissive, his slave for two years. He’s here — tonight. He’s a walking devil. He showed me true fear.

Cold, vacant eyes that settle into black holes of a soul that doesn’t exist scan the room. The man’s a murderer, but I can’t prove it. All that’s left is to hide amongst the filth, hoping that it will camouflage me from his hollow gaze.

Inside this space, I feel an angel on my shoulder. As I look into this mirror, I take my salvation like a communion wafer —a tiny bit of ecstasy to make me forget all of the horrible things I’ve had to do—to make me forget that death’s around the corner and knows where I live.

My face pools with sweat as my body vibrates out of control in this bathroom stall, tiles cold pressed to my flesh as my paranoid nightmare tears at me. I need someone to save me. But nobody’s here. Why won’t you save me? Please don’t let him find me. Oh God, please don’t let him find me.

The spasms overcome my body in wild waves, shuddering through my being as the force of the universe shoots through me like a terrible wave of dark matter that pierces stars, shattering them into cosmic angel dust that covers my soul. Are these even my thoughts? Whose voice is this in my head? What were those drugs laced with?

I wretch like a creature in the throes of death, unable to comprehend that the nightmare has only begun. A chill settles upon me as I realize that every form of my existence has passed into the dark nebula of his cold grip. He wants to hear me scream one last time.

I welcome death like an old lover as it offers me one last caress, but it cheats me out of a lasting peace only the grave knows, forcing me to accept a living hell on Earth.

But something’s changed. Something settles over me as I know that somehow I’ll live through this. Something has stripped away all the fear and revealed to me a vast horizon of truth. An illusion has been shattered.