This is just a little section from larger piece I'm writing, but wanted it to be critiqued. Suggestions on how to amplify Melancholy's weird-ness wound be appreciated.
Here we go!
The next morning, my emotion-liquor hangover allowed me to get out of bed and dressed without feeling my newly-realized heartache. I didn’t feel my heart tear as I started to wake up and use it again. I was numb.
The stress put on mi corazon had slowly started a fissure when I was in dreamland, not knowing that every second I was blissfully happy, my heart was breaking in more and more places.
I stumbled downstairs, everything was blurry. The world around me shifted, and nothing had depth. Nothing had meaning anymore. The toaster was just metal and the floor was wood nailed together. My drunkenness made my head hurt like I had been dealt a blow to the temple. Crashing into the kitchen, I sat down at a bar stool where I normally ate breakfast and talked to my mom when she ate dinner. My head fell into my hands and the sweat mixed with the blood of my heart to create an acid so potent it burned my lungs like bleach. Tears didn’t wash the hurt away. But the Vodka of my feelings might. This vodka had a brand. Her name was Melancholy.
“Hello, Sarah.” Melancholy appeared like an angel in the kitchen doorway and looked at me. I must have been a pathetic sight, too; hair fresh from bed, tears and sweat smeared on my face. Her perfectness alarmed me. Like when someone is so perfect in a horror movie, you know they’re the killer. And she would have played a kick butt killer.
“Get away from me.” She was freaking me out. For one, where the hell did she pop up from?
“You know, you shouldn’t have started drinking.” There was an almost empty bottle of brandy on the counter. But it wasn’t mine. It was my father’s. He’d been drinking a little more than never lately since he was having problems with his job. This behavior hadn’t bothered me because Dad wasn’t an abusive slobbering drunk or anything, we were just Italians who like fine wine. Drinking was a respectable part of my family. But as Melancholy held the bottle as Exhibit One and sneered, the alcohol seemed childish and immature.
“I wasn’t drinking.”
“Sure you weren’t.”
“No really, get away from me.” I sat up straighter and backed up to the very edge of my stool.
“But you don’t even know who I am.” She smiled and a honey-sweet voice dripped from her lips. Perfect lips; she was beautiful. Every line where it ought to be. Refined nose. Complexion the color of fallen snow. Long, angel blonde hair. But her eyes were, at the least, horrifying. Glowing blood red on the rims and deep violet in the middle, they seared into my head and drilled a hypnotic stare into my soul. I remember in science that red was the longest wavelength of visible light and violet was the shortest.
Her eyes.
She was first and last. Melancholy was here to take the whole of me.
“I am Shiva, the goddess of death. I am Hades. I scream your name while holding you in an iron clasp you will never escape from. I am Zeus of the heavens. I am death. I am fear. I personify evil. I am everything you hope for. I am what you never wanted to see.” Her eyes flashed and undulated the colors of my mortality. They glowed, searing their mark of shadows onto my heart. I felt her mark like a brand on my chest. She had me owned like we people own cattle.
“I will be your sunlight,” she held her hand up to a ray of morning light coming through the window and grabbed onto it. Somehow, she took that wave of brightness and strangled it, until it became only a shadow on her palm. She them returned her gaze back to me and the mark of servitude on my heart steamed, glowing red like hot iron. “and I will also be your darkness.” She scared the shit out of me.
Melancholy reached for me, glacier hands cold and dank, wanted to clasp my very soul. They came towards me, inching, flowing, even in her death grip, graceful. Fingers entwined themselves through my hair. She ran her nails across my hot cheek, saw-like hands ravaging my feverous skin. Her fingers traced around my face and then down towards my mouth. Melancholy’s muscles tensed, her wrists tightened. I watched her toxic blood pulse through her veins that popped beneath her translucent skin. I sucked in one last breath. I wasn’t sure if she was going to give me any more.
