Death by Train, a Love Story

A perfect specimen of manhood. He prefers the Studio 55 with all-white interior. His hunter’s costume is a tailor-made suit, white herringbone business shirt with open wingtip collar. His bare chest rises and falls with each breath. He senses her attention, fucking him with a look as he lingers in practiced slouching, eye of his own hurricane. He fingers the steel cocktail pick in his martini glass. At its tip the olive, hideous puke green with a mini-gherkin stuffed in the hole. Crassly protruding.

When she screams no one hears her, tied to the railroad tracks. The metal rails press into the soft flesh of her shoulder, and she feels them coming alive. Bloating with power, surge of friction from twenty thousand tons, black iron pounding. Hot wheels on the hell train.

His earliest hero was Snidely Whiplash, morning cartoons. He loved the black skinny-fit jeans, the double-breasted duster coat. Later the movies, Joker with his scar smile, Heath Ledger’s dead eyes—

His killer’s costume is a custom black sports jacket, black stretch pants, boots made from polished stingray leather. He wears a railman’s waxed handlebar mustache, fashioned from his hair that he collected.

She leads him on at the Studio 55. He’s never seen her before. She wears all red, heels that could take out your eye. The turn of her mouth says she’s ready to do it, and he really "likes" that about her.

He likes the tracks by that stretch of highway barely used. He’s always prepared, carries an extra length of rope, hemp, 1¼-inch thick, made from sustainably sourced jute. His boots sparkle in the moonlight. He always resented the caricature of Snidely’s face, the oversized jaw, green skin, when Snidely was clearly such a sophisticate. He puts it down to jealousy.

She’s like fresh blood on the studio dance floor, hot and bright from a severed artery. He imagines the iron smell of it, running thick on the railroad tracks, splatter on his shirt. White and red and white. Smeared red lipstick. The Joker’s kiss.

If he ever danced with someone like this, he can’t remember.

He read a book once, about a man who loved beheading people with a sword. Whenever the man met someone knew, he mentally sized up their neck.

At the end of the book, the man who loved beheading people was beheaded.

He dances close and whispers to her about the beheading man, and she laughs.

He prefers the men’s black long smoking jacket, like wearing the night sky. Polysilk quilted collar and foldback cuffs, luxurious against his nude skin below. Between her thumb and forefinger she teases a slimline cigarette holder, raising it to her lips in his apartment. Penthouse, modern style. Fresh burns in the carpet near her red red shoes, naked without her feet. She’s keeping them for herself, tucked out of sight on the chair.

In his bedroom closet, the black stretch pants hang neatly folded and creased on the trouser hanger clips, stainless steel. Drycleaned and pressed. The mustache is in the bathroom, in a leather case that closes with a snap, Death Grip brand mustache wax, all natural, cruelty-free ingredients. Good for the skin.

He eats the lies she dishes to him across the space that separates, wingback chair and oxblood fainting sofa. About her innocence. Caviar of falsehoods, Kobe beef and raw egg yolk glistening, they fill his mouth. The bare white flesh of her throat, shea butter. Sweet anguish and white satin sheets.

White opera gloves. No fingerprints. The mustache twitches on his face, the man in black. Consummate sophisticate of reaping. He walks to the bed, but feels a strange lethargy, a disconnect. His foot is too far away, his ankle buckling. The moon through the windows is huge and luminous like he’s never seen it, cratered and monstrous, and impossibly beautiful as she slips from the covers.

Suicide on the tracks, suddenly in the path of the locomotive by a stretch of highway barely used. A man in black skinny pants and stingray leather boots, a railman’s old-fashioned handlebar mustache. An incurable romantic, that’s what they say. Nights spent alone with cheap bourbon in a battered recliner chair, endlessly streaming black and white war movies, young couples torn apart by circumstances. Pencil skirts and fedoras, broken kisses. His note leaves no doubt: a heart broken, a thoughtless lover. This tender soul crushed by the gears of life, too gentle to go on, sacrificed to the ideal of true love. A hundred red roses mark the spot, wilting in the hot summer sun.

THE END

*Feature image by psychoshadow (Adobe)