Do you think that the devil told Alexander to keep going?

Excerpt from an imaginary book

A final breathless cry and she falls on her back, exhausted. I fall on my front, slumped next to her as she reaches for a smoke. Looking down, I breathe in the sheets for a while until I slowly drag myself up, with the weight of a prehistoric beast. Quietly, I angle my body to face her on the side, positioned like a French girl. I just watch her existing in time from that angled view on the bed, saying nothing. Staring at her like a pervert.

As she puffs out the exhaust like Billy, she turns her head brusquely to me, then back to empty space, then me again, then back and again and again and again, my unhesitating gaze like a warning shot of introspection.

“What now?” she interrogates, not looking at me.

I continue staring at her, my head resting on my fist. Cliché descriptions like ‘milk white’ and ‘jet black’ recycle through my head until I think of better ones. Soft strands of curled ink brushed down and over her slanted canvas body, over her paper-white breasts and under her back. She was a charcoal sketch under a blanket right there, an impression of my gaze.

“I’m gonna go downstairs”, she announces, without intent.

“Do you think the devil told Alexander to keep going?” I ask.

She barely registers it.

“I gotta get up, I need a drink.”

Without a movement from either of us I ask it again.

“Or do you think that the God he worshipped ever told him to stop?”

She then looked at me in the eye, twirling her body to mirror mine, putting away her cigarette on the windowsill above us with her other hand. Our eyes locked, I fixate on her.

“I don’t know”, she says.

“What do you think though?” I persist.

“Why… it doesn’t matter what I think. I don’t think anything.”

“It matters deeply to me what you think.”

She puts the cigarette back in her mouth, breathes the stuff out, then puts it on the windowsill again, like a marionette in the shadow play. I watch her, I watch her like a movie.

“Do you think he heard voices, telling him to stop?”

She then huffed like a girl and slumped every bone in her body to lie flat, before tilting her head to face mine. She stares at me without expression, without interest- our eyes simply locked in fighting embrace, the rigid death of mutual company.

“I mean, we all have our demons, right?” she asks, without any questioning tone in her voice.

I consider it, letting her words weigh deeply on my bare chest as I stare at the ceiling, hands behind my head. I said nothing for 30 seconds, letting the thought penetrate me entirely, making sure it washed over thoroughly.

“You know what I think,” I finally begin. Throughout talking I wrapped my arm under her bare back, lifting her body onto mine, as she adjusted automatically to kneel over me. “I think the devil spoke to Alexander, and he said: ‘Earth is not enough for the likes of you’.” She seemed to agree, with all of her body and mind. Our agreement lasted long into the early hours of morning.