It’s like someone forcing you wide open with metal hands that can’t feel. (I sure do love redheads, sweetheart.) It’s like that Tin Man grabbing around on your insides and wrapping your intestines all in his hard cold fingers that never numb you but just slice like ice. (You’re just pink and red everywhere, aren’t you now?) You reach out to grab him back but his razor sharp skin leaves shrapnel in your fingertips that grabs onto your nerves and migrates through your system all the way to your eyeballs until all you can see is metal and blood. (You seeing red, sweetheart? You squirm just like I thought you would.) And when he roots his hands around enough—gets that hole inside you big enough—he sits his hard cold self right down inside your base and in your being where you thought that you could keep things safe. He leans down real close to speak in your ear because now he thinks he owns you like the lover you have at home, waiting on you—unaware. (Aren’t you glad I’m here?) And then that Tin Man pisses his venomous liquid, freezing cold—just like him—with metal shards that flow from his insides now. (Feels like I’m the only thing that’s ever been inside you.) And those shards travel in mercury currents up through your veins and into your throat and everywhere in between. Shards of him just sticking into you all along the way where you know they’re going to stay no matter what you wash them down with. (Shh…sweetheart, don’t cry now.) And you can’t scream because if you open your mouth to try and force all the poisonous metal parts out, those bits and pieces of him just dig down deeper into your throat until you can’t even speak above a whisper. You think of your lover and how he loves your red hair, burying his face in it and breathing in deeply as if the smell of your hair has the power to wash his sins away. But you can no longer hear, no longer see, and you feel this wound forming that not even your lover’s sweet words could ever close up. And once you’re nothing of yourself and all hard cold metal inlay—with thoughts of a Tin Man ticking inyour brain—that hard cold metal man is just going to walk away. (I told you it’d all be alright, sweetheart.)
Printed with permission by Alyssa Cooper, copyrighted by Alyssa Cooper @ 2009
