Read Warmed and Bound: A Velvet Anthology for Free Online

her by not tearing her to pieces, by not taking her inside me one bite at a time.
    Too focused on myself, what I thought instead—right before I pulled out of her, before she pushed me against the stall divider with her tiny wrists full of their fragile bird bones, and definitely before she slipped past me without giving me the last kiss I so desperately wanted—what I thought then was, This one time will never be enough.
    Still misunderstanding everything, what I said was, I’m going to need to see you again.
    Her mouth laughed as she exited the bathroom, the sound so loud my ears were already ringing by the time I got my pants up. I raced after her, out of the bar and into the cold parking lot, where I lost her to the night’s thick blanket of confusion, its sharp starlight and fuzzed out streetlamps. 
    I waited for the sound to stop, and eventually it did. Nothing she’d done would turn out to be permanent. Her smell would be gone by morning, and the teeth marks on my face would take less than a week to scab over and then, to my terror, heal completely.

    For the first time in months, I went home to my apartment and emptied the kitchen junk drawer onto the dining table. I picked up the tiny nails and paper clips and stubs of pencils and erasers and whatever else I could find and then I jammed them into my system. I considered pouring myself a drink, then stopped and took a long hot swallow from the bottle. I smashed the unnecessary tumbler on the corner of the counter, watched as the cheap glass shattered everywhere. Stepping carefully so as not to cut my bare feet, I picked up the most wicked shard I could find. I held it in my hand, then set it in my mouth, rested it on my tongue. I swallowed hard, and when I didn’t die I went back for more.
     
    ——————————
     

All the Acid in the World
    by Gavin Pate

    Sunshine
    At thirteen they made the pact, swore they’d reign forever. The Acid King and Queen. He told her you have to do it this way, taking off his clothes in the middle of the woods and folding them on a patch of pine, because it’s ritual, it shows a way to God. She nodded and peeled herself naked. He tried not to look at those freckled breasts, knowing she knew he was looking just the same. They couldn’t hide anything. 
    This is ceremony. 
    She said she knew that too.
    They scored the yellow blotter from her cousin’s friend, the one who said it would burn right through their brains. No matter. They already couldn’t concentrate in class, couldn’t stop drinking their parents’ liquor, couldn’t wait the three months before they’d be policed at 4:00 a.m. in the orange chairs of the elementary school, Wizard of Oz singing Dark Side of the Moon off some teacher’s VCR.
    In the woods they held each other’s hands and the trees bent into a portal blowing a voice through their flesh. She came down talking of a tunnel in her grandmother’s basement, that behind a bookshelf burrowed not into the middle of the earth, but a secret passageway to the second floor restroom of JC Penneys. He said God lived in the dirt, and she agreed, said Hippo Penis, and they found laughter everlasting under the cap of a small red tree. 
    Mostly he rode his bike past her house morning and night tasting the air that watched her window and not feeling the crucible already hanging from his neck. 

    Escher
    Fifteen.
    The stairways went up and down and came around to beetles and fish, open panes of window glass dripping soaked and drowned.
    She hung posters in her room, he drew imitations on the desks.
    The hits were big—MC Eschers under their eyelids—and they went to class, laughed off lessons, learned walls can cry and breathe.
    They ran away from home and stole her grandmother’s Maxima with the factory equalizer and Guns N’ Roses all the way to the beach, a mix tape with nothing but Sweet Child o’ Mine and November Rain over and over again.
    But later he’d remember not the strips of