Post by lauren on Mar 7, 2006 11:28:13 GMT -5
Suckers for Love
“Help,” she screamed.
“Come back!” she cried.
The frightened dowager was far from alone in this lake. Her head bobbed idly above the water as her lifejacket was put to work. But no lifejacket could save her now, she thought.
The little demons were closing in on her and the boat drifted further and further away. She opened her mouth to scream again, but a wave tumbled over her; fearing that she may swallow one of the dreaded leeches, she quickly closed her mouth and kept her lips thin.
It was not long before they had made themselves comfortable and opened their gaping mouths to take a suck. Josephine frantically wagged her arms and legs, but the 6 rows of teeth on each leech seemed to have caught onto a good niche in her skin. Quick to try another method, Josephine pinched at a leech on her elbow and tugged it off. Another leech soon took its place.
Her only chance was to swim, to swim to shore and make it back with enough blood to maintain a life. Making sure to keep her head out of the water she performed a freestyle, cringing every so often at the thought of the blood oozing out of her body.
She was going to die, just as Ike had, her life was going to be sucked out from her body.
She stopped, exasperated. The loss of blood was making her woozy.
“Oh Ike” she cried.
She had always liked to imagine Ike was in a warm place, but she always knew, she always knew this was not so. His life had been sucked into the squirming bodies of these leeches. He was there, he was there with her. Every leech was a drop of Ike’s blood. The leeches assembled like this, it was almost as if Ike was here in her presence, to comfort her in death.
Her head was aching from craning it out of the water whilst maintaining a freestyle position. She let her head fall as she succumbed. Her fallen head half in the water had attracted a leach.
It punctured the skin directly below her lip.
It felt of warm wetness.
It felt of a kiss. Yes it is a kiss, she thought, that is Ike sucking at my lip.
With a more gentle movement she touched the leach on her face with a shaking hand, but quickly wrenched it off in disgust and mastered the energy to keep swimming. Her face felt somewhat cold now, the warm mucous the leech had left behind had now been washed off by the sea.
She tried to keep her mind off the leeches as they dug deeper into her skin. They seem to make small waving thrusts, she thought, as if every suck requires a burst of energy which reverberates out of their body. Oh the tingling vibration as their suction holes gaped open and shut; it was almost massaging.
“No” she thought aloud, how she could go on, with such temptations drawing her back. The shore was a long way from here, Ike knew she would die, he wants her to die peacefully, he was massaging her a comfortable death. “Oh Ike” she whispered, the leeches furiously sucking down her blood.
The woman closed her eyes and relaxed as she floated on her lifejacket waiting for death. Smiling softly she stroked the leech on her right shoulder as she weakened into a thoughtless slumber.
After a minute or so of waiting, she was woken by the sound of distant voices. Opening her eyes, the world seemed to have changed quite a bit through an almost unconscious vision. In the state she just made out the blurry outline of a green sailboat. The frail woman slowly began paddling towards it, but as she did a daring leech squeezed its way through her lifejacket and took a bite into her breast. It was then when she realised.
They had come to take her away; they wanted to seize her from her husband when she had only just found him. “No!” she gasped.
With all the energy she has left, her hands worked to unbuckle the straps of her lifejacket and with one last breath she plummeted into the depths of the lake.