Curiosity kills the Twilight
“Alright this is it.” Twilight’s sneakers pounded against the sidewalk, the view of CHS coming over the cookie-cutter-house horizon. “This is my big break!”
Cars whizzed by, shouts and police sirens pierced the once calm nighttime air. Red and blue lights flashed, street lights flickered from distant explosions, homes suddenly lit aglow with television light up and down the street.
Finally, sandwiched between a corner sliced building and an aged-eaten row home, Twilight found the perfect place to watch this new energy in its habitat: Canterlot High School.
Several students ducked and ran, dressed in their prom best but leaving behind the coca-cola white smiles as they ran from the flying rubble overhead. Twilight didn’t heed their warning shouts of alarm, instead, following the clock-ticking of her locket nestled against her chest.
“Finally, a good shot.” she looked down and brought the locket to her face, not even stumbling as an older boy's shoulder checked as he ran by. With a click she started her voice recorder in her other hand.
“Log 42 on strange local energy housed within Canterlot High.” A window broke next to her, she smiled giddily as another scream rang out. “A ‘bat-like-creature’ mentioned on police scanners has been spotted terrorizing the area and the local prom night.”
She aimed the locket up, where she believed she creature would dive too next.
“Various accounts through social media have also mentioned destructive capabilities such as-“ Twilight cut herself off as the supposed ‘bat’ rounded the corner and came into view on the now solely occupied street.
Its skin was a bright waxy red, splotchy with boils as big as golf balls that congealed and bubbled against her skin, like her muscles were trying to claw out from inside her face. At least, Twilight assumed, it used to be a she.
Deep tracks had carved down, down, down from the bright red seeping seed of what was once her tear ducts. Melted blue hot flames of tears into finger deep tracks of burning flesh, muscle, fat, and teeth.
For a brief moment Twilight recalled the time when her science teacher showed the class a video of a twenty-five foot tapeworm being removed from someone's intestinal lining. Despite strings of gore hanging off it like morbid Christmas lights, and how only moments ago the surgeon was elbow-deep inside the patient’s stomach, their life literally clenched inside his fist, everyone still smiled.
They chatted, joked, one nurse even said they should all pose with it like those guys on tinder. It felt like she had been let in on some bizarro world. A brief glimpse into a world outside her own. Twilight didn’t eat fish for weeks after watching that.
The stench of burning human fat permeated the air as thick globs of hair and flesh clung and sunk to the corners of her mouth before dripping down onto the ground like a human candle. The searing scent of burning flesh haunted her every jerky movement.
Filets of skin appeared to have been savagely ripped off her face, the remaining bits of red and yellow hair turning fully, deep black blood red. All these pieces hung off her body, her neck, the contorted mesh of devil and human left in her face, like the viscera crown deer wear shredding their antlers, only this was her mouth.
Squint her eyes Twilight saw big wells of golden ichor, the color of gasoline, pooled in her penny hot eyes. Pitch black bottomless holes of collected hate so dark you could fall through. Yet they seemed sad, like those dog commercials that ask you for money.
Her jaw was horrifically configured, dropped out of socket and pulled by an invisible force forward to make room for the fangs- no, tusk sized teeth that had curled in a painful twist towards her face. It forced her already disfigured and monstrous face into cruel mockery of a smile, sinister in every sense of the word.
The leather sludge, that was once a jacket Twilight assumed, had fused to her skin, melting into a black chitinous ooze that leaked down her arms and stuck to her body like veins.
Never for a moment did Twilight consider looking away, staring into this abomination of human and devil. She never once considered her safety or turned to look at her crumbling surroundings.
The beast, creature, whatever it was, never once looked at her. Didn’t even spare her a glance as the ticking on her locket turned to overdrive, pointing directly at the ghastly caricature of a human.
With one swoop of its meaty claws, it grabbed a chunk of concrete, steel, and rebar like it was nothing and tossed it towards the sight-hidden entrance of the school. Before, suddenly being launched away by an invisible force and heading like the sun towards Twilight.
It didn’t really feel like anything once it hit, rubble crushing her chest, lungs speared by a stray piece of rebar, it all happened so fast. It just simply was. Like a snap of a genie’s fingers.
The sounds of the fighting moves away without her. And it all falls silent. Nobody around her is alive enough to scream for help, or maybe, like her, they all know it won’t do any good.
The blood melts against her skin, like a cherry on white shirt. The smell of copper was so thick in the air it was how Twilight imagined chewing on a handful of pennies would taste like. Her arm is numb so she can’t even check her locket.
“You were such a good kid,” Twilight Velvet would say to her daughter if she could see her right now, blocking the sun with head, her white, frail hair shining like a halo. “So good. So bright.”
Her voice would flow through the frankensteined rubble of her daughter, like fingers steepled into a comb. Every word pronounced fully and set in stone, dragging across her hairline one fingertip at a time.
“Why do you do these things, Twilight?”
Twilight had only ever seen her mother smiling, even with worry. This was the first time she had ever seen her with a flat face. No anger, no shame. Just disappointment. Her voice was as flat and dead as a stone in the bottom of a lake, unmoved by the waves that raged above.
“Why do you do this to me? You’re so much smarter than this, I know it.”
“I know…. I know mom,” Twilight hiccuped another blood-red cough down. “I never liked being smart.”
Twilight tries to twist her hand to look at the locket, but only finds its spewed electric-green guts leaking from its body, just like her. Emerald wire intestines intermittently spark like the fourth-of-July sparklers her mother is so fond of.
The crack of the glass face, pulled from her father’s pocket watch, catches the light of an orange blaze overhead, so bright it could have been the sun within her palm. But it’s just light.
A light that catches inside her glasses, refracting a shimmer of colors back at her, like a stained glass window hitting a puddle. The only glimpse of warmth it will ever see.
“You could have been having dinner right now,” her mother would say, placid and hollow the only way outliving a child can make you. “Or studying. Or sleeping. Any number of things but this. Anything.” Her mother pleads, flat faced and empty. “Anything but this.”
With every flutter of her iron teeth eyelashes, she could feel the bear trap of her eye slowly start to bite around her.
“You were meant to do great things, Twilight.”
“This was my great thing mama.” she felt big toddler wells of tears build in her eyes. It stung against the blood.
“Yes. Was. It’s now the thing that killed you.”
Twilight doesn’t understand what people mean by life flashing before their eyes - The life you had, or could have been. It felt more like a dull yellow of subtitles flashing at the bottom of the screen. A footnote smudged with ink. The chorus to a song you can’t remember the words too. She wishes she could write this down.
“You were meant to do great things.” she hears again. She tries to remember her birthday, a soft golden glow burned out before she could blow it out, tries to imagine her graduation, hands shaking with Dean Cadance, skipping grades and shipping off to college early.
She can think of closer things, the breakfast left uneaten this morning, the school work in her bag, the loneliness inside her workshop. But it all comes back to the clicking and clacking of her keyboard on her jury-rigged computer, two years past warranty, that first showed her this energy. Click-clack, click-clack, click-clunk. The space key always got stuck.
The arm with the locket still won’t move.
“What will I tell them? What will I tell your brother? Your father?” She looked down at the rebar lodged between Twilight’s ribs like it held all the answer's in the world, and not her daughter. “I will never be able to get your body out of this.”
She could see in her mind's eye, her mother shifting by hand through the rubble while bystanders looked on with pity for the dead girl’s mother.
“Poor girl,” they’d say, with the same sad affection as a dog about to be put down. “Poor, dead, girl.”
Of course, Twilight’s mother isn’t actually here. The real Velvet is at home, doling out spoonfuls of salad out, fussing over everyone, while the TV blares out - Shelter in place, Traffic expected, Keep indoors - completely unaware.
“Awful thing,” she could hear her mother utter at the television, turning it off, “I wonder what happened.”
Still, she would cry. “I’ll never get to see you again, baby. Why would you do this to our family?”
Twilight looks away, looks down at the graying arm that still clenches the broken locket, the only way rigor mortis could, even though she knows it’s too early for that to set in. Probably. It's hard to tell time when you're dying.
Soon, like everything, Twilight Velvet is gone. Twilight breathes half in, and then half out, in solitude. The rumble of her breath mimicked the raspy purrs of a street cat she liked. It claws out from between her teeth, clinking like knives and forks to dinner plates.
There is no fighting it, she doesn’t even know if she would if she could. There is no last standing. No heroic finish. No eleventh hour in a saturday cartoon. Just quiet, near silent, skeleton breaths that wheeze through the debris in her lungs, her bottle-neck throat closing tighter and tighter, not letting the cool night air replace itself inside her.
And as it gets tighter, Twilight can feel her heartbeat weaken. The kernel of warmth, of hope, loses its grip on her blood, knowing it only pushes out to crab-cracked bones, raw flesh, and rebar skewered ribs, and rot, rot, rot. A rot sweet with death.
Her brain tries to catch up with this reality, tries to accept it for what it is, but it is too slow. Too fast. Nothing moves at all. It couldn’t end like this. It was.
Twilight tries to close her eyes to let it cover over her, like the first time her mother carried her to bed from the car, but they shoot back awake. Close again, shoot back weaker. Close once more and it’s done. Over.
And there is nothing at all in that dark.
Death is silent. Creeping slowly around the skirts of your eyelashes. It waits in the doorway, watching you for but a moment that feels like eternity in that child-like way, the hum and warmth of the car still lingering in the air. Death watches, waits, and carries you to bed without a sound, everything so far away as it takes you to bed, just one room over from life. So close you can still hear people laughing.
To be born again is wrong. Unnatural. It thrust you back to the highway, filling you with sound. An orchestra of cicadas sawing their legs undisturbed, the sudden burst of a jetliner cracking through the air, the sputtering and coughing of an old truck startling awake.
Twilight is back, sandwiched in that alleyway, the coolness of night spitting like the sea against her. Like nothing ever happened. Not a stone out of place. It's quiet, the trill of crickets hum around her.
Twilight falls to her knees - in what she realizes mutely, is not a prayer of thanks - a cacophony of sounds bounce off her, spewing from every angle, like crows dive bombing cars.
Yelps and cries, a bell tolling and cars honking, the chorus of a hundred teenagers chanting in exuberants. Every bird chirp, every electric hum, every breath and smacking lips sound she had learned to tune out from birth, suddenly screams at her.
Sixteen years of life condensed into seconds of growth. A sudden onslaught of memories that cram through every single nerve like an ice pick taken to the back of the neck.
Twilight, once again feeling the atmosphere settle on her skin, of a stable heartbeat behind her ribs, everything in life she took for granted, is needed to be relearned in the matter of a second.
Twilight couldn’t see the riots of grass whipping in the wind, the asphalt still warm with evening, the dark lines of trees that lined the street, with her once life-parched eyes.
Twilight had always been alive though, hadn’t she? Always been the sole brainiac daughter of Twilight Velvet, and also the stubborn knot in her mother’s hair, destined for greatness and with so much talent it practically overflowed out of her. Twilight’s only troubles at school were making friends and rampant bullying.
Twilight had always lived at 1939 Crystal Lane way, with her brother, her dog, and her parents. Twilight loved her family dearly and wouldn't trade them for a thing, even when she skips dinner to do her homework instead.
The pinging of her flip phone vibrated in the deepest area of her jean pocket. Twilight would come to find out that Velvet had been calling frantically for hours, wearing holes into the living room floor and leaving fallen tears in her wake.
Twilight checked her locket first.
Author's Note
please dont hurt me for this lol
