i don't miss living near most of my family, tbh, but i DO miss terribly the recovered meth addict uncle.

A Night in Kyiv

“I’m an angel who was attending a school of Satan.”

Anatoly Onoprienko

We have broken our way into an abandoned tenement in the slums of Kyiv. Piles of trash are scattered about recklessly. A black pentagram has been spraypainted on the wall. We mark all the squats we occupy this way as a tribute to Beelzebub. The wallet I stole from the old man I stabbed to death in the park earlier that evening has enabled us to spend a little extra money on drugs. A hypodermic needle filled with high-grade heroin sits next to a piss-stained mattress lying on the floor. I stole some vodka from the market on the way back from the Peste Noir concert. Most of the bottle has been finished. We're thoroughly drunk by now. You can't wait to make love. You're already lying back against the side of the mattress with your skirt hiked up over your pale, young legs. Our skin has yet to become leathery and peel away from our bones like it has to a lot of our friends who are addicts, though my track marks are becoming blacker and blacker—the chronic nature of my abuse growing impossible to ignore. I'm grateful that I was able to cop some decent drugs for a change. Due to the grinding poverty we are forced to endure on a daily basis, we often have to use a substance that is less potent and far more toxic than heroin to keep from getting sick. Were it not for the deplorable conditions of our environment we would not have to inject this garbage known as desomorphine. We are smarter than this! We are better than this! But the hopelessness of our situation keeps us down. We cannot raise our voice to our oppressors for fear of reprisal.

After having suppressed my rage throughout my adolescence, I found solace in Satanism. Huysmans once stated that Satanists are no more than disappointed Christians. Well, I am disappointed. Not only in Christ, but in the entire world. I am disappointed with the U.S. and globalization's fallout. I am tired of being caught in the middle of a tug-of-war between Poland and Russia like a helpless child growing up in a dysfunctional household. Centuries of oppression boil inside me, but I’m not allowed to scream. I must suppress this fury.

I’m getting sick. I feel weak. Tingling sensations radiate down over my shoulders, emptying out into my legs.

You want to make love, but I tell you we must shoot up first.

You have only been using needles for a week. You were twelve when you became my lover. Now you are thirteen. Your arms are as white as a Calla lily drenched in a gauze of mist. They show no trace of abuse. You’re still inexperienced and squeamish so I have to inject you myself.

Everything unfolds before us in black and white as if we were actors in a film. Our favorite scene gets played back over and over again unto eternity. I hear your breath in my ear while I find a tender, blue vein under the light of the moon. The plunger descends beneath my thumb and memories of our love are pushed back into my mind…

You were lost when I met you. The drowning ghost of Ophelia lived inside you. And your emerald eyes climbed out of the black waters of your long hair to cling to me for dear life. I introduced you to the Devil and you embraced His power wholeheartedly. I took sadistic pleasure in seeing what heresies you were willing to commit in His name. We vandalized and burned churches together when I wasn't introducing you to the lowliest depths of sexual degradation. But as our fascination with the occult grew into an obsession, it became apparent that we had both become equally enmeshed within a web of inescapable evil. Murder became more than just a means of fueling our habit. It became a mainstay.

We left a string of killings behind us. We talked about them for hours together, recalling certain details about the incidents that one of us may have missed in the heat of the slaughter. For instance, you were particularly interested in what our victims were wearing. Whether it was the diamond brooch we pilfered from your aunt after clubbing her to death in the schoolyard or the ring I had slid from off the finger of a dismembered hand seconds before proposing to you under a sanguine moon, you always had an eye for accoutrement. You remembered the pattern of the knickers that the street vendor from Andriyivskyy Descent wore when we stripped him down at the abandoned factory and forced him to drink drain cleaner, putting cigarettes out on his chest as he ingested the toxic concoction. After removing a pauper's private parts with a box cutter and feeding them to his dog, you kept its collar, not only as a memento, but to wear around your own neck as a fashion statement. You always had a strong sense for aesthetics.

What fascinated me was how some of our victims would assume an entirely passive stance once they came to the realization that their death was inevitable while others would scream like bloody hell until their very last breath. A trucker we ambushed on Hertsena Street was surprisingly resigned after I had slit his throat. Having worked at a slaughterhouse, I knew it took considerable time for a pig to die after this. Instead of panicking or trying to escape, he just lay there in the brush beside us, surrounded by tall stalks of hazel grass as a burbling fountain of maroon viscera bubbled out of his mouth. Watching the individual suffer is half the entertainment when committing a homicide. He wasn't animated enough so I stabbed him in the eyes with his own house keys hoping that would jolt him into action, but he hardly flinched. We took turns carving upside down crosses into the fat of his thighs but he nary moved an inch. On the other hand, a young woman and her five-year-old daughter would prove to be quite the handful. Not the daughter. The daughter behaved in much the same fashion as the old man, though I only know this from what you’ve told me. I was busy with Mother Goose. She sure squawked like one. Enough for me to have to stuff her mouth up with my own sock while gutting her. After considering these psychological phenomena, I asked you whether or not you intended to die softly or put up a fight.

Your purple lips curved into a serene smile. Lightly dusted with pollen from an upturned window box of chrysanthemums nearby, your cheeks betrayed an ever so slight blush of excitement. Bearing the tenderness of a kitten and the immaculate aura of a cherub, you answered thus:

“If it is for my Master, the Great Spirit Lucifer, I shall approach my grave with open arms. He has assured me during His visits that we will have a place beside Him at the foot of His throne so long as we have done His bidding on the material plane. The violence of our passion burns with a flame intense enough to carry us into the netherworld where we will rejoice together in love everlasting."

The Gods of the Pit must have been watching out for us. For we had successfully taken out almost a dozen people without a trace of the law in sight. But the season of our good fortune would abruptly change one afternoon.

We had been terrorizing a homeless woman in a field just outside of Puscha-Vodytsia. Cold drizzle pelted us as I smashed her head in with a shovel. Amping up the bludgeoning to a hyperbolic frequency, you, my ashen-haired accomplice, whipped her with the branch of a tree. In beige, mercurial gobs, the three of our shadows fused to create a single form projected onto the shivering walls of grass around us. The ghostly reflection of our struggle wavered in the wind. She whimpered and drooled as her brains spilled out of the top of her cracked skull with the same disorder as the tentacles of a freshly beached squid. On a trail less than a yard away, a little boy happened to be riding his bicycle. I knew he recognized you as the missing girl in the papers because he stopped momentarily to get a better look at the scene. I tried to catch him but he sped away.

Now we are on the run, hiding out in the slums of the Ukraine.

Your beauty shines through the gray pall of the room. You excite me beyond measure despite the potency of the heroin. I'm no longer paralyzed by the grinding stress of being hunted amidst a country about to go to war when I’m entering the clean, silky haven of your insides. It seems I could live off your spit and your fluids forever when we are bound together physically. I see the look in your pleading eyes and know what you want me to do. I wrap my hands around your throat and start to squeeze. It’s hard for me to stay focused on making love to you while I'm choking you, but I do it because you’ve come to love it so much. I derive no pleasure from this. I have to be careful not to deface your fragile skin or use too much pressure while at the same time maintaining my own level of arousal. This is difficult for me, particularly when I'm high. I do this strictly for you.

You’ve told me you’ve experienced visions of the Beast while being throttled and tonight something wondrous happens. Lucifer comes to visit, not just you, but both of us while our bodies are entwined together in that squalid lair. Inky jets of smoke climb out from the back of your head as you speak in tongues entirely foreign to this world. Sweaty bundles of pale yellow and green fungi growing on the far wall behind us swell to life. An oozing globule of sulfuric vapors congeals to form a static cloud in the shape of the Horned God. He stands over us, calling upon us to express our devotion to Him through the throes of our lust as we writhe about the floor in throes of illicit rapture. Your face begins to twitch as I apply extra pressure to your platysma muscle, clenching my teeth together so tightly they threaten to pierce the insides of my mouth. Your throat—so pure and white that it never so much as reveals the horizontal stress lines that all of us possess from infancy on—is now wreathed in blue and purple corals of broken blood vessels as ecchymosis sets in from vagal inhibition and the increased strain against your hyoid bone. Your hypoxic climax is a sea of convulsions squirming in my clenched fists. Milky clouds fill up the green domes of your eyes and a tear of black blood runs down your left cheek as my darkness empties into you, blotting out what little you still possessed of your purity like an oil spill spreading out from the center of a crystalline pond.

I collapse on top of you, resting my head atop the thin plate of your solar plexus. You’re coughing violently. You pull yourself out from beneath me. I lift myself up and watch you in silence as you gasp for air while clutching your throat. At first I’m worried I’ve gone too far this time, but you flash me a faint smile to assure me you’re okay once your composure’s regained. I breathe a sigh of relief. I haven’t disappointed Lucifer by denying Him the sacrifice we’ll be offering Him when we execute the joint suicide pact we planned for tomorrow on Walpurgisnacht.

"Regie Satanas," I mumble under my breath.

Solomon Fiore - March 18, 2017

<photos: Aleksandra Petrova>

Special thanks to Aleksandra Petrova of the Kitsune Klan.