Every morning, waking up together, the chaos is unerring and infinite. Their love is brutal and violent and it is scorched into the surface of them: unending and intense. Late one night, with her laughter like music, she carved her name into his chest with a Stanley blade. He wore it with pride, a badge of honour, and he couldn’t understand it when the seeping incisions made all the little children cry, when he drunkenly staggered, shirtless at the motel swimming pool.

Before, he used to aimlessly bump around this city, crashing into other pointless lumps of meat, feeling nothing and desperately screaming for something more. He would drink until he was numb and he refused to accept that this was all there was, inevitably his words became blades and nothing was ever enough. He was drenched in oppressive loathing, incessantly unfulfilled, haunted with nothing but the suffering. 

Together, they are a verdant garden of depravity. They are unity, waging a vengeful war. She is his weapon that he conceals from the world. She is the only one that can conceive of the mayhem that consumes him. He could tell her all of his secrets, gradually revealing all of his scars, and he found solace in the confession of his sins. She would grasp the flaws within him, and make him a better version of himself. She understood what it was to be truly alone, but together they would no longer bleed in silence. All of those times, when he was at his most broken, she could rebuild him and soothe his countless wounds. She gives him wings of purest white, when he has no hope. 

She was always so creative when they disposed of the bodies. She would sew their mouths closed and braid their hair. She would buy little plastic hair bands from roadside garages, and she would place petals under their eyelids as she sang them to sleep. She would buy rainbow coloured streamers and tiny coloured windmills. Sometimes she would devote hours to cleansing their skin and getting their make up just right. She was so attentive; she would touch them and caress them like a mother holding her newborn child. She would take her time decorating them and dressing them up, enclosing them in industrial plastic for their graceless journey to the landfill site. 

When we were finally getting rid of her old Maths tutor, she wanted to spend some extra time over it. She seemed to savour his agony, as he sat there twisting and screeching, soaked in the leakage from his catheter bag. She told me that she wanted to make recompense for all those hazy afternoons spent hidden away in his tool shed, playing his special secret games. Her lust for retribution aroused him; he was itching to get her back to the hotel room with the knotted nylon rope and vegan white wine vinegar. 

She told me that she wanted to remove the skin from his calloused, liver spotted hands, slowly stripping it away like upholstery fabric. She told me she wanted to take his sickly hide and sew it into the lining of a pair of black PVC gloves. She would incessantly carry them around inside her oversized crocodile handbag, but she would never put them on. She wanted to ensure that those harmful hands were never to touch the skin of another; no longer could he spend time stealing purity and desecrating innocence. I still felt bad about the nurse that night; but it wasn’t easy to break into a care home without causing some form of disturbance. All those visits, all those bleach sponge baths and his glazed milky eyes still didn’t register her presence, not even a glimmer of recognition. All those force fed milk chocolate truffles dipped in caustic soda: so saccharine sweet, so deadly.

He would sometimes think that they could leave all of this behind, move on from it all and settle down together. They could make a home together and have a place to stay forever and ever. He could have built a wall around it all and made it their temple. They could create an altar of all their trophies: the minuscule clumps of hair, laced with beads, the silver opal locket with the picture of a sparrow on it, and her favourite, the contorted amalgam fillings that she wrenched out of his detestable skull. Look at them all glistening, in a row, nestled together in the fake art deco glass ashtray that she stole from the antique fleamarket down by the park.

It was around that time that they started getting careless. They even stopped scrupulously cleaning everything down. It was like they wanted to leave them something to find. In those days they were invincible; nothing could ever bring them down. They were rampant, uncontrollable and unforgiving. He knew that they would eventually catch up with them, but that was a far off, ephemeral time in the distant future. As long as they were together, nothing else seemed significant.

Like that time she brutalised that schoolteacher with his brass belt buckle in the stinking bathroom of an industrial estate burger joint. He still remembers giggling as he kept losing my balance on the slippery tiles, rank with grease. She left him face down, burbling in the urinal and they laughed as she forced the blue antiseptic cake up into his mouth: and it choked and choked and choked. He couldn’t believe how it easy it had become, even in the lukewarm rusting hours before sunset when the molten golden light fell upon the distorted face of her latest glowing accomplishment; or beneath a crumbling concrete motorway underpass during rush hour, or in the lighting section of an inner city hardware store.

Her viciousness was irresistible; her ability to inflict pain was monolithic. There were times he would be breathless observing the devastating acts that she could carry out, without a second of hesitation or remorse. Violence flowed out of her: effortless, with an astounding, elegant grace. That was when he was most in awe of her, when she wiped the speckles of red off her brow and her playful, coquettish smile cut through him.

And now, their atrocities have finally caught up with them. It was always destined to end with all of these hopeless blue flashing lights and stern, rage emboldened faces. With all those polyester neckties, just a bit too tight, and all those nights of disturbed sleep and cheap caffeine-stained shirts: they eventually worked it all out, with the reams of paper all spread out on the walls. The news cameras are all here, gasping for flesh. The wind is gently flowing through her hair; the dark strands are gently drifting and floating in the breeze. There is a sharp scent of salt and death on the air and the sun is just setting over the surface of the water. Golden rays sparkle on the surface of her liquid eyes, but she doesn’t look afraid as she sees nothing but his pleading eyes, craving her forgiveness. She looks at him and she knows what is coming. They hold hands and gaze down into their inevitable oblivion.

His knuckles are white; his mind is full of all of the horror that they have perpetrated, yet he feels no guilt. All those crunching cogs gone astray, littered with the carcasses of cockroaches with their insides scooped out. It doesn’t look too far too fall; they might make it after all.

And just as they are stepping off the edge and into their interminable end, she turns to him and a single solitary silver tears slips down her face, and all of the butchery and blasphemy of this uncaring world reflects on its surface, she softly whispers, “I’m having your baby”.

And at that moment, with those precious sacred words, all these desolate plans that he had for them evaporate: together, they will not accept acquiescence, they will not tolerate defeat, and he knows that from this point on everything has changed. He can look through the horizon and there is only clarity: he knows now that they can never, ever give in. He cannot let these clawing animalistic masses bring them down. He will deny their fetid feasting, there will be no crucifixion. 

And now, they are stitched together for an eternity, and he smiles with all of certainty behind him, they will live on, everlasting into the sparkling unknown, as they become: chaos, as three.