Sumptous
Midnight

All work copyright the author



Intoxicated by her beauty, he swaggered out the brothel door. It was a ludicrous business mixing Absinthe with desire, but a four-year standing practice in Cooper’s life. He’d be damned if he could remember the girl’s name, but she couldn’t have been more than sixteen. Arabella? Bailey? Celeste? Cooper could go though an alphabet yet not remember.

She was the nameless Aphrodite that injected him with passion unheard of. Familiar streets now aroused shadows and ghost – reminders from a wicked, twisted past. Yet Cooper wandered, remembering the shadowy vixen next to him, murmuring foreign speech into his ear, his mind, his soul.

Her tantalizing taste lingered upon his tongue. And although hunger cried from within, Cooper found no satisfaction in the sustenance he held in the decaying cabinets of his home.

Whether it was coming off his intoxication, or if her passion had set a trance within his mind, he began to view those tarnished, cracked, molded, crumbling cabinets as a metaphor for his life. His wasteful, thundering, spiraling, indulgent life.

Long ago, Cooper remembered sitting in pews, listening to utterances of God and salvation; purity and saintly hood. And with a single fatal sip of a sinful, sumptuous midnight, all his religious instilments scampered away in the wake of whorehouses and taverns.

With one palm against the cabinets and the other against the floor, Cooper let himself drown in miserable tears. His twenty-four years of life and artistic talent had wasted away to this – to her, the glorious Venus, strewn upon a rose-petal bed of seduction and desire, green fairies at her lips and in her hands offering to Cooper the fantasy of his pitiful, erotic mind.

There she appeared, standing over his pathetic frame, drenched from the purifying water pouring in sheets outside his home. Her face with forest eyes, and midnight mane, and mouth of succulent curves stared intently into his. Her body trembled, or perhaps it was Cooper’s mind. As she fell nearer, Cooper felt her icy warmth engulf him; her deathly kiss penetrate his spirit. And so, she came in robes of flowing black, a nameless Goddess, to steal away his deplorable life.