The last face I see before my life is choked out of me is my lover’s face. My god, what a goddamn coward he is. He doesn’t even look me in the eye when he wrings my neck hard with his gloved hands as if it’s a wet, dirty rag. How did I ever think that he’s a hopeless romantic?

  I asked him once how he'd feel, if suddenly I stopped seeing him.

  “Devastated,” he answered with a kiss.

  I was truly touched. I thought back then I snatched the man I dreamt of spending the rest of my life with, though he had already made vows to another woman under God. What had mattered to me was that he loved me, and we were going to have a life together one day after he served his wife the divorce papers. He sealed that promise with a blue sapphire ring.

  But he isn’t devastated once the flame of life in me was extinguished. Instead, he looks relieved. He cries into his hands, then starts to cackle.

  His eyes shine with tears, and he smiles. I know what he’s thinking. My death has made his life a little less complicated. Just before the last breath leaves me, I wish I hadn’t answered that ad.

  The ad online read: “In search of a hard worker with an upbeat personality who can handle basic maintenance and cleaning, maintain a professional appearance, and work well unsupervised.” It was the payment that caught my eye. No other household paid as much as this family was offering.

  The Reyes family’s house is one of a dozen houses guarded within a high brick wall like a fortress on a hill looking over the cityscape. I’d never been in such a big house before. One room was as big as my entire apartment.

  After a brief meeting with their then-housekeeper, I wandered into the kitchen and poked my head in the fridge, looking for something to quench my thirst, when he strode in and stood behind me. His unexpected presence startled me, and I ended up dropping the carton of pomegranate juice, spilling it all over the tiled floor.

  I imagined the man of the house to be a tall, unearthly handsome being in a dark well-fitted suit who lighted up the room with his kindness and charm. So, when I finally met him, I was surprisingly a little more disappointed than in awe.

  He looked ordinary with his neatly combed dark hair, caterpillar-like eyebrows, and black beard, but behind the round pair of glasses were brown eyes so piercing I felt them cut through me. He carried an air of authority around him, and it shadowed over me like an approaching storm.

  We both noticed that the juice had wet his house slippers. I thought he’d get mad over the spilt drink. Instead, he chuckled, and his intense stare softened, sparkling with amusement. Just as I was about to apologize, the housekeeper swooped in with a rag and got on her hands and knees to clean the mess up, simultaneously apologizing to Henry and shooting daggers at me.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “She did nothing wrong; it was my fault for startling her,” and giving me a gentle squeeze on the shoulder, he added with a wink, “I’ll go pick up more juice for you, if that’s what you wanted.”

  I left the house, feeling like I didn’t get the job, judging by the stern looks the housekeeper kept throwing at me after the little incident. But when he called me later that evening to say I was hired, I was surprised.

  At sunset, with me in the trunk wrapped up in blue tarp, he drives up to the mountain, fumbling with the radio dial for an oldies station. He and his family own a sprawling two-story granite stone house near the Rocky Mountains overlooking a pristine and calm lake. It’s their home away from their city home.

  After a few months of working for him, he kindly suggested that I join him and his family at their second home in the summers. He said that I'd enjoy the warm sunny weather and the quiet beauty of the surrounding nature. Of course, this offer came with the condition that I worked a few hours a day, including weekends, as their housekeeper. But on my time off, I was more than welcome to make myself comfortable in the TV lounge. Sometimes he joined me, and we watched whatever was on the channel. Other times, he brought out a board game from the storage closet, and we played for an hour or more.

  Then, there were the lost hours…

  When his wife and kids went out to do some shopping in town, he stayed behind, claiming he had a lot more work to catch up on. He said it with a twinkle in his eye and a wink, when his wife wasn’t looking. Goosebumps rippled all over my arms, and I went red. All along he had planned on burying himself deep inside of me, reserving each of my three penetrable orifices on certain days. The Hole-y Trinity, he used to call them.

  And what a lovefool I was to let him. I never thought that after telling him about our own little creation growing inside me that he’d be burying me instead. Because he’s a scared grown boy.

  The car stops. He finds a good spot in the woods, miles from the closest hiking trail and a few yards from where his property line ends. He brings out his shovels and starts ripping the earth, digging as deep as he can, without a break.

  He tosses me in without the tarp and covers me up with the cold earth like a boy throwing out his broken toy into the garbage can, until he's sure not a part of me poked out that’d catch a random passerby’s attention.

  No flowers, no Lord’s Prayer. Not a single tear dropped for me. Well, at least, Henry didn’t think to take his chainsaw and cut me up into pieces and feed me to starving wild animals that roam the forest. I’m glad about that. Because I’m going to crawl out of this pit and come back and take him down with me.

  Piece by piece, I’ll chip away bits of his sanity, bits of his soul, and bits of his body. I yearned for him to endure my heartbreak and pain, and not a second of relief or mercy would be given to him. Because judgment was without mercy to one who had shown no mercy.

  Vengeance fills my soul to the brim. All the creatures in the woods stand stock still, heckles raise before they scamper away, daring to never return. The woods are lifeless, not a bug in the dirt or on a leaf.

  The winds howl for me, and the moon shines a silvery beam upon my unmarked grave. My soul awakens with a burning fury.

  *****

  I’ve a thousand eyes. I see through the eyes of the fly darting across the air, the eight eyes of a spider dangling from the broken ceiling fan, the five eyes of a roach scurrying across the floor toward the dark space under the desks—three eyes that detected dark and light and two eyes to detect movements. I hover over the living, breathing beings unseen.

  Henry is bored.

  The meeting is stretching close to nearly its second hour and yet the chairperson rambles on. His eyes flicker over to the clock on the wall, and restlessness is starting to make him fidget—shaking his right leg, twirling the pen between his fingers.

  I know what will calm him down, and it’s in the inner pocket of his blazer. He has the same thought, too. He reaches into his pocket and pulls out a lock of my hair tied up in a rope string. I remember him snipping a lock of hair when I had just died, and my essence slipped out of the body. He wanted a piece of me with him.

  Keeping the lock in a fist, he rubs his chin with it, pretending to ponder and show concern over the chairperson’s points. Then, he rubs the hair against his cheek, closing his eyes and reminiscing about the times we had together.

  Henry was my first kiss, though he claimed it was accidental. We were in his car on our way to drop me home. He leaned over to help fasten my seatbelt when he turned his head and brushed his lips against mine. It lasted a few seconds, long enough for the moment to burn in my memory—the warm and softness of his lips, and the musky smell of his lust.

  He didn’t say sorry, instead he said, “Oops, that was an accident…” And I sat there dumbfounded, unsure what to do or say, but when he told me not to say a word to his wife, I simply and numbingly nodded.

  He explained that his wife might not believe that it was ‘an accidental slip of his lips,’ so he couldn’t keep me around.

  I didn’t want that at all!

  “Don’t worry, Mr. Reyes, I won’t say anything.”

  He clasped his hand over mine, caressing my knuckles with his thumb. “Good, good,” he said, grinning. “Also…”

  “Yes, sir?”

  “You can call me Henry.”

  The second kiss, however, wasn’t an accident. Henry and his wife had waltzed into the living room, giddy from the Christmas party they had attended. I was at their house babysitting their nine-year-old son and six-year-old daughter for extra cash. While the Missus went upstairs to check on the children, Henry waved a mistletoe above our heads. He couldn’t wait any longer.

  He already showed enough restraint and went in for the kill. This time, he slipped his tongue out. It was like a fat slug sliding along the seam of my mouth and leaving a trail of its slime.

  I should’ve opened up and bit that tongue.

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  Hard.

  Henry’s eyes shoot open, and he groans. The other directors and executives sitting at the long mahogany table all turned to him. Their faces scrunch up in disgust as he coughs and spits out blood on the papers in front of him.

  Shocked and embarrassed, he hurriedly gathers up his papers and notebook and throws them into his briefcase. Excusing himself, he heads out of the conference room and into the restroom at the end of the hall. He sticks out his tongue and inspects the nasty injury in the mirror.

  He hisses. Along the side of his fat pink tongue are my bite marks. A piece of flesh dangles near the tip, oozing blood. He quickly rinses his mouth and presses a handkerchief to the wound.

  I draw close to Henry’s ear and whisper the words he said to me that Christmas night, “I couldn’t, you know, help myself.”

  He swerves around with a hand clutching to his pounding heart. His widened eyes darted around the room.

  The door swings open, and he raises a fist, ready to strike, but the man takes a step back in surprise. Henry instantly recognizes him as the associate director of marketing—Connolly— and hastily apologizes.

  “Jesus! What has gotten into you?” Connolly asks. “Are you alright? You just bolted out of that meeting!”

  “I’m fine.”

  His colleague raises a skeptical brow as he eyed the bloody handkerchief. Henry shoves the cloth back into his pocket, telling him that it’s not a problem and that he had started to doze off at the meeting and accidentally bitten his tongue.

  Connolly chuckles. “Ah, yes, the meeting was as dull as ever. All meetings are a waste of time and could be delivered in an email. Meetings are a circle jerk for loud ramblers.”

  Henry rinses his mouth once more. Spitting into the sink, he’s relieved that the bleeding has slowed down. His spittle isn’t as red as before.

  “I should get home now,” he says. “I promised my wife that I’d make it in time for dinner.”

  Just as he’s about to head out the door, Connolly calls out to him. “By the way, you left this behind in the conference room,” he says, holding up my lock of hair tied with a rope string. “I thought you might want it back.”

  Henry’s face pales. “Thanks,” he mutters, snatching the hair from Connolly’s hand.

  “So, whose is it? Who is the lucky lady?” Connolly unzips his pants and pisses into the urinal.

  “My wife… She can be quite sentimental. She thought we should carry a piece of each other whenever we’re not together. I guess, in a sense, there’s not a day where we’re apart.”

  Connolly cringes. “Oh, good lord, that is absolutely fucking cheesy.”

  “Yes, well, you know how women are.” Henry stuffs the hair into his pocket and leaves for the parking garage.

  I want to show him how sentimental I am about our secret love and how I couldn’t rest in peace in the unmarked grave he had lovingly dug for me.

  As he drives, I snuggle up to him like how I used to when we went on one of our excursions at night. He phoned the missus and said he’d be at the office all night until morning because his boss dumped a large stinking mountain dung of paperwork. But I was in the office waiting for him to hang up. And once his wife was convinced and had accepted his promise to make up for his absence later, we were off together in his loud, fast Porsche.

  But this time he’s driving the Benz. It’s a smooth, calm drive with a jazz band playing on the radio. He has the window open letting the cool breeze brush his hair, as I snuggle closer, wrapping my arms around his shoulders from behind and my lips near his right ear. Then, in the rearview mirror, our eyes meet.

  Henry doesn’t realize he has veered off the lane, until the car beside him blares its horn and he corrects himself at the last second, barely escaping collision.

  He snaps his head around searching for me. His hands are still on the steering wheel and his foot on the gas. But he doesn’t see the traffic in front of him has stopped at the red light.

  The crash happens fast. A loud, terrible screeching of metal being ripped and crushed. Glass shattered and flew everywhere.

  I run a hand through his hair, which is now wet with blood as glass shards are wedged in the wound. His face is smeared with blood and ruined by a nasty gash on his cheek. His eyes flutter open as he comes around; he’s relieved to be alive, though the relief is a fleeting moment. His expression is quickly awash with horror.

  *****

  The family gathers around poor, pervy Henry. Heavily sedated, he’s lying in the hospital bed, looking helpless and weak. His wife sits by his bedside, stroking his hair and squeezing his hand, while their young son, holding onto his little sister’s hand, awkwardly stands behind his mother, unsure of what to do or say.

  Seeing him in such a state, expectedly, breaks the family’s hearts, but what they don’t know is that even in an unconscious state, Henry is still a sick little demon. Unlike the rest of his limp limbs, his dick rises like a tent pole, and the corner of his lips twitch into a slight smile.

  He’s reliving a sweet memory; an afternoon delight we had together. While his wife was out shopping with her girlfriends and his kids were in another room, he had me sucking him off in his study. He was working at his desk with his pants slipping down past his knees. Every fifteen seconds, his fingers paused on the keyboard, his body tensed up, and he’d muffle the loud groan trying to pry his mouth open. But then, the 15 seconds turned to 10, then to five, and then zero.

  He went rigid, and a scream forcefully escaped his lips. I remember that moment vividly. I, too, became tense, but not for the same reason as him. In the midst of this, his little daughter rushed into the study, asking, “Are you all right, Daddy? Did you get hurt?”

  Panting as if he had just run a marathon, he straightened himself up, careful not to show that he was nearly pants-less. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. “No, no, no. I’m alright. Thanks for asking, honey. Go back to your room and play there.”

  She nodded and shut the door behind her.

  Now, Henry is replaying that afternoon many times over, while his family is on the verge of tears. But on his tenth replay of that fateful afternoon, I tweak the moment just as he reaches the climax. Instead of waves of pleasure, agony throbs throughout his body, and he desperately pushes himself up, attempting to shake me off. The harder he tries, the deeper my teeth sink into him, gnawing through the skin and muscles. Tearing off his prized and beloved scepter, I swallow it whole, like how he always wanted me to do.

  He jolts awake into the real world, howling in terror.

  The scene terrifies his kids, clinging onto each other and crying. Henry’s wife rushes out of the room to find the nurse. As she returns with two nurses in tow, Henry starts convulsing. One nurse holds him down, while the other injects a dose of sedatives into his bloodstream.

  No one knows why he woke up screaming. By the time he finally comes around, and the grogginess of being drugged out for hours has faded, Henry can’t remember why either, though that horrible feeling still lingers. His body twinges with pain, and his trembling hands lift the blanket. He wants to be sure that his precious scepter is still there. When he sees that it is indeed in its rightful place, he cries out loudly in relief, much like a child who has just found his long-lost cherished toy.

  His wife fills in the gap in his memory about the car crash, recounting how the firefighters pulled him out of the wreckage and how lucky he is to have been saved in time before the vehicle suddenly exploded. He’s well aware of his luck, being the sole survivor, while another man tragically died on impact.

  Looking lovingly at the one who’s been the most loyal and faithful to him, he tells her that he can’t wait to return home. The accident has forced him to realize she and their kids are what matters to him most. This time, he promised to be at home more often. They’ll go on a trip to Europe this summer, from Paris to the canals of Venice. He rambles on and on about the landmarks they’ll visit and the cuisines they’ll enjoy. It’s all the things he once promised me.

  His words, however, don't seem to move his wife. Narrowed eyes, pursed lips – I know that look well. She's pissed about something. Henry finally falls silent as she pulls out a zip lock bag from her purse and tosses it onto his food tray, scaring off the fly that had been dancing along the edge. The fly buzzes angrily, circling around his head before settling in the far corner of the wall. What they don't know is that I, through its thousands of tiny eyes, am staring down at their soured faces with an unobstructed view.

  Inside the zip lock is his memento of me—the lock of hair. A nurse found it in his pocket while they were undressing him and carefully placed it with his other belongings to return to his family.

  I know that his wife had her suspicions about what Henry and I did behind closed doors. No doubt she smelled the musk of our fucking that hung thick in the air. But one word of protest could unravel the family. And so, from across the kitchen island, all she could do was quietly watch me sweep the floor, dust their furniture, and wash the bedsheets reeking of mine and Henry’s fluids. Her eyes were full of quiet contempt simmering behind a fa?ade of calm composure.

  That very same glare is now fixed on Henry. “The kids and I are going on a very, very long visit to my parents’ house.”

  “Okay, when will you come back?”

  An icy silence fills the room as she gets up from the chair to leave, turning a deaf ear to Henry’s desperate pleas for her return. He pushes the tray table aside and attempts to get out of bed, but suddenly, a blinding, sharp pain shoots through him. His legs fold under him, and he collapses.

  Oh, my sweet, sick Henry.

  His legs have turned red and swollen, resembling cased sausages riddled with boils of varying sizes, some as large as marbles, extending from thighs to toes. Inside each fatty purple boil, something is moving. The slightest movement he makes triggers a rippling effect down his spine, radiating to his throbbing legs.

  Hearing his pleas for help, the nurses rush in but stagger back, their faces draining of color. After overcoming the initial shock, one of the nurses quickly snaps on a pair of medical gloves and gently touches one of the boils. As it bursts, it squirts a yellowish ooze with an awful odor. From the gaping hole emerges a red centipede with hundreds of yellow legs. It falls to the floor with an audible "plop!" and quickly scampers under the bed.

  More boils pop and emit the foul odor as centipedes and roaches pour out of them, crawling all over his legs. The nurse sweeps the insects off Henry, yet more seem to emerge from the holes.

  The doctor believes it’s a bacterial infection and suggests applying a topical antiseptic cream to help. But the wounds don’t heal. Soon, necrosis creeps in. I’ll start with the tips of his toes. He liked having his toes kissed and suckled, and he especially relished the feeling of my tongue rubbing between them.

  His toes blackened. The nails slip off. The rot inches its way to his ankles creeping up to his legs. The nurses rotate shifts every other hour, wiping off the pus with a cloth then cutting a sliver of the rot where underneath it is the new skin, pink and raw. But the rot always returns.

  He is whisked away to the MRI room. Despite Henry being unable to move anything below his waist, the doctor finds nothing out of the ordinary in his lumbar region. Nothing that explains his condition. No sign of a herniated or ruptured disc, not even a pinched nerve.

  An unusual detail catches a nurse’s eye. She directs the doctor’s attention to a minuscule black object in the shape of a ring at the lowest part of the spine. The doctor dismisses it as a defect in the machine, and they run Henry through the machine again, but the images once again show the black ring-shaped object. Gently pressing a finger against the spot in Henry’s lower spine, the doctor asks him to rate the level of pain on a scale of zero to 10, with 10 being the highest.

  “Two.”

  Something is lodged in there.

  The doctor presses a little harder.

  “Seven!”

  When the doctor presses much harder, a sharp unbearable pain radiates through his body, reaching beyond the scale of 10, as if a bullet pierced right through him. The round object is growing a millimeter a day, and the pain growing sharper and ripping through the muscle fibers. Soon, Henry finds himself on the operating table succumbing to the anesthesia.

  As the doctor presses with greater force, a sharp, unbearable pain radiates through Henry’s body, going beyond the pain scale tenfold, as if a bullet is piercing him. The round object continues to grow, a millimeter each day, while the pain grows sharper, tearing through his muscle fibers. Before long, Henry finds himself on the operating table, yielding to the embrace of anesthesia.

  The surgeon opens him up, carefully probing around Henry’s lower spine until the source of his pain is found—a blue sapphire ring. The promised ring he gave me. The one buried with me in my unmarked grave.

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