Ariadne

I've been waiting here forever, it seems, waiting, waiting, waiting ... ever since he seduced me. I want him to come back so badly, but my wanting doesn't do any good. I need him. I'm weak, getting weaker, too much to go out and get my own food. He has seduced me and left me. Why would he do that? Why leave me here to starve? He could have just killed me.

It is cold in this basement, but I don't feel it like I used to. I am cold, too, and it doesn't bother me. Still, I wish there was furniture. I sit on the hard cement floor, in a corner where the cement block walls meet, and wait, alone. There is a cat who sometimes peeks in between the slats nailed over the window, and I want it, but I do not have the strength to get up and go out after it. He has drained all the strength from me, and every day he doesn't come back I grow weaker. When he comes I will be nothing but a skeleton with a sunken face, rattling in dry skin, and he will not want me then. My hair will be dry and brittle and colorless, my nails yellowed and cracked, my teeth loose in their sockets and my eyes shrivelled and sightless. He will see me and turn and leave in disgust before I can crawl across the floor to him.

He seduced me with his mystery, and his otherworldly love, and now I am his and there is no escaping. If he abandons me there is nothing I can do. I cannot belong to anyone else, not even to myself now. The world has disowned me, or I have disowned it. He kissed my neck three times and I am his. I must wait in this underground darkness all night and sleep all day out of sight of the sun's eye.

I think perhaps he is dead and I giggle at my own joke. I really am getting into a sad state. Of course he is dead. But where is he?

There is a spider in the far corner, a crunchy, juicy spider. Must I scrabble along the floor for bugs? Will they keep me alive? In a novel I read they kept a man alive. Not a man. Someone like me, someone seduced and discarded.

I do not think he is coming back. I must eat the bugs, so that I will have the strength to kill the cat, and drink its blood. Then perhaps I will be able to kill for myself and drink sweet, warm, human blood. But if he comes back, he will bring me something, surely, a child or a rabbit or something pumping warm blood.

Maybe he will come back. I do not think I could eat the spider.