holli
coca-cola rollercoaster
ART USED BELONGS TO SULHUAERSHI @ LOFTER & KYARIX_ @ IG !!
JEFF THE KILLER !
The ever-present gaze of the moon’s eye casts its familiar judgment over his back; Jeff knows she must despise him for all she’s had to witness on his account. Silver beams of moonlight nonetheless catch little beads of the previous afternoon’s rain on cropped—no, preened— blades of grass. A touch of indignation at the sight has his fingers tightening on the grip of his knife tucked in his hoodie pocket, the eager anticipation to feel skin split on its point almost too much to bear. A breeze rustles the leaves of a tall oak tree up ahead, but nothing else makes a sound. There’s a type of knowing hush over the lawn as the microcosm of an ecosystem waits for that cutout of a kitchen window lit from the inside to disappear. Waiting has never been as easy as leaping at whatever satisfies his urge for a head rush right away. Yet, nothing beyond this could satiate him so well. So he waits. Impatiently, of course—but he waits.
A silhouette passes by the curtain and he shifts forward in interest, though he stays crouched beneath the coiffed shrubbery at the edge of the backyard fence. There is a pause, then the switch is flipped and that beacon of artificial light is swallowed by darkness, assimilating the window into the rest of the house’s siding. Most of the time, Jeff doesn’t ‘choose.’ He’s too impatient, too feral to care which local insomniac he puts to sleep. He scopes out weaknesses instead: raised windows, unlocked doors, “hidden” keys under welcome mats and flowerpots. The person that fails these tests is certainly unlucky, but nonetheless nothing more than a random statistic pulled from the pool. On any other night, he’d be indifferent to anything except the sweet spot where his hatred of the world and joy in bloodshed intersect. This man, though, is not a random statistic. Jeff is only human, or rather something that passes marginally well enough on a very good day from about 40 yards away, and this lingering human sensibility means some people get deep under his skin. Like this motherfucker. He’s so typically perfect, from his pristine lawn to his unblemished face. God, it’s infuriating. It was a form of fate that he saw him out hiking a day and a half ago, straying uncomfortably close to the territory Jeff considers his own— like a universally ordained encounter between a set of twin flames, except there’s no infatuation, just a raw loathing for all the things this man could stand to represent.
So, maybe not that much like twin flames, after all.
It takes the average person somewhere between ten to fifteen minutes to drift off to sleep. There’s more to it than that, nuances that Jeff is largely indifferent to— in no small part due to his formal education coming to a screeching halt in middle school— but what’s important is that he manages to catch this man slipping. There’s too many ways to escape on the first floor. His track record speaks for itself (and if it doesn’t, his stacks of newspaper clippings detailing his work will); it’s not often that anyone manages to come out of an encounter with him alive. Even so, it’s a risk he’d rather not take. The curtains of an upstairs window are drawn back and he watches, decidedly thrilled, as the sleepless blue light of a computer screen takes the place of the darkness.
Jeff is not a man whose emotions are well-controlled, so there’s a jittery giddiness that consumes him as he makes what are not particularly careful moves up the oak tree. Even before everything truly went to hell, he’d been expressive—there’s the faintest memory left of a woman, maybe his mother, that bitch, telling him once that he wore his heart on his sleeve. As the faint rust-red stains of his hoodie might indicate, Jeff supposes that he wears plenty of people’s hearts on his sleeves now, too.
A bit more cautious than before, he swings down from a high branch onto the low pitch of the roof. It makes a bit of a thud, but the reality is that if he’s this close, it’s already far too late to investigate. He tilts his head to the side, letting out a pleased sigh at the cracks of released tension. Jeff slinks to the dormer and peers inside, seeing that the man hasn’t any idea he’s there—too immersed in furiously typing away to notice. His fingers curl around the lift, one good pull enough to raise the window completely. He’s a bit surprised to see that even this doesn’t catch his attention; seriously, is it too much to ask to get some recognition around here? After going through all of the trouble of waiting, too. That’s why he can’t stand guys like this, anyway.
“Helloooo?” he calls into the half-light of the room as he creeps inside, feet slipping off the sill to land on plush, expensive carpeting. That gets his attention. He’s seen a lot of reactions over the last ten years, but most of the time, people scream at the sight of him. The man doesn’t; the color drains from his face the second he turns around and goes completely still like a wax statue of himself. This response, of freezing up and staring, is second in line—first: the screaming, third: the running, fourth: the fighting. This one amuses him in all of its uselessness, but he still prefers the screaming most of all.
“I saw that move in Jurassic Park,” he remarks, slowly sliding the window shut behind him. “Doesn’t actually work like that, though. I see you.” Jeff taps the side of his own head, saying, “I think I was into that sort of thing, once.” He pulls his hand from his pocket, now holding his knife loosely so he can twirl it as he speaks. In the past, he never really took the time to talk much with his victims. It felt like such a waste of time to delay the action, and sometimes he still does go right for the kill. Even so, there’s a certain pleasure in prolonging the psychological torture. A bit like ripping the legs and wings off a struggling bug instead of killing it. Both of them know he’s going to die tonight, but Jeff has the highest pleasure of deciding when. “What about you—what was your ‘thing’?”
The man stumbles through a bunch of useless syllables before he finally, as pathetic as can be, says, “Please, I- I don’t deserve this, I- “
“Damn, are you serious? I'm trying to get to know you a little. Fucking rude.” Jeff spins the knife around one more time before sealing it in his tight grip. He takes a couple more steps forward as he says, with the heavy weight of finality, "But oh, well... I’ll still fix you. That face doesn’t suit you.”
Cold realization visibly washes over the man just as he sums up the will to try to run—several seconds too late. Jeff tackles him to the floor and, after what he will admit was a decent struggle, wins out in brute strength. His body weight on his chest keeps him from squirming away, and he’s squeezing his head between his knees while he fights the last point of interruption away pinning his wrists down under his forearm. The two of them are close with Jeff’s body bent overtop of his— so close that his frantic, terrified breaths moisten their shared air.
Jeff presses the point of the knife right against the corner of the man’s mouth, slowly letting the pressure increase until it pierces in and blood beads around the blade. It earns him a yelp and a renewed struggle, just as fruitless as other every one before it. He’s done this more than a few times; enough to hone it into a fine, precise art form. The slow arc of the knife as he cuts through his cheek is like a brush in the hands of a painter; methodical work upon a canvas that has now begun to screech and choke on the blood that seeps over his tongue and down his throat. He is just as methodical as he repeats the process on the other side, slicing into his cheek until it hangs on only by little threads of meat left behind. A beautiful sight, indeed.
There’s grotesque, wet sobs and squelching as Jeff stares down at his handiwork. “Much better,” he muses. He can see the shock and pain doing its job to spare him the pain—he hates how quickly some of them succumb to that. So, he makes it a point to grip him by the face, dirty nails digging into the fresh wounds; it drags another shriek out of his raw throat, confirming that he can still feel just fine.
Jeff lets his arms go so he can grip the hilt in both hands. The man notices and tries to take the chance to fight back, but Jeff doesn't seem deterred by his best attempts. He brings the blade up, letting it stay there just long enough for him to process what’s coming. “Go to sleep,” he says, before he’s plunging it deep into his chest and savoring every centimeter of living flesh that gives way under his knife. Still relishing in the feeling, he draws it back out and goes in for another. Though, after that point, he sort of forgets everything except the unfiltered bliss of this act. He doesn’t count how many times he stabs him or think about if he’s still alive— he just craves the sensation of his knife scraping bone and popping sinew and tendons like rubber bands.
When he comes back to, he realizes he’s absolutely destroyed this corpse; it’s the epitome of all that is ‘overkill.’ The first wound by itself would have been plenty fatal, let alone a dozen more. He is well and truly dead.
Head buzzing with euphoria, Jeff pushes himself up off the floor and starts off towards the window. But, in the end, the curiosity gets the better of him. He isn’t one to linger on crime scenes when his purpose is through, however his curiosity is high and his impulse control is not— he turns back on his heel and goes straight to the laptop on the desk to snoop through what this guy had been writing during some of his last minutes.
“Love letters,” he thinks aloud, skimming through what must be pages of waxing poetic about the unnamed person he’d been infatuated with. Jeff doesn’t care much for sappy shit; just seeing it sort of makes him feel a bit sick, like he’s fighting off a cloyingly sweet taste that sticks between his teeth and trickles down his throat. The house is dark and quiet, and he doesn’t hear any distant sirens yet on account of nosy neighbors calling in over noise complaints; what’s the harm in giving it another minute or two? He never did get the chance to learn anything about this man by asking, after all.
MINGMEI MYIOW !
If there is one thing Mingmei has never understood, it's video games.
On the scientific level, of course she grasps the basic concepts: imaginary rewards create real chemical releases, the pleasure of a win leads to chasing more, and the cycle continues ad infinitum until the whole affair is wrung dry of dopamine. The things that make it an obsession are clear to her, but she’s never been able to process why anyone stays with it long enough to get hooked in the first place. After all, there are plenty of things a person could do– things that would create real, tangible rewards instead of substituting it for a fictionalized idea of one– that would make them smarter, healthier, happier. Needless to say, Mei has never been “one” with the ins and outs of that particular habit. She supposes that’s got something to do with why her mother gives her such an odd look when she trudges into the house a half-hour later than usual, carrying a cardboard box filled to its edge with a retro console and its accoutrements.
“What’s that for?” her mother asks from her usual place at the table, watching Mei balance the box precariously on her hip as she tries to get her shoes off without setting anything down.
“Mm,” hums Mei distractedly. “Another repair project.”
“Really? On something like that?” There’s the lightest air of judgment to her tone that Mei could have caught from a mile away, but she knows better than to meet it with any of her own.
“Ah, well- I told the old guy I’d only worked on modern consoles and he insisted I had to at least give it a try anyway. Must’ve been important to him.” She nudges her shoes into a row with the tips of her toes and scurries off to the stairs before she can be met with any more questions. The moment she’s in her room with the door closed behind with an indistinct little ‘click,’ a weight seems to lift off her in the form of a long, relieved sigh. She starts shedding objects like a second skin: the box, her backpack, her thin windbreaker, each onto her bed.
God, Mei has been pining for this exact moment of isolation and bliss from the moment she woke up. At the start of every day she fulfills her obligations just as she should, but her mind is always on how desperate she is to board up her door and never go outside again. Such whims never win, though; she’s never had that type of spontaneity in her life, nor can she leave things unfinished. So, it’s no surprise that the next thing she does is put everything back where it goes: jacket back in the closet, the contents of her bag arranged in neat piles on the desk, her now-empty backpack hung on a labeled hook. Which just leaves the box to be trifled with. Staring at it with a displeased frown, she considers just cracking open the casing and getting to work without giving it the proper assessment.
Nonetheless, her logic wins out against that whim, too, and she resigns herself to another five minutes spent begrudgingly getting everything set up in the corner of her room. As she fumbles the odd, gold cartridge with its scratched-off label and ink substitution into place, she briefly considers the faint notion that lurks in the back of her mind: something about this is weird. Mei never cares much to take notice of her classmates beyond what’s necessary, but they and their families have nonetheless been her only clients thus far. Where had the stranger come from, then? It’s all just so strange. Mei pushes those thoughts aside for the moment and folds her spindly legs under the rest of her so she can sit back on her heels in front of the TV.
It’s only another few seconds before she’s sitting with the controller flat on the floor, maneuvering it awkwardly with the nimble digits of one hand while the other is fixed on the underside of her jaw, nails digging into a spot that’s only just begun to scab over.
“Ben?” she mutters aloud as she’s faced with the file menu. Her eyes squint to study every inch of the screen; there isn’t so much as a pixel out of place. No weird ripples of color down the middle, no anything— she should’ve asked the man for a description of the issue, she’d admit it now, but her animal hindbrain desperate to get away from him and his admittedly unsettling aura had won out against her formal thinking processes during that moment. Just thinking about it has her gnawing the inside of her cheek. Mei starts a new save file under her name, calling it MEIMEI, and begins experiencing a video game for the first time ever. With any luck, she thinks as it fades into the first scene, it will be swift.
The ever-present gaze of the moon’s eye casts its familiar judgment over his back; Jeff knows she must despise him for all she’s had to witness on his account. Silver beams of moonlight nonetheless catch little beads of the previous afternoon’s rain on cropped—no, preened— blades of grass. A touch of indignation at the sight has his fingers tightening on the grip of his knife tucked in his hoodie pocket, the eager anticipation to feel skin split on its point almost too much to bear. A breeze rustles the leaves of a tall oak tree up ahead, but nothing else makes a sound. There’s a type of knowing hush over the lawn as the microcosm of an ecosystem waits for that cutout of a kitchen window lit from the inside to disappear. Waiting has never been as easy as leaping at whatever satisfies his urge for a head rush right away. Yet, nothing beyond this could satiate him so well. So he waits. Impatiently, of course—but he waits.
A silhouette passes by the curtain and he shifts forward in interest, though he stays crouched beneath the coiffed shrubbery at the edge of the backyard fence. There is a pause, then the switch is flipped and that beacon of artificial light is swallowed by darkness, assimilating the window into the rest of the house’s siding. Most of the time, Jeff doesn’t ‘choose.’ He’s too impatient, too feral to care which local insomniac he puts to sleep. He scopes out weaknesses instead: raised windows, unlocked doors, “hidden” keys under welcome mats and flowerpots. The person that fails these tests is certainly unlucky, but nonetheless nothing more than a random statistic pulled from the pool. On any other night, he’d be indifferent to anything except the sweet spot where his hatred of the world and joy in bloodshed intersect. This man, though, is not a random statistic. Jeff is only human, or rather something that passes marginally well enough on a very good day from about 40 yards away, and this lingering human sensibility means some people get deep under his skin. Like this motherfucker. He’s so typically perfect, from his pristine lawn to his unblemished face. God, it’s infuriating. It was a form of fate that he saw him out hiking a day and a half ago, straying uncomfortably close to the territory Jeff considers his own— like a universally ordained encounter between a set of twin flames, except there’s no infatuation, just a raw loathing for all the things this man could stand to represent.
So, maybe not that much like twin flames, after all.
It takes the average person somewhere between ten to fifteen minutes to drift off to sleep. There’s more to it than that, nuances that Jeff is largely indifferent to— in no small part due to his formal education coming to a screeching halt in middle school— but what’s important is that he manages to catch this man slipping. There’s too many ways to escape on the first floor. His track record speaks for itself (and if it doesn’t, his stacks of newspaper clippings detailing his work will); it’s not often that anyone manages to come out of an encounter with him alive. Even so, it’s a risk he’d rather not take. The curtains of an upstairs window are drawn back and he watches, decidedly thrilled, as the sleepless blue light of a computer screen takes the place of the darkness.
Jeff is not a man whose emotions are well-controlled, so there’s a jittery giddiness that consumes him as he makes what are not particularly careful moves up the oak tree. Even before everything truly went to hell, he’d been expressive—there’s the faintest memory left of a woman, maybe his mother, that bitch, telling him once that he wore his heart on his sleeve. As the faint rust-red stains of his hoodie might indicate, Jeff supposes that he wears plenty of people’s hearts on his sleeves now, too.
A bit more cautious than before, he swings down from a high branch onto the low pitch of the roof. It makes a bit of a thud, but the reality is that if he’s this close, it’s already far too late to investigate. He tilts his head to the side, letting out a pleased sigh at the cracks of released tension. Jeff slinks to the dormer and peers inside, seeing that the man hasn’t any idea he’s there—too immersed in furiously typing away to notice. His fingers curl around the lift, one good pull enough to raise the window completely. He’s a bit surprised to see that even this doesn’t catch his attention; seriously, is it too much to ask to get some recognition around here? After going through all of the trouble of waiting, too. That’s why he can’t stand guys like this, anyway.
“Helloooo?” he calls into the half-light of the room as he creeps inside, feet slipping off the sill to land on plush, expensive carpeting. That gets his attention. He’s seen a lot of reactions over the last ten years, but most of the time, people scream at the sight of him. The man doesn’t; the color drains from his face the second he turns around and goes completely still like a wax statue of himself. This response, of freezing up and staring, is second in line—first: the screaming, third: the running, fourth: the fighting. This one amuses him in all of its uselessness, but he still prefers the screaming most of all.
“I saw that move in Jurassic Park,” he remarks, slowly sliding the window shut behind him. “Doesn’t actually work like that, though. I see you.” Jeff taps the side of his own head, saying, “I think I was into that sort of thing, once.” He pulls his hand from his pocket, now holding his knife loosely so he can twirl it as he speaks. In the past, he never really took the time to talk much with his victims. It felt like such a waste of time to delay the action, and sometimes he still does go right for the kill. Even so, there’s a certain pleasure in prolonging the psychological torture. A bit like ripping the legs and wings off a struggling bug instead of killing it. Both of them know he’s going to die tonight, but Jeff has the highest pleasure of deciding when. “What about you—what was your ‘thing’?”
The man stumbles through a bunch of useless syllables before he finally, as pathetic as can be, says, “Please, I- I don’t deserve this, I- “
“Damn, are you serious? I'm trying to get to know you a little. Fucking rude.” Jeff spins the knife around one more time before sealing it in his tight grip. He takes a couple more steps forward as he says, with the heavy weight of finality, "But oh, well... I’ll still fix you. That face doesn’t suit you.”
Cold realization visibly washes over the man just as he sums up the will to try to run—several seconds too late. Jeff tackles him to the floor and, after what he will admit was a decent struggle, wins out in brute strength. His body weight on his chest keeps him from squirming away, and he’s squeezing his head between his knees while he fights the last point of interruption away pinning his wrists down under his forearm. The two of them are close with Jeff’s body bent overtop of his— so close that his frantic, terrified breaths moisten their shared air.
Jeff presses the point of the knife right against the corner of the man’s mouth, slowly letting the pressure increase until it pierces in and blood beads around the blade. It earns him a yelp and a renewed struggle, just as fruitless as other every one before it. He’s done this more than a few times; enough to hone it into a fine, precise art form. The slow arc of the knife as he cuts through his cheek is like a brush in the hands of a painter; methodical work upon a canvas that has now begun to screech and choke on the blood that seeps over his tongue and down his throat. He is just as methodical as he repeats the process on the other side, slicing into his cheek until it hangs on only by little threads of meat left behind. A beautiful sight, indeed.
There’s grotesque, wet sobs and squelching as Jeff stares down at his handiwork. “Much better,” he muses. He can see the shock and pain doing its job to spare him the pain—he hates how quickly some of them succumb to that. So, he makes it a point to grip him by the face, dirty nails digging into the fresh wounds; it drags another shriek out of his raw throat, confirming that he can still feel just fine.
Jeff lets his arms go so he can grip the hilt in both hands. The man notices and tries to take the chance to fight back, but Jeff doesn't seem deterred by his best attempts. He brings the blade up, letting it stay there just long enough for him to process what’s coming. “Go to sleep,” he says, before he’s plunging it deep into his chest and savoring every centimeter of living flesh that gives way under his knife. Still relishing in the feeling, he draws it back out and goes in for another. Though, after that point, he sort of forgets everything except the unfiltered bliss of this act. He doesn’t count how many times he stabs him or think about if he’s still alive— he just craves the sensation of his knife scraping bone and popping sinew and tendons like rubber bands.
When he comes back to, he realizes he’s absolutely destroyed this corpse; it’s the epitome of all that is ‘overkill.’ The first wound by itself would have been plenty fatal, let alone a dozen more. He is well and truly dead.
Head buzzing with euphoria, Jeff pushes himself up off the floor and starts off towards the window. But, in the end, the curiosity gets the better of him. He isn’t one to linger on crime scenes when his purpose is through, however his curiosity is high and his impulse control is not— he turns back on his heel and goes straight to the laptop on the desk to snoop through what this guy had been writing during some of his last minutes.
“Love letters,” he thinks aloud, skimming through what must be pages of waxing poetic about the unnamed person he’d been infatuated with. Jeff doesn’t care much for sappy shit; just seeing it sort of makes him feel a bit sick, like he’s fighting off a cloyingly sweet taste that sticks between his teeth and trickles down his throat. The house is dark and quiet, and he doesn’t hear any distant sirens yet on account of nosy neighbors calling in over noise complaints; what’s the harm in giving it another minute or two? He never did get the chance to learn anything about this man by asking, after all.
MINGMEI MYIOW !
If there is one thing Mingmei has never understood, it's video games.
On the scientific level, of course she grasps the basic concepts: imaginary rewards create real chemical releases, the pleasure of a win leads to chasing more, and the cycle continues ad infinitum until the whole affair is wrung dry of dopamine. The things that make it an obsession are clear to her, but she’s never been able to process why anyone stays with it long enough to get hooked in the first place. After all, there are plenty of things a person could do– things that would create real, tangible rewards instead of substituting it for a fictionalized idea of one– that would make them smarter, healthier, happier. Needless to say, Mei has never been “one” with the ins and outs of that particular habit. She supposes that’s got something to do with why her mother gives her such an odd look when she trudges into the house a half-hour later than usual, carrying a cardboard box filled to its edge with a retro console and its accoutrements.
“What’s that for?” her mother asks from her usual place at the table, watching Mei balance the box precariously on her hip as she tries to get her shoes off without setting anything down.
“Mm,” hums Mei distractedly. “Another repair project.”
“Really? On something like that?” There’s the lightest air of judgment to her tone that Mei could have caught from a mile away, but she knows better than to meet it with any of her own.
“Ah, well- I told the old guy I’d only worked on modern consoles and he insisted I had to at least give it a try anyway. Must’ve been important to him.” She nudges her shoes into a row with the tips of her toes and scurries off to the stairs before she can be met with any more questions. The moment she’s in her room with the door closed behind with an indistinct little ‘click,’ a weight seems to lift off her in the form of a long, relieved sigh. She starts shedding objects like a second skin: the box, her backpack, her thin windbreaker, each onto her bed.
God, Mei has been pining for this exact moment of isolation and bliss from the moment she woke up. At the start of every day she fulfills her obligations just as she should, but her mind is always on how desperate she is to board up her door and never go outside again. Such whims never win, though; she’s never had that type of spontaneity in her life, nor can she leave things unfinished. So, it’s no surprise that the next thing she does is put everything back where it goes: jacket back in the closet, the contents of her bag arranged in neat piles on the desk, her now-empty backpack hung on a labeled hook. Which just leaves the box to be trifled with. Staring at it with a displeased frown, she considers just cracking open the casing and getting to work without giving it the proper assessment.
Nonetheless, her logic wins out against that whim, too, and she resigns herself to another five minutes spent begrudgingly getting everything set up in the corner of her room. As she fumbles the odd, gold cartridge with its scratched-off label and ink substitution into place, she briefly considers the faint notion that lurks in the back of her mind: something about this is weird. Mei never cares much to take notice of her classmates beyond what’s necessary, but they and their families have nonetheless been her only clients thus far. Where had the stranger come from, then? It’s all just so strange. Mei pushes those thoughts aside for the moment and folds her spindly legs under the rest of her so she can sit back on her heels in front of the TV.
It’s only another few seconds before she’s sitting with the controller flat on the floor, maneuvering it awkwardly with the nimble digits of one hand while the other is fixed on the underside of her jaw, nails digging into a spot that’s only just begun to scab over.
“Ben?” she mutters aloud as she’s faced with the file menu. Her eyes squint to study every inch of the screen; there isn’t so much as a pixel out of place. No weird ripples of color down the middle, no anything— she should’ve asked the man for a description of the issue, she’d admit it now, but her animal hindbrain desperate to get away from him and his admittedly unsettling aura had won out against her formal thinking processes during that moment. Just thinking about it has her gnawing the inside of her cheek. Mei starts a new save file under her name, calling it MEIMEI, and begins experiencing a video game for the first time ever. With any luck, she thinks as it fades into the first scene, it will be swift.
