The irreconcilable devil concentrates on her untenable gloom. Mesmerizing viper eyes, languid limbs, a sheath of supple flesh stretched over a skeleton bones ribbed with thorns, weeping for my touch. The slightest movement pains her as she swims through the ether of the cobwebbed night.

Rats' tails bind my wrists, cockroaches skitter across my unblinking eyes, pinned to a canvas of nails. Downturned lips stained with gore, she weeps blood, spilling all that sustains her. My mouth hangs agape, words choked by roiling black bile. Rivulets of fire streak down my sallow cheeks.

Her form sways, drunken, balletic, precise in its confusion, calculatedly incongruous to the tune we cannot hear. Colored lights sparkle, hearkening to the long dead stage shows of our imaginations, as she trips a hideous pantomime through the tragedy of our existence.

A slick, pulsing boil on her chest expands as she squalls, until it erupts, flesh tearing, and from it steps a child, a miniature monster formed in her image, a gorgon of terrible beauty. Squirming ceases and my flesh turns to stone.

Amid the cacophony of clapping leathery bat wings I hear joyless laughter, a cracking whip flaying my naked skin to ribbons. These twin torturers who lap my adulation step into a teacup ringed with barbed wire and it topples from the shelf. I strain to slough off my bonds but muscles knot and fray as I lay motionless, tracing the infinite path of their descent, growing withered and old in the waiting, until one day without warning it shatters into a trillion fading stars.