‘Slutlips,’ a Surreal, Psychological Horror Story: Chapter One

[NOTE: this is the beginning of a psychological horror story based on an audio film of the same name by my musician friend, Cat Corelli, something I wrote up an analysis for; you can learn more about that here. Before you begin reading, though, TRIGGER WARNING: as a horror story, this one has some graphic content of a violent and sexual nature; so if you’re one of my readers with C-PTSD or other forms of psychological trauma, you may want to skip this one. As for you braver souls, though, read on…]

Alice looked at herself in the mirror as she applied cherry-red lipstick to her lower lip. The face in the reflection was a painted beauty. She smiled.

Her flowing, wavy hair (dyed a she-devil red), her piercing brown eyes, her almost ghost-like skin–except for her tattoos, the pink blush on her cheeks, the dark blue eye shadow going from her eyelids up to her brown-pencilled eyebrows, and those aforementioned cherry lips–and the dark red and black striped dress that draped from just under her white shoulders; all of this in the mirror reflection gave her reassurance of a woman, a unified, coherent entity.

This was comforting, for everything on the other side, where she stood, her unseen self–if it even was a self–felt spastic, uncontrollable, broken in pieces, even merged with the surroundings. Where did she end, and where did everything else begin?

Only mirrors gave her assurance of being whole. Seeing a whole body, all together, in the reflection gave her peace. Looking away from it, she’d begin to feel as if in pieces. She’d have to look back at the reflection to remind herself that she was all in one piece. Still, she couldn’t just stare at her reflection forever. She had to walk away from the mirror if she was going to go to the bar and pick up a dude to take back here and screw…in more ways than one.

Away from the mirror, she always felt as if her body was either being torn limb from limb, like a victim in a Romero zombie flick, or already thus torn apart. Her mind was perpetually in a nightmare state, her dismembered parts floating in the ocean as if her murderer had thrown her naked body parts in the water.

In this hallucinatory state, she sometimes saw a penis and a castrated, hairy sack of balls floating by her arms and legs, as if the male genitalia were hers.

“Off with her head!” a familiarly regal woman’s voice shouted in Alice’s mind.

Her consciousness would shift up and down, lighter and darker, in oceanic waves. With those undulating movements, she’d see naked body parts other than her own mixed with hers. There were torsos, sometimes male, but usually female. The decapitated heads of young women were most familiar to her.

“Off with her head!” she heard again, off in the distance.

It sometimes seemed that those bobbing female heads were hers.

She’d call out their names. “Daisy, Lily,…” she’d sigh.

As the wave-like movements of her consciousness continued slowly vibrating up and down, she’d see the world through the eyes of each of those heads. Often, with her consciousness inhabiting one of the heads, she’d feel whole, in a unified body. She’d look down at herself and smile to see a body…for a while, at least.

Then she’d hear, “Off with her head!” again, and she’d leave that head and haunt another, like a ghost animating a body.

Indeed, she put the psychosis into metempsychosis.

After her wavy reverie, Alice looked back into the mirror.

Her made-up face was putana perfection.

“Oh, my God,” she said with a Lilith-like vocal fry. “You look like a slut.” She grinned at her image with almost serrated teeth. “Those are slut-lips.” She pursed them, then touched herself between her legs. “And those are my slit-lips.” She giggled and licked her lips.

She could hear music in her mind’s ear. It sounded almost like a harpsichord playing Baroque music…or was it a pair of acoustic guitars, with bluesy fingers bending strings? She wasn’t sure: the two musical styles shifted back and forth like those waves in her mind.

She chanted along with the rhythm of the music. “Everybody wants you, everybody needs you, everybody hates you, everybody bleeds you, everybody wants you, everybody needs you, everybody fucks you, everybody kills you.”

At the sound of those verbs, she looked away from the mirror, and the hallucinations resumed. She felt hands grabbing her. Her breasts and ass-cheeks were being squeezed ‘til it hurt. Fingers went up her pussy and ass…then the fingers felt like fists; she felt blood dripping from down there.

Then, the fists inside her felt like phalluses ramming in and out of her; it felt like repeated punches. More blood.

Those grabbing hands were all over her, seeming to be tearing her dress and underwear off. At first, it felt like a dozen hands; then it felt like only two. Now she felt as if naked, shaking before the mirror, her eyes squeezed shut. She moaned a mix of pain and sexual excitement.

She opened her eyes. The face of her father, on top of her and sweating like a pig. A creaking, shaking bed under both of them.

Now those two phalluses felt like knives. An ocean of blood.

She looked around and saw all those dismembered body parts floating in the waves of red.

“Daisy, Lily,…” she sighed with each phallic stab.

She looked up into the eyes of her smirking, fucking father.

She showed him her serrated grin. His smirk turned upside-down.

She bit him hard on the nose. His blood sprayed out in all directions. He screamed so loud, it pierced her eardrums.

The hallucination vanished. She looked at herself in the mirror and grinned.

That horror had given her inspiration: she knew what she had to do.

“Oh, my God,” she said again in that vocal fry. “You look like a slut.”

She picked up her purse, left the mirror, turned off the lights, and left her apartment. As she walked in the direction of the local bar, her high heels clanking on the sidewalk, she felt those waves all around her…and through her.