postcard amelie 09
During the day, Club Deliquesce is like so many clubs on the island: An unassuming two-story building in grey or white rendering, blistered with air-con units and flanked by an electricity substation. During the night, bass seeps from the walls, animating the fairy- and neon-lit front with an insistent form of life as if the earth itself is inviting the queuing supplicants to dance. There is something primal and hallowed about it, if you ignore the giggling hen dos with their dealy-boppers and identical white dresses, the lads groups chanting football songs, and the furtive gentlemen standing by selling glow-sticks and little packets for a reasonable number of Euros.
Amelie is chatting animatedly with her friends, but casts frequent glances in your direction. With her dark eye makeup her green eyes glitter with evil plans. She is gorgeous, in a gold and white dress reminiscent of a goddess’s attire. You keep realising you’re wetting your lips when you look at her.
You feel good about yourself, too. Amelie helped you pick out your dress and seemed beside herself with excitement when she held up something Spanish-looking in black with lace at the chest, chased through with abstract red flowery patterns. You saw her testing the stretch in the waist and had to give serious thought to whether or not you were, in fact, in love.
There’s a break in the pattern of the bass as one song is mixed into the next. Amelie breaks free of her group and sidles alongside you.
“Looking forward to a night out, Raven?” Earlier she was trying out pet names for you. Rey, Ven, Ravey, Wavey, Corvid, Budgie—it was at this point that you realised she was taking the piss—but decided she liked the taste of your full name.
“Sort of. I’m a little full, still.”
“Poor darling.” She wraps her arms around you and presses her body against yours. Your generous curves fill in the space her thinner body provides. When she squeezes, it’s a full-body massage, propagated by hips that gently sway in counterpoint to the music. The sound of your belly settling down is completely obliterated but you can both feel it, a private rumble shared between you.
The group of lads lets loose with a “wheeey”, approving in the most tedious fashion of a lesbian PDA. Amelie ignores them, your friends cast daggers. You mark them for death.
The queue shuffles on. Your party is next in.
Inside, the club that Amelie has chosen is formed from several cosy break-out bars spaced irregularly around a central high-ceilinged dance-pit. The pit is already full of dancers in the grip of the ever-shifting moment, dancing alone or in circles, dancing well or poorly for amusement. From above an observer would see a gentle chaotic flow around the central stage, currently occupied by a DJ at his decks. Three raised satellite dance floors feature some professional or more adventurous dancers. Two of three cages are occupied: skinny girls put up to it by friends and granted access by the MC, who is trying to find another volunteer from the whirling crowd.
The bars’ lower ceilings and plush purple wall-hangings help reduce the music to a point where you can just about hear the person next to you, though the bass still throbs in your gut and bones. Your friends are drinking and soaking up the atmosphere before venturing into the dance floor, but Amelie disappeared straight away.
Amelie reappears with three shot-glasses and a giggling woman partially hanging off her arm.
“Here,” says Amelie, handing you a shot glass, and one to her new friend. Tequila. You all clink glasses and down them simultaneously. Amelie coughs and splutters, perhaps unused to the harsh drink, and the new girl laughs and talks to you with the rounded, bouncy tones of someone high on something pleasant.
“Hi. Your friend said you wanted to dance? I’m Rhea.”
“Raven.” You look her up and down appraisingly, not bothering to hide the hunger in your expression. Amelie is turning into quite a feeder. Rhea flushes but meets your gaze, luxuriating under the attention.
“Dance!” says Amelie, between coughs. “But not too much, Raven. Just a little. It’s a long night.”
Rhea unhooks her elbow from Amelie and extends a hand, courtesan-style, to you. You grasp it, not taking your eyes from her.
The crowd on the dance floor makes space if you ask for it. People melt aside naturally as you walk towards them, a meta-dance that envelops you in the mix of people.
Rhea is a firework frozen in the midst of exploding. The second she reaches a clearing near the DJ and his decks she bursts into some raver mode, throwing her elegant arms in the air with abandon and the slight miscoordination of a person intoxicated. She turns to you and grips your hands, encouraging you to move as well.
You’re stone-cold sober, tequila notwithstanding, but Rhea is just what you need. Her energy is infectious. It’s not long before the shock of the cold-plunge melts into the rising joy of movement.
The DJ isn’t a big name, but he is skilled. The crowd, yourself included, are swept along in a build-up that never seems to crest: three songs spiraling up and up to a fever-pitch intensity. Sweat shines on your forehead, and on Rhea’s apple-flushed cheeks, and on her throat. Both of you are yearning for something.
The third song reaches its crescendo and drops. In the breathless span between verses you sweep Rhea into your arms and bury your mouth against her throat. Her cry of pain and ecstasy is lost in the hammer-fall of the renewed beat. It feels to you like all the dizzy energy of the music, the crowd, all of it pours into your mouth in one neon swell. You swallow and heat goes with it, filling you up from the inside, setting your nerve-endings on fire.
The song’s coda fades away and you face the agony of releasing this woman undrunk. You feel you have taken just a taste, but she is loose on her legs and her eyes are glazed. A kiss hides the wound but you wear her blood proudly on your lips as you guide her from the dance floor. She is forlorn watching you go, being benched with a bottle of water. You belch iron-heavy air and seek out Amelie.
“Enjoy your dance?”
“Mmh. What are you planning?”
“Meet Evan.”
Evan is like iron to Rhea’s bending reed. Amelie, rather than buying you drinks, seems to be furnishing you with a living pharmacy. He’s on something that makes his eyes sharp but the way he holds your hips and sways with you to the beat of the music is as seductive as the tide of the sea. Your dance is more akin to a flamenco than the club-jump-rave excitement all around you. Evan carves out a little pocket of space for you both.
You burst his bubble with a bite flavoured by some expensive aftershave. His every muscle goes perfectly rigid and your mouth can barely contain the arterial generosity, but this isn’t your first rodeo. He runs down your relaxed throat and mingles with Rhea and your digestive fluids, safe and sound.
He relaxes onto you all at once and you begin a slow-dance, each footstep corresponding to another suck, another swallow; another step for him closer to your abyss.
“You’re looking a little flushed, Raven.”
~UuuoOOoorp~
“Sally, this is the person I was telling you about.”
Sally is not high on anything except life. She is shy, and you get the impression you might be the first girl she has kissed, so you kiss her often in between swells in the music. She is sweet and fresh and tastes of strawberry lip gloss.
By now the place has its hooks in you. You’re an agent of chaos in the mixing bowl of the dance floor, a mote of darkness in your black dress among fluorescent colours and glow-sticks and jewel tones. The oneness of the crowd flows through you, and you channel it through your temporary partner, loosening her up and opening her, too, to unity.
Sally’s blood has no trace of the taste of strawberry, but is vibrant and meaty on your palate. When you bite she collapses into your arms and you hold her, still dancing, while feeling her weep on your shoulder. Her arms stroke your back, a strangely intimate motion for one so scared. Or is she scared? She seems to be experiencing some sort of catharsis as you drain away her strength.
Something of the blended high you are experiencing communicates itself to her. When you regretfully disengage, her pupils are broad and her lips slightly pursed. She sits heavily and curls up on a couch where you leave her, giving her one last kiss tasting of her own blood.
You are an agent of chaos, spreading free love and taking only life force.
Your dress is getting tight about your middle.
You don’t need Amelie to find you Ryan, the football-chanting gentleman who ruined your moment outside. He sees you and engages crudely with your silent dance, seeking to dominate the pairing by grabbing you and grinding, but you slip away like oil. In chasing you he isolates himself: his friends are obscured by the crowd.
You make yourself soft and sensual, your arms tracing the growing curves of your body as you move to the music. He has been beaten by you so often that he’s fallen into the dance, no longer seeking to dominate but just be present with you. He’s probably not such a bad guy, underneath the bravado.
You lean in to kiss him. His eyes crinkle with a smile and then go wide with shock. Just before the kiss landed you placed a finger on his lips and a whisper-thin blade between his ribs. You feel his ribcage creak as a tendril swells with a swallow of blood straight from the aorta. Ironically, only the kiss of your blade cradling the artery is holding him together. You feel his heart spasm and flutter.
Hot living blood spurts like an orgasm into you, passing beneath your shoulderblade. He is treated to a vision of your open-mouthed pleasure, the sound of your gasp.
You take from him everything he can give and still possibly survive. The strange shared-high of your feed leaves him pale and staggering. When you slip away from him, mercifully knitting together his primary artery, you observe a bouncer making his way through the crowd to deal with the paralytic man.
Amelie’s eyes widen dramatically when she sees you, a little panicked. “You’re so big, Raven. Did you drink her all up?”
The life of four people is gurgling away through your system. Its weight is heaven inside you, though you bitterly regret not being able to hear it properly. Inside you your gut is moving, constantly, and so are you. Blood-high, you want to dance.
“Sally’s fine,” you say, pulling Amelie close. Her skin feels like warm silk under your fingertips. Pressing against her, you can both feel the contents of your stomach slosh when you shake your behind. Amelie blushes bright red beneath her strong tan. “Who’s next?”
“Um, everyone, Raven.”
“What?”
“Everyone.”
The MC takes your hand and lifts you onto the central stage. You’re heavier than he expected, even though you do most of the work yourself.
“You scared of heights or closed spaces?” he asks through a thick Dutch accent.
“I fear nothing on earth,” you say. Air swallowed along with Sally’s blood burbles up your throat and you mask it behind your hand. Perhaps you fear throwing up, come to think of it.
“Tja, well and good. Enjoy!” He leads you to the steps that provide entry to the raised cage. You slip inside, brushing both sides of the metal doorframe, and he closes the door behind you.
Looking out over the crowd it’s like you’re on the prow of a ship and the people are a sea of heads and arms. The magic that animated you and drove you to move falters for a moment as you scan the crowd.
There. You spot Amelie. Her face is bursting with pride and adoration. She raises her hands in a prayer gesture and then opens her arms wide, encompassing the whole room. You recall her last words to you: “just like the market. They’re all here for you.”
The music fades to a hyperfast technical best and carries you with it. You shape the space inside the dance cage with your body, ignoring the discomfort of a belly slightly overfull. It will have to deal with much more before the night is through.
When you throw your arms wide you allow your tendrils to burst forth, dividing and subdividing as they go. Like shadowy streamers they arc over and into the crowd.
This is like meditation. This is like ascendence. Two, five, ten strangers are delicately cut by your predatory tendrils. They barely break step even as their lifeblood is borne away from their bodies. You drink from them shallowly, healing as you part from them and sinking your blades afresh into someone new.
Blood curves upwards in peristaltic parabola, flowing between the cage’s bars and gushing into your belly. You never stop dancing though you’re expanding visibly second on second. The excitement and joy and desperation and high of the club-goers filters into you and shares itself back among those you kiss.
This feels familiar, you think to yourself as you whirl a sensual trance figure in your prison. I have been here before, fed from masses, made their hearts leap and shrink as I willed it. The memory teeters on the brink of conscious recognition, then slips away.
The crowd is being whipped into frenzy, and it’s not just the music. Your predatory intent has split your tendrils again and again. Fifty blades work through the crowd, gracing breasts, flanks, backs, inner arms. Barely noticed by your multifarious prey, and forgotten after you sip.
Your dress is so tight it threatens to tear. Plastered black against you, you resemble a leech. The awesome volume of blood you have imbibed threatens to tear something inside as well. Tears of happy pain stream down your face. Pressure forces your pylorus open and the crowd pushes its way into your intestines, dark and secret tubes stretching and straining to absorb this incredible windfall. Soon you are thick, deep crimson from the top of your stomach to the very bottom of your small intestine.
The bars of the cage press snugly into your skin. You can no longer dance properly, your excess having fixed you in place. It’s the strangest hug you have ever received.
Below you, delirium has settled upon the crowd. You have been an unwitting conductor of sensuality and excess. Hearts that have felt your bite reach out to one another. You look over the pockets of pawing, kissing clubbers and feel a sudden urge for calm solitude, a place where your servants—where did that thought come from?—where Amelie can tend to your aching stomach and tender intestinal coils.
Your tendrils, sagging with the weight of their glut, cease their harvest and retract back to you. Before they slip back into your skin they fix your immediate problem of escape. Gripping the bars of the cage they barely exert themselves but peel the cage apart as easy as a chrysanthemum.
You step out from the ruined cage, swaying as the liquid weight inside you sloushes from side to side. The MC watches you with an open mouth. You blow him a kiss and descend to the dance floor. Amelie is waiting to meet you.
“In my wildest dreams I couldn’t have imagined…” she says, and does her best to throw her arms around you. She can’t quite encircle you, and her attempt forces a very careful burp-exhale from you: ~huoooooOOOUURrrrppp~
“Take me home,” you say, half delirious with the need to rest and digest your prodigious meal. Stolen heat perfuses your whole being, soaking into your bones and bringing with it a desire for sleep.
“Of course, my darling. I will tuck you in and massage your poor belly all night. Oh, my darling, how much you have taken…”
You follow her out of the club and hail a minivan. The flashing blue lights of an ambulance indicate where Ryan got to. What a waste, you think, if he dies. I could have drunk him dry after all.
In the ear-ringing quiet of the minivan your stomach’s protests make themselves heard. Hundreds of people are being processed from living blood to simple food for you, passing the barrier of your intestines and flooding into your own bloodstream. They gurgle and glork and burble as they go, filling the cab and making Amelie blush.
At the hotel the torpor is stealing over you. Amelie peels your dress from you and lays you naked on the bed. “You are magnificent, Raven. I never thought I would meet someone like you.” Slow kisses trail up and down your swollen belly and flanks. “Stretch marks!”
You accept her adoration as your due. Even as you glide into sleep you are aware of her soft, firm hands massaging the air out from you, her lips on your belly, breasts, mons, throat. As the crowd in the club worshipped you with their bodies, Amelie worships you with time and affection.
What could be more right?