He went outside to read. He was about to finish the book he was currently reading, so he snapped up another to start in case he did finish while he was outside. He didn't really know long he'd be out. As an afterthought, perhaps the main reason, he went upstairs and dug around, looking for it. Then he saw it, the little piece of cardboard filled with steel tacks. He took one out then walked back downstairs. On the way out, he saw a thumb tack as well. Scooping that up, he brought that one with as well. He went out.
He took his shirt off. It was somewhat cold, but the sun warmed him up pretty quickly. His skin always did soak up the sun fairly well. Then he set down the pins, and his extra book, and cracked upon the one he had brought. He finished it off. It was about a bargain, a deal and a decision. It was about death. It was about dreams. It was somewhat hard to focus through, but he finished anyway. He picked up the next book and started to flip through that one as well. After a thought about how poorly he was concentrating and how little he was getting from the story. Then he set it down and laid down on the top of the picnic table and basked instead.
The sun was quite warm, and it suffused him with heat and warmth. A good feeling, for feeling so cold lately. For almost ten minutes he laid there, soaking up the sun and feeling quite good. He kept getting distracted by the squiggles in his eyes when he closed them. Floaters, they're called, he remembered. Little clumps of protein on the lens of the eye. He couldn't really relax when his eyes were seeing them. He tried to distract himself with sound, listening to the wind blow through the grass and the trees. It didn't work very well. Neither did focusing on the feelings in his body, though that wasn't quite as ineffective. Still, he couldn't relax. Then the feeling of keen sharpness scraped across his mind like a razor, and he opened his eyes. It wouldn't go away. He continued to lay there and relax, since the floaters seemed to have disappeared since he started thinking of that. Then he opened his eyes, rolled over and picked up the thumb tack.
He rolled it around in his fingers, holding it, touching it, feeling the little sliver of metal, and the tip. Especially the tip. He gently pressed the pads of his thumb against it, rotated, and dragged the tip gently, very gently, across his other fingers. It felt nice. He thought about jabbing it into his side, how it'd feel. A good memory, he felt it mentally without ever even bringing the tack to his side. He imagined and knew how it'd feel if it went through his fingers as well. It wasn't a bad sensation. In fact, it was a nice one. A nice change from all the anger and sense of injustice. Anger and injustice personified, no? Suits, really. What is life but a paradise for the evil and a hell for the good? Little truths like that are the ones most often ignored, it seems.
He put the thumb tack down and picked up the steel tack. The little steel monster. This one was far more sharp, you could tell. He wanted even more to bleed from it. Not deeply, no. That'd hurt a bit more than desired, and pain never really was the reason. He never hated himself and never really enjoyed the idea of destroying self. It seemed hypocritical and silly. No, it was because of the red. The red, the redness, it was really pretty. Especially when his skin looked the way it does now....unblemished and smooth, not oily and not dry, just in between, and the finest shade of white...the steel tack was the one to do it with. He wanted it, he wanted it now. But he was older now, and more aware. Like a good fuck, he knew the value of foreplay, of controlling the pace, of drawing it out and creating an magnificent orgasm. Mmm....it just took patience. Patience, patience. Tease and move away, tease and move away....
And then he dropped it.
The tack bounced off the bench of the picnic table and it feel into the grass. He saw where it went because he got up and looked as soon as it fell. It dropped straight down into the grass and....he couldn't. It wasn't there. It was like the ground rose up and swallowed the tack whole, just so he couldn't do what he was planning to do. His heart dropped a little. Then perked back up. He remembered that he still had the thumb tack. He picked that up instead and put it to his skin of his forearm and drug it across. Nothing. He remembered the burn that still came, though. Then he pulled it across, low and fast, pushing his arm against the tack. Not too forcefully, but enough. Two dots began to well. At first they were too small to notice, there was nothing but a minor discoloration. But he knew what to look for, and he knew he had did it, just hard enough to break in two places, at the start, and at the end. Two drops. He did it again, trying to be as close to the original line in case someone noticed. Easily explainable as scraping against something somewhere. He wasn't quite on the line, he soon discovered. A third dot, precisely in the middle of the two already there, began to form. A triangle. A tiny triangle. An interesting shape.
It was pretty.
He always liked red on white. It just worked for him.
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