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A Kiss of Death
A mysterious man stood motionless in front of a cup of coffee resting on the table in front of him. He had a plain face, the kind of face you forget the moment you look away. He had messy black hair with calm waves like when you run your fingers through your hair and forget to fix it. His skin was pale like the moon and almost appeared with a shimmer like a mirage. The man was ordinarily tall, if it weren't for the strange packet he held in his slender finger no one would give him a second thought.
He dug his finger nail into the edge of the packet and smoothly ripped the top off of it and throwing the rip into the trash. He turned the packet over in his fingers and held it upside down over the cup of coffee until all the contents had fallen into the steaming liquid. The substance disintegrated into the drink in seconds, if that. Odorless, tasteless, powder. Toxic in tiny quantities and deadly in anything larger than a gram.
The amount the man had poured into the cup was enough to kill a giant yet the cup would be delivered to an average man sitting a couple dozen feet away with his blue eyed daughter across from him. He wouldn't even know what hit him until the poison had already spread to his heart.
The man set the cup of coffee onto a serving trey next to a vanilla milkshake with whipped cream and two cherries on top. He picked up the trey and brought both the drinks over to the merry table waiting. The father and his daughter came here every Sunday like clockwork in their best Sunday formals after they visited the poor father's dead wife and the daughter's dead mother. Setting the trey down the man placed the vanilla milkshake in front of the daughter and handed the coffee to her father who smiled and thanked him. He could see in their eyes how much they loved each other but they weren't his concern anymore. He simply nodded at the father and turned on his heels, leaving the restaurant.
After he left the restaurant he dumped the dark green apron the waiters wore into the garbage bin outside the doors. Then he leaned against a tree, smoking a few cigarettes while waiting for the man and his daughter to leave for their home. His job wasn't over until the father was dead and nothing would come of it until this happened, and so he waited.
When the family of two finally left the restaurant an hour later they had no idea of the man lying in wait less than a foot away. The pair brushed past him barely giving him a single thought and still, as they walked home they had no idea of the man's presence. He lurked tentatively behind every tree they passed. While following them, the man heard only snippets of the two's conversation. Something about a book he believed sounded like Robin Hood. Heavy reading for such a young girl of 14. Despite his best thoughts he found himself slightly impressed, slightly.
The girl, he observed, had long hair down to her waist. It was a beautiful color, as black as his own but her eyes were the color of only the bluest Caribbean sea water. Her frail hands were barely big enough to close her fingers around her father's own but she held onto his hand like he was the only person left in the world. She hadn't yet noticed the beads of sweat beginning to form on her father's neck, right behind his ears. He's a tall man, surely taller than his daughter, it was no surprise to him that the girl hadn't noticed.
It was a short walk back to their house and they were there in no time at all. Closing the door behind themselves, the father/daughter duo started to take off their coats and put their keys away but the man following them still observed them from an open window in the front. The daughter politely helped her father out of his coat before shrugging her own coat off. She turned away for only a second to put their coats in the closet, no one could blame her, but in the second she had looked away her father had collapsed to his knees.
She turned around and screamed. Running over to her father she started to softly shake his shoulders. The man knew it was already far too late for the girl to save her father but it was a valiant effort at the very least. He watched patiently as her panic grew. Her father on the floor was now started to bleed from his eyes like gruesome, crimson tear drops. He clutched his churning stomach and raked his fingers raggedly through his short and graying hair. On the floor the man coughed up stomach acid. It burned his throat on the way up and pooled on the ground. Her father dug his nails into the skin on his neck trying to tear a hole in it to stop the burning leaving behind jagged, tears in his flesh.
Blood dripped from his cheeks and neck falling into the growing pool of stomach acid turning the awful yellowish clear acid to a light shade of pink like strawberry cream soda. All his daughter could do was stare in horror as her father, her whole world, died in front of her eyes. She was crying and hurriedly she raced out the door screaming for help in a last ditch effort.
Silently, and quickly, the mysterious man glided into their house and took a mental picture of the father collapsed in pain on the floor. He looked pityingly down into the dying man's terrified eyes. Slowly he leaned down, kneeling in the pool of blood and acid, laying his lips onto the acrid lips of the father, he took away the pain and finally killed him. The man suddenly grew large, beautiful, black wings that wrapped around the now dead man's body on the floor. The wings carefully set down the body and the angel of death tore his lips from the father.
His once plain face contorted into a stunning shape with sharp and wicked features that were unbelievably mesmerizing and terrifying at the same time. The angel faded from the physical world and out of view in a whirl of black swirls and calming, silencing, blissful wind.
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I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.<br /> <br /> - Vincent Van Gogh