Severed Veins Reach Up In Rapture

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     It was part of their scene. He was skinny, didn't do sports, didn't get good grades in school, and he got all the girls because he grew his hair long, and put on lots of makeup. He had big blue eyes that he accented with different colors, today it was bright green and black that he wore to school. His hair was dyed blonde with blue and black streaks going through it. He clipped little racoon stripes in it.

    All those years he spent getting beaten up in elementary and middle school, and the sexual jokes he endured ('Aura' sounds like 'oral', get it?) were worth it. You want to make fun of me? Oh, I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you over the sound of my follower count, bitch. He was laying on his stomach, staring at the cuts going across his arms. Some of them were new, some were faded and scabbed.

    He made the newer ones about ten minutes ago. He did it with a safety pin that barely scratched the skin, it took awhile for the blood to pool up in little droplets. He took the safety pin and artfully dragged the droplets out to the sides so the cuts looked bigger and bloodier, yes this would be perfect. He rolled over onto his back, his head resting against his checkerboard printed pillow.

     He stretched out his clean arm and reached over for his pink digital camera. He lifted it up and held it over himself, and snapped a picture, making sure to hold it at angle that made his features look as distorted as possible. He held his bleeding arm up across his chest, making sure all the cuts were clearly visible in the picture. It took him a few tries until he got just the right pose that made him look a china white helpless Ophelia of a man. It was perfect. He heard a slight knock on the door and quickly slipped his cut up arm and camera under the pillow.

     "Aura, can you come down for dinner?” his mother asked him.

“I told you to call me Vincent,” he said. He hated to hear her call him that name. The only people who could call him Aura were his bitches

“Your name is Aura, now come down for dinner, and please take off that makeup, you're not a girl,” she told him before closing the door again.

     She was one of those all-organic crunchy hippies, but she worked as a lawyer for a GMO lobbyist. She probably didn't regret how her hippie phase was unceremoniously forced on her kid. The hatred he felt for her burned with in him slowly and unseen like the small methane fires gathering beneath landfills. She didn't know about his myspace, she thought it was of the devil, but with so many people making up fake names with the name Aura in it, and with all the editing he did to his photos, she'd never know it was him!

    Aura slipped on a black hoodie over his tight pink tshirt with an image of a gun shooting multicolored hearts on it. He was wearing skinny jeans, which he knew pissed off his mother, but he didn't have time to change pants without getting yelled at for taking too long. He sulked his way down stairs into the kitchen. He was making sure to frown as much as possible, even though he was looking forward to posting his pics later.

     His parents had a big house with a nice kitchen that had granite counter tops and stainless steel everything. His father and sister weren't home, and that left him alone with his mother. For dinner she had cooked up kale, quinoa, and some grilled chicken. His plate was already piled on high, he was beginning to suspect that his mother was onto his new intermittent fasting diet plan. Vincent let himself slip up, this stuff was too healthy to get fat on anyways. No sugar or fat was allowed in this household.

    “Aren't you too warm with that on?” she asked him. It wasn't that warm in the house, it was only at the start of fall in new jersey, but it was warm enough in the house that the hoodie raised attention.

   “No,” he said, picked at the food with his fork and ate without much enthusiasm. He tried not to meet his mothers gaze and to keep his sleeves down in place.