R U Mine?
“Are you ready for this?” The mysterious girl with the cowboy hat stares you down from the other end of the overstuffed booth in the dingy dive bar she asked to go to. God d-----, how did I end up here, you ask yourself. No really, how did you end up here?
It starts off with the girl, the girl, Arabella, she’s beautiful, long brown hair, a tight button down t-shirt, denim skirt and cowboy boots. She was standing on the side of the road, in the meek light being given off by the meager amount of stars in the sky you can barely see her but something tells you she’s perfect, thumb pointing outward, you come to the conclusion that she’s a hitchhiker. You’ve never picked up a hitch hiker before but there’s something so electric about her that you can’t help yourself.
“Where you off to?” You ask casually as she gets into the car, you still haven’t gotten a good look at her but her voice sounds like heroin as she answers you harshly, “Fat Tommy’s”. She’s abrasive but you want to get to know her.
When you arrive at Fat Tommy’s you aren’t really surprised. It’s small, dirty and rundown. You let the girl out of the car and she looks at you, “Well aren’t you going to get a drink?” The girl grabs your hand and you follow her in the dimly lit dive.
She hands you a whiskey, she’s barely spoken to you since you picked her up and you sip the drink slowly, not to seem too nervous in her presence. She’s like a Goddess. She looks around the bar apprehensively. “Do you wanna go?” She takes your hand again and leads you outside. Thunder and lightning crash as she steps out the door and a motorcycle pulls up and stops under the lone street light in the parking lot.
The man on the motorcycle was less of a man and more of a monster. He took off his helmet and his face was gone. He was just muscle and bones and tendons and yet he was the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen. You watch him as he gets off the bike and walks towards Arabella, in the shadow of the building. They quietly talk as you slowly back into the bar, trying to assess the situation at hand. “What the f*** was that?” you mumble to yourself as you stumble back into booth feeling drunker than one drink should have made you.
Arabella follows you in. You look at her more closely and suddenly you realize that she’s just like him. Under the tight shirt and short skirt, she has no skin, just muscle and bone, your heart skips a beat and you try to find a way out of the situation. She gets in the booth across from you yet again, she stares at you, her overly white teeth gleaming under the harsh fluorescent lights.
Your heart beats fast and you start to see double.
One Arabella,
then two,
then four,
then eight.
You close your eyes but that isn’t much better.
The man with no skin’s face is etched into your memory, haunting you. His beady eyes follow you. He opens and closes his mouth as if he’s chewing on something, He walks towards you and you realize that he’s chewing on a head. You open your eyes again, Arabella is staring at you, “So, R U Mine?” She reaches her hand across the table.
You close your eyes again and the words R U Mine? Pop up all over the place in various colors and shapes. Suddenly the words begin to morph and you see Arabella and the man beckoning you to them. They’re reaching out to you and even though every fiber in your being is telling you no, you walk to them. You open your eyes again. You look around the bar and suddenly everyone is losing their skin, they’re being torn apart by unknown forces. What the actual f***. Something inside of you says. Something else says Shut up.
“Don’t you want to be like us?” Suddenly the man is in the bar too, sitting close to Arabella across from you in the booth. His voice is gruff. It sounds like he smokes 4 packs a day and it has the slightest hint of a British accent, it intrigues and repulses you at the same time and suddenly you want him to talk more. The longer you stare the more his lack of skin starts to disconcert you, where do his teeth end and his face begin?  You try to shake your head no but “Yes” comes out of your mouth.
“Are you ready for this?” Arabella holds a blue pill out in front of you. Its square shaped and has a shine that glares in your eyes. It blue hue and smooth texture contrasts starkly from her red, rough hand.
“Be one of us” The man says.
Your hand reaches out and grabs the caplet from Arabella’s tough hand. You cringe as you feel her hand and realize that the hand you’ve been holding wasn’t really a hand but a mangled muscle. You look at it and lift it towards your mouth. As you swallow it, it stops in your throat; you can feel it as it swells.
Choking, you grab the man’s whiskey and take a swig. The warm sensation of the whiskey almost makes the feeling of your skin receding and your muscles expanding disappear but you can still feel it. Your skin slowly crawls away and dissipates, leaving you with a burning sensation as the air hits you. Your muscles slowly expand and become tough, you try to move but when you move they tear. Then the pain stops as quickly as it came.
Suddenly you’re one of them.