• At the outskirts of the forest, leaning upon a tree, stood a girl dressed in white. Her skin was pale as bone and her red painted lips curled into a smile. Her curved mouth looked out of place on her otherwise blank face, her cold, lifeless eyes glinting menacingly. She could feel her sanity slowly giving into the madness that had been lurking in the back of her mind, images of which could fuel the most traumatic nightmares running rampant through her head.
    She stood there every day, waiting for the object of her affection to grace her with his presence as he passed her by on his way home from work. He may as well have ripped her heart from her chest and left it dangling over her head, just barely out of her grasp, even when she stood at her very tallest on her tiptoes.
    So, she decided she’d take his in return.
    Perhaps it was the grotesque amount of horror films she had become enthralled with as a child that contributed to her sick obsession with him. After all, only the pretty boys die in movies, and he was surely the prettiest. She wanted nothing more than to stand over his corpse in her bloodstained Sunday’s best, his chest ripped open to expose the entrails that would make a fantastic necklace. She would keep his heart in a jar on her bedside table as a trophy, and smile sweetly at it every night as she fell back into her world of nightmares.
    She was roused from her disturbing musings as she heard the sound of approaching footfalls. She turned her head in the direction they were coming from, dark curls spilling over her shoulder with the movement. The boy was soon within sight, his stoic face brightening into a beaming smile that the girl so adored - and wished to erase - once he saw her. “Hey, Diable,”
    He said her name. That disgusting, worthless name that had been bestowed upon her by her equally disgusting and worthless mother. Uttered from his lips, in that hopelessly sweet tone of his made her feel sick.
    “Hello, Stephen,” she smiled up at him.
    He laughed and her smile morphed into a frown of confusion. “What are you doing out here? It’s freezing,”
    She hardly noticed the snowflakes that cascaded silently from the sky, nor did she notice the sudden chill she felt, or the way Stephen’s breath fogged up her view of him. “Waiting for you, of course,” she murmured meekly. “I must have left my coat at home.”
    “You’re such a space case, Dia,” he teased lightly, and shrugged off his jacket. He wrapped it around her shoulders, and grabbed her hand. “C’mon, you’ll catch your death out here.”
    She walked beside him, looking up at his face from the corner of her eyes. She wondered if he knew it would not be she who would be catching her death; the irony made her giggle.
    “What’s so funny?” Stephen muttered, pulling up the collar of his sweater.
    “Nothing,” she grinned. “Your hand is warm.”
    “Nah, you’re just an icicle,” he mirrored her grin. They walked in silence until she suddenly stopped, releasing his hand. He looked down at her curiously, parting his lips to ask what was wrong when he felt a sudden pain in his chest that left him gasping for air, falling to his knees. He coughed, crimson liquid spilling from his lips.
    Diable laughed mirthlessly, pulling the bloodied knife from his chest.
    “Why…?” he choked, his blood dripping to the icy pavement.
    “I’m just taking what’s mine,” Diable tilted her head and smiled, his world turning to darkness as she raised the knife again.
    She never was able to claim her prize – it was buried along with the rest of Stephen’s mutilated body in a graveyard far from her mental ward. She threw her head back and laughed, her body screaming in protest from the way the restraints tightened. She would miss their pointless conversations that ultimately led to his demise. But he deserved it. He took her heart and didn’t even have the courtesy to give her his for compensation!
    She looked around the padded cell they had thrown her in; as the last part of her sanity died, she took solace in the fact that both she and Stephen would be confined for eternity.