matryoshka

His smile was quickly-given. It was beaming, dentally-proud, overflowing like glinting shards begging for flesh. The knives were sharpened and ever-ready, to present, to perform for his captive audience. It was, after all, a Pan-American one. It may seem duchenne, but it is half-meant and wholly fallacious. Like a pat without pressure, or an embrace without pull. He knew this, and kept this knowledge akin to a trade secret.

His composure was perfection, his words precise, an ensnaring spiel practiced to every nuance, flection and manner. This was the only way he knew, to parade and haggle by the sweetness of his promises, through the cunning of his misdirections. He was singular in may respects, poised and elegant, with a slight awkwardness approximated for good measure.

It was an image worth preserving, he believed. The charade he played fitted his intentions like the steady hand to a silken glove, no longer a matter of means to an end. The play was him, theatrical and plausible, intrepidly realistic. He owned it, longed for it, that sense of omnipotent control he has over his prey, unknowingly lured by the the cues he incepted, strung by the filamentous fibrosis of deceit. Driving them into the recidivist madness he himself inhabits, spiralling, cyclical, unending, cursed.

He needed it, the game. It was all that was left for him. Blurred by the amorphous deviance he espoused and subscribed to, reality became this extravagant construct he imagined into fruition. He was no longer the puppet master, but a marionette, a mindless, heartless automaton. His actions, movements made across a trajectory predestined by need and objective, his emotions mere outward manifestations of a calculated output, utterly barren and false, his thoughts, though complex and labyrinthine were undermined by an elementary reason – to gain advantage.

He is a shell. And, like all calcium envelopes, constituted of a rather brittle quality. And he was, brickly as a dried twig, snapping beneath the fall of rain. The difference was that he was completely hollow inside, as dehydrated as his pristine and fragile exterior.

He drifted with the finesse of a danseur and the supple heaves of a child, yet in his eyes you'll see the dark abyss of an empty anhedonia. Piercing and slicing through the tenderness of your gaze, devoid of focus and empathy.

Blank. Soulless.