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The August sun seemed to pierce through Genevieve's dishwater-blonde hair with rays of gold as she lurched to catch Madeleine, who had twisted her ankle on an abrupt curb of concrete and fallen. A fit of road rash had broken open across her kneecap, her skin pitted with gravel bruises and slow-trickling blood."Oh, shit." She murmured as she brushed the pebbles off of her dimpled skin, face screwed up in a squint as she looked up at Genevieve, whose face paled slightly.Genevieve scanned the deadening grass and brush of broken twigs for anything that could be used as makeshift bandage before a hidden hand thrust a grayish shirt dappled with sweat in her field of vision."Here." Valentine had peeled off her cotton knit sweater that concealed a formfitting black tanktop underneath, rubbing her thumb back and forth anxiously in the knit of the material. "It has this texture or whatever. It feels kinda like that hospital wrap stuff." Valentine knelt before Madeleine, whose dark brown eyes were now overflowing with tears."Don't cry, you fucking pussy." Vivienne teased, sneering at Madeleine as she stuck her tongue out, one arm draped over Valentine's shoulder.Valentine's downward gaze shifted to her feet, noticing Vivi's foot a few inches from her own. She turned her ankle and crushed Vivi's toes under the heel of her muddied black canvas sneakers, pinching her by the side. "Stop being such a bitch."Vivienne yelped, her eyes brimming with tears as she began to pout, pulling all the attention away from Madeleine like a sub-zero vacuum force. Vivi's face reddened with embarrassment, resentment etched deep into the lines between her eyebrows."I WISH YOU WERE NEVER BORN!" She screamed as she curled her small hands into fists, storming away into the open field, the starting step with her barely-sore foot.Valentine blushed a sheepish shade of purple as her ears burned with humiliation, preemptively exhausted by the need to chase Vivienne and grovel for mercy.Genevieve rolled her eyes, waving Valentine away with a shoo. "Go ahead, I got this." she deadpanned, leaning over Madeleine as she played nurse, dressing her wounds.
"Thanks. Sorry." she murmured as she started after Vivienne, whose rage had led her to become little more than a fading, far-off speck, disappearing in a thicket of hemlock trees.

Valentine ran through the untamed field to catch Vivienne, knee-high weeds welting her legs as she tore across the earth in an anxious attempt to catch up; her breathing sharp and lung capacity quickly fading."Vivi! Vivi, please!" She cried, the rubber toe of her sneaker catching on the gnarled roots of the hemlock trees as the forest line began, stumbling as her breath became nearly expended.Vivienne had dropped to the ground with a flair for the dramatic long before Valentine had cleared the field; collapsing into unsoothable sobbing with knees folded, curled up in a root system that resembled open arms extended for a hug.Valentine crept closer to her sister, jagged-edge breathing stunting her energy as thickets of amber-golden leaves and twigs crunched beneath her, falling to Vivienne's level, stifling the yelp of pain threatening to burst out of her chest. Her knees ached from the shrapnel on the forest floor, sweetgum balls and sandspurs needling against her skin. "Please forgive me. I'm sorry."A pang of guilt struck Vivienne through her simmering rage, as if someone had shocked a pot of boiling water with a freezing rod of metal, killing her fury."I don't believe you," Vivi snarked, pushing around a fallen acorn with a twig of hemlock that she had retrieved. She bowed her head, her thick black hair unfurling around her shoulders, sniffling as she began to rub her shins, which she had whipped with the stick in an act of defiance, self-harm.Valentine's eyes fell to the hand that brushed Vivi's welted legs. "Hey.." she murmured, extending her index finger to softly stroke the whip-marks, counting them in her mind. There were at least thirty on each leg.Vivienne shoved Valentine's hand away, protectively wrapping her arms around her shins as she drew them in to her chest, turning her head away. "Get your freaky ass E.T. finger away from me. Don't touch me." She snipped, voice shaking.Exhaling deeply, Valentine wrapped her hands around both of Vivienne's wrists, prying her arms away from her legs. "Vivienne." She said coldly, suddenly very seriously."I'm serious, don't touch me! I'm going to start screaming!" She emphasized, voice shrill with rising octaves. "Let me go! Don't touch me!" Vivienne began to thrash, struggling to wrench her wrists out from Valentine's ironclad grip.
"Fine." Valentine let go of both of her sister's wrists instantly, sighing in frustrating and discontentment. "Forget about it," she said dryly. Valentine rose to her knees, brushing away the sandspurs and dried leaves that had been crushed to flakes.As if triggered on cue, Vivi threw herself at Valentine's feet, gripping her ankle in an attempt to pull her back down. "DON'T FUCKING LEAVE ME!" She screamed in hysteria, snot bubbling out of her nose as a bubble of panic swelled in her chest.

A flight of mourning doves flinched at the sound, exploding from the treetops in a swell of fear, leaves on branches whispering before falling silent, only the sound of their ragged breathing in the thicket of the wood.The long afternoon sun had paled in the sky, moonrise cresting as the distant streetlamps began to burn orange in its absence. Shrouded in the stillness, Valentine crouched to the ground to meet her sister."I could never leave you, Vivi."Vivienne's chest hurt mournfully, saline tears and snot coating her face, the tip of her button nose reddened with heartache. "How do I know you're not lying to me?"Kneeling to the ground again, Valentine took Vivienne's hand in her own, their small dirty fingers interlocking, cuticles and nailbeds caked in mud residue from digging through the shales of soil. "I could get married to you. Till death do us part is part of the vows, right?""You can't marry your sister, you numbnuts," Vivienne scoffed, rolling her eyes as she tried to tear her hand away from Valentine's, her eyes welling with hot, angry tears. "Just leave me alone. I'm going to fucking kill myself or something."The silence of the clearing was broken by the distinct crackling pop of footfall as Madeleine and Genevieve found the girls' hiding spot. Vivienne sniffed hard, wiping her nose against her dry, dirty arm; a shimmer of wet snot streaking through the grime.
Perfectly oblivious, or perfect at pretending that she was, Genevieve skipped over to the sisters. She sighed in exasperation as she rested her hands on her hips, digits splayed against grass-stained acid-wash denim and her purple Gildan shirt, covered in little filthy fingerprints. "The streetlights came on," She rolled her eyes, before jerking a thumb back over her shoulder. "We gotta drop the baby off."Madeleine stamped her foot, her voice audibly restrained with tears. "Come on, you know my Grandma's crazy! That is NOT my fault!" She began to pout, her arms folded over her chest. Genevieve pivoted on the ball of her foot as she turned to laugh at the odd one out, bending at the waist as she yelp-laughed once, loudly. "HA! What, you're mad your Grandma gives a shit and doesn't want you to get like, kidnapped?"Madeleine's parents had died in a boating accident on a vacation when she was only three, and custody fell upon the next living relative; which happened to be her widowed, anxious-obsessive Grandmother who watched too much true crime on the late-night channels.

"Shut up already! I wanna go home! It's bad enough that I scraped my knee, if it gets any darker then she's going to start riding around the city with a bull horn!" Madeleine thrashed her legs in self-defense, her knees wobbling as she threw her arms down at her side.Using the hand that Valentine refused to let go of, Vivienne hoisted herself to her feet, rolling her eyes as she brushed off her knees. "Whatever, you pussy. You should just let that old bat die of a heart attack so you can go in the foster system for realsies and not have that wrinkly ass helicopter sagging over your head forever." Vivienne scoffed, storming out of the treeline as she tore her hand away from Valentine's, marching out into the field, in a beeline to the pavement."What the fuck is her damage?" Madeleine began to freak out, convulsing with quieted anger as she clenched her little hands into fists, pantomiming strangling Vivienne."A lot. She's worse off than you. She actually has no future." Genevieve poked at Madeleine's side. "Your Grandma might love you enough for you to turn out alright. Why do you think the Vees and I are always out here? My dad dipped and my mom works nights. Have you ever seen the Lastnames at any school events?"Genevieve was two years older than the rest of the girls, but had been held back twice for flunking math. She was eager to pop the bubbles of naivete of her younger friends, to watch their crestfallen faces when she told them that the common mythos for children were all lies. No Santa Claus, no Tooth Fairy, and no baby-delivering stork perched in the lawn during perfect weather. Taped reruns of Clarissa on Nick gave Genevieve the basics in puberty talk, late night Cinemax was sex ed."Please stop talking about me like I'm dead," Valentine teased, leaves and twigs crunching beneath her sneakers as she crept up on the pair. "Let's head out before Maddie here has a cow."

"Madeleine Delilah! You nearly gave me an infarction!" Her Grandmother shrieked as the girls stood on the brick stoop of the apartment door steps, nestled in the heart of the sixty-five-and-older-only housing community that had made an exception for orphaned Madeline.
"Sorry, Grandma!" Madeleine squealed as her Grandmother reached out to pull her into the apartment, frantic in her overprotection, desperate to keep the girl from Death's door, paranoid at every possible happening. The door seemed an eager mouth that closed around Madeline, like Jonah and the whale, sealing her in a tomb of crocheted blankets and Caldesene-scented safety.The pause of time felt infinite as she looked Madeleine over before she pulled her inside by the wrist, her eye catching on the rash of bloodied skin across Madeleine's kneecap. "Have you lost your mind? You are not to play with these… demon children!" Her voice seemed to reach a frequency audible only to dogs, her face reddening with a sullen, psychotic rage as she stared Vivienne down from behind the threshold of the door."You. I bet it was your fault, you little… slut. I always knew there was something wrong with you. Get off of my porch. Don't you dare come back. I rebuke you in the name of the Lord," She spat as Madeleine grew hysterical with distress, digging her fingernails into her Grandmother's arm. "Grandma, stop! Stop, it wasn't her fault! I fell! I FELL, GRANDMA! PLEASE, YOU CAN'T LOCK ME UP IN HERE FOREVER, PLEASE!"Tugging her sharply through the door, slamming it in the girls' faces, she began to scream, growls surging through the walls that defied the bassy decible of the Devil. "LYING BITCH!"There was a loud crash, and Genevieve grabbed the shirts of the Vees, her heart aching. "Run, run, run," she started, urging them along as their little legs thundered out of the entranceway, rushing out into the narrow frontage road. Once they were out of earshot, she screamed, "RUN FOR YOUR FUCKING LIVES!", weaving into the busy street and into traffic, rushing across the street and into the clearing across the way.Vivienne and Valentine interlocked fingers, making eye contact as their hair whipped across their reddened cheeks, grips tight in desperate prayer for survival as they stood before the road together, both too afraid to cross alone.Voice shaking, Valentine spoke above the rush of wind and metal, mechanical beasts closed around humans like embarrassing-looking land boats. "It's not your fault, V… and.. I meant what I said earlier. I don't wanna be without you for the rest of my life. I wish I could be your husband." Her hand was slick with sweat, a puddle of salinic dirt in their joined palms.Vivienne began to cry, tears rolling down her cheeks as she squeezed Valentine's hand in fear, her chest tight. "You promise? You really really mean it?" She turned her head to face Valentine, sniffling as liquid snot pooled around her philtrum. "I swear to God. I really really mean it." Valentine turned her head to see Vivienne's oak-brown eyes dewy with tears, as beautiful as ever, locking her pinky around her sister's."I love you, Vivienne.""I love you, Valentine."A red light at the intersection gave way to a lull in traffic and a clearing in the road safe enough to walk across at a snail's pace. Still hand in desperate hand, they darted across the two-laner as Valentine laughed breathlessly, sniffling away snot and tears.Vivienne shrieked with glee as they ran, kicking up clods of badly-lain sod with heavy footing as she hit the other side. She rushed over to Genevieve — who had dramatically collapsed on the ground, whose face was sticky and red with exertion —bending over with her hands on her knees; panting to catch her breath, legs freckled with Jersey dirt."Hey.." Vivienne giggled as she leaned over her, sticking her tongue out to pant, impishly raising her eyebrows. "I got ten bucks in my pocket I stole from my Mom's wallet when she got home from work this morning. Wanna go to Wawa?""Fuck yeah I do!" Genevieve seemed to launch off the ground, dusting her clothes off as she stood up. "I got a half a bottle of Burnetts' in my bathroom cabinet at the house. Let's go get fucked up."

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"V.V!Hello, earth to Valentine! Are you gonna pass that joint or are you gonna waste my twenty bucks like a total dick?" Vivienne sneered at her little sister, whose glassy red eyes were stuck to the corner edge of the beaten Turkish rug carpet tucked under the sofa. Valentine's ears perked as her face burned with embarrassment, nodding with her arm outstretched, dragging the sofa's square throw pillow across her lap."Sorry. Got lost." Valentine murmured, pressing her foot to the ground and twisting her ankle back and forth, her jaw clenching and unclenching.Vivienne retrieved the joint with a languid hand, lazy and delicate as ever, raising it to her mouth and inhaling as slowly as possible, careful to not cough hard enough to gag.It was horrible quality bud, standard for Jersey dealers — total dirt weed that tasted no better in a bong with years of blackened resin stuck to the walls and water that had grown moldy than it did in poorly packed joints, rolled with blank pages torn out of the Bible."What's got you all wound up?" She probed, her voice tinged with condescension that went unnoticed; cocking her head as her short, greasy black hair fell from behind her ear.Valentine's ankle wobbled as if it were going to fall off, her scrawny fingers anxiously fiddling with the fraying threads along the rip in her jeans, twisting them back and forth to cut off circulation until her fingertip was nearly purple, then let the blood rush back again. "Do you want the truth truth or the nice truth?" Valentine chewed at the inner corner of her mouth, deadened eyes returned to their fixed spot on the basement floor.Vivienne flicked the ash forming at the end of her joint at Valentine and bucked her leg out to kick her, her face red with blossoms of anger across her cheeks. "What part of my sincerity sounds like pity to you, you jackass? I share my weed with you, you nearly burn it all just sitting there, and you try to lie to me when I ask how you're doing. Do you have brain damage? Am I some kind of creepy ass shrink that smells like Vicks' and not your sister?" She scoffed, offended by the shallow pool of pity that Valentine seemed to be wallowing in.

The burn of shame across Valentine's face deepened as she sank further into the sagging sofa, the frame inside broken and the pillows deflated. "Sorry." She offered meekly, the hair on the back of her neck standing up. A measured silence hung between them, where time felt thick and coagulated. Valentine inhaled deeply and stretched her legs out, pressing her dried lips together. "There's this guy I've be-", she started, and the air in the basement became suddenly stifling, the weed smoke and pangs of anxiety working in unison to extinguish all oxygen from her lungs.Vivienne bark-laughed, clapping one hand over her mouth as she crushed what was left of her joint in the ashtray, now no longer worried about the value of a dollar. "Stop. Stop. Sorry. What?" She said, incredulous, voice thin with restrained violence. "Come again?" She crossed and uncrossed her legs, folding her arms as she threw herself back against the office chair she was sitting across from Valentine in, her jaw gurning with anger."Um." Valentine inhaled deeply again, running her sweat-slick hands down the thighs of her faded black jeans, swallowing once. "There's this guy I've been talking to." She speaks with her lips pursed as she keeps her eyes to the floor, too afraid to make eye contact with Vivienne lest she beat her, cowering like an abused dog.Vivienne stood up abruptly, startling Valentine as she shoved the office chair back suddenly, her posture aggressively stiff and unenthused. "Ok, so?" She pressed on, starting to pace angrily as her tattered plaid pajama pants dragged along the basement floor, her footsteps thudding against the concrete with tremendously poorly-hidden rage. Her folded arms flew out to her side as she laughed again, shaking her head. "So what?"Valentine's head shakes mournfully, swallowing again tensely as she exhales slowly, clearing her throat. "Talking like… talking talking." She licks her lips almost imperceptibly, wetting them with the tip of her tongue and then pressing the moisture away, twirling her fingers up in the frayed hem of her jeans again.The world seemed to blacken.Vivienne was always an angry girl, prone to hitting herself in tantruming fits, lunging at other kids in class and threatening to kill them, promising to shoot the building up before graduation. She tried, and often failed, to shield her kid sibling from the extent of her indignant rage, from the hunger for violence that seemed to seep into the marrow of her bones.

When they were kids, she'd squeezed Valentine by the throat a little too hard once. It was supposed to be playful, but she always overestimated her own strength, and Valentine clutched at Vivienne's wrist with her nails digging in, and she dropped her like a ragdoll, falling to her knees as hot tears spilled over her little hands, begging her to not tell Mom."Don't hit me, don't hit me," Valentine threw her arms up over the top of her head, her hands curled into loose fists against the back of her head as she began to cry and babble frantically, "don't hit me, Vivi, please don't fucking hit me, don'thitme." Vivienne laughed again, stomping over to Valentine to grab her by her arms and curl her fingers around them tightly, digging her fingertips in hard to press bruises into her, yanking her back and forth as she coiled into the fetal position for self-defense."Don't hit you? Don't HIT you? You're lucky if I don't snap off all of your fingers and break your fucking skull for doing this to me." Vivienne raged at her, her voice strung taut in her throat as she started to wail, landing blows against her arms. Valentine squeaked as Vivienne battered her, her body coiling tightly in fear, tears falling in hot desperation. "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry." She hiccuped, her core trembling as the words tumbled out as quick as vomit.Vivienne grabbed a handful of Valentine's mousy brown hair and pulled hard, shaking her head as she tried to tear her hair out of her scalp. "I hope you die. I hope your fag-ass boyfriend gets AIDS and you get it from him and you both die. I hate you. I hate you." She sobbed, breaking down as she collapsed over her in a pathetic coil, her stomach heaving as if she were going to wretch and vomit down the back of her shirt."I'm sorry, Vivi. I'm so sorry." Valentine curled her fingers around a tendril of Vivienne’s hair, breath shuddering. "You promised we would always be together," Vivienne wept, voice drawn with despair and resentment as she crushed her little sister beneath her. "We can still be together, always, Vivienne," Valentine started, to no avail, as Vivienne coiled her fingers into an angry fistful of her hair, pulling it into scalp-blisteringly tight tension as her teeth loomed over her ear, threatening to bite it off."Stop lying to me. Stop talking." The pain from Vivienne pulling Valentine's hair made the nerves across her jaw blossom with electricity, her facial muscles had gone slack. "You think I want your loser boyfriend's sloppy seconds?" She shook her clenched fistful of Valentine's hair back and forth tightly as the blood vessels that ran to the nape of her skull ached."Wives don't share their husbands."Every word Vivienne choked on seemed to hang with suspended tension, needles and fishhooks through soft skin and tissue. "If you lied to me then, how can I trust anything you've said since then? How can I trust you at all?" She cried, her little-girl voice broken with grief.Her clenched fist went limp, sudden tears rushing out of her eyes as she pressed her cheek to Valentine's, her tears rolling down her face and onto her. "I'm sorry, Vivienne. I'm so sorry." Valentine repeated, her fingers curling into her soft hips just above the waistband of her pajama pants, kneading guiltily in hopes of currying her favor."I don't know how it happened. He messaged me first one night, and I didn't want to stop talking to him, and I knew I needed to tell you, but I didn't know how, or when…" Valentine spoke softly as she cried, their bodies melded together in disparate union, suddenly feeling awkward and unfamiliar, despite decades of familiarity.The room seemed to blister with heat on the hottest day of the season; as the burn of the sun that laid long against the foundation began to ache. The house usually started to swelter around four, when all the kids got home from school and the grid got overloaded with demand for more driving power to run tons of coolant into perfect suburban dreams, and the Lastnames had to cut the whole thing off, unless they wanted a nine-hundred dollar power bill.Vivienne didn't move, sticky with sweat and rage and fear, collapsed in defeat against Valentine, a promise she wouldn't beat her any further, tears falling as she let her speak, her heart skipping the beats that ached with stomach-flipping hiccups."I'm gonna kill your boyfriend."Vivienne hiccuped with sobbing laughing as she hugged Valentine by the neck, crying as if she were being forced to do it, like a bad guy had strapped a C4 timer vest to her chest and sent her into a crowded bank to ask for a quarter of a million dollars; a hostage to her own emotional volatility.

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^SYNOPSIS

Born in the same year, Vivienne and Valentine Lastnames were sisters from a sleepy township in Central Jersey. With abuse and neglect permeating every corner of their lives, the sisters were all the other had.Consanguineous and codependent, the girls relied on impossible fantasies to escape the psychological warfare of their seemingly mundane lives.Anyone willing to admit the truth could see through the family's facade, and knew it was ready to come crashing down, but two problems remained.No one wanted to admit the truth, and no one knew when it would happen.Spanning 1997 to 2005, rotten.cam is a heart-wrenching multimedia project about stranger danger, how isolation breeds abuse, and the perils of the internet.

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Developed in the Sonoran Desert in 2026, ROTTEN.CAM is the brainchild of The Author, who wishes to be otherwise unnamed.In October of 2025, the creative process for ROTTEN.CAM began. In the project's infancy, it was storyboarded as a halloween-inspired act in three parts to be published on the fan-work hosting website, Archive of Our Own.However, The Author recognized the desire to undertake a more in-depth personal project with greater creative liberties, and in Spring of 2026, ROTTEN.CAM was born.

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There are two entities responsible for the online presence of rotten.cam: The Admin and The Author.The Admin is who performs site maintenance and posts about chapter updates on social media.
The Author is who writes the chapter updates.Both wish to remain otherwise unnamed.

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ROTTEN.CAM is a work of extreme horror fiction meant for adult readers, with controversial and provocative themes intended to provoke and disturb such as abuse, murder, and incest.ROTTEN.CAM contains graphic descriptions and depictions of the following:— violence
— child abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual abuse)
— child neglect
— incest
— self-harm
— abusive language
— homophobic and serophobic language
— bodily fluids (blood, urine, vomit)
— ableist slurs
— torture
— murder
— exploitation
— gore
— homicide (familicide)

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This is a work of fiction.Any similarity to real individuals or events is purely coincidental.The author does not support or encourage any of the actions portrayed herein; these depictions are for narrative purposes only and must not be replicated in real life.

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Vivienne pushed her chair back from her faded, worn teakwood desk. It held her computer, various overflowing ashtrays of stubbed cigarette butts, and speckles of ash that looked like little soot-stars; constellations of addiction.There were empty cans of taurine-infused energy drinks with sticky residue at the mouthpiece that were crushed and kicked over with general disregard, alongside empty green bottles of citrus soda; half-filled with electric-yellow stores of stale urine.Her stomach churned as she stared at the blinking cursor in the chat box, leaning back to cross her ankle and sitting forward again. Vivienne exhaled slowly, curling and uncurling a strand of hair around her index finger."Make the right decisions?" she muttered to herself, scoffing with laughter as she used her free hand to fetch her cigarettes from the threadbare pocket of her pajama pants.She placed the cigarette between her lips deliberately and inhaled as she flicked the flame open on her lighter, holding it for a moment as she inhaled.The menthol made her dizzy, a minty headrush before she exhaled through barely-parted lips, flicking the sliver of budding ash into the closest ashtray. Vivienne shook her head slightly, laughing to herself.The Lastnames had neglected Vivienne enough for her to only confidently make the wrong decisions — to befriend dangerous strangers from seedy online forums, to get hooked on nicotine and do lines in bathrooms stalls at industrial music shows; thin veneers of white powder dusting the tops of metal toilet-paper dispensers, evidence of visits from the coke fairy.She'd found herself immersed in the soft white underbelly, welcomed into websites with bad and broken code that hosted grainy crime scene photos of dismembered parents and unidentified car crash corpses; brains and limbs splattered and cracked open across dashboards.The viscera seemed as brown as dead winter dirt when it dried, when it wasn't leaking pomegranate-red out of bodies beaten apart by death's scythe.Vivienne had spent hours at a time at the computer — at first she had convinced herself it was educational, she would learn music tabs and potential gig sites. She had herself fooled, until that inauspicious muggy April night Genevieve told Vivienne about rotten.What started as morbid curiosity, oblique gawking on sites with posts that made legislators and hyperreligious zealot mothers claim that the internet was a unique evil that needed to be contained against all odds, but it had consumed her.Chat rooms seemed to burst at the seams on the weekends, and a few drinks made for social lubrication, and she was burnt bright at both ends to stay up more than she slept.She couldn't keep from prying into thought processes of the perverts that trawled the same squalid corners of the internet, long after the basement floor grew cold enough to send bone-cutting chill through her feet.Weirdos online seemed less of a threat than anyone Vivienne had the displeasure of knowing personally.The anonymity made them loud, mostly-fangless snakes, coiled around each other in hibernacula; hissing and slithering and irritable and sometimes gouging the other's eyes out.There was some sort of hazing ritual; a social scrape when users would talk about having boners as hard as diamonds when they had cut themselves for the first time, or had made jokes about doxxing other users to swat them or rape them, flinging homophobic slurs in the process. If you survived corruption, you were untouchable; declared royalty to rule with a scepter of shit.She survived it with an exceptional pass rate, unflinching at videos of accidental railroad amputations that left the corpses split down the middle as if they had been bent backwards at the spine and snapped in half like flimsy planks of plywood; or girls eating each other's excrement and then throwing it up and eating the shit-bile-puke soft serve between sloppy porn-camera kisses.Vivienne met other people who had horrific dreams of dismembering people they loved and hordes of German roaches pouring from sewer grates like a plague descending upon the city.People with homicidal ideation ofttimes so visceral that she found herself folding the lapels of her grimy brandless black zip-up jacket over the other, her delicate sensibilities scorched.People who knew a guy who knew a guy in New York that could get you a sidearm with a sawn-off serial number with no trouble at all, as long as you paid in cash and came in person. People who had done time and eaten human flesh, in that order.They loved Vivienne because she was so affable, so consistent, so predictable. She showed up like clockwork. She considered these heinous criminals her friends with minimized judgment, the edgelords that lived between the ultrafine weave of the web.Vivienne met a jaded handful of anonymous users that she considered herself "close-ish acquaintances" through a particularly vile 'Try Not to Puke' thread. The oldest and newest users alike banded together for the shock-jockey threads, and the forum had only grown in size each summer since 9/11.People had posted photos of their hoard-homes full of milk gallons that had long curdled into a bloated bottle of whey and opaque yellow cream; decaying necrotizing tissue that had grown blackened with grave-green wound edges, rot infested trailers with septic-tank failures where yards flooded with gallons of shit water as the owners stood knee-high in it.The holidays brought in the goriest stories, with the three-time-compressed pixels to prove it. It always kicked off with Easter ham carving disasters, then morphed into Fourth-of-July fingers and hands that had been mutilated from staying curled around fireworks with sizzling short fuses. Still-frozen Thanksgiving turkeys lowered into full vats of peanut oil that treated the water content of the blood inside the body as a challenge. Christmas autoeroticasphyxic suicides, bloated bodies hanging from the rafters with Santa hats crudely drawn on in pre-installed paint programs.

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"There's this video of this girl getting hit by a bus in like, Poland or Russia or some shit, from the mid-nineties. The footage is so grainy it looks like she just gets blown apart. The bank of snow gets drenched in blood. It's fucking insane." Genevieve giggled as she crossed her legs, ashing her cigarette into a candy-apple-red glazed ashtray bolted to the picnic table."Rotten dot cam." Genevieve repeated, suddenly looking Vivienne in the eye very seriously as she clutched Vivi's free hand, threatening to crush her fingers."Rotten dot cam." Vivienne echoed, nodding as she moved in tandem with Genevieve, leaning forward to ash her cigarette as Genevieve leaned back to drag on her own, her fingers slipping into the closed palm of her friend.The air in April was not yet unbearably hot, but still carried smoke in a sticky humid haze that clung to the very molecules and atoms of their hair and fingers, nails yellowing from chainsmoking.That evening, Vivienne found herself moving in hurried need at the computer when she booted it up again; anxious for her ancient monitor to flash the familiar scramble of pixels that was her wallpaper -- a grainy photo of herself with her sister on their shared birthday, dated 2000.Her computer wheezed to life as she flung herself into the office chair, spinning back and forth as multiple program logos ached across the screen, each one initializing on start up and slowing the clogged RAM queue of the pre-Y2K fossil.You've got mail.

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