ROTTEN.CAM is a work of extreme horror fiction meant only for adult (18+) readers, with controversial and provocative themes and topics contained and discussed herein intended to provoke and disturb such as abuse, murder, and incest.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.The story told herein is intended strictly as an artistic narrative and is not an encouragement of criminal or illegal behaviors. Do not attempt.

By accessing and entering the site, you agree per Carrd's Terms of Service that you are 18 years of age or older.

ROTTEN.CAMHOME OF GOD'S DISGRACE
ONLINE USERS: 666

.

Looking for chatrooms? Visit rotten.chat here.

• Arrow Right

Subscribe to the official rotten.cam mailing list to get updates directly in your inbox, so you never miss out.

gmail users, PLEASE check your spam folder after subscribing!

• Arrow Left

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 their parents 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 zinc-powder-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 get snacks from the corner store?""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 my mom's vodka hiding in my bathroom cabinet at the house. Let's go get fucked up."

• Arrow Right

• Arrow Left

"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 Campbells 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.

• Arrow Right

.

Go Back

.

Go Back

^SYNOPSIS

Born in the same year, Vivienne and Valentine Campbell were inseparable irish twin 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.The reputation of the girls' family preceded them, and the trappings of isolation slowly wrung out all contact with anyone who could save the them.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.Following five girls, the story spans a decade in epistolary snapshots, from 1997 to 2007. rotten.cam is a cruel, chaotic, and horrifyingly heart-wrenching multimedia project about stranger danger, how isolation breeds abuse, and the dangers of losing yourself to the internet.Eager to challenge the modern cultural conventions of sanitized horror, the mythos of cyberhorror within begs the reader, “Can you trust a stranger? When does a joke go too far?”

.

.

Developed in the Sonoran Desert in 2026
by Andrew Strange.

.

.

Born of indigenous Central American ancestry in 1998, Andrew Strange is a critically acclaimed horror author hailing from South Carolina.Following the death of Andrew's mother, Mrs. Strange, in 2023, Andrew's life began to unravel at the seams. For two years, he would experience innumerable traumatic losses and hardships, ranging from homelessness to labor trafficking.The desperate plea of his unfulfilled creative desire seemed to scream between the empty cracks of his anguish-inducing daily life, and Andrew realized he did not fear death, but instead feared a life without meaning.After two-and-a-half decades of flinching and cowering - and waiting for the perfect moment that would never come - Andrew decided to drag his beaten corpse out of the mud; as so to alchemize the pain and psychosis that had become intimately interwoven with his life.In honor of the five friends lost in as many years and the four homes, three years later, he wants to teach you what he has learned.

.

.

You can send love letters to Andrew at
[email protected],
or check out his blog on tumblr, strangeandrew.

.

ROTTEN.CAM contains graphic descriptions and depictions of the following:— violence
— child abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual abuse)
— child neglect
— exploitation (child and adult)
— incest
— self-harm
— strong and abusive language
— homophobic and serophobic language
— bodily fluids (blood, urine, vomit)
— ableist slurs
— torture
— blackmail
— murder
— homicide (familicide)
— gore

.

ROTTEN.CAM is a work of extreme horror fiction meant only for adult (18+) readers, with controversial and provocative themes and topics contained and discussed herein intended to provoke and disturb such as abuse, murder, and incest.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.The story told herein is intended strictly as an artistic narrative and is not an encouragement of criminal or illegal behaviors. Do not attempt.

By accessing and entering the site, you agree per Carrd's Terms of Service that you are 18 years of age or older.

.

.

.

.

.

• Arrow Right

.

• Arrow Left

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 Campbells had abused 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.It 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.

.

"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 party, 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.

• Arrow Right

.

• Arrow Left

A swarm of boys rushed past Valentine and Genevieve, clad in polyester, numbered runners' bibs pinned to the backs of their sweat-soaked gray t-shirts.Genevieve turned her head as she sneered in disgust, tucking her chin in against her shoulder, gagging for dramatic emphasis after they'd cleared the path. Their smell was positively putrid, acrid enough to wilt even the hardiest winter flowers."Jeeeeesus." Valentine groaned, upper lip curled in repulsion as she brought her hand to her face instinctively, using the sleeve from her zipper jacket to cover it."My GOD!" Genevieve shrieked, stamping her feet on the concrete as she let out an emphatic full-body shiver. "That is so fucking DISGUSTING!" Turning on her heel to face the boys who were running in the other direction, she screamed after them, "PUT SOME FUCKING DEODORANT ON, YOU FUCKING PIGS!"Turning back to face Valentine, she huffed as she tugged her purse further up her shoulder. "It's un-fucking-real how disgusting teenage boys are." Genevieve, who had just turned 19, had graduated in the spring, and felt superior to the peers she walked with just 180 days prior. She started talking to some 28-year-old creep from a chat-room and convinced herself that she was more mature, an esoteric cool girl for getting groomed."Yeah," Valentine started, face blank as she stared at the pavement, dragging a pebble under the rubber of her sneaker, chewing on the inside of her mouth passively. "I'm not really sure how anyone likes them."Valentine was desperate to take the heat off of herself, and Genevieve took the bait. She was a pretty girl, but had a tendency to be awfully naive about the internet in ways she wasn't about real life. The contrast between her online and offline personas were so stark, she seemed split in two at times."OH. MY. GOD. You're fucking telling me!" Genevieve rolled her eyes, arms folded, flicking her hair over her shoulder, before ranting at a million words per hour without taking a breath between any of them, "Iseriouslydon'tgetit!Thisisalwayswhyitellgirlstodateolderguys.They'resomuchmore laid back. My guy doesn't care where I go, what I do, and he doesn't STINK like a grody ass sweat rag from the boys' locker room."Despite Genevieve's mother's neglectful absence, the heft of her presence was felt in every Missouri syllable that Genevieve would spit for the rest of her life; the boundaries of her accent drawn between a disaffected Californian wild-child and a third-generation Missouri-born Melungeon. Her mother joked that she had a father just long enough for it to not count, but long enough for him to leave an awful impression.Valentine nodded, honestly disinterested but monotonously sarcastic enough to be imperceptible, "He sounds like a real catch. Thanks for walking home with me. Sorry about the Swarm of the Living Jock Itch." She apologized, sincere in her sheepishness."Oh, totally. It's no biggie. You know I love you, you don't have to thank me for that stuff. Are you feeling alright?" Genevieve pried suddenly, her ability to read between the lines uncanny beyond belief.Valentine shook her head, laughing. "I'm fine, Gennie. Serious. I figured you wouldn't want to, since you graduated 'n all."Almost immediately, Genevieve shook her head. "Stop it. Right now. You know you're like a sister to me. I would never let you walk home alone with all these weirdos ready to snatch you out of the bushes. You're such a pretty girl.""Genevieve's cognitive dissonance is gonna get her killed someday," Valentine thought to herself, shaking her head as she tensed up, her body preemptively bracing against her bad news. "I actually have something to tell you." The pause between her sentences felt infinite. "It's serious."Stopping dead in her tracks, Genevieve's hand closed around her friend's wrist. "How serious?""Like, serious serious. But we have to keep walking, because I don't want anyone to hear us."Genevieve let go, shaking her head as she pushed on. "This is fucked up," she fretted, before knowing the amount of truth to the statement."Yeah," Valentine agreed as she tugged the strings of her backpack, tightening it as if it were a suit of armor. "It is." It felt as if one of her ear crystals had suddenly become dislodged, having grown dizzy as the open air seemed to close around her.

The sullen autumn evening sky of New Jersey had grown cold and blue, the pine-needles of the trees tinted with melancholy as Valentine ground the toe of her sneaker into the gravelly forest floor. They had made their way to the same gnarled wood where Valentine begged for Vivienne's forgiveness almost a decade ago, in the seven-year itch of sisterhood.Genevieve sat cross-legged, her low-rise jeans drawing the moisture from the ground the longer the pair sat together, creating splotches of muddy denim that clung to her thighs, chilling her to the bone.Valentine's backpack had been hung carefully from thick branches that warped and bent under the weight of her bags, stuffed and zipped tightly with four textbooks and four notebooks and a completely-full two-inch binder, thirty pounds of curriculae.An acidic ember of hesitation burned in Valentine's throat as she bowed her head, leaning back against the trunk of the maple tree in the thicket of woods they had disappeared in, a quarter mile from the winding foot path, dotted sparsely with streetlights."I am more terrified to tell you this than I think I realize." Valentine coughed, sliding down the trunk of the tree with a grimace as the bark snagged at her shirt, scraping her back with dull, dry cork in the process.Genevieve froze, side eyeing her friend fearfully. "Please don't say that. I am really fucking worried. Please don't tell me you like, killed somebody." She laughed nervously, acid washing the back of her throat as she covered her mouth with one manicured hand. Grabbing the strap of her microscopic purse - which had been tucked under her armpit tightly, crushing all of its contents inside - she slid it off her arm and fished inside for her clove cigarettes. Genevieve had a way of making small things feel huge, both literally and metaphorically, for better or for worse, and it looked like she had been rummaging around in a potato sack, not a handbag shaped like the sly smile of a waning crescent moon.Valentine laughed wryly with a huff through her nose, shaking her head. "No, definitely not that. I wish, sometimes.""You wish, sometimes? What the fuck does that mean, Val?" Genevieve's eyebrows were half-cocked in confusion as she produced the soft pack of clove cigarettes, so badly beaten that it had rolled itself up, shoved in the corner of her bag.Valentine's hand extended instinctively for a cigarette, wiggling her fingers back and forth.Genevieve scoffed, clutching the cigarettes to her chest defensively, her disbelief worn well on her face. "Not until you promise me that you're not going to poke me to death and leave me out here!"Valentine's fingers curled into her fist as she extended her pinky, rolling her eyes. "Pinky swear. Please give me a cigarette now." She deadpanned, slightly irritated.Genevieve rolled her eyes in return, shaking her head as she pressed her knees to the damp ground to fish into the even more microscopic three-centimeter sliver of denim that the designers so boldly called a "pocket", creasing her sneakers as she knelt. She produced a small, hot pink lighter, and flicked it once. A very weak, tepid flame sprung up from the lighter, even shorter than Valentine's stubby, chewed pinky nail."That's not going to work, Gennie." Valentine stared in an almost quiet disdain as Genevieve waved her hand around, shushing her. "Shut up. You know nothing of my tricks. You need to learn a little patience."Genevieve produced a second, empty lighter, from her pocket, and flicked the flint, holding down the plunger to release the butane inside. With her opposite hand she brought the weak lighter to the empty one, and it sprung to life, the flame wavering slightly in the humidity."Move quick," Genevieve said, cupping the flame with her hand as she held it out to Valentine. "Cause I really don't feel like re-lighting this shit."Valentine leaned forward quickly, drawing hard on the cigarette to start it, exhaling sharply once enough smoke had flooded her lungs. "Thanks." Valentine murmured, cigarette pinched between her lips. Genevieve produced her own from the package and put it between her lips, carefully putting her hands on either side of Valentine's face.Valentine sat still for a moment as the wind swirled around them, cold breeze kicking up the fallen leaves that had been eaten by the rot of rain, blackened pin-holes that marred their delicate structures.

Genevieve pressed the tips of their cigarettes together and inhaled, drawing the burn of Valentine's ember back into her throat, the pair sharing the deepest air from their lungs in the shroud of secrecy. Genevieve sat back on her feet, driving them to painful prickling numbness as the tendons stretched, pinned beneath the weight of her body."You have to swear to god you won't tell anyone. I am begging you. Nobody knows this except for Vivienne and the guy I've been talking to." Valentine began to cry, preemptively hysterical, her voice warbling as her lower lip trembled. There was a tremendous tightness in her chest, as if she had broken her ribs and been breathing through a straw.Genevieve nodded, silent in the dread that was flooding her chest, blinking a few times."Okay, so, I guess, um." Valentine's stomach had knotted itself ten times over, and it felt as if her tongue had been replaced with a block of lead, impossible to move with any amount of force. Squeezing her eyes shut and resting her head against the bark of the tree she nestled beneath, she licked her lips, exhaling through them tensely before resuming."When my mom left my dad, she pretty much immediately started looking for a new boyfriend. Um," She began to sob again, laughing incredulously. "She found a real catch." Valentine began to chew on an already bedraggled fingernail, biting her skin at this rate."Do you remember how after Dad left, I got a bunch of fears out of nowhere, like how I was really scared of balloons all of a sudden?" Valentine's eyes stayed screwed shut, not even opening them to take a trembling drag from the clove cigarette that burned between her fingers, afraid to be seen or see anything."Balloons, cameras, and mirrors." Genevieve replied, murmuring softly."Yeah." Valentine sobbed, her voice wrenching with pain in her chest. "Balloons, cameras, and mirrors. You got it."Genevieve shifted uncomfortably, crossing her legs beneath herself, smoking quietly as the sun anchored itself below the horizon and raced to the bottom of the sky, chewing at the inside of her lip between drags of her cigarette."I didn't say anything because I didn't wanna think about it. For as long as I could, I've ignored it and hoped it would stop, or go away. It hasn't. Not even a little bit." Valentine suddenly steeled herself, voice icy and angry, her jaw audibly clenched."Vivienne is getting worse because of it, every day. We were already fucked up before he showed up. We had enough on our plate with Mom being in her own fucking world all the time, and then she got boy-crazy for this fucking…" She paused, her upper lip curling in disgust before spitting decisively, "fag."Valentine opened her eyes, shaking her head as she rolled her eyes, angrily flicking the centimeters of ash that had blossomed at the end of her clove cigarette. "You know how I feel about that word. This dude is seriously sick in the fucking head. Why do you think he doesn't go to PTA meetings? Shit, not that they did before, but now they can't, Gennie."Genevieve had suddenly been flooded with too many memories to count, all of the instances of his awfully obvious sticky eyesight that seemed to glue to the girls' developing bodies, and her face contorted in horror."Oh my God." Genevieve managed. Her cigarette had been long finished from how anxiously she had sucked it down, and she'd been chewing on the hard acrylic of her fresh manicure, frantic with disgust."It's not just that, though." Valentine exhaled sharply, swallowing with a tense click of her larynx before she spoke, the blood rushing to the base of her head amplifying her dizziness. "The camera." She struggled, before bringing her hands to her mouth to swallow a scream before steadying herself again.The thirty seconds between sentences felt infinite, and she licked her lips, swallowing before speaking again."There are…. probably hundreds of videos and photos of Vivienne and I.""H-huh?" Genevieve cocked her head quickly, shaking her head subtly."Nudie pics. Nudie videos of Vivienne and I, doing horrible, awful, terrifying shit. 'playing house', just like he called it." Valentine spoke carefully, her vocal cords drawn painfully tight."Please say you're fucking joking."Another heavy pause flooded the air of the forest around them, and Valentine shook her head. "It started a few months after he moved in. It hasn't stopped. It keeps getting worse and worse. At night he stumbles down to the basement drunk, and if I'm still on the computer, I don't have enough time to get away. At some point I stopped feeling hurt by it. It's like my brain shuts off, and I mostly forget it."Genevieve's eyes welled with tears, her voice stolen with fear as she recognized the gravity, the absolute weight, and that she was - like the sisters - helpless to make any meaningful change."Vivienne's not so good at… separating herself from it. She still cries after, every time. That's why she doesn't shower much anymore. She realized that he wouldn't touch her unless she was a good girl. She didn't want to be a good girl anymore. Now she's the worst possible version of herself, and, truthfully," Valentine shivered, cold as the sky darkened with night."I needed to tell you because I felt myself hit the point of no return the last time it happened. It kinda broke me, this time. I sat there, empty afterwards, feeling dirty down to my bones. I can't keep living like this, Gennie. I'm almost eighteen and still getting raped by my step dad."Genevieve said nothing, silent for what seemed like the longest time in her life, excluding her nine months in the womb. The silence drove Valentine to fill every second of it, rambling nervously in the hopes of undoing the last hour-and-a-half.

"I feel totally alone and completely crazy. It's… It isn't really safe for me to talk about it, so it's made me feel even crazier. It's fucked up, and it's so.. fucking hard for me to place the blame where it belongs. Like, my mom's a victim, too, right? He manipulated her into this, right?" Valentine huffed in frustration, scornful and tearful, incredulous with pain."Valentine.." Genevieve started, fat teardrops running down her cheeks as she stared at her childhood best friend, who now seemed to her to encapsulate the myth of Chiron, the orphaned child of rape, who died of an incurable wound.It was impossible to conceptualize and completely obvious all the same; all the peculiar hyper-sexual behaviors the sisters displayed at needlessly young ages had come down to Mrs. Campbell's unmarried boyfriend, her pedophile pet boy."I don't know that that's the truth. You didn't deserve any of that." Genevieve struggled for words, her head swimming. "Shit, I'm a feminist. I don't even wear a bra!" She teased, trying to crack the ice that surrounded the two of them and failing, the punchline incoherent and the joke too poorly-timed.Genevieve reached for her dearest friend's hand, clutching it tightly, desperate to save the moment. "Which means that I think women are just as capable as men, and that means capable of owning up to their shit and being held responsible when they fuck up."Valentine began to cry harder, turning her head away as roiling waves of sniveling tears began to wash from her chest to her throat, stealing her breaths. She grabbed a tiny fallen twig from the maple tree they sat beneath and scratched at the ground, desperate to offset the nervous energy that urged her to run, to snap a branch from the tree and whip herself with it.Genevieve leaned over, pressing her knees to the damp, hard ground as she wrapped her arms tightly around her friend; enveloping her in a cloud of vanilla perfume and cold skin. Valentine swore to herself that she felt a few silent freezing-cold tears tickle the cartilage of her exposed ear as Genevieve pressed her cold-chapped pink cheek to the side of her head, her box-black hair that smelled like apricots hanging in Valentine's face, enveloping her entirely.Valentine's fingers curled tightly around Genevieve's left bicep as she wailed openly, hiccuping tears streaming faster. "I understand why you didn't tell me. You were afraid you wouldn't see me again." Genevieve began to cry, too, more openly."I wouldn't have told a soul. I would have kept your secret. I'll still keep it, I promise." She sat back on her heels again, the toes of her sneakers crushed into the dirt, the white threads muddied. Genevieve extended her right fist with her pinky extended, wiping her tears with the heel of her opposite hand.Valentine blinked through fat tears, the world blurry through the weight of water. "I love you so much, Gennie." She whimpered as she locked pinkies with her best friend, pulling her in for another hug, desperate for her grungy-clean smell. "I love you so much, Tiny. I'm so sorry I didn't see the signs."Pulling her friend closer, she kissed the top of Valentine's head, frowning. "All the times you wanted to play family and be the dad, and I kept having to tell you that wasn't what dads did…" She trailed off, her voice pained, tight with tears. "I'm so sorry, Valentine.""There's nothing to forgive you for," Valentine started, pressing her chin to Genevieve's shoulder as she looked up from the ground; realizing suddenly that the streetlights had been humming, and the sky was past pitch, and that she would be due for some awful treatment at home, and had subconsciously preemptively numbed herself to the entire ordeal. "But we gotta get home."Looking up from the ground, Genevieve leapt to her feet with a clumsy start as she panicked, old programming from the girls' childhoods still serving their purpose - fear, shame, humiliation, and panic. "FUCK!" She shouted, scrambling for her purse.Valentine laughed and shrugged, coming to her feet as she took Genevieve's outstretched, urgent hand, fingers fluttering with anxiety. Valentine unhooked her heavy backpack from the now-weakened twig that had been warped, the bark cracked and weakened beneath the weight of what'd been on Valentine's shoulders."It's okay. It's already too late anyway. I'm thankful he doesn't count the minutes for licks anymore. He's getting too old to do all the extra-extra weird shit he used to. It'll be okay. I think. I'll probably just get some standard treatment. Nothing too violent. He's too chicken-shit to leave as many bruises, since we're nearly adults. Now it's just the evidence that washes away.""I'm gonna fucking puke. He is such a sick fucking bastard. He's going to Super Hell when he dies. Shit, I'll personally send his ass there." Genevieve scoffed incredulously, wiping hot, scornful tears away with the heel of her hand as the girls started out of the woods, following the halogen constellations of streetlights home.

• Arrow Right

.

• Key