Happy Birthday MARA (Music Video)

By PROJECT MONROE · Gothic Metal · From the album THE HORROR CONTINUES

The banner read HAPPY BIRTHDAY MARA in big pink letters that already looked like a lie.

Mara sat in the wheelchair at the head of the table, skeletal, radiant, eyes too bright from the morphine. The cancer had eaten her down to something almost weightless, a paper lantern with a candle still burning inside. She smiled like this was normal: thirty-two balloons, a sheet cake bleeding red frosting roses, twenty-three people who loved her crammed into our little house on Laurel Street.

I’d made the punch myself. Cherry Kool-Aid, vodka, and enough thallium sulfate to stop a circus. Colorless, tasteless, slow. The rat poison of kings.

“To Mara,” I toasted, raising my plastic cup. “May this be the best day you’ve ever had.”

Everyone drank. They always do.

The singing started off-key but earnest. Mara’s mother was crying into her verse, mascara streaking like warpaint. Her brother kept trying to turn it into some ironic punk version until Mara laughed so hard she coughed blood into a napkin shaped like a party hat. I refilled cups. Second round, third. Thallium likes company.

Forty minutes in, the first wave hit.

Tante Lisa dropped her plate mid-sentence, stared at her hand like it belonged to someone else. “I can’t feel my fingers,” she said, almost curious. Then the vomiting began, polite at first, then projectile, then biblical. Someone screamed. Someone else laughed, thinking it was a prank. The cake slid off the table and landed face-down in a puddle of bile and confetti.

Mara watched it all with the serene expression of a child at the zoo. She reached for my hand. Her skin was cold, but her grip was fierce.

“Did you do this?” she whispered.

“Every detail,” I said.

She kissed my knuckles. “I love you so much it’s disgusting.”

The lights flickered. Someone tried to dial 911 and discovered I’d cut the landline and tossed every phone into the bathtub full of water hours earlier. Outside, I’d parked both cars across the driveway, keys in my pocket next to the empty thallium vial. No ambulances tonight.

The second wave was convulsions. Beautiful, synchronized, like a dance nobody rehearsed. Little Emma from down the street—six years old, pigtails, unicorn shirt—was the first to seize so hard her spine arched until only her heels and the back of her head touched the floor. Pink foam bubbled at her lips. Her mother tried to cradle her and only managed to smear blood across both their faces like warpaint.

Mara wheeled herself into the center of the room. The singing had long since died, replaced by wet choking and the wetter slap of bodies hitting hardwood. She raised her arms like a conductor.

“Again,” she croaked. “From the top.”

A few of them tried. God, they tried. Her brother got as far as “Happy birthday to—” before his tongue swelled and split. The sound that came out wasn’t human. It was perfect.

I turned the music up. The playlist I’d made for her actual birthday last year—Sinéad O’Connor into Nine Inch Nails into some warped music-box version of “For She’s a Jolly Good Fellow.” The speakers rattled like they were dying too.

Hair started falling out in clumps. Beautiful black sheaths across the floor, mingling with the frosting and the blood. Eyes burst. Someone pissed themselves so hard it steamed. The smell was copper and birthday candles and burnt sugar.

Mara rolled over the ruins toward me. Her breathing was a shallow rattle, but the smile never left.

“Carry me,” she said.

I lifted her. She weighed less than the lie we’d all been living. Around us the last guests twitched their finale, fingers clawing at nothing, mouths working around words they no longer had the machinery to form.

I laid her on the kitchen counter beside the ruined cake. Took the biggest knife we owned. She watched me cut two pieces, one for each of us. The frosting was the exact color of arterial spray.

“Make a wish,” I told her.

She closed her eyes. Blew out the single candle someone had lit hours earlier when hope was still a thing we pretended to have.

The candle wouldn’t stay out. Kept reigniting, a cheap trick candle laughing at us.

Mara opened her eyes, looked around the room—at the balloons deflating one by one, at the bodies arranged like a child’s tea party gone very, very wrong—and she laughed until she cried blood.

“Best day ever,” she said.

Then she took my hand, guided the knife to her throat, and together we finished what the poison started.

The last thing I heard was that fucking trick candle still burning, and the playlist looping back to the beginning:

Happy birthday to you…

Listen to Happy Birthday MARA

About Gothic Metal

Dark, atmospheric metal combining symphonic elements with gothic aesthetics, featuring clean and harsh vocals, melancholic melodies, and themes of romance and darkness. Bands include: Type O Negative, Paradise Lost, The Gathering

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