11-13-2021, 07:18 PM
These are the things she knows:
she does not belong to the darkness that plumbed her up out of the depths of hell, cobbled her together with flesh that was not hers, breathed new life into her withered lungs.
No, she belongs to the place he dredged her up from.
Because the life he’d breathed into her was not life at all but something lesser.
There is a heart that lives in the cage of her chest but there is no heartbeat.
He has crudely made her whole again but there are so many vital things missing. (No pulse, no stilted pattern of breath). And he looks at her as she stands there in the darkness, unaffected by the cold of the winter that presses in around them, and he smiles.
And so she smiles in turn but there is something manic in the eyes, a kind of hysteria lurking just beneath the surface. (And she could have been beautiful, too, if not for the wrongness. If not for the ragged edges where all the parts meet. If not for the blood that pools along the edges of her lower eyelids.)
‘Go,’ he says and she does.
She does not need to be sustained. She does not yearn for warmth or nourishment and he offers her neither. Instead, he unleashes her on the world and she goes. And if one were to stop and look, they would see clearly the ladder of her spine as it presses earnestly against the flesh, the sharp edges of her ribs.
She could have been beautiful, if he had not made her so gruesome in her ugliness.
She goes and only the white parts of her glow in the half-darkness, throwing light so soft that she might have seemed ethereal if one did not look too closely.
she does not belong to the darkness that plumbed her up out of the depths of hell, cobbled her together with flesh that was not hers, breathed new life into her withered lungs.
No, she belongs to the place he dredged her up from.
Because the life he’d breathed into her was not life at all but something lesser.
There is a heart that lives in the cage of her chest but there is no heartbeat.
He has crudely made her whole again but there are so many vital things missing. (No pulse, no stilted pattern of breath). And he looks at her as she stands there in the darkness, unaffected by the cold of the winter that presses in around them, and he smiles.
And so she smiles in turn but there is something manic in the eyes, a kind of hysteria lurking just beneath the surface. (And she could have been beautiful, too, if not for the wrongness. If not for the ragged edges where all the parts meet. If not for the blood that pools along the edges of her lower eyelids.)
‘Go,’ he says and she does.
She does not need to be sustained. She does not yearn for warmth or nourishment and he offers her neither. Instead, he unleashes her on the world and she goes. And if one were to stop and look, they would see clearly the ladder of her spine as it presses earnestly against the flesh, the sharp edges of her ribs.
She could have been beautiful, if he had not made her so gruesome in her ugliness.
She goes and only the white parts of her glow in the half-darkness, throwing light so soft that she might have seemed ethereal if one did not look too closely.
