The Spirit Bares Its Teeth

I almost miss it. The knowledge that something was there with me, hyperaware of danger, keeping me safe. But it wasn’t keeping me safe, was it? It was only ever torturing me, reminding me of what my tutors said, making sure that I remained frozen and afraid like a prey animal. Just like a rabbit

I do not look like my parents’ perfect violet-eyed daughter.

Good

Father,” she says, “bring help. O rivers, if you have divinity, destroy my shape by changing it.” She glances over her shoulder at me; her cheeks are pink. “That’s not the exact translation, but it’s clunky if you phrase it literally. It’s from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Daphne and Apollo.”

They have no reason to not fight back, so they will.

Mors vincit omnia, right?

And she’s looking at me like I’m something at all worth looking at.

Maybe I’ll get used that one day. But not now

For the first time, when I tell myself how my future will go, it is not the instructions for a hysterectomy. It is not hot blood, yellow fat, the soft edges of internal organs slipping between my fingers. There are no implements jutting out of a wound and no stitches. There is nothing to cut, or clamp, or sew shut. I don’t even have to take out my eyes.

Instead, my future is calm. Once this is done, once this is over, it will be just us.

We deserve to be together on our own. Without death hanging over us like a scalpel. But we’re not, and this is what we face now, so we have to make do with what we have

It would be so easy to not hurt us, and the Speakers can’t even do that. It’s more work to hurt us. It’s more work to be cruel. And yet they continue.

This is not Veil sickness. This is the ones who did not make it reaching out screaming

There’s a difference between horrible things that have gone on forever, because you can almost convince yourself of the inevitability of an age-old cruelty, or almost its necessity. But not a new one. With a new one, the change is too great, the wound too new, and you cannot convince yourself that it is simply the way of the world.