she pulls the oven open so we can see by the little light inside
it glistens on dark sludge oozing from under the fridge door like fluids from a casket
the stink fills my throat with puke but I can't leave her side
not into the darkness
not alone again
so I stay silent and watch her
she's the real thing
really real dark stuff and she trusts me to see
she leads me to the countertop coated with dirty smears and shows me the little bodies of animals she killed preserved in different destructions
all crowded in pickle jars of murky milky green with seeping tendrils of black blood
their soft soggy flesh makes my stomach sink and I don't understand
she told me that she's the only one who practices this and I wanted to ask her if she's the first or the last but I get so nervous around her
and how she studies me so quiet and careful like I'm a specimen
maybe she likes how quiet we are together
her body heats the time passing through mine to a bearable baseline of social animal warmth
and it comforts me even confronted with this horror she's showing me
I don't know what to say so I say nothing like always
I lean in to look at one of her dead things and I see her eye warped so wide through the glass
peering past the pale tissues so thin and the thicket of floating fleshy cords that fill the jar
through the tiny ribs of a pink stained skeleton
somehow I sense that this dead thing isn't dead
it's so faintly alive
but on a dizzying scale
the other end of something ancient
inside its jar body is circulating glacial as glass flows
I gaze back through it at her eye opening so wide and white
at her pupil swimming so small in its soft sparkling jelly and staring out so sharp and dark
and the warmth is gone
the blood is draining from my face as I strain to send her a nervous smile
but my mouth moves so slow through the fluid and gets stuck before it can reach her on the other side
and she's already gone
and the rim of the jar already broke my teeth and shattered into my face and I'm falling back and laying there bleeding warm and shivering wet and stung with blazing chemical heat dissolving time off the surface of my body so I seep inside myself
she sits on me and pins me to the tile floor all stinking and crusted with years and years and years of old food gunk and rot
all slippery and slimy again against my skin soaked in her juices
and they're making me so cold and numb and pale and slow and so so soft
"this softness came before us
it can't be cut by all the edges of this world"
she takes the biggest shard and stabs it into my face and pulls back with a wet scoop of skin and asks suddenly so tender
“is that ok?”
and I’m so small floating in my head like one of her little critters
and she's only moving me around
and so I breathe out “yes” and so she plunges the shard into me and asks me again and again I tell her it is
and from under her my rubbery limbs are flopping around without me so weak and useless like a dying octopus and again she scrapes more of me away like clay
over and over and over all over she opens me up so easy so she can see my insides and preserve them forever hers forever and ever
and every time she waits for my response I murmur up from my soft white mangled mess
“yes” “yes” “yes”