if you get hungry enough, they say,
you start eating your own heart
you start eating your own heart
“It’s alright, we won’t hurt you.”
A small part of Messalina wants, so desperately, to believe it. Perhaps before she had awoken in a puddle of cooling blood, chunks of rabbit congealing in her mouth like rubber—the sick need for more crawling like mites in her stomach—she would have.
Or perhaps not. She bites back a cough; when had she ever trusted anyone? She had not even trusted Mother (or so she tells herself) and in the end she had been right. In the end, Mother had left her too.
Shivering, sealing her swollen lips back over her teeth, Messalina pushes away from the growing shadow, kicking dirt and leaves into the puddle of blood. The scaly trunk of a dead oak presses into her spine as she backs into it, and even that—that slight touch—releases a wave of red-fury through her trembling body.
"It is not I who will be hurt," she says hoarsely, pleadingly; but the pitch of her voice has ceased to obey her, rising in tone like a siren's horrific land-cry, and it sounds like a curse. Written backwards, she thinks, and tossed with a stone into the sea.
In the thickly knotted brush, her eyes glow like twin rubies; unblinking and eerily round. Her pupils have shrunk to pinpricks, her irises a ring of dark blood.
"Are you injured?" the voice asks; and down smashes a mallet to Messalina's heart.
Yes, she wants to scream. I am injured beyond measure, beyond sense. Something has broken, and it is not a bone. Something has torn, and it is not a lung. The crescent moon looks like a laughing mouth leering down from an empty sky. It is unfixable. I am a ruin.
"... I am fine," she says, soft as starlight. Soft as mourning.
Until, inhaling sharply, tucking her chin to her chest, Messalina pulls her lips back,
and back,
and back.
To hiss: "The blood you smell is not mine. But I am the cause of it. Are you afraid?"
Better that she sound monstrous, glass-sharp and wailing; better that she leaks of it, becomes it, so that the sweet voice and her bonded would—
run.
while I was writing this I imagined a fluffy little bird trying its best to look Evil
