B
oudika dreams of sinking ships; she dreams of sails full of water, and captain’s quarters with the tea table still set, the atlas with courses plotted and reeling compass spinning through the deep. Which way is north, underwater?She dreams, more specifically, of drowning. Of what a scream tastes like when it becomes nothing except for bubbles of air, cascading toward the flittering light above. Of what life tastes like gritted between teeth; wrapped softly in wave after wave, in froth, in the absence of light and wave and sound and thought. There are days she thinks she died, long ago, in the storm. And there are nights, lately, when she wished she had.
Perhaps it is her loneliness. It gnaws on her as winter does the world. The sights she had once seen in full colour seem grayscale; the joys of her recent past transform from happiness into contempt. How had she been so happy? How had she been so foolish?
Do you know what else she dreams of, in her grayscale world, full of contempt and loneliness?
Sbe dreams of eating men.
There was one, two nights ago, she lured from a party in Denocte to the sea. He was a sailor, from a foreign land, and in all the ways that mattered she knew he would not be missed. Come away with me, she had whispered like molasses to the fly. Come to the sea with me, she had coaxed.
And once there, she had thought of all the ways she could kill him. How she wanted to bleed him out in the sand, or take him dancing into the sea. It would have made her feel more alone, she had thought. So why not undress him from his skin, coax from him something even more savoury?
Virginity, she’d been told, had always had an aura of value; of pricelessness. She had heard boys whisper of it in the academy; of the taking of it, like another conquest of war. Vercingtorix had told her how he had lost his; and she had held her jealousy between her teeth like a seed that could crack them if she bit too hard. And Tenebrae had said, there is another girl.
It would have made sense for her to find Amaroq, and seduce him, instead of some sailor with golden hair and blue eyes and a softness that reminded her of sand in the sun. It would have made sense for her to find someone that would placate the bitter pounding of her heart; to suture the jagged edges of her broken heart with the softness of their empathy. Not a man that tasted like cinnamon and rum, almost too sweet. Boudika hadn’t even know his name. Only that he said, after, you’re striped like a tigress.
She had hoped it would have felt more like taking her destiny, and her heart, back into her own power; she had hoped it would make her feel free instead of caged, powerless. Instead, it made her feel even more foolish, after; cheap and easily discarded. It turned her hardness brittle. It turned her sorrow into splinters.
It made her dream of sinking ships.
And those are the thoughts in her mind when she sees the palomino on the beach. Those are her thoughts when she remembers how Tenebrae’s face had shifted when she’d become a palomino mare; and Boudika knows this one cannot be the same one, whoever she was. Boudika knows--and yet the feeling in her stomach is the same one she had felt every time she has ever sunk to the bottom of the sea.
Boudika emerges from the winter shore with the heat from her body steaming into the cool air. Her mouth is long and garish; her mane tangled and full of seashells and seaweed. She cannot remember the last time her lungs filled with air instead of water.
It burns.
When she approaches, she is monstrous; she is a lashing tail and a body gaunt with the winter sea. She smiles; but it is not a smile.
“Elena.” The voice rasps out. Water rushing over rocks. Water rushing back into itself. There is something cruel when she asks, “Do you know a man named Tenebrae?”
She laughs.
It is more like an osprey’s shrill cry, or a shark’s teeth slicing flesh.
“Better yet, did you keep the wolves away?”
When is a monster not a monster?
Oh, when you are the reason it has become so mangled.
Here is your humble offering,
obliterated and broken in the mouth
of this abandoned church.
