Children do not know how to be good at living. They do not see the world in more than bits and pieces all haloed in the rose-gold of innocence. They do not, even if they think it, know how to be anything but lambs. I can see childhood in each curl of her skin, in each awkward angle of her body that only hints instead of promises. Only a child would see the wrongness of my smile, of my etierity, and ask for a thing that I must struggle not to give.
It would be easy to free her spine from her neck, her eyes from their holes, her heart from the tender cage of her youth. It would be easier for her to die than it had been for me. If I laid my teeth against her throat, instead of where I am thinking about laying them, I would be kind.
My first bite would be my last. I do not make children suffer, only fools made not born, only stallions who think they can bleed arrogance and nothing else.
But my kindness does not mean I will spare her. I am not my mother, or my father, or my sister. I am the sea full of riptides and a million sharks circling, and circling, and circling. Just because she is a child does not mean I will muzzle myself and pretend I am something I am not.
I circle her again like the sharks had circled my war-torn corpse when my mother tossed me into the sea. There is a memory in my blood of how they move, how I should move, and I can feel salt behind my eyes when I blink away the feeling of brine filling up my lungs. The blood in my veins feels sluggish, a mire begging for rain, when my circle starts to get smaller and smaller.
The instincts the sea had buried in my once-dreaming soul scream to me: prey, prey, prey. They are telling me that I am not moving fast enough, that I am being too kind, too much a unicorn instead of a tidal wave. I have no choice (I never will again) but to listen.
“Do I feel dead?” And that is all the warning she will get before I lunge towards her in a move to lay my teeth against the hard ridge of her withers. My only goal is a little blood and to let her knees feel how hard the world can be.
When will others learn that they must ask things of me if they want to learn an answer instead of suffering it?
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