we are the ones who don't slow down at all
The silence in here is sickening.
O is not glad for it. Usually it doesn’t bother her, either, but here—knowing that there is a murderer walking in its midst, that somewhere in the copse of trees there is a man (it must be a man) who uses his knife as a bearer of his entitlement—it makes her skin crawl. It makes her heart beat too fast.
As she weaves through the forest, the feeling of being watched only grows more intense. Birds with beady eyes peering down from their branches. Foxes wearing black masks peering out from the undergrowth. She watches them right back, eyes roving like searchlights, sharp and focused. Somehow it does not make her feel much better. For every one she catches, there must be a dozen more predators better-hidden.
The hairs on the back of her neck are raised. Inside her something is quite tense, wound up like a clock forced to stop, like a wire coiled too tight—it is scraping at her with heated ferocity. But her stride, at least, is still relaxed. Her shoulders are not pinched too tight. She has never learned how not to look intimidating; and anyway, it is her natural state.
Here it could be a windfall.
After a while, the silence catches up to her, oppressive as a scarf soaked in chloroform, and despite her better judgement O hums under her breath. Some tune from her childhood (whatever that was meant to look like). A low song, the lyrics muddied by time, strangely soft in the mouth: had a wife but couldn’t keep her, had another, didn’t love her—
“Mind if I join you for a spell?“
—up the chimney he did shove her.
“Why not,” O calls over her shoulder. Her voice is easy, companionable, even; it would be hard, even for someone who knows her, to find the cold thread of contempt that runs underneath it.
She turns to face him, and coolly (too coolly) returns his smile.
