PENALIZED MERCY
She is nestled in the roots above me, skittering about. It is hard to describe the terror she wafts off of her flesh pulped body, her limbs the color of disease, a molted web of dangling red and purple injury. Her eyes hard as two black plates slicked viscous with pearly soap and her smile wide and tearing, I feel her invasion. Some indifferent glare of ironed light seeps darkness into my mouth. Through my very teeth she lets out a rasp and my cunt responds with its own rattle. I fear of what will leave me, of the cellular leech, of her noisome silence that stalks me.
The quality of my time has become thickened, gelatinous; it ropes itself around my life and, like a cow squeezed in its final chute, the fluttering of my heart slows to a pleasurable thrum. And somehow, as mineral turned oil, she arrived in the same time and place as this thickness. I squint to think, why has she come for me now? Why here? What is that thud of her body obliterating mine, her unbiased smile collecting my skin as if disparate shards of a seashell?
I know, she watches me. In turn, I watch winter ebb into spring. I wonder if I invited her in. I envy the security of the fresh asphalt being flattened outside my window. I could’ve sworn that I promised to not let any women in my house. But this house is not my home, and I am stunned when, unsummoned, mercy barges into my mind— my whole spirit poisoned—
Penalized, mercy now holds a very specific shape. A medium weave white cloth bundled and gathered by a thread, and underneath, two dice pierced and hung, glittering, sitting in a shallow mirror of tinned water. I am told this is for her. But how can I bear to burn her, to blister and bubble her unyielding eyes with smoke, to curl her gash singed, this terror that immolates and expounds my second still beating heart?