Aki

I hated all of them for what the man had done to me and I hated myself and when I saw how easily you killed them I felt a bright hope that you would then kill me. You were carrying me like a bride and your breath smelled like trash on a beach. There were crows in the tree and the horrible mangy black wolf dog was down and barking when you carried me out the door. I didn’t know why you wouldn’t kill me and send me down to Hell to wait for you there. I began to struggle and bray and tear at my hair and throat, wanting you to understand how badly I wanted to be killed. The black dog’s yellow fangs were slick and moving fast in the fading red light. My head was pounding. Your hands oily wet like the floor of a swamp. The black dog was barking and it was a terrible hot sound, the first I’d ever heard. You commanded him to stop, a low terrible snake sound to your voice. The fear clenched my buttocks and raced up my bottom and I felt the urine rush out of me and heard it on the ground. The black dog ceased to bark and I heard the wind, heard the emptiness of the world and you breathing it in. It was like being born. Your oily hands, cool and murderous but not for me not for me you had not come for me. I wanted to make you promise to kill me and take me back to Hell with you when you went back but I didn’t have words then. Only later would I learn that in a world full of demons you were not one.

Red

All I had eaten for many days was grass but at the final moment the grass had gone with the heat and what small bitter fruits had fallen from the tree I had eaten and these had ruined my insides. He toed me away from the tree and my eyes were open, the red sky moving over them.

I felt like water indeed watching Him walk up the road. Felt cooler and cooler with his each passing step. But at the touch of his boot the pain flared back into me as though the dust beneath me were knives. The collar of pain where the chain had buried flashed, my eyes turned back on. I snarled, I reared up.

And He smiled.

And when He knelt to cup his hand to my face I was going to bite and tear but He smelled like water and there was water in His palm. I lapped, and there was always water there.

I drank and there was no more pain. With His other hand he pinched the chain and the chain snapped and fell away, and as He drew the chain from out beneath the folded mass of rotten skin and muscle, there was no pain, but fresh blood spilled, and it was my blood. I kept drinking His water hand and as he passed the other hand around the collar my pain went away.

I buried my head into the crook of his arm and I smelled Him.

His teeth and eyes were gold when He stood up, and the fur on his head and around his face was black like mine. The red sky wreathed his head. He growled out long and low and my belly thrilled. Though I was hungry and desperate for meat. My belly thrilled.

When he stepped off the hill and started making his way down to the house was when I realized I could smell and see, better than before. I couldn’t remember much. I needed meat. I stared after him as he went in the house. I stood by the tree, the broken chain at my feet.

I waited. I looked after him.

Then I heard breaking sounds coming from the house, and I heard the shout of the one who had chained me, who had almost killed me, and I tasted again the arm of the boy his son who I’d bitten.

That boy now hung in the tree.

I fired myself down the hill.. I must follow Him.

He was there carrying with him the crying girl with the orange hair. I barked and she cringed and He said to stop so I did. She was fighting Him.

I wondered about his water hand. Then I went in the house. The floor was slick with the blood of the man who’d chained me. He was just barely dead and smelled just like before.
He was barely dead. I left it there.

Aki

You came on a night late in August. The twilight and heat faded from the air, replaced by cold air moving in from the ocean. The red sky died out into darkness over the fields, stretching still in its thick immensity to that ocean I’d never seen but which I vowed to see someday before I died.

I lay upstairs on burlap covering a filthy mattress, itching from bug bites and bleeding again in my crotch. The one window hung open allowing the night wind through because Carl had smashed through the window after I had bitten him.

It must be characteristic of our age for victims to develop a sense of humor even in the midst of abuse. Degradation is not always abuse. I frankly supplemented my rent with carnal favors. I had been beaten before by men and was not especially afraid of anything they might do to me. And so I had bitten Carl hard on his scrotum as he was filming and had laughed as he went pirouetting through the window, hitting it with his hairy shoulder, breaking it. There was glass on the floor. The thick warm air went over me, over the top of my collarbone filthy and over the tops of my freckled thighs. With my orange hair, Asiatic eyes and thick bones, I could only ever imagine what was thought of me, a girl.

I remembered that young me. I could remember feeling pure.

After that however I saw the men look at me as sexual and I didn’t care for them. I saw animals. I didn’t care for them.

I wish I could’ve stayed with that family up north at the edge of the mountains. Their house so unlike these rooms of depravity and stupidity and filming. Carl in his camoflage. The old lady smoking, watchful, watching him, me, watching the window, sitting, staring.

I awoke to the dry flaking face of the old lady smoking in the space in my bedroom door and saw glass fear in her eye and felt cold beneath the flat pale skin of my stomach. The smoking lady’s mouth a dark hole moving, informing. I turned my head to look out the window.

Red sky. The white ocean miles distant. Cool breeze.

Then rough bitch palms on both of my wrists, pulling me like anchor rope, up from filthy bed. She threw me down the stairs. On the way down I cracked my head on the banister and it felt like a drill bit in my temple and the drill bit was your finger as you caught me.
I turned to look up the stairs as you held me in your hot arms, up the short narrow stairs to see her face and neck, veins small erupting, her yellow teeth flashing in the dim orange of the fire you’d set. I couldn’t hear for all the screaming and barking but the force of her gesticulation caused me to turn in your arms and look left. You’d slit Carl’s throat and his head hung off. I saw his crushed ribcage and a dark pool at his feet.

You clamped your black hand over my mouth and drew me to you. I shut up. The old woman threw herself down the stairs and crashed into your hand. She fell to the stairs and did not move. Then we were out side and I saw the the boy hanging in the tree, his shadow against the red sky.

And you held me. I felt you wanted me to see what you’d wrought.

Aki

The only thing I can’t understand is how could you use my ovaries like pebbles in your mouth. Something to suckle while you waited for more apt sustenance. I admit I am not so young anymore but still I am all I have in this world. But in the event you are not the Devil (or even if you are), this is what I would like to know: How was I for you?

Red

I was almost gone when He came. The only way I could lay comfortably was on my side with my head resting at the foot of the apple tree on the scrubby hill back in the field. The tree they’d chained me to. They never unchained me since I bit the boy’s arm. The chain, tied and knotted, became part of my neck; it burned through my coat and buried in my flesh.

The pain in my neck and head was all that was left. I lay and my eyes felt huge as the red sky. That night the clouds fell in my eyes and I was awake dreaming that I was floating in cool water, a red misty stream.
I died when I felt His boot, the toe of it nudging my belly. It did not hurt.