Darling, can I tell you a secret?

It would be so easy. To sip chi from her lips, to empty her like a broken heart, to leave her skin and only skin, like gauze or yesterday’s drunken lovemaking. Until all that is left is the instinct to walk, to breathe, to hold on, hold on, hold on.

But should I?

All monsters must eat, whether they are men or myth, fabrications of fear or consequences of nurture. We find our prey where we may. You in the unguarded, I in the broken, the worn-down, the street-side prayer, the alleyway fighter. But if you still cared, still held her wellbeing suspended like a prize in your consciousness, I might consider mercy.

Maybe.

If you were awake, darling, if you were standing framed in the moonlight, your lips stitched shut with veins, your eyes closed with red string, I would come to your ears and whisper, “What do you think will happen next?”

Will I write my hurts into doa selamats, a hundred invocations against a thousand new anguishes? Will I graze my tongue across hers, calling the monsters in her blood? Douen, Jumbie, Loogaroo. Will I tell them to keep her safe, keep her safe from men who only have eyes for themselves, who keep their hearts locked behind doors while they hold out their hands for yours?

Or will I dig through spine and brain, guzzle blood and lymph? Will I gorge myself on lung fibrous and vein intricate, on intestines still warm with animal heat, on a brain still shuddering with a memory of you? Darling, do you see me keeping the best parts of her for myself, those things that made you love her for more years than you’ve known me? Or do you see it pulped into energy, into fuel for flight, inconsequential as the names of all the women you never loved, only lusted for?

One wonders, but it does not matter. When you wake up tomorrow, you won’t find me slathered in gore, throat bulging, belly heavy with meat and muscle. Instead, you will see me as you’ve always seen me, a fascination, a novelty, a hope.

When we kiss, when we trade affection like tokens of power, it’s possible that she will just be awaking, lungs inflamed with myth, and confused, move to sit at her parents’ balustrade, wondering why she had ever wasted time on you at all. Tomorrow, it’s possible too that her parents might awake and find her ribs in her bed, cracked open for marrow, licked completely clean, her finger-bones rattling like dice in her ribs. Tomorrow, they might scream and all of Paris will wake, wondering, wondering how this disaster came to be.

Who knows? You’ll never ask, and I’ll never tell.

an ocean of eyes

one

“If I were the mayor, I’d have renamed this town long ago,” announces the man beside me, his chuckle wet with old hurts.