She is riding sublimated light, along with the bird that was the woman from the cave.

They are the light.

My name was once Matthias, but now I am simply the Headsman’s Trust.

I turn my gaze once more earthward and I see the pair of headless bodies. Their bones awaiting repurposing. Soon I will carry them to the pithouse shelter of the horrible Woman who has already slipped away from the Headsman and myself.

She is vile.

She is a Saint.

She and the Headsman have freed these two souls from the tyranny of their heads.

Their thoughts have now become a shrieking music, a deathly birdsong that now makes these decapitated corpses flail.

These mangled forms frighten me. They are rising and moving all around me. I shut my eyes and I shiver.

Everywhere I hear the screaming shrikes. Everywhere is the unbearable sound of dead flesh dancing, dancing…

Chain of Empathy

Chain of Empathy

I.

The first link in the chain of empathy that would eventually bind Berthe to an obscure and fiery plane was forged the instant she spied the blacksmith’s nail that had been stabbed into the trunk of an oak tree.

She’d been taking advantage of the first temperate day since October by riding her bicycle, pressing her way across the sucking mud of the lanes near her parents’ farm. Berthe was a free woman with no interest in suitors, and as a consequence she had no prospects of security, nor did she truly wish to have any. She had grown inured to simply mimicking the shiftless existence of her parents. She occupied the same narrow chamber where she’d been birthed. Her adult life had truly been little more than a protraction of her adolescence. There were the same daily chores to be accomplished, the same perfunctory conversations to be had around the supper table. Of late, Berthe began to find these rituals stifling. What had once brought comfort now caused her to inwardly cringe, whether it be her habitual laughter at her father’s jokes or her singing ballads with her mother whenever the two of them hunched over their spindles to pull wool for the loom. Today, she yearned to feel something of her genuine roots.

It was as if there were two distinct souls dwelling in her skin: one obvious; dutiful and calculatedly naïve and performatively virtuous; the other, a latent yet sharp yearning for something Berthe could never quite define. It constantly tested her, allowing her only a few stolen moments of contentment now and again before once again filling her mind with briars.