By the edge of a cliff in Norway,

three men are sitting on a bench:

one of them hasbegun to shout

at the man in the middle, saying

that he has made a great mistake

in publishing his book in French,

as it denotes that he has no concern

for who might understand it, even

if he has titled it Quelqu’un, as surely

he must have hoped that someone

exists to show any response to it.

But in the midst of his outburst, the man

is conquered by the other’s silence,

that offers no retort to his rebukes,

to leave him with the impression that

only that which is worth saying must

be chased regardless of its utterance.

Nevertheless, his rage, proportionate

to his veiled admiration, increases,

and with a shovel lying next to him

he strikes a sudden blow

at the man’s head, who tumbles down

the bench as if he’d been dead,

before he is thrown off the cliff.

Immediately regretting it, the man

can’t peek from the cliff peak, in fear

that he might slip to follow after him,

as he now has the feeling that he had

been witnessing his fall and not the man’s.

He rushes down a path by the cliff side,

to reach the man who is now floating

with his face down upon the surface

of the bright sea, girt by the boulders

at the feet of the cliff, on top of which

the third man verges to survey the steep

with a grim laugh that echoes through the rocks.

The man approaches the still body

to see that he’s alive and yet unable

to counter with hisstirs the lulling waves;

but by his side, upon the mantle

of strewing blood enveloping the water,

seven fishes buoy the currents to remain

immobile under his attentive gaze,

all of them shining with the glinting of

a precious stone, of different colors,

together mirroring in their array

the spectrum that revives the rain

with the arched smile of a sown rainbow

In his amazement, the man knows

that these are the seven planets, turned

into the notes that in all things are tuned,

to extricate from matter the commotion

that strings the firmament with the felt joy

of any single star reflected in the dance

according distances to resonance.

The man tries to reach out to touch

the biggest of the fish, whose shimmer

of an ignited ruby shines above

the rest, while giving them their lustre,

but he can’t grab it, and as he moves,

the water breaks in wrinkles that dismiss

the fishes from his vision.

In clear discomfort, the man turns

toward the body next to him, to see

for the first time that he’s the man

that laughed from the cliff top before,

to recognize him as his father,

who at his wonder smiles and says:

“Is this not the composition of the waters?”

We were together for five years. I had never loved such a woman before. She’d braided my hair. Given me my favorite flowers. Red roses. I would accept no other color.

Three weeks ago, she left me for someone else. Older. Attractive. Better. A man.

Two days from now is my procedure and I’ll be the only one left within my memories.

I’m scavenging through the lies scratched into “love” letters and burning the clothes she abandoned. All traces of her should be gone, otherwise I’ll have a hard time recuperating after the procedure. This is not the first time I’ve had memory erasure. I’ve done this five times. The first time must’ve had something to do with my parents, then it must’ve been other women. I don’t remember. I shouldn’t remember.

After three days of clearing everything, the house seems abnormal. I tell myself that’s normal, it’ll be over soon. I browse my neglected bookshelf for something to read to heal from this exhaustion. My fingers scratch against something foreign. A black binder. It was never here before, or perhaps I never noticed it, but it’s certainly not mine. There’s nothing written on the outside of it. I flip inside to see a collection of dark maroon petals in penny sleeves, dates written on paper, tape over each one up until a month ago. My hands slow, trembling across each page until I find the first petal. I remember her confession. I remember her hiding her face with a red bouquet, failing to hide the nervous smile behind it. I remember how gentle her hands were when embracing me. I remember her nibbling on my neck when we cuddled. I remember how loud broken glasses were when we argued over her mother. I remember how our first mistake tasted like lemon candy. I remember how we walked to the edge of the school so she could cry in my arms fifteen years ago. I remember her long lashes when I looked at her from above. I remember the ache in my heart when I first sat next to her in class, and the cheeky grin on her face when she caught me looking.

I remember when I loved her.

And it was real.

A buzz shocks me out of my stupor. I pick up my phone. “Hi, this is Hermann Clinic, confirming your appointment for a procedure on the 14th?”

I look across my barren room. Then at the penny sleeves catching my tears. The ink bleeds slightly on one of the labels, spreading across the tape until it’s no longer beige.

“I’d like to cancel my appointment, please.”

I end the call and go to the storage room. Before I set it on a shelf, I place the binder against my face and close my eyes, “Thank you for having loved me.”

And I think I’m okay with that.

There was something to be said for Melania’s patient panel: it had breadth. She treated a wide range of traumas and living things. The latter feature of her practice got into gray territory when it came to certifications, but the lack of a certificate for each and every species she saw didn’t keep her up at night. No two patients were the same, their variety of compunctions and disorders and difficulties compelling her through their surface-level yap and garbage as she revealed the cure to whatever ailed their true and dark hearts.

That being said, she wasn’t entirely sure how the human found her. She’d thought humans had been extinct, or were at least extremely endangered, for good reason.

Still, “don’t believe everything you read” and all that, so she opened her calendar and then her door when the human walked in.

Due to her lack of experience with this type of patient, Melania focused on their name: Taylor. She offered a practiced smile and gestured to the couch across from her. Taylor sat back on their haunches, their odd mammalian limbs sifting restlessly in their lap.

They walked through the requisite caveats: introductions, safe space, get to know one another, I’m here for you and what you need.  The silence settled around them, not uncomfortable but not quite warm; Melania mirrored Taylor’s gesture of limbs on lap. A bit awkward as she had quite a few more than the human.

“What brings you here today?”

Taylor blinked. Shifted a bit, then opened and closed their mouth, reminiscent of a prehistoric fish. What an unattractive set of teeth, Melania observed.

“It’s just, there’s a second-hand store that opened down the street from me. I walk by it every day to go to work.”

A bizarre turn already. No mention of family trauma yet but Melania knew they’d get there eventually. They always did.

“Anyway, it has, like, rare things in it? Old things? Borderline illegal things now? Like, I don’t know if you remember when they used to make handbags out of…” Taylor ran their phalanges over their bare arms.

Oh. Oh dear, Melania thought. 

“Anyway, I made the mistake of going in.”

Oh dear, oh dear.

“Like before, their existence took up zero brain space and now, it’s all I think about.”

Melania could not offer lobotomy or shock therapy. Nor could she provide a drug to make Taylor forget what they’d seen.

“I see,” Melania said panicking internally.

There was no guidebook for this, but there was always visualization. So, she asked Taylor for a happy memory, perhaps with other humans, perhaps at a mall. Humans loved malls.

“There’s never been anyone else,” Taylor said. “I’m the only one left.”

To this, Melania had no answer.

With the Dragon and the Devil When Mamă Pădurii knocks, we hide the recycling bin full of numbers six and seven, plaqued with the last slosh from beer cans. She smells them, or us, our shame sharper than the brânză de capră soured in the fridge. When she mutters wasteful, we’re unsure if she means us or our…

Having stumbled upon your job listing, I am beyond delighted to be applying for the open position of Supply Chain Lead with Tollman Creamery. I believe I possess qualities which make me a strong candidate. If you will, grant me a moment of your time, and I shall enumerate my qualifications below.

Previously, I worked at Emple Footwear Inc. as a Quality Control Technician. Daily, I would audit footwear products for quality defects, generally by way of burrowing inside them and inspecting the material with my sensory organs. Other responsibilities included inputting the results of my investigations into our ERP system and liaising with Scheduling and Production teams to ensure quality standards. These responsibilities honed my attention to anthropomorphism and my ability to maneuver around desktop computer systems which dwarfed my physical dimensions. Prior to my time in manufacturing, I grew accustomed to tapping vegetative detritus to produce acoustics that would attract female members of my species. This perfectly translated to success in typing, and I can boast a speed of twelve WPM, which is excellent given my small stature and the limited span of my prothoracic appendages.

After six weeks with Emple Footwear, for the betterment of my career, I accepted a Procurement Analyst position at BleureXSC, a company that specializes in the production of lathes. In my role, I exercised linguistic and bipedal fluency while on-boarding new suppliers, ensuring that they adhered to our documentation policies, and managed scheduling and reporting for our workflows. As a nymph, it was admittedly sometimes difficult to be taken seriously by colleagues, a large subset of whom considered me nothing more than evidence that our shared office required fumigation, but this challenge is what spurred me to pursue APICS certification. I am happy to report that I am scheduled to take the CSCP Exam this May, and that I fully intend to pass, despite the timing with my final molt being less than ideal.

Should you be willing to hire me to work at Tollman Creamery, I can ensure physiological hardiness, circumspection, sociability, and an unkillable determination as your dedicated employee. Frankly speaking, the lifespan of my kind is only three to six months. I humbly hope you magnanimously allow me to offer my complete willingness to marry the remainder of my limited time on Earth to your enterprise. Gainful employment is the soul of persistence, and whether or not I have an immortal soul, like you, I have legs, I have eyes, I have an MBA and a beating heart, all of which want nothing more than to be put to use for the sake of security, significance, a salary, and perhaps (management willing) even an occasional sample of your product.

I thank you for your time, empathy, good-will, and consideration. Feel free to respond to me using the email address and phone number found on the header of my resume (attached). Idiomatically speaking, I hope to hear from you soon.

Kind vibrations,

Geremy Blatt

Left forgotten in the washing machine

A lone sock without its twin

You careless human, you

Under the guise of responsibility 

You put me through the wringer so callously

My other half languishes under your bed

Neither of us yours to clean 

And yet!

Stripped off without warning

Me and my sister, mourning

By our owner true

Who slept in your bed till noon

Maybe it’s at her I should be mad

When she left so soon still scantily clad

But it’s you who didn’t stop her

Instead raised your voice, encouraged her

Roused her with an angry shout,

“My wife will be home soon, get out, get out!”

So I tumble in your washing machine,

Jostling between boxer shorts and lacy briefs

My sockish threads unravel

No longer will I travel

Helpless as you dispose

My sister into the trash

As though it’s where she rightfully goes

“We’re leaving in ten!” He calls from the other room.

I don’t bother responding. I tap my fingers on the bathroom counter, scrutinizing my reflection. I think I’ll do blue eyes today. No—green. Perfect.

I plug in my beauty products, and gulp down a concoction of coffee and little white pills. The Dyenator 300 pings with a green light. I stretch my eyelids taut so the Dyenator’s microneedles can search for my irises. I spasm when the needles kiss the wet flesh then hammer into the tender tissue.

I screamed the first time I tried it.

My eye sockets felt as if they were melting away. But afterwards, like now and every time in between, seeing the mud brown eyes I’ve always hated melt away to a vibrant green made the pain a whisper of an afterthought.

Eyes still burning, I start on my hair. I flick through the implant options on my phone and find the long golden waves I was looking for and hit Upload to the Plate! Tufts of hair stab hotly through my scalp, and I wince. In a puff of processed plastics, flowing locks of gold drape across my shoulders. You get used to the synthetic smell.

All that’s left is my new product. The one he bought. I take a few steadying breaths as I stare at it. It’s easier to slip on than it should be, the corrector securing tightly around my waist with a single tug. I set the dial to hourglass beauty, and the iron corset begins to push in around my lower ribs and waist. My fingernails scrape against the bathroom countertop as the pressure increases, forcing the breath out of my lungs. I bite my lip as I fight through the panic, hysteric thoughts bubbling as I remind myself I’m fine, this is okay, I’m going to be so beautiful after this—

A rib pops. Then another. A scream wrenches from my throat. Air catches, my chest locking around the pain.

I’m on my knees when the corrector finally releases its hold. I’m reaching blindly for another handful of pills when my eyes land on my reflection in the mirror.

I see a doll. The same doll I had when I was young, one pulled apart by our family dog and stitched back together with spare parts, over and over again. I haven’t seen the doll since. But now—

His low voice echoes once more through the doorway. “Hey, you ready yet?” he asks.

I’m thankful that the Dyenator singed my tear ducts shut a long time ago. Because instead of tears coming from this unfamiliar face in the mirror, it’s a smile. A wide, white smile, one that never quite reaches my red-lined green eyes. But he won’t notice.

“I’m ready!”

The Ghost Ship

It’s not that we didn’t know. Your name, after all,
was the Ghost Ship, some kind of omen for what you’d become.

Ferrying somebody’s sister, somebody’s body, some bodies 
across that fiery water: elsewhere. I don’t believe

in elsewhere, an eternity of fire or sun. You were mannequin arms 
and a rug on a dance floor. Some kind of baroque, you

were built of pallets and tar paper, old couches, and terrycloth. 
Everything that burns. You were art, and art is always worth burning.

I don’t believe in fate. I believe in grief, what it does to us. 
Somewhere, somebody said: intergenerational trauma.

This isn’t my grief, not mine to carry, a chalky
fire-crisped piano, the twanging sound of each string popped

by heat. Everything can be a performance. The hand- 
lebars of a ’65 Panhead. Your dark mustache

and aviator shades. You didn’t die in this fire’s crush: 
a dream filled with opulence and hope.

Rents so high twenty-two people live and build
where they build beauty, too. This wasn’t how we lost you—

timbers crashed in char and singe, staircase crumbled 
in smoky crush—

The things we love to blame, the things we love 
end us. One fire or another, inheritance

of doors burned shut. I think of you with no escape 
I think of you                 how could I not

           my first ghost                  I wish I could
                        sail back to you                          I wish I could remember

[The italicized line “a dream filled with opulence and hope” is taken from Ghost Ship 
founder and master tenant Derick Ion Almena’s Facebook post the day after the fire.]

Muscle Test

They say it comes in waves, grief,
like the swell’s crush against
your small board in the ocean,
you learning to surf on such a vast sea, learning

like the boy so proud at the front of the class 
Coach quizzing him, the boy pointing
at his own body, moving
tibialis, gastrocnemius, latissimus

dorsi, the whole body
hurts, doesn’t it, after a day of surfing 
muscles you didn’t know you had 
muscles writing the next day,

sore, the neck turning to watch
for coming swells, for what you know 
will come, what you wait for, can’t 
avoid, pointing here, here,

trapezius, pectoral, the pull of your body 
and the hard board pushing back out 
against the waves coming and coming 
barely any relief in between.

My Mouth Tastes the Ocean When I Kiss My Love

She builds a causeway of her own skin : a road to the sea

She is all water                       hard-shelled crab, heart of fish, hidden sting
                                                                                                        of extinct scorpion

Her bruised nape, sore hip, skewed scapula       the intoxicating smell
                                                                                              of white flower oil and human touch

She is looking for a way back to herself : people, flesh, bone, spirit 
Can she call their names with her seaweed mouth?

She floats between meditation and sleep, body hovering like a frond blown onto calm seas

She is mathematics and perfect form : parabolic sand dune, eyelashes of grass, 
                                                                                 fingernails the empty shells of mollusks

Can I lie in the sun on the shore of myself?

            She built this landscape of what she loves
                                      salt-licked and kelp-strewn : let me rest

Let the swell of the tide carry my love                       her loss                     out to the deep

Dear lovely readers,

As regular readers of F(r)iction will know, this Editor’s Note is usually penned by our Editor-in-Chief, Dani Hedlund. This time around though, I’m popping in—Helen Maimaris here, at your service.

Why the change, you might ask? Well, before I get to the moment I hung suspended in the Pacific Ocean, tears filling my diving mask as I gazed upon my very first manta ray, let me introduce myself.

I started life at Brink—F(r)iction’s parent nonprofit—nine years ago as a wee publishing intern; by the time you’re reading this, I will have been one of Brink’s C-Suite Executives for seven years and F(r)iction’s Managing Editor for five. I live in the UK, and I’m a British-Cypriot mash-up (which mostly means that 1) I’ll likely accidentally slide the word “bloody” in here somewhere, and 2) I tan at the speed of light and think oregano and olive oil goes on everything). I’m an obsessive consumer of potatoes, love tropical heat, and am a confusing mix of simultaneously hyper-organized and pretty slapdash. But really, a vast proportion of my personality can be summarized by my two great passions: storytelling and the ocean.

Firstly, storytelling. As a child, I was most definitely a bookworm (so much so that interaction with other humans sometimes felt like an unnecessary hindrance, I mean honestly). No wonder really that I’ve spent my adult life working at a storytelling nonprofit. At Brink, I have the incredible privilege of overseeing our education programs that harness storytelling to transform the lives of our students, editing work with immensely talented authors, mentoring our senior staff team, and guiding our nonprofit’s vision and mission alongside one of the humans I most admire in the world. It’s not an exaggeration to say that every day, when I sit at my desk, I feel that same, intense pull that I get from reading, moments of joy akin to the breathless suspension of turning the first page in a book, the whole world falling away as your imagination lights up.

My love of the ocean plays out in seemingly less evident ways. It’s so core to me that I honestly don’t know when it began or why, but I like to think the spark was lit when I was just eight months old. My parents took me to Cyprus for the first time, ostensibly for my christening, but it was a baptism of a different kind that became pivotal. On that trip, I was dunked into the Mediterranean for the first time and that was that. Deep-Med blue is my favorite color, I’ve done volunteer scientific fieldwork in Ecuador with humpback whales during the mating season, I have been a professional-level scuba diver since my early twenties. I’ve dived with sea lions, manta rays, bull sharks, grey sharks, reef sharks, turtles; I know firsthand how the shifting mirror of the ocean opens up like a portal as soon as you drift past the surface and downwards, and that whether you’re exploring a shipwreck, gazing at the intense detail of a living, breathing coral reef, or drifting along in a current looking down into the deep deep blue, the ocean will never ever fail to awe.

So, when Dani suggested a couple of years ago that we curate an Oceans issue, I was ecstatic. Attentive readers may have noticed an odd trend in the artwork of previous issues—for years, the art direction team has been sneaking ocean details into F(r)iction illustrations, purely to hear my cries of delight when I spot them during our production meetings. Just one example: check out the space whales floating through the recent Dreams issue.

Then Dani proposed that I write this Editor’s Note and maybe mention her personal favorite ocean anecdote of mine. Share the magical moment when, on precisely my 194th dive, I first saw one of the most bizarre and beautiful animals imaginable after years of nurturing a, quite frankly, desperate longing to see one.

It was December 2019, and I was part of a small group diving a rocky site off the Pacific coast of Costa Rica. We were near the end of our dive and thinking about surfacing soon when, from the hazy blue off to our left, a single, female manta ray emerged. She was huge, several feet across, and her fins moved gracefully up and down as though flying. The visibility wasn’t the best, but I could clearly see the lobes at the top of her head curving down in front of her mouth as her right eye tracked us. She circled our group once with a vast slowness before disappearing back into the mineral gloom. I realized then that I was crying into my mask—which, if you were wondering, is not where water goes and complicated seeing the actual damn, gorgeous thing. I’ve had the privilege of diving with many manta rays since, had a pregnant female pass just a meter above me, even floated in the midst of a “train” of tens of mantas. But something about that first teary time has stayed with me ever since. As the well-known saying goes, you never forget your first manta.

This is all to say that once Dani suggested I be the one to write this note, I thought, hell yes, I can’t wait to share my obsession with our readers to help frame the amazing content in this issue.

In these pages, we move around the globe to bring you poetry from a tsunami survivor; a feature from the eminent marine biologist, Dr. Ocean, illuminating the power of sunlight in the sea’s ecosystems; and a story exploring the ancient Vietnamese Con Rồng, or water dragons. We bring you a future world flooded after the waters rise, sci-fi that tracks a probe as it lands in the ocean of one of Saturn’s moons, a story delving into a DNA process that allows us to keep the ghosts of extinct animals alive, and a comic reimagining mermaid folklore. There’s also a feature showcasing work from several amazing storytellers over at Ocean Culture Life, an incredible nonprofit that brings people together from around the world to create an ocean community.

When I reflected on all these pieces, considering how they each explore the ocean through a different lens—whether fearful of its power, intoxicated by its vibrance, or turning to it as a beacon of hope—I realized that this diversity of experience was interwoven with one clear similarity: all these pieces surge with a deep, inexorable pull, a creative expression of the profound connection and undeniable fascination we humans have with the intense, shifting blue that surrounds us.

Safe to say, not only am I bloody proud of this issue, I’m also so excited to share it with you all that I can practically hear you oooing at the gorgeous art as you flip through these pages, despite the fact that I can safely assume, for the vast majority of you, we’re separated by a least a channel, or perhaps a sea, or most likely, a vast vast ocean.

And when I say separated, I mean connected. And when I say connected, I invite you into a moment of collective imagination: here we all are, wetsuitted up, tanks on our backs, hanging weightless in the blue, with the busy metropolis of a coral reef just below us, or perhaps the long fronds of a kelp forest surrounding us. We look up to see the wavering glow of the sun hanging above the surface, beams of sunlight cascading through the water like chandeliers. And in this moment, just like turning the very first page of a book you can’t wait to read, giddy with the joy of diving into the worlds within, everything is perfect.

Cheers,

Helen Maimaris
Managing Editor

The knell at the door tolls. 

I turn. A black paw swipes mercilessly at my face—claws sharp, bloody, and vicious. I snap my fingers. He freezes mid-snarl. I hum indifferently.

He is sleek, his coat gleaming under the club’s cold neon. This panther will drink Death in the Afternoon. 

“Welcome to the Nightclub for the Newly Departed,” I say. “Denial, yearning, and violence are not permitted here.” I nod to one of the many signs plastered around the club:

RULES—Once you step into the premises . . . “What will you have today?”

It’s a meaningless, ritualistic question; I’m already retrieving a coupe glass. The panther drops to his haunches, growling. His eyes are the color of a split lime. 

Perfect, I muse as I work. The right absinthe, topped with champagne, creates a heavy cocktail as green as his gaze. 

“You look like one of them.” He hisses. 

Lemon twist on the rim. I slide the coupe glass over to him and press my fingers together. Snap,and the glass is replaced with a broad glass dish. “I was born millennia before your poachers. I did not know them.”

“Why did they kill me?”

Arrogance. Money. Boredom. Desperation. “Drink,” I say. “Be at peace.”

The panther growls. “My life was unfairly ripped from me. Peace?”

I can see his fury; it coils off him like smoke and hisses like a lit fuse. 

Murder victims are all the same. Rage blankets helplessness, but never extinguishes it.

They are not my favorite customers.

“Drink,” I repeat.

“No.”

“What do you want? Revenge?”

His tail lashes. “I want them to burn in the wildfires they set to my home. To feel their own bullets tear through their hearts.”

I spin into the usual rhetoric. “Revenge is a fantasy. We are on an entirely different plane from reality. You will never see them again. Will you let that anger consume you? Drink.”

The panther does not consider my words; his unwavering gaze does not break. “You,” he hisses, prowling the table. “You are worse than them.”

“I told you I never associated with your poachers.”

“No. You. You, with your monotone voice and your indifferent gaze. I would rather see hate, or the pride in my killers’ eyes. Have you spent your millennia holding yourself above the pain of others? Have you been so devoid of life that you have lost your heart?”

My fingers falter on the counter. 

“This job calls for no empathy,” I say, after a beat too long. “I serve and endure.”

He studies me, head tilted, tail curling in silent question. Then, finally, he dips his head and laps at the cocktail. The dish is empty in seconds.

“Acceptance,” I say, my voice thinner than I intend. “To drink is to accept.”

The panther looks at me one last time, searching for something I cannot name. Then he leaps off the counter, vanishing into the scattered crowd. I watch him go, tasting absinthe on my tongue.

It is bitter, sharp, and green.

I.

You can’t remember when the rash first appeared. The little buds, poppyseed size, have barely faded since making your forearm their homestead. They were flush, defiant little things, untouchable by creams.

There’s a ritual you do that helps, though. Fifteen minutes soaking in Epsom salt water. Lit candles scented like sugared almonds. You don’t need it, not anymore, but it relaxes you. Soothes the itch.

Your eyes drift to your arm as it rests below the surface. The clotted blooms stare back at you. Blood-red, you think, like your favorite going-out lipstick—the color you’d wear each night to Club Eden, a crimson offering to God in the hopes He’d send “the one.”

Moonlight slivers through your moth-eaten curtain, and in its glow, you watch as paper wings flutter and dance.

II.

The rash spreads to your collarbone. It slinks between your breasts like crawling ivy. In some sick, slightly Freudian way, they remind you of flowers; you want to nourish them, water them, tell them it’s okay.

You inspect the growth at your vanity. The little red clusters have swollen into being, almost pulsing with life. Your hands ghost over the fields, stopping right below the abdomen.

You’re beginning to think this is your fault.

How careless you’d been that night. You barely remember his name—but you remember how his hands snaked around your waist, how far he led you from Eden. The test read positive a week later, and in four more, you lost it. You couldn’t even bring yourself to see a doctor.

Beautiful Flora, your mama once called you. She’d roll in her grave if she saw you now.

III.

The moment you felt the itch on your face, you knew that nothing could be done. Every bump has become a slick, milky pustule. The swelling smothers your body like a strangler fig. You can no longer look at yourself.

You’ve confined yourself to the mattress. It’s the only way to reach Heaven, now. A thick white sheet covers your vanity,  your curtains, a veil from the outside world. You wonder, again, if this is His punishment for that night. As if losing the child was not enough. As if every second spent repenting since the blood came was not enough. Your hands clasp together in a desperate, trembling litany.

But a sudden, sharp pain stifles all thoughts of devotion. Your whole body tightens, tightens, tightens, until you’re grasping at your sheets, pathetic and shameful and writhing. It hurts, you think, it hurts, it hurts—

but this, in the end, will be your salvation.

IV.

It takes hours for the pain to finally subside. Your breathing slows to a deadened rhythm. A white-heat haze clouds your vision, and just barely, you make out the fruits of your labor.

Newborn larvae, departing from the petalled remains of your skin. Little crescent angels. A swarming, holy Primavera.

You watch them dance, the way you once did, as you sink into His restful arms.