An Education in Malice

by S.T. Gibson

My nervous temperament was soothed by the rote prayers of organized religion, even if I developed a reputation back home for questioning the priest at every turn.

She had the slightly haughty air of someone who enjoyed experimental French cinema, which I found charming despite my better judgment.

I harbored a suspicion that most collegiate traditions were bunk, an excuse to see and be seen, but in that moment I understood the strange power of ritual.

Her lips spread into a smile as she silently took me in with warm caramel eyes, and I thought, for a shining moment, that she was seeing me as I was seeing her: As absolutely perfect.

New starts made me exceptionally nervous, but my day planner helped. It laid out my whole life in neat little time blocks, with tasks listed off to the side, ready to be checked off.

me fr

“I hope you celebrated so ferociously you called down the old gods, my bacchantes,” the professor said with a mischievous smile.

bro is that a tsh reference (it was in fact a tsh reference)

She pulled her hair up with a pale blue ribbon, almost exactly the color of the veins showing through the delicate skin of her wrist. I lost myself for a moment in the vision of tying her hands together with that same ribbon, of forcing them down into a coverlet. Inexplicably, the hatred blooming between us sharpened my attraction even more.

Sullenly, I gave in to Carmilla’s beckoning and drew closer to her. She was still flipping through the pamphlet, eating up the illustrations with wide, eager eyes. I marveled at how unashamed she was. I wondered what it must be like to walk through life with her self-assured air. She was like a modern-day princess, with a face sculpted by generations of thoroughbred intermarriage and a mouth shaped for giving orders. I was desperate to know what she looked like on her knees.

I had always so loved being loomed over, especially by beautiful people. I was, at my core, a brat who adored the guidance of a firm hand.

Love and pain grew in a thorny grove inside me, impossible to disentangle from one another.

Everything she did was elegant. It absolutely infuriated me.

THE YEARNING

“There’s a special pleasure in cultivation,” she said, cradling the bloom in her hand. She turned her head this way and that, inspecting it for imperfections. “In helping things grow. I love knowing that I was the force behind such beauty, that, in the end, it couldn’t exist without me.”

I’ve always had the strangest instinct to run towards whatever is hurting me, to bare my neck to any predator that caught my scent, and that instinct was even stronger in times of crisis.