Unholy with Eyes like Wolves

by Morgan Dante

As a girl I felt like a girl, but I’m unsure if I’ve ever felt like a woman. Or if I have, it’s been a season that passes. At first, I considered this idea to be nonsensical. How can it be so, when my life has been defined by attempts at being a wife and mother, and I often feel like I’m at war with my womb?

I’m not supposed to be attracted to her. Even when I felt that lurch in my stomach, that flutter in my chest, I never said what it was because I didn’t recognize it. The idea of being wanted and wanting without shame is alien.

The birth of sin isn’t our fault. If the gods didn’t want Pandora to open the box, there should’ve been no box. If God didn’t want Eve to eat the fruit of knowledge, there would’ve been no tree. And why did Adam taste and fall with her? Because he loved her. Because without God, their religion was love, which is, in fact, the most holy state of all.

I should kill more. I should be a monster. No more weeping and moaning about being above the fray or having dear, capricious Mother disown me. I’m fortunate, and yet I’m sullied and grieving while the world goes on. Maybe I should make the world grieve with me.

I’m tired of trying to forgive. What good is being a saint, so I might be lit on fire or decapitated?

Indeed, I was once incensed about the Countess having lovers because of what I was deathly, irrationally afraid to admit: it wasn’t her actions; it was my exclusion from them.

Only God has a right to kill and has made murder a sin, and yet if he has fated everything to happen, it was always supposed to happen like this. So, we must trust that this is how you’re supposed to be, and we can’t run from it.”

That said, I want her to say, You are a monster, bathed in blood. Sinful and repulsive and whorish. Grotesque. Good. I love you. Come inside.

And I’m yours. I’m your beast. Your monster. Held so tenderly between your hands. With me, you’re safe; you’re the only safe one.