Voice Like a Hyacinth

by Mallory Pearson

“Easy. I only have two settings,” Finch said around a full mouth. “Bitch and cunt.” Amrita nodded solemnly. “Truest thing you’ve ever said.”

“I drink of my sister,” Caroline said. I watched, horrified, as she licked across my weeping cut. Her cheeks hollowed. Then, with our hands still linked, she sloshed my blood around in her mouth and spat into the cavern of the effigy’s chest. It landed frothy and pink amid the disgusting mass. She brought our hands to my mouth and fixed me with a stare. There was so much coaxing in that look. I could feel my heart everywhere, pulse straining against my skin as if I’d been turned inside out, veins on display.

It felt like an answer to our sacrifice. Like we actually held all the power we had taken from Kolesnik with our Boar King effigy. Like we were witches, conjurers, necromancers, animating the life out of his body, drinking it into our own. Or maybe we were just girls obsessed with the occult, and each other, and all the different ways we could mutilate ourselves. Playing at liturgy until we could call it our own. But couldn’t this be ritual enough? Couldn’t it be religion, the way I felt beside them?

I was so afraid to be the last one missing them—terrified that I might be the only one who remembered who we had been and the pacts we made. If they forgot me, how could I show my face? How could I deal with the idea that maybe I loved them more than they loved me, that this mattered most to me, that they were okay with letting it dissolve?