Hazelthorn

by C.G. Drews

He is the uncanny copy of a human, the best the garden could do. A boy made of otherness and green wood sticks and wicked hunger.

Maybe he is just a tree that has been pruned. Maybe it shouldn’t hurt.

“Thank you for coming to eat,” Evander says. “And be eaten. Long may you rot.”

claustrophobic, suffocating gothic imagery of being trapped behind glass with your jaw unhinged in a silent scream.

lack choice in life, to feel palpitating rage at unfairness, to not fit in and ask what is wrong with me.