The Devourers

by Indra Das

But it is all potential energy, made all the more powerful by how gentle his hands are, rising across my neck and through my hair, tingling with the promise of carnage.

Not for a moment is he ferocious, even as my bared body burns with the expectation of violence. He licks and kisses, and guides me into his mouth as if I were a fragile, brittle creature. To him, I am. I know this, I believe it. I am human.

Identity doesn’t mean the same thing to us as it does to you.

“This is where I was going to kill you. In this forest.”

With that, she stands on her toes and presses her mouth to my cheek. Her lips spark in the winter air like a brand against me, the kiss tingling and evaporating on my scorching skin.

Though I have dreamed their patchwork lives, learned from their flesh and blood and souls the different ways of this world, I have never before seen with my own senses how massive this orb we all make our stories on truly is. What I see in front of me is but a fraction of it, but it looks like eternity itself.

Blood on her lips, salt water in her eyes. Even though she is shivering, there is no fear in her.

in a fever so scorching that I become in dream’s eye a pyre at the edge of the ocean,

“Sometimes we wake and wake, and one night becomes a thousand, each dream a life lived,” he says.

I could live with this being beside me for the rest of my life and never tire of him, never know enough. But would I be a historian or a lover to him?

I am reborn, in language. I listen to stories whispered in my ear as I sleep. I look at the two scrolls, side by side, wrapped in twine. I killed my parents. I am my mother. I am my father. I am a shape-shifter. I am devi. I am deva. I am sura. I am asura. I am male. I am female. I am neither. I am rakshasa. I am djinn. I am werewolf. I am not a khrissal. I was once a human. I want to be a human. I want to love a human. I am a human. I love you.