A Dowry of Blood

by S.T. Gibson

I knew then I would chase your tiny moments of weakness all the way into hell and back. What is more lovely, after all, than a monster undone with want?

Plague drains not only victims but whole cities of life. It freezes trade, decays parishes, forbids lovemaking, turns childrearing into a dance with death. Most of all, it steals time. Days spent boarded up in houses, sick or clean, pass in a swirl of flat grey. Plague time is different, it stretches and looms,

I touched you the way I would touch any other man, trying to make my eager presence known and inscribe some sense of intimacy between us. But it was like grasping at a flame. I never penetrated to the burning heart of you, only came away with empty, scorched fingers.

Laying with her made me feel so vibrantly alive. It was almost enough to make me forget that I was already dead.

I felt like it gave you even more power over me, like your heart was an empty lacrimosa waiting to catch my tears.

I had sacrificed everything for the crown and you had raised me into queenship in return. I was unique in your eyes. Special, even after we brought Magdalena into our world. I was the love that started it all. Wasn’t I?

Yet, that night, I would have given anything to be a mortal girl once again, flesh dying around me just as quickly as my beauty had come into bloom. An infinitesimal life seemed preferable to an endless one trailing after you like a dog.

I was no woman, I was merely a supplicant, a pilgrim who had stumbled across your dark altar and was doomed to worship at it forever.

Love is violence, my darling, it is a thunderstorm that tears apart your world. More often than not, love ends in tragedy, but we go on loving in the hopes that this time, it will be different.

Desire and foreboding curled together in my stomach.

I craved you like maidens crave the grave, the way Death burns for human touch: inconsolably, unrelentingly, aching for the annihilation in your kiss.

I still wanted to believe I was living in a fairy tale, that I laid down every night with a prince instead of a wolf.

You held him by the throat, watching waves of rapture cross his face while Magdalena and I drank from him. He looked like a lithe young Christ, crucified between two beautiful women with you as his cross.

ward. I had a face built for a chaperone, not for making beautiful young men fall in love with me.

But, like Eve, I had taken a bite of forbidden fruit and been rewarded with all the knowledge I had hitherto been denied.

I was tired of being your Magdalene. I was tired of waiting expectantly at your tomb every night for you to rise and bring light into my world once again.

I was tired of carrying around the weight of a love like worship, of the sickly-warm rush of idolatry coloring my whole world. I was tired of faithfulness.

I wanted to hold your power in my mouth, as carefully as a mother cat holds her young, and then swallow until there was nothing of you left.