My Throat an Open Grave

by Tori Bovalino

The god we worship called for Abraham to kill his only son, sacrifice him on the altar as a show of devotion. What if Abraham had not heard when God urged him to stay his hand?

He can hurt me, but at least I know that. At least I see him in front of me. At least, when the time comes, I will be able to see the fatal blow coming.

I don’t know how to not ruin good things. I don’t know how to keep them—how to make myself worth the having.

My feelings about religion and my own faith are too tangled with disappointment and scar tissue to look at them with any nuance. It’s certainly not something I can handle right now.

I’m distracted, so overwhelmed with my own little world that I forget there are other things going on outside of it. So in love with romantic notions of what is and isn’t that I get carried away. And that’s what got me, this concept that everything would turn out okay, that I was some heroine in a story of Winston, when that was not at all the case. I’m just as destined for that cursed soil as my mother, and her mother before her.

It’s a slippery slope, imagining your own death and the aftershocks that follow. A sick sort of inertia. Because you imagine, and imagine, and then before you know it, you’re making plans. Wanting it.

Words mean something. These songs, they tether this place to time, show some sort of change and shift besides the echoing memory of ghosts. And I am now a part of it.

I can’t remember the last time my body felt like it was entirely my own.

I can’t imagine that, being dead and still being scared. I always hoped that death would be some kind of release, some easing of the fear weighing me down always. The idea that it’s just more fear—well, I don’t know what to do with that.

I want to live. Dammit, I so dearly want to live.

I so badly want to believe that there’s something out there, some divine power, that doesn’t hate me.

I’m Red Riding Hood, lost to temptation, screaming forever in the belly of the wolf.