All That Consumes Us

by Erica Waters

This is it, the last time you’ll kiss me. I want to burn it into my heart, inscribe every touch so that later, in that dark place, I’ll be able to run my fingers over the memory, feel the worn grooves of it against my skin. A spell for not forgetting, a spell for not disappearing.

That is what I want, more than anything. I want to be great, someone who matters in the world—the next Daphne du Maurier, Shirley Jackson, Sarah Waters. Someone who writes the way Meredith did, someone whose books are still read long after she’s dead. It seems impossible though. I’m not sure I can ever be more than a small, lonely creature

Why is my value all tied up in accomplishing things? What’s so terribly wrong with being ordinary? It’s not like greatness ever made anyone happy.”

All this time, I’ve been obsessed with her. Half in love with her at times, half enraged by her at others. Always jealous, always insecure. Sometimes giving myself over to her power, sometimes fighting her with all I’m worth. But she was never here. She was only a memory.

I shake my head and continue on. It wasn’t friendship. It wasn’t love. It was a charade. It was a game that Magni Viri was playing with me. They lured me in and trapped me. I thought I was Jane Eyre, but maybe I’m truly Bertha Rochester, the mad wife in the attic. Locked up and hidden away—inside my own body. I was never anything more to these people than an empty shell, waiting to be inhabited.

She can’t stop writing because she needs, desperately, to reach the apex of horror and watch humanity unravel. She is, in every possible way, her mother’s daughter. And I—at least in some sense—am her. I am Isabella Snow. Right now, at this moment, I am glad to be her. I am glad to have my brain and my body put to a greater use than I could ever give them. Isabella might be bloody, but she’s also brilliant. She came from dark and humble beginnings just like me. But she made something of herself. She built herself up into a person even death could not conquer. She deserves the use of my hands. She deserves it more than I ever will. Isabella is the writer I could never be.

The heart of Magni Viri is death and rot, like so many institutions.