Lilac Wine

“You are so beautiful that I break.” Lucia lets out a low wail. She begins to weep, reaching down under the bed to reach a cat o’ nine tails. She scourges herself, praying to dead Eleleth for forgiveness – to break her rosy curse of undeath. 

“Pray with me, sweet Magdalene,” Lucia cries out in fathomless depths, like a beached whale upon my shores. The sorrow of the elegant Snow Queen frosts my room to Kelvin zero, and I shudder as blue ice forms in snowflakes on my flesh. I shiver violently, biting my teeth as my mouth chatters, and the lights in the candles blow out as Lucia whips herself, crying out in the angelic tonal language to her Fallen Father. Gold seeps from her wounds.

Lucia sings, a song of hunger pangs, a melody of the labor of Rahab’s watery womb, with a timbrel of her father Eleleth’s hellfire seed, and there is a great making and unbreaking in my wife as she punishes herself for her fat