The Salt Grows Heavy
Cassandra KhawWe are made of *stardust*.
Or maybe, of primordial elements such as the ocean and the dark and the killing flame and love. Perhaps, my kind are conduits, our shape defined not by parentage but the things to which we’d yoked our beliefs. Perhaps, we are as any myths are: protean, impossible, exactly what we need to be.
The body I’d held for long, that I’d held despite man’s predations, that I’d held in captivity, held like a vow, a curse, a blasphemy, a wish for better things, combusts.
I look to the tree line where the pines stand like a tribunal in judgment. Sunlight breaks itself upon their branches, and the world beneath them is stark, no color at all, a chiaroscuro of midnight and salt. I tilt my head. Between the roots, there are graves, I realize, planted so close to the trees that there can be no mistaking the purpose. What better use is there for the rotting tenement of the soul than as sustenance for new life, life that’d linger longer after history has been digested by moths and mold?
It is always interesting to see how often women are described as ravenous when it is the men who, without exception, take without thought of compensation.
“Do you see now?” the three cry in unison, voices bolstered by the paeans of their disciples, messianic in their mutilation. In that moment, they are nothing if not mythic, nothing if not gods of this small place, this snow-swallowed taiga. “Do you not *see*?”
Of all the men who have mistold my history, I resent him least. Like me, he stood anchored in gilded chains, throat and wrists collared by another’s presumptions, breath beaten to gasps by a world that permits only a single direction: forward and away from our heart’s desire.