Cassandra Khaw

The ritualism of my dressing, the attention they invest in the act, every motion elegiac, elegant; it proposes the presence of an unconsummated tenderness, something more profound than camaraderie.
I tilt my cheek, feel their breath puff against my flesh, and there is the sense of timelines fractalizing. In some other world, somewhere, perhaps they kiss me: lightly, feverishly, with the emphasis of desperation, with hesitation, with passion requited.

If I could answer this with any certainty, I’d consume them in a heartbeat, preserve them in every chapter of my body. I’d do anything but watch them die.

Better I be reduced to miscreant daydreams of the ocean than be alive without them. Whatever it takes. Anything. Anything, so long as they stay with me.

I recall once there was an astronomer in my husband’s court, who extolled the poetry of the universe, how numinous we were, despite the mucus and the blood we shed. Stardust, he’d said, inebriated with his own doctrine. We are made of stardust.
Or maybe, of primordial elements such as the ocean and the dark and the killing flame and love.

“Do you know where you’re going?”

I consider the question. I’d toyed with the idea of going home. In my dreams, I still swim that soundless black, still travel its eddies of salt and cold nothing. My sisters are alive in these nocturnal fantasies: colorless, resplendent, their hair floating like a frothing of wedding veils.

But those are just baseless images pieced together by the unconscious, invoked by a longing that has since had time to turn septic. I have been on dry land for too long; the depths would devour me the way they would any creature of the air.

I say nothing, of course. My husband cut the tongue from me when he discovered I was pregnant; braised it with five-spice and saffron before feeding me the tender slivers. Animal meat was forbidden, but assisted autosarcophagy, his soothsayer had crooned, would ensure pliance.

For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.

Certain stories are recounted so many times that they become parched of meaning, stories like those concerning the girl and her wolf in the woods, the cinder-smudged princess, the monstrous beauty who vomits pearls with every sob.
Others, however, are kept from taverns and wine-warmed conversations, catalogued but rarely recited. Complicated stories with no easy ending, stories that remind us karmic debt is a contrivance of despair, that there is nothing fair or sweet about this world.

Like a story, we are the summation of our incarnations, a spirit refracted through a billion lives. We are our pasts, our futures, tethered by the flavor of our sisters’ flesh.

“Even though no one has ever discovered any proof that we are more than meat and bone, humans continue to hold on to the belief that some part of us will persist after our deaths. The unscrupulous have built an entire industry on this.”