Cassandra Khaw

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.

They nuzzle their jaw into my hands, allow my fingers to cinch about their skull. I could snap their neck, dislocate the vertebrae stacked upon each other, sever the blood flow. They know this. I do too. Nonetheless, they place their faith and their breakable flesh in my fingers, eyes closed.

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.

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.

“Bury me, my love, and take a lock of my hair with you. Carry me through the centuries. I think I’d like to share, just a little, in what immortality is like.”

I begin to keen.

That I want to die here, mired in the cold. That I want to race them to Death’s carriage, exceeding their pace but only just, never going so far as to be unable to turn and corset their fingers in mine. That eternity is a worthless bauble without their conversation. That I would follow them into the demise of the universe where every heaven and each hell is shuttered, and there is nothing of us but motings of wan light, and there is no bodily apparatus with which to express affection, no recourse save to glow weakly in worship until at last, such things are swallowed too by the dark.

That I would love them even then.

As long as a moiety of conscious thought persists, I will love them.

I will love them to the death of days.

And they have my teeth, my deepwater hair, like the lures of the anglerfish spun into thick coils. Nothing sticks to those radiant strands, no amount of gore or mud. Which is fortunate, given how messily my offspring eat.

“Of course. I forgot. You can’t speak. My apologies.”

I look back. The plague doctor flutters a hand, voice strange behind their mask. Today, they are dressed most austerely: plain black robes; a broad-brimmed hat; the half-skull of a vulture, carefully bleached, unornamented save for a single hieroglyph embossing its brow. Alone of my husband’s people, what few remain after the apocalypse of my children’s hunger, the plague doctor is not afraid. Has not ever been afraid.

“Well?” The plague doctor steps closer, fearless. Eyes green as the humid, hated summer.

I shrug.

To my astonishment, they laugh.

“Such a pair we make. I don’t know what I’m going to do either, what with the kingdom being eaten to nothing.” The look they slide me—heavy-lidded and coquettish—is so audacious that I soundlessly laugh in spite of myself