violence
She is not scared because she rode lived in her father’s feral mind, where thoughts were condensed into the basest things. hunt and feast and kill. She lived in its (always it, never he) mind while it hunted prey – hunted meat - and she recalls with a vivid clarity how easy flesh tears and how, when dying, so many things sound the same.
She had returned to the kill site, later, the earth strewn in blood and bone. She recreated the creature with what was left – there wasn’t much – and chased mother with its skull.
She isn’t scared because with one push she could jump into the boy’s queer mind and make him dance for her, a puppet on her strings.
(She thinks. She hasn’t possessed much other than the feral shell of her father, who is simple, an easy toy.)
He responds playing with my food and a fleck of blood flies form his lips like spittle. She finds it all quite messy, prefers her things to be bleached bone. But she doesn’t leave. Not yet.
He questions her and in response she stands taller. She is a child yet, and she is not all sharp angles as her mother is, but she comes birthed from monsters and magicians, a girl who speaks bones from the earth and laughs among the dead, and she is not a thing to be questioned.
“I am Violence,” she says, “and I am so much more than you.”
She does not say this haughtily, though perhaps the words suggest otherwise. She says it calmly – she does not know him, does not know his lineage, but she has the self-assured righteousness of the young.
From the earth, she begins to pull forth the bones. Most are simple woodland creatures – common collateral damage of living amongst those who fancy themselves mad – but there are some larger things, wolves and such. She finds a whole wolf, mostly rotted, and calls her forth. The creature obeys, the skeleton piecing itself together, and it walks to the woman who summons it.
The bones clatter as she is flanked by the wolf, bones held together by her macabre magic. The wolf’s skull is aimed at the boy but the sightless eye-sockets see nothing, long ago emptied by crows.
There is no fear here.
I’d stay the hand of god, but war is on your lips
