black ocean, cold and dark, i am the hungry shark
Perhaps she should have known she was there.
Because her sister was a weak thing, the kind of soft, fragile thing that needed looking after.
Because it made sense that her mother should be close behind.
It coaxes a laugh out of her. A hollow, echoing thing. It swells and bursts across the surface of her tongue and when it explodes out of her mouth, it takes the girl’s blood with it. The mother kisses the daughter’s head and drags her tongue slow across the surface of her own teeth. How the girl’s existence had made her own mother ache. Gospel had seen it first hand, she had lived with the suffering. All for a fool! An ordinary man who did not deserve to occupy any piece of her mother’s mind or her heart. Were you to confront her about it, certainly Gospel would say that her aunt, too, was above him.
Gospel knows nothing of love. She is oblivious to the fissure cracks of heartbreak. She knows nothing of the rage that accompanies it. Her aunt turns to her, armed with all that anger, and it makes Gospel’s heart race. “You are a fool, too, Sabbath,” she murmurs in the space between the agony and the rage, “if you think that I have not done both of you a favor.” She grins then, feral. “Isn’t it better this way, aunt? To know that she died by the hand of someone who shared her blood?”
But there is no time left for talking. Because Sabbath lunges for her and Gospel delights in the heat of her breath and the teeth scramble for purchase. There is some small part of her that longs to tip back her find head, to expose her own vulnerable throat, to die in the half-melted snow beside her sister. Instead, she scrambles backward, gnashing her own teeth and rolling her own wild eyes.
She rears only in an attempt to slow her aunt’s progress, hissing as Sabbath’s venom sinks into the crux of her own elbow. It surges through her, turns her numb, and she snaps her own powerful jaw. She is no match for the older mare, certainly, but she has the folly of youth on her side.
“Haven’t we suffered enough?” she snaps, her sides heaving.
Because her sister was a weak thing, the kind of soft, fragile thing that needed looking after.
Because it made sense that her mother should be close behind.
It coaxes a laugh out of her. A hollow, echoing thing. It swells and bursts across the surface of her tongue and when it explodes out of her mouth, it takes the girl’s blood with it. The mother kisses the daughter’s head and drags her tongue slow across the surface of her own teeth. How the girl’s existence had made her own mother ache. Gospel had seen it first hand, she had lived with the suffering. All for a fool! An ordinary man who did not deserve to occupy any piece of her mother’s mind or her heart. Were you to confront her about it, certainly Gospel would say that her aunt, too, was above him.
Gospel knows nothing of love. She is oblivious to the fissure cracks of heartbreak. She knows nothing of the rage that accompanies it. Her aunt turns to her, armed with all that anger, and it makes Gospel’s heart race. “You are a fool, too, Sabbath,” she murmurs in the space between the agony and the rage, “if you think that I have not done both of you a favor.” She grins then, feral. “Isn’t it better this way, aunt? To know that she died by the hand of someone who shared her blood?”
But there is no time left for talking. Because Sabbath lunges for her and Gospel delights in the heat of her breath and the teeth scramble for purchase. There is some small part of her that longs to tip back her find head, to expose her own vulnerable throat, to die in the half-melted snow beside her sister. Instead, she scrambles backward, gnashing her own teeth and rolling her own wild eyes.
She rears only in an attempt to slow her aunt’s progress, hissing as Sabbath’s venom sinks into the crux of her own elbow. It surges through her, turns her numb, and she snaps her own powerful jaw. She is no match for the older mare, certainly, but she has the folly of youth on her side.
“Haven’t we suffered enough?” she snaps, her sides heaving.
g o s p e l
