the haematoma in your heart: chantale

[chantale]

my corrupt nature is empty of grace; bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. What they don’t tell you is you won’t know anything until it’s too late. They didn’t tell you anything. You were left to discover the world on your own, through your own misguided, stupid eyes. It’s all their fault. If they’d taught you when they were still smarter then you, if they had pounded the facts of life, the pain of life, into your skull you might not have wanted you. If they had broken you then you might not have broken them. It was law of the jungle, kill or be killed. When they’re surrounding you, when they’re chanting, killer, killer, sinner, whore, lesbian, when they’re advancing, well then, you can imagine... Break or be broken. They didn’t do it. Maybe they were trying to save you as a baby, preserve the innocence you didn’t have. Maybe they didn’t think to – after all, who imagines their baby to be like you? Who imagines their baby with a sick mind, a lesbian, a killer? The sick-minded, the lesbians, the killers, they do – but they are none of those things. So it’s only you. Sheltered until it was too late. Too late to be broken, much too late. She doesn’t give one whit about fear. Fear is not the end game. My corpse masterpiece takes them whether they are laughing or crying. She doesn’t sup on the fear the same way she does blood. Fear is a side effect, something marginal. She doesn’t need them to be frightened of her (many are, but that is unimportant). She is a thing made of the macabre, of whimsy, and what resulted – what she is – is strange and impossible and curious, a thing that should be in museums, preserved in formaldehyde. But she lets the girl blather on about their fear and the sanguine sweetness of it. She lets the words wash over her, watches the black lips moves. My corpse queen is in another world (her own, a world of synesthesia, of madness, where only she is real), and Nykeln exists at the periphery. Something, though - quaint little herd, pleasing a man with children - tickles the nerves and my zombie lurches, rakes her teeth along the mare, because she is no longer her zealot, she is Prince Charming, she is Herd, she is their faceless drove descending. A blink, and then she is Nykeln a lot. “You will,” she says. She will let her roam, let her kill, bring her hearts and bones to build a throne upon. “You will give me something else, too,” she says. She’s lying, surely – although her body magicked itself, once, to act as sire rather than dam – but surely it won’t again, it’s foolhardy talk, her usual rambling. “A child,” she says, “you’ll bear us a quaint little child.” chantale how original a sin.