{Excerpt}

…I paced the perimeter of a deteriorating cell, animal-like, walls of rough edged stone awoke, cracking knuckles of fingers formulated by calcified history, extending for my flesh, hooking the slightest bit on my epidermis, tearing open my arms and back, like a thin cotton skirt snagged and torn on a barb, jumping a fence for freedom’s sake…my blood in rivulets, running a serenity and smearing a deficiency, reanimated my body in goosebumps, with each dip in temperature, stacking the chills, until my nipples were left in permanent tense, aching for warmth to supple, to ease, reviving my humanity…from the center of the floor, shadows began to form, to morph in a one dimensional Rorschach demise of clarity, not a one in shape of sanity, until the splatter welled and rose, as a contained mass of mercury, forming a mirrored humanoid hull, bound to a chair, reflecting my captivity…my movements of ire-infused curiosity, designed a Möbius strip of force about the unsuspecting intruder, slowing me at its broad back, my visage of feminine ferocity reflecting at me, and with the harnessing of my blood-bathed wrath, I spoke a singular word that slit its throat, my hands snapping its neck back, to open a bloodless gaping wound, a fissure broadening into a canyon, revealing a nesting doll core fashioned from the wood of varying sacred trees, and at the very center, an infant conceived of a mycorrhizal network long dismantled for the pursuit of craft…I cradled her to me, skin-to-skin, her own flesh the design of each of the tree’s recordings of natural events, her first gasp an arrowhead to my womb, bleeding me out a November sugared crimson, my breasts full and leaking the sun inflamed gold of ginkgo… …I had achieved an enlightenment in that world, be it as a captive of my mind and heart, or the wild of my soul-self, I persisted, not out of a vengeful rage, but out of a vital, vulnerable love…I had found peace in that cell…

E.A. O'Connell. November 2018