{Excerpt}

Pall of mine, a thin overlay of navy linen wedded to my curves as funerary fine to a third degree murder. At the Moon’s behest, my eyes are prised open, allowing Venus’s light to glint as dancing spectres in my periphery. At the Sun’s bidding, my eyelids are drawn shut, obsidian mirror orbs take residency at my pineal eye, alien and all knowing, they meld into one before receding. At His summons, the commonplace shadows of night convene as a gallery within his surgical theatre. He draws back my cover, revealing me bare, a cavity of absence where my heart once echoed of anticipation and trepidation at proximity. A resounding silence, weighted with need, draws His finger to my lips, pulling a slow deliberate line to my sternum, where His hand splays. Bending to my ear, He whispers in a cicada percussion, the silence of my cavity commencing a serpentine coil, thickening a knot of roots and vines, replicating an anatomical heart. His luring call, brings hover flies to imbibe of my humid flesh. His seductive song, the warmth that stirs a rising from the roots to my ribs, the discarding of earthbound flesh for wings, and my own bewitching song of reply. He calls forth a shadow, its arachnid precision of silk, stitching shut my flesh. A second is dispatched to the far reachings of the night, where it draws the curtains of the theatre, closing us off from all spying eyes, as I recover my sentient bearings in the face of His want.

E. A. O'Connell. August 14, 2020.