Page 11 of Bonepetal
That’s when I laugh. Low. Wrong. It snaps his head toward me.
My grin is teeth in the dark. “I didn’t come here to save your life.” I lean closer, voice steady as the knife in my grip. “I came here to fucking end it.”
His face drains. “Wait—hold on, man, whatever this is?—”
The knife answers before I do, sliding up under his ribs. The first sound is wet, a thick choke swallowed by the fog. He folds against me, shock and panic in his wide eyes, and I press my hand hard over his mouth.
“Don’t beg,” I whisper, though he tries anyway. His words break against my palm, hot and damp. He thrashes.Fucking pathetic. “You think you get to plead after touching what’s mine? You think you get mercy when you put your filthy mouth on her?”
I slam him back into the stalks, the corn splitting around us like a wound. He claws at my arm, at the air, anywhere he can, but I hold him fast. His tears cut channels through the grime on his cheeks.
“I bled for her,” I growl, twisting the blade deeper. His body jerks. “I died for her. And you” —I wrench the knife free and drive it higher, angling for the heart— “you thought you could use her.”
He makes a bubbling sob, a broken animal noise. His knees buckle. I lower him to them, force his gaze to mine, making him see the feral grin behind his own death.
“I’m not the god who takes prayers,” I whisper as his body starts to fold. “I’m the fucking thing that answers them.”
The second thrust splits him open. His breath rattles out into the fog. I hold him up for a moment, staring into his panicked, stupid eyes, then let him crumple into the dirt, dead weight swallowed by the rows.
He gurgles, fingers clawing at my wrist. Useless. Good. Let him thrash. Let him rage. I want him to know he was weighed and found wanting, damned before he even had a chance to whisper a prayer. Heaven never had his name, and hell doesn’t even want him. He’s just meat caught between my hands and the devil’s teeth.
I tilt his chin up with the blade’s point. Make him look at me through the black holes of his own fear.
He vomits pink and bile across my boots. I let him choke on it.
“Did she make the sounds for you?” I press, leaning close, words hot enough to fog his eyes. “No. Because you don’t know where they live in her. You don’t know what her body does when she's close to breaking apart, or how it feels to be loved by her. You don’t know her body, how she got the scar on her thigh. You don’t know a goddamn thing.”
His pupils blow wide, horror-struck. He tries to pull away but can’t. I set the knife beneath his jaw and lift his face like a chalice.
“You laid hands where you shouldn’t,” I murmur. “But you’ll choke on the truth, that you never touched her the way I did. Not where her heartbeat stutters. Not where her body sings.”
I lay him back in the dirt, head tipped into a nest of broken stalks. My left hand seals his mouth again. The blade’s edge kisses the skin below his ear. He makes that clogged-drain noise. I stroke once. Twice. Clean cuts are the kindest. They let what needs to leave, leave.
The artery bursts. Warmth jets across my wrist, my forearm, and my throat. Iron-sweet air blooms in my lungs.
He thrashes, choking on his own wet breath, eyes bulging as if prayer might crawl out of them. Useless. I straddle his hips, ride the panic out of him until the fight empties like a gutted animal. He claws, slips, slows, until nothing is left but twitch and silence.
He dies beneath me, and it still isn’t enough. It will never fucking be enough.
Anatomy is a language with slippery grammar. You learn the rules, then you make poetry.
The cult taught me how to cut clean. How to make the body fold quietly. They even taught me when it wasn’t deer, when it had to be done, when flesh needed to be language and blood the answer to a prayer.
I’m not thinking of either of them now.
I’m thinking of her.
Her vow, the sounds she’ll make when I take her back.
I free the head with the patience of a man who once learned to braid hair by watching Salem twist her own in a cracked mirror.
The spinal tether snaps like knotted tissue, and the weight shifts. It always surprises me how quickly people become portable when you take the argument of their blood out of them.
The face is its own project. Bone wants to keep flesh; it believes it’s a house. I remind it that it’s going for a walk. The knife slides under cheek, peels slow, and deliberate. The fog thickens, condenses on the edge of the blade. The corn whispers. The crows perch along the row click their beaks like their applauding.
I work the skin off in a single, careful sheet. Lay it aside like a pale wet question. Lift the skull into my lap. Slick. Stinking. Mine. I spit into the hollows, grind dry dirt into the bone with the heel of my palm until it goes matte, hungry, honest.Somewhere in the maze a girl shrieks and laughs to prove it wasn’t fear. Good for her. Fear has better plans tonight.
Beside me, the phone he dropped lies in the dirt, screen glowing, buzzing faint against the soil. Another girl’s messages spill across it:baby, can’t wait to see you later. Photos too. Her body, mouth, and lies. My jaw knots. My hands tighten on the skull until bone creaks. He had the gall to touch Salem and still crawl to another bed after. Rage floods me. The phone buzzes again, an insect begging to be crushed. I grind my heel over it until the glow dies in glass splinters.
