article #2 teaser & 'cephalophore'
article #2 teaser & 'cephalophore'
i lived bitches! new article coming 23/01!!! <3
i still haven’t finished any of my 4 essays but i am a glutton for punishment, so i shall keep procrastinating and drawing little hearts with powder on my vintage mirror perfume tray until i cannot get away with it anymore!
to keep y’all fed, i have attached my latest prose piece, ‘cephalophore’, which u can also find on my portfolio webpage linked below:
https://thestratagem.weebly.com/cephalophore.html
see y’all in 5 days! smooches x
CEPHALOPHORE
(“THE HEAD CARRIER”)
I know how it feels to starve.
My bones still remember it. The world speaks of golden twenties glittering with the very idea of potential, but that was never my case.
When I turned twenty, I cherished the idea of punishment. Perhaps because it would explain the wretchedness of the things I lost. I thought of myself, truant child, flagellating myself before some false god. Perhaps then I could understand why I was abandoned—brain matter slick across the asphalt like roadkill.
Because I was starved, I understood love differently. I loved like a rabid dog to be slaughtered. I loved like skinwalkers yearning for the taste of flesh. I loved like wounded animals with gnashing teeth and all-or-nothings. I loved like a monster because it was the only way I could be seen.
I'm gentler, now. Pacified. Wrought empty when my life as I knew it was destroyed and feasted upon by vultures with the laughter of people I'd recognise anywhere. I don't think about starvation anymore. I don't stare at the ceiling until it stares back.
They'd say my name even when I haven't spoken a word to them in a year. They like the taste of my name in their mouth.
I pity the people they say they love.
Perhaps, after all, the most human feeling there is in the world is gentleness. I thought before that it had been love—the behemoth, devourer of souls. The very god before whom we prostrate ourselves and tear our skin raw in the aftermath. I had been wrong.
Do I dare tell of the shadows that paint me as the wild woman that never was? Do I dare dig out the remains of my bones after I have been sucked dry? Meanwhile, the culprits feast on my marrows and dance over my grave.
Nothing like a mad woman, fuelled by Plathian rage, Lady Lazarus reborn.
"Out of the ash I rise with my red hair, and I eat men like air."
No, it was not love that sang to me.
I gave it many names. A human act, I confess. It was how I learned I still had a heart, after all. I let it in when I was nothing but spat out carcasses on the other side of paradise. Out of the ash, it brought tenderness to a bruised soul—a Michelangelan touch. On sunny days, I still think maybe divinity exists in the embrace of those human arms that did not turn away from wretchedness.
Here, in my wasteland, I learnt how to feed again.
"The gentleness that comes, not in the absence of violence, but despite the abundance of it."
I think of Osyth. After her head was cut off, she took it in her hands and walked with it to the church of St. Peter and St. Paul, about one-third of a mile. Stopping at the church door that was closed, she struck it, and fell dead on the threshold.
Her severed head rots close by the fountain that still flows, christened with her name.
Perhaps one day it will be called by mine.