Cauldron Anthology Issue 9: They Who Were Spurned cauldron9finalproof | Page 19

for pen of sisters hugging each other, maddening vastness of the moors, tundra, swamp, and savanna.
I was by a river. Drinking water. All I could think was to ease my thirst and get back to the herd, and
gallop.
I didn’t know before that my back she squeezed with ten fingers was this broad.
My body was tired after all the jealous evenings, and scared under the effect of medicine’s blue
juice and the reddened aorta. I let go, my flesh loose. Suddenly her feet found my feet and she stuck
her tongue up my butt. Where my spinal cord ended I met the true lion-headed lady.

Nobody could ever named the disease that flew from the hole she stuck her tongue to. Pus,
rash, scaling off, they were mere words. Anything damaged where the tongue entered had to heal
itself. A way to call myself another name was now open.

I stared at the curtains with similar eggplants, tomatoes, and peppers on. She sat on my
thighs. She realized my ankles couldn’t stand her press. All of a sudden she held my spine, face-down.
She mounted her sick zebra. Her game that can’t put its feet anywhere without agony on wetlands.
My neck, wet from her mouth. Her teeth in my vein. She would save me had I died. She’d rather heal
than kill, a soul that wouldn’t belong to any of the seven layers, she didn’t use her sharpest teeth. My
blood stayed in, I didn’t burst to the ceiling. She was trying to suck the poison out of me and melt it
in her own blood. She fell down, away from me. Pulled her legs and hugged them, perfect embryo
shape.

I stood up on the reeking bed (feeling, so much of me) and looked at her. Her naked, bent
double flesh.
Embroidered curtains of her gloomy room. Paper piles on her dusty table. Her phalluses.
I looked at the milk coming out of her nipple. Glitter of the transparent white.
I looked at the blood leaking out of her ass, resembling two hills, dark, fluid, fragrant.
I looked at her wilderness, right in her slit.
With the power rising from my chest, I got up. I moved my hands over my broken ribs. I
felt my veins going in and coming out of my heart, and for the first time in years, I took a breath. I
looked at the tight ass crawling in pain after all the shit she took on. I should have released her off to
the forest. Should have made her die under (her favorite) tree. I, now at ease, I was wrong. I forgot
that she was the almighty lioness that would never return. I left her on the dusty carpet, bent double.
I left my shaman to her luck.
I went out of the copper door.
I went to the wine-house where I’d found her to distill life. I drank a lot. I set the city on fire,
and came back.
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Cauldron Anthology