butcher

I hold my sister as she chokingly sobs. My sister holds on to me, a fleck of ferrite dust caught on a plastic stub, the rest blown away by magnetic wind.

I hold my sister how I learned through love. My sister holds on to me how she learned with lungs full of crimson, rivulets coating blades, tsunamis of silence.

I hold my sister as explosions echo in the distance, as the air ripples with distortion but the room around us remains eerily intact. I hold my sister as the world shrinks smaller around me, until I can see over the wall I'm facing, until I can see with my own eyes our deities of creation, cruel and clueless, docile beneath white sheets that wrap also within them golden chandeliers and the sky full of stars.

I hold my sister as the flesh of space is mercilessly torn open along invisible but never-healing wounds, sinews and veins giving way to bone before this too cracks and implodes. I hold my sister as the horizontal distance between us rockets to infinity, stretching my vision and mind to their breaking points, while a sixth dimension compresses to a space smaller than my nerves tell me possible.

I hold my sister as days, weeks, and months pass by, as the sun and the moon swap places and Jupiter crashes into our orbit. I hold my sister as the blood of chaos gives way to a new world order, or perhaps I am simply molding peace out of carnage.

My sister holds on to me as I emerge a new god of creation, blood pumped by my own heart weathering the sediment of cluelessness until titanium cruelty shines through. My sister holds on to me, the magnet to the ferrite speck, the sun-moon pull of the tsunami tide, the blood-stained butcher's knife of reality's re-birth.

Published in Volume 7 of The Incandescent Review. Originally titled i, rapist.