monday

You erupt deep within the lungs of the woods. A celestial stillness surrounds you, suffusing the strange sensation that you’re approaching something that no longer belongs to this world. In a copse you trespass upon it: a deer, deep in sacred travail. Her ordeal seems painful, her ribcage rippling with each laborious exhale. But you know nothing yet of the pain of wordless creatures— how they bend, how they endure. Nearby, obscured by the foliage, a man stands curious, wound in woe and wonder. Something is ripe to emerge— a smooth bloody head, a torso. It is a human infant, swaddled in guts and umbilical cord. She cries and your vision is swallowed into the small black void of her mouth.

⨳

tuesday

The doegirl has grown up. She is in the woods still, running, spinning, dancing, her jonquil gown catching the sunlight and then releasing it. Her mother has taught her to be wary, warned her that her kind are meat for savages, their flesh prized by avaricious teeth, but the girl is pure of heart— she doesn’t comprehend the danger that lurks in the bowels of the woods. Close by, the man is hunting. He hasn’t yet encountered anything worthy of killing, so he stands, hands poised, arrow drawn and quivering. He comes upon the girl— he sees, he covets. Momentarily he hesitates, but he is compelled— his rapacious nature devastates and prostrates him. The arrow travels like a whisper, piercing the girl. She staggers, falls to the ground, her dress smeared with blood.

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wednesday

The injured girl lies on a marble slab. The cycle has been hastened; it is her turn to give birth. She appears faint, as if with an exhale of air she might disappear. Her dress, rolled up around her waist, is completely soiled. The man is there still, presiding. She screams, struggles, pushes out a misshapen thing slick with blood. Its emergence lands with a metallic ring— the offspring is a sword. The girl falls back and dies from her exertion and wounds. The man picks up the weapon in all its power, lets himself be coronated by the girl’s unwitting sacrifice.

⨳

thursday

The man lies still. Twin pools of blood issue out of his lungs into idle wings. The forest behind him has been razed, black smoke billowing out through the trees. The mother deer is poised over him. Childlessness has transformed her— twinblades have sprouted skewed from her skull, dripping with gore from his lungs. There is an undercurrent of meaning gurgling beneath this vision, but its significance is swallowed into the liquid void of her eyes. 

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friday

A youth is hunting within the ribcage of the woods, foraging for purpose. He resembles the first man— the cut of his jaw, the avarice in his eyes. He comes upon the first deer, the mother, who seems to have shed her cumbering grief and appears reborn. He halts as if suddenly remembering. He understands his calling, whom he’s come to seek. He feels a steadier hand guiding his own. He draws his arrow and shoots.

⨳

saturday

The boy lies in darkness. He doesn’t remember his life before this. He understands now that there’s a price to pay for trespassing, that some things are inviolable like the wind. He remembers a story his father told him, of a sacred deer giving birth in the woods, of a divine sister and brother raised together. Of a girl that dies to birth a war, of the goddess who keeps watch. Of a curse that keeps mutating through generations, demanding blood, each year growing more cavernous, more ravenous.

⨳

sunday

The boy is dead. The old familiar curse looms over him, stripping carrion off his tumid corpse, its three heads wielding antlers dripping with gore. Sensing an intrusion, the curse lifts its tripartite head, all its eyes honed on you. It had been expecting you, knew you’d wind up watching. An epiphany dawns upon you like the onslaught of a fever: you’re the only one to have been touched by the curse and released. You wake up blind with sweat.

…

a.d. is drawn to the sacred, the profane, the mysterious and the mythological, which provides inspiration for her work. She is an award-nominated bisexual poet, writer, and visual artist, and her work is published in HAD, Hominum Journal, the engine(idling, Eulogy Press, God’s Cruel Joke, Cosmic Daffodil, Blood+Honey, Bleating Thing, and elsewhere. Tumblr & Twitter: @godstained