time stays. we go. by Helena Pantsis

            I have watched you die a thousand times. Perhaps I am embellishing—perhaps I relive it instead when I close my eyes and imagine you here.  But I have seen it, this much is true. It starts, you call my name from where you stand; you run toward me, and disappear. But I am eloquent; the image is not so poetic — there is a moment where your body, once tied at the seams, begins to leak – a discharge of blood and fluid organs seeping from any weakened crevice, nook, severed limb. You are the picture of the devil burnt into my retinas, with your dying body, unloosed head, twisted expression; I cannot see you anymore, and when I do I feel the bile rise in my throat – you are the image of death, not hooded black cloak and scythe but a vessel to be reaped by the Earth. May the maggots find home in your rotting corpse—what possessed me to return to this moment? Your grand demise; ladies, gentlemen, behold the woman who died and died.

            So corpse lover, my zombie bride, know that I’ve finally learned in the process of playing God that I do not want to be God. I have unlatched myself from your grave, torn my shovel from your gardenbed. I am not the man I was before and if you could speak you’d say the same I’m sure. Only the worms can find comfort in what remains. Let them make home in your inhuman form.

            await my arrival in the 25th hour

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Helena Pantsis (18) is a student of psychology from Australia who occupies her free time dabbling in the art of writing with an affinity for darker themes of literature. She has been featured as an artist in the Body Without Organs international online literary journal.