she expects it to be more... ethereal. instead, it's just meat all over: breathing, pulsing walls of muscle, nets upon nets of capillaries, blood slowly congealing in her footprints. the thick, unmistakable stench. shouldn't have surprised her: angels had always spoken to her in slaughter, crimson gashes across her thighs, Dallas skinning a hare as she watches. small animal corpses by the side of a highway. meat is living and breathing and dying and rotting and rotting. nothing more to being a creature: was there ever? still, it keeps getting harder to go. it sings to her, breathes her name. a surge of joy, flesh burning — melting off bone, her own veins suddenly too thin to contain the liquid. it knows me. knows of me. thoughts getting scattered and then gone. gone.

"what are you?"

a thought — a dream — a massacre — an agony of dull blade trying to cleave through fat and joint and fascia — again — again — never quite there

"what is this place?"

a garden — a set of teeth — pretty pretty place — a memory: nest of maggots hiding under a loose floorboard

“what do you want from me?"

a memory: slaughterhouse — a memory: first kill — a memory: irredeemable loss — Dallas grinning at her, both of them sweaty and still smelling like sex

"stop it!"

a nightmare: ██ ███████ — a nightmare: ████ █████ █ █████ — a nightmare: ██████ ███ ██████ — a clump of bile coming up to her throat, and then, finally, a scream.

***

That’s how it goes for a while. She is careful, maybe too careful: never wandering too far, laying low while she is in the city. Ignoring the rows of liquor bottles in the grocery store to then come back to the hotel room and stare for hours at the cheap wallpaper. Writing down pages upon pages of incoherent bullshit, notebook always at her side, fingers smeared with ink, too afraid to lose anything. She expected her brain to melt away as soon as she crossed the line into chaos territory, but she feels sharp – sharper than she’s ever been, probably. Buzzing with possibility like a finely tuned string. She can feel it pulsing into her temples, talking to her in words and images and unspeakable horrors, weaving the scraps of her own memory into something alien and off-putting and then familiar once again. Emotions and memories come close to the surface, but not close enough for her to grasp. At night, she turns down the radiators and suffocates under the sweat-soaked sheets, scratching her arms and legs until the skin goes red and swollen. It wants her to go further, or maybe she's the one who does. It has something that she used to have, but not anymore, and it’s fucking driving her insane.

Dallas is not here. She notes it to herself the moment that she wakes up, and after she wakes up again, he is still gone. Then she goes to sleep and there he is, carving up her flesh with his hunting knife, the familiar inscrutable smile still on her face. She doesn’t mind, not really, because it doesn’t hurt and she knows she will be back anyway. She watches him lick the blade clean and the stars overhead slowly fade into darkness. She loves him, she thinks, but wakes up in an empty bed nonetheless.

No phones, no credit cards. Greyhound tickets, fake names on the paper trail and only the hotels that are shitty enough not to care. It’s a weird, cruel thing: using against him what used to be so intimately theirs, this arcane, precarious art of being hard to find that they slowly learned together through blood and bruises. Maybe she is the butcher after all. But she had no choice, she really didn’t. Dallas couldn’t understand her: he hadn’t seen what she’d seen, hadn’t felt this horrible, gnawing emptiness. She knew that deep down he saw her affliction as something pliable and linear, something that was capable of being solved. Dallas, she knows, was never that good with things that he could not take apart and then put back together. And very, very fucking subborn when he wanted to be.

Maybe it always has to be like that, she thinks. Maybe it’s a bit like dying: in the end, you still have to face it all alone. She and Dallas haven’t been apart in years, almost decades. Pulling him out of her life, her bed, her spatial awareness felt almost like tearing at her own flesh. But maybe this is how you talk to God: clutching your useless hand on a bleeding, gaping wound. Maybe that's the only way to hear His voice for real.

The sun is going up again: she can see the first streaks of light coming through the flimsy curtains. Come on, Ida thinks to herself. There is still work to do.