Annabelle
A gift for the lover
Annabelle ran her fingers along the deer’s desiccated spine. Bump bump bump, a slow ripple like a mountain ridge, rolling out with each vertebrae, a corpse unfolding like a flower. Her lover would want a trophy. Proof she’d passed his test.
She broke from the spine and shifted, tracing ribs, fingers cradled in the grooves of the cage and trickling down until they came to the crater, the blown out gut. The destruction was flagged with tattered remnants of flesh and hair. Her fingers fluttered against them, marveling at their inconsequence and strength. The forest breathed around her, each ancient breath a birth and funeral. Annabelle gripped the flesh and pulled it back, it ripped from the bone with a stubborn crackle, like paper from the wall of an abandoned house.
She clapped her hands, her prize was still tucked inside, maggoty and withered. The pale plump squirmits slithered in and out of veins and ventricles, lolling in their four chambered nursery. Annabelle reached into the maw of the open ribcage and wrapped her fingers around the heart. She pulled, but the deer was hesitant to give up its soul, the heart stuck. She braced her other hand against the trinity of arteries sprouting from the trinket and pulled again, smiling as the body released the heart with a pop. Her lover would appreciate the gift. The slick red power of the stopped engine would endear him. She wrapped the heart in the deer’s papery hide and patted the deer on the head.
“Your sacrifice is my boon, thank you,” she said as she stood and turned toward her lover’s cave.
That was gruesome!😏
Damn. That was something!