AUDIO RECORDING:

The Madwoman

I thought salvation was supposed to feel like relief. (1)

Like warm hands.
Like someone lifting the weight from my shoulders and saying,
“There now. You don’t have to carry it anymore.”

That’s the savior I wanted.
The one who would tell me I was innocent.
The one who would look at the blood on my hands and insist it belonged to someone else.
The one who would mistake my softness for goodness.

Then he smiled.
Not kindly.
Curiously.

Like he’d found an animal hiding under the porch.
“Show me those pretty white jaws.”

Excuse me?
No.

You’ve misunderstood.
I am the one being hunted.
I am the trembling thing.

The caged thing.
The thing with bruises instead of bite marks.

Wrong.
Again.

“Show me where the delicate stops.”

There it is.
The betrayal.

He doesn’t ask where I became fragile.
He asks where I stopped pretending.

Because delicate isn’t what I am.
It’s where I learned to stop letting anyone look deeper.

There is apparently a line.
A border crossing.
A threshold.

On one side, sweetness.
On the other…
Teeth.

I have spent years polishing the first side until I could no longer see my reflection in the second.

He isn’t interested in the polished version.

He keeps asking for the parts I keep barely house-trained.

The appetite.
The anger.
The possessiveness.
The hunger.

The part of me that would consume if given permission.

I keep trying to hand him my wounds.
He keeps handing them back.
“Those aren’t what I asked for.”

I offer him my losses.
He nods.
Not enough.

I offer him my grief.
He waits.
Not enough.

I offer him devotion.
Still not enough.

Finally, exhausted, I bare my teeth just to make him leave.
And he laughs.

Not because I’ve become monstrous.
Because I’ve become honest.

God.

That’s the trick, isn’t it?
I thought predators wanted weakness.

No.

Predators already know weakness exists.
What they want is the moment you realize you were never only prey.
I have been waiting for someone to rescue me from the beast.

He arrived asking to meet her.

And somewhere inside me, against every instinct I possess, something ancient lifted its head and answered.