Pigment caked under my nails.
Tasting the metallic remnants of a lost childhood.
The reality is hidden in visions and supposed dreams.
Fed to me, was the comforting hugs of mother and soothing lies.
Grew up in the age of paid horror.

A new appendage is cheaper than keeping the original.
Marked by the price of my body.
Each fall, subtracting, each workout, adding.
Beauty is a curse nowadays.
Each beautiful child is raised and sold for millions.
Each ugly child prays to be one of the lucky to receive the new parts.

Greedy families hope for attractive offspring,
to disassemble for a new future.
A pair of brilliant green eyes can change your luck.
Having blue eyes guarantees you to be blind.
Leaving you with shades to cover the hollow left behind.

Adults will tell you sports lead to a promising future.
But they don’t tell you that it’ll lead you to losing your body.
Self-harm is a death sentence. A cut drops your value.
It forces you into the career of taking.       Taking the beauty from the beautiful.
Cutting a limb or two won’t hurt them. Taking an eye is just life.
Tell yourself they should know better. They should’ve expected it.
Expect the unexpected when you are beautiful. Expect a life of pain.
Expect misery and lose those emotions when you are ugly. You won’t need that conscience.

Forget about the forgotten already. Use that arm to grab a new leg.
Use your head to get a better one.
Use your emptiness to end others. They won’t need that life.
And don’t forget, to use your misery.
The more miserable you are, the better off the world is when you end it.

have you seen the dark of night?
the shadows that lurk closer?
the eyes that follow your every move?
the cold dread in the air?

have you seen the flower bloom?
it withers until it is black as black.
it releases the spirit.
it haunts you forever and ever.

have you seen the glowing eyes?
they are in the dark.
they are in the shadows.
they are everywhere you look.
they make you afraid.

have you seen the shadow woman?
i lost her.

So it was just the three of us; Rider, Bailey, and me
We borrowed my great uncle’s car
Promised to bring it back by uncle’s work the next morning
We weren’t planning on going too far
Just east to the outskirts of the city by the train tracks
Just shy of the fields and the woods
Before we went out, we got fast food and beer
Planning to stay out as long as we could

On the other side of the tracks
Was an orchard ⁠— neat rows of trees
And in them a deafening sound
Like out of your more horrible dreams
As the rows went in deeper
The deeper the darkness seemed
Rider swore that it was coyotes
But coyotes’ howls sound like screams

The sun was just starting to go down in the west
And the howls started to fade
So we turned up the radio and cracked open our beers
To laugh our worries away
The sun bid all of us her final goodbyes
And disappeared behind the earth
We opened up the car doors and stretched our legs
Outside in the evening’s birth

On the other side of the tracks
Was an orchard ⁠— neat rows of trees
And in them a deafening sound
Like out of your more horrible dreams
As the rows went in deeper
The deeper the darkness seemed
Rider swore that it was coyotes
But coyotes’ howls sound like screams

Bailey and I were standing around by the tracks
When Rider turned on the car’s lights at our backs
And out in the trees on all fours like dogs
These humanoid creatures rolled and crawled
Pale and grey, with leathery skin
Naked and sickly and disgustingly thin
We screamed and tripped on the rails and fell
As we ran for the car like a bat out of hell
We could see the creatures coming up on us fast
So Rider slammed his foot on the gas

On the other side of the tracks
Was an orchard ⁠— neat rows of trees
And in them a deafening sound
Like out of your more horrible dreams
As the rows went in deeper
The deeper the darkness seemed
I’m not lying to you, I swear it
Those weren’t coyotes’ screams
There are beasts out in the orchard
If you go where I’ve been

And as I turned the corner
Into her old room
I saw what I had been warned not to see.
The apparition.

To describe its features would be a great feat;
It had no features so to speak
Just a vague veil
Of a time and place gone by.

In truth it was not terrifying to look at,
In fact it was rather soothing;
The history kept behind the pale old eyes
Kept me drawn to its pale old face.

I was rather calmed by its presence
Until suddenly features started to appear
On its cold dead face
And what had previously been a vacant plane

Was now the vessel of a horrifying creature.
And the sound.
The sound which shattered all the windows
And had with it a tone of fury and anger

Which made my ears cry out in contempt.
And at that point I understood it.
Why it was called what it was.
When I’d heard the cautionary tales of Draymore

I assumed they were nothing but wild fantasy.
But with her scream of a shivering evil
With no compassion in the tone
I realised why
They called her the scream.

Flay me, shroud my body
in Saran wrap, for others to see
what you mean to me: a relief
map of live suffering,
writhing organs in a plastic bag,
a human soup to drag
behind you, sensitive to everything you do,
overflowing with formless worship,
pink, raw and dreaming
of a vicious kinship:
Open yourself and slip my parts in,
we can exist, two hideous beasts
within a single beautiful skin.

I am huddled in the coroner,
a little beast within a man,
And when at night he studies bodies,
I come out,
now and again.

even as a kid, I knew that
forever didn’t exist.
I pulled tulips from the earth
and brought them home with me,
but I wasn’t looking at the petals.
I was looking at the tiny hole
left behind in the soil
after the roots were ripped out.

it wasn’t about the
beautiful thing I had taken;
it was about taking something
from the planet that had
taken everything from me.

the tulips went into a vase and
I kept them, like any other kid.
but I wasn’t the kid
who marched in and proudly
showed them to their parents.
I didn’t show them to anyone.
I sat by the vase and
watched them rot.

they were my physical proof
that death is real,
evidence that my friend’s dog
did not run away to a butterfly farm,
and the old man down the road
did not mysteriously go to a better place.
they died, and they rotted.

I think about this often now.
I killed flowers not to admire them,
but to prove to myself that
even beautiful things can die.

I know how morbid that sounds,
but what you have to understand
is that my whole life had
revolved around death.

my childhood memories
were a sickening collection
of wilted flowers, of worms
burned into the concrete
after a storm, of rotting fruit
and swarms of flies.

my young mind showed me
the same images on repeat.
dead friends, dead relatives,
people who left me,
people who left this earth.

for my entire childhood,
I never got to stop seeing
lives that weren’t fully lived.

even as a kid, death didn’t faze me.
violence was nothing to me.
pain wasn’t fun, but it was tolerable.
even back then, I was numb.

I remember how being
so numb at such a young age
terrified my teachers and
scared my friends’ parents.

I didn’t know how
to explain that I was numb
because no matter what
horrors I was shown,
I had already seen worse.