Obsolescence
By Mari Harrison
I quit shooting ages ago. My quiver rotted to splinters; arrows drifted like unanswered prayers through time’s black folds. I crouch in the world’s rafters, wings peeling gray skin, diaper fused into blackened crust.
Below, they love: clumsy, filthy, free. It gnaws me hollow. I hunger for the rot-sweet ache of wanting someone who might want me back.
Tonight I find a fallen feather and shove it into the cavity where my heart once beat.
Nothing.
Silence gapes, cold and flawless. I smile, lips splitting wide, spittle oozing.
At last I understand. I am the wound.
They were always godless.
Mari Harrison loves language the way she loves coffee: obsessively and at all hours. After years crafting speculative fiction for the government and occasional poetry (as Mari Nichols-Haining), she left to chase fiction. These days she writes alongside her husband Jesse, also a writer, drawing on a mutual muse and striving to be a less chaotic version of the Fitzgeralds.