Bitten & Bound

Two Women, One Coffin, Infinite Hunger

(Painting: Moonlight Dreams by Gabriel Ferrier, 1874)

We were not born. We began.

I woke as the coffin lurched,
ropes strained above me,
groaning like old rafters.
The coffin swayed, lowered,
inch by inch into the throat of the earth.

The silk lined bed held me, narrow, suffocating.
Soil drummed against the lid.
My body was paralysed,
my voice bound by silent ribbons.
I imagined bells tied to my wrists, to signal the living,
but my wrists were bare.
No bell would sound for me.

Silence.
Stillness.
The coffin no longer lowered.
A hinge opened, lantern light flared.
The scent of lilacs entered,
and she bent close as narcissus over her own reflection.
Grazed my cheek with her hand,
cracking the paralysis inside,
snow bled into fire.
Her eyes held me until the ropes unraveled into stars,
the soil dissolved into centuries
and I slowly lost the shape of my body.
Her hunger emptied,
but I grew vast.

What I thought was end,
was me stepping into her dreams,
locking them from within.

The coffin held only one body, but the grave,
the grave is infinite enough for two.

She drank and I expanded.
The wood around us no longer but a corridor.
Her mouth devoured me,
yet I felt filled beyond measure.
I was prey, yes,
but as her hunger deepened,
I felt her waver.
Her need betrayed her.
She fed, but each sip chained…
tighter.
She was mine,
to hold or break,
and she waited - eyes wide,
for me to open the door again.
I leaned closer and when I pierced her skin
the box split at the seams.

Wood fell into soil.
Soil fell into night.
Night fell into nothing.
We were falling without end,
but we were not falling alone.

Predator and prey were only masks now.
Roles slipping like veils
between mouth and mouth.
The coffin was gone.
The grave was a cathedral.
Time itself was our prey
and we tore at it together.
Two hungry ferals.
Seconds unraveled
until nothing held.

We lay in eternity,
yet eternity lay in us.
A thousand winters curled in the hollow of her tongue.
Her words lingered inside me unable to leave.
We braided our names into rope,
and pulled until it lifted us.
We hung tangled together,
between hunger and promise.
Fallen kingdoms dripping from our mouths.

I lifted her hair and found a key
unlocking a garden with whispering willows,
scent of opium and rain suspended,
where time devoured its own tail.
The hunt remained.
I heard the slow bell of her heart,
felt the old world loosen one nail.

We chose a table,
black walnut, polished by prayers.
Our knives were thin as swan bones.
There were goblets and fountains of iron honey.
We worshipped at no altar but the one we made.
Two ghosts,
one table.
We made our desire live in offerings,
to remember us when we forgot ourselves.
When she inhabited me, it felt like wintering,
walking through my collarbone
as if it were long grass.
She ran and the world quieted.
The spool in her hand turning, turning.
The red line passing across the floor,
laying the path to the bed,
where she offered herself to me,
butterfly wings spread open.

We did not promise mornings.
We laid ourselves like blades, choosing only the parts that reflected us true.
Your hands were disastrous and I let them be.
We were each others country
crossing borders again and again.
No one stopped us.

We were not born. We began.
We met in the dark between centuries.
A ribbon waited in a cradle of stone.
She laid me down.
Tied it through my wrists and hers.
Not tight, but enough to bind
from one lifetime to the next.

She laid next to me.
Her presence filling the absence.
The grave bloomed,
soil pressed against our bodies,
we did not rise.

The earth made room for us.