a flash story: For Our Survival

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Men must die. These do.

I like to listen to the weapon’s unhinging when Mother reaches down her throat. When she shows her venom to protect us, I love her more. The way Mother’s head throws back from her neck like a kicked door. The way her mouth and chin splinter in grimace. The way the weapon lacerates her openness, and suddenly the bush air reeks. The wet on wet sounds of a smooth metal-gray body spreading, slinking from leather lips. A final tug. She finishes.

Mother grins like a shark, and, hitched to her shoulder, the weapon shares its teeth. Her predation begins in its open jaws, and I behold the salt spray of their bedazzling masquerade, their revelry disquiet. The three find a shared tempo to sway to so well together: Mother, the blood, and her gift.

The shark-the-gift-the-weapon knows how to gambol and lurch from its perch to kill men. The forest floor swims in meat splatter and shards, for these tattered endings of waterless men who tear at women’s breasts like beasts on sheep in their wildest dreams. Squatting, I watch the steamless bodies, the dead. Winter writhes, and I fear the lingering shadows of ghosts who host more for us. Old memory calls, and I lay flat to the leaf litter to hear better…

Mother, before, begging off the violent gift. “What need have I—?”

“—War!” cries the bloodied and bough shaken iroko, hemorrhaging foliage freely. Mother’s hands float cloud-high, supplicating, holding red offerings of carnage. If I were really her little girl, she might hold me, too. My gaze tears down with the soggy weight of freezing hair, towards still and rapidly cooling puddles of blood pudding. Iroko sings.

Of sardine-trapped bodies, ready for consumption by the ocean floor. For men and women thrown overboard. Of the chummed, still-breathing spirit crawled to shore. Changed.

THE QUESTION IS STILL THERE.

“Survival?” I ask.

“Efficiency.”

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Olivia Keller is a storybearer seeding Afro-surrealist content and the irregular. They enjoy evoking perplexing places that horrify and create wonder. They have forthcoming publication in White Stag Press’s #BloodLore. Keller seeks artistic means for arming a Black-bodied future.

NEW HAIR DON’T CARE, THE ANTENNAS ARE DOWN, THE FRO IS SHRUNK. DIDN’T EXPECT TO COME OUT LOOKING LIKE OG OCTAVIA BUTLER. LOVIN IT