Like All Witnesses Of An Event Horizon, They Didn’t Know They Were Witnesses
We ended up in the same zoology lab for three semesters. Everyone said we were so cute, so textbook in love, dissecting tapeworms, frogs and crows. How cute, how in love, the way you always took up the scalpel. And how textbook it all seemed to me—you, holding what cuts helpless things open.
The professor joked that maybe he had done this before. The incisions were so clean, she couldn’t even tell where he had made a cut. Others would watch, but couldn’t see what it meant. I couldn’t blame them—it took me 14 months to learn the difference between being studied and being shadowed. He could be so patient. Most predators are.
Even my friends wouldn’t believe me when I said I couldn’t sense I was being cornered until my head hit the wall. But really, most prey can’t.
Everyone seemed so shocked, no one saw it coming. Honestly, most audiences don’t.
I did not escape with grace—Never praying, just limping, just another aimless host after the parasite, another legless frog, another broken crow, doomed to sink down choked, half-eating, half-eaten.
I know we respect freedom, but do we ever really know what some animals have to go through to earn it? Freedom is not always happy, not always safe. In it’s simplest form, freedom is what emerges from a perfect prison.
Like the snakes we watched molt in class, I eventually set fire to all the physical reminders but it wasn’t until after I had buried myself in them that I lit the match. It felt so much like freedom usually does— flames burning to cover a deeper burning.
We didn’t learn about the phoenix in zoology; I didn’t know that as long as I was the one who started the fire, I could be reborn— Consumed, only to be unhanded.













