taken from angela carter's short story. feel free to change pronouns, etc.
there is not much in the autumn wood to make you smile but it is not yet, not quite yet, the saddest time of year.
there is a haunting sense of the imminent cessation of being.
the wood swallows you up.
it is easy to lose yourself in these woods.
though the cold wind that always heralds your presence, had i but known it then, blew gentle around me, i thought that nobody was in the wood but me.
erl-king will do you grievous harm.
there are some eyes can eat you.
how cruel it is, to keep wild birds in cages!
the price of flesh is love.
a little of the cold air that blows over graveyards always goes with you, it crisps the hairs on the back of my neck but i am not afraid of you; only, afraid of vertigo, of the vertigo with which you seize me. afraid of falling down.
i know it is only because you are kind to me that i do not fall still further.
you could thrust me into the seed-bed of next year's generation and i would have to wait until you whistled me up from my darkness before i could come back again.
yet, when you shake out those two clear notes from your bird call, i come, like any other trusting thing that perches on the crook of your wrist.
you sink your teeth into my throat and make me scream.
how sweet i roamed, or, rather, used to roam; once i was the perfect chuld if the meadows of summer, but then the year turned
if i strung that old fiddle with your hair, we could waltz together to the music as the exhausted daylight founders among the trees.
he strips me to my last nakedness, that underskin of mauve, pearlized satin, like a skinned rabbit; then dresses me again in an embrace so lucid and encompassing it might be made of water.
we are like two halves of a seed, enclosed in the same integument. i should like to grow enormously small, so that you could seallow me, like those queens in fairy tales who conceive when they swallow a grain of corn or a sesame seed. then i could lodge inside your body and you would bear me.
your touch both consoles and devastated me; i felt my heart pulse, then wither.
eat me, drink me; thirsty, cankered, goblin-ridden, i go back and back to you.
i go back and back to you to have your fingers strip the tattered skin away and clothe me in your dress of water, this garment that drenches me, its slithering odour, its capacity for drowning.
now the crows drop winter from their wings, invoke the harshest season with their cry.
he spread out a goblin feast of fruit for me, such appalling succulence.
i am afraid i will be trapped in it for ever like the poor little ants and flies that stuck their feet in resin before the sea covered the baltic.
there is a black hole in the middle of both your eyes; it is their still centre, looking there makes me giddy, as if i might fall into it.
your eye is a reducing chamber. if i look into it long enough, i will become as small as my own reflection, i will diminish to a point and vanish.
i will be drawn down into that black whirlpool and be consumed by you.
i shall become so small you can keep me in one of your osier cages and mock my loss of liberty.
i have seen the cage you are weaving for me; it is a very pretty one.
i shall sit, hereafter, in my cage among the other singing birds but i—i shall be dumb, from spite
when i realized what you meant to do to me, i was shaken with a terrible fear and didnnot know what to do for i loved you with all my heart
your embraces were your enticements and yet, oh yet! they were the branches of which the trap itself was woven.
in his innocence he never knew he might be the death of me, although i knew from the first moment i saw him how he would do me grievous harn.
i knew from the first moment i saw you how you would do me grievous harm.
although the bow hangs beside the old fiddle on the wall, all the strings are broken so you cannot play it. i don't know what kind of tunes you might play on it, if it were strung again; lullabies for foolish virgins, perhaps.
lay your head on my knee.
lay your head on my knee so that i can't see the inward-turning suns of your eyes anymore.
i shall take two huge handfuls of your rustling hair as you lie half dreaming, half waking, and wind them into ropes, very softly, so you will not wake up, and, softly, with hands as gentle as rain, i shall strangle you with them.
