Nightshade

Death didn’t devour me the way I’d expected. It despised me, as he did—though it was kinder, more mature.

Death wasn’t a bully. It didn’t envelope my battered body over my ballet barre in one final, dismissive push: it didn’t mock my bruises or take pride in my departure, smiling ear-to-ear.

Don’t believe this world's stories—Death is warm. Bright. A million cold, dark things led me to Death: black eyes, betrayal, depression’s grip, sore ribs—but Death was none of those things. Not one.

Death was a greenhouse from which I became. In Death, I was incubated by their presence, watered by their blood, sown by the collective wrath of the many women who've perished at the hands of the men they loved—trusted.

It was too late for them. But not for me.

“RISE,” they ordered.

And, once a dancer, rigor mortis didn’t stand a chance with me.

My body rose limberly—libidinously—swaying with a slow, hypnotic, serpentine seduction. I blossomed: no longer a mound of limp, contused flesh hung where he'd ended me.

Resurrection reformed me. I was a new venom—a vine of lethal ivy, a Venus flytrap—hungry for my lunch.

"I'm starving," I complained.

“Good. Make 'em your prey.”

I now smelled the perpetrators' narcissism. Death'd left my skin hyper-receptive. Whenever women were touched out of rage, I felt it—and I followed. I became the white swan, then the black one, luring offenders into stillness right before the kill.

And Death, seeing I moved too erotically for a corpse, released me. Forever. I’d become too dark for his taste.

I reside now in living shadows—stalking toxic men like a lioness, dragging them to my lair.

I am the Night. I am the Shade. I assassinate abusers.

My forbidden fruit is the most poisonous of all.

Sick fucks cannot resist me.