The Sisterhood in Saffron

“On January 3, 1889, in the throes of a manic episode, Friedrich Nietzsche left his lodgings in Turin, walked a short distance across a nearby square, and then halted. Seeing a horse being flogged by its owner, he threw himself towards the animal and embraced it. Breaking into tears, he slumped to the floor.”

- Chris Townsend | Nietzsche’s Horse (2017)

It all felt like a mere dream. The drip-drops of the blood that leaking from it’s pool on the bed, right onto my carpet. almost gave a relaxing melody to the unmistakable stench of death encompassing my bedroom. Decomposition had made the already stuffy air even more unbreathable for my poor lungs. Nowadays I assume this is what awakened me from my slumber. A act of the gods to pull me out of dreams blissful to a forsaken reality. It took a while for me to make sense of the crimson scene around me. Most of all from that early-morning I painfully remember The cold dead green eyes of the red-head from the night before, staring upwards towards the unmoving ceiling fan. Refusing to accept this terrible reality I let myself slide back into the realm of sleep. If only it had indeed been just a bad dream.

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How much of a misery it can be to simply come into being. How much of an idiocy it is to be birthed simply to fill out blind instinct and feeble projections. How maddening it must be to raise a naive helpless child who is predestined for fates that are both undetermined and inescapable. I can never fully discern why my biological parents brought me into this world but if I had to take an educated guess it was not out of any solid wisdom. My earliest memories seem to be flashes of sadness and neglect that I simply have no words for. Nevertheless the state at some point removed me and put into a foster home. Then into a another. And into another until I was officially adopted by a quaint family in New England who sought to raise a god-faring woman. While to a degree they were indeed of good nature and intention they were also meek and overtly conservative. They tried their best with what they had and what they knew, I do give them that, but I simply was not built for the pious W.A.S.P. communities of white-picket fenced suburbia.

Everyone from my adoptive family to the lunch lady could tell I was different from the rest, even during those early days were I myself couldn’t. a bit oddly boyish but still tender. Jeans and leather jackets, but done alongside touches of almost professionally done make up. Born sinful, perhaps even defective in their church-going eyes. That’s tragic enough to be pitied instead of truly loved both in the platonic and familiar sense of the word. My blonde blue-eyed classmates made sure to take me down a notch every chance they got. Not with bruises and boasting like most of the boys but with petty whispered choices and actions on their parts that implicitly made sure that I was socially untouchable even by the most socially awkward social castes. Even now trying to bitterly reminiscence on any more of their constant bullying threatens to drive me into a weeping heap. Come the end of High School I was overjoyed to soon be free from all these morons. Such happiness was to be dashed since shortly after school the urges started to happen.

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I spent many hours thinking about the first time the devil, in all of his sadistic glee, decided to play with me. Taking me into his arms and throwing away any remaining chances of a normal life. I think about how the simplest of choices from my part could have saved me from the flames of agony. To this moment my observations rattle in my skull: I should have kept driving. I should have never gone inside that unkempt excuse for a bar. In-fact I should have put a noose around my neck long before this could have happened.

Should have, shouldn’t have. It matters little now that tears and blood are stained into my skin. And no matter how many times I can try and excuse the murders I didn’t the fact of the matter is that nobody put a gun to my head. I and I alone make the choice to sit next to the lady with the welcoming smile and those bright red lips which brought a firmness to my breasts.

I took her home. And after the love-making that I so emotionally needed I cracked her skull open in a glory of oozing brain matter and pieces of bone. Her pleas not to leave her daughter without a mother went unanswered. I’m the monster that did this. The monster that preyed upon closeted girls from all sides of town.They wanted to share pleasure with another of their queer kind. I did too but my body needed something more than coitus, its demanding go needed blood to be spilled. A monster.

Though as divine truths are being revealed to me I can’t help but wonder, were the other spectral forces in this universe guiding my hand? An accomplice or even a light-match in my crimes? Did the Sisterhood wanted this trail of bodies?

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The smell of decay that haunted my apartment could have only been hidden for so long. The bodies withered away with a mischief of delighted rats enjoying the gallows feasts. Sometimes I swore I could hear soft ghostly sobbing of the dead. Pleading why, why, and why. I could only delusionally pretend that these lifeless women did not exist but that was a task doomed to failed. Occasionally I saw one of them being talked about in the local news. Loved ones begging for their safe return. All because of me these families will never be the same or even continue to exist. All because of me.

The disgust towards the hideousness that is my very own person that grew brightly like the sun the last time I watched a husband weep for his beloved, this poor bastard didn’t even know how little she cared for men. This moment of irony didn’t stop the waves of self hatred that followed. Since then I spent so many hours in front of a dirty mirror holding a rusty razor just above my wrists. Always too much of a coward to do the deed. I wanted to die yet I wanted to live. Living in this paradox I prayed and prayed for some undeserved mercy from any god that might have been listening that my body will stop giving me these macabre demands. The Abrahamic God - if he existed - looked the other way before I was even a sperm. That doesn’t mean however that is the only deity watching over the twist game known as being.

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They are calling to me. Not the silent righteous rage of the dead weeping underneath my floorboards. But rather a corrupted olive branch brought forth from those that are beyond humanity. Sometimes when I closed my eyes , even for a millisecond, I found myself in a different plane of existence. There I saw these eldritch denizens. I stood helpless right in the center of this infinite palace of the abyss as this infinite army of glowing saffron eyes all watched me in a haunting unison. Staring at me and whatever immoral mark I had left in the order of things. The first time I snapped back to reality away from that dimension of orange blackness I foolishly thought it was perhaps judgment from the lord’s angels, my sins flaying me down into nothing. But as their visits continued, almost in perfect harmony with the piling mass of bodies in my abode I knew that something greater was at play here.

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In my final month I took any chance I could to look at my own two-hands and wonder how this could all be. Why was I put on this forsaken planet? Just to inflict unfathomable misery on innocent people? What kind of world is this? What kind of ghastly blood do I have running through my veins? What pure evil comets passed the earth when I was born ? The other moments I spent outside of these lamentations were efforts to try and hold onto anything that gave me a sense of nostalgia or of bygone happiness.

Friends I haven’t spoken to in years. Pets I owned and held but have since passed on. My adoptive dad surprising me with a pepperoni pizza that he picked up for me on the way home from work. “Just give me peace”, I would sob to myself, “someone please help me”. Someone did help me but not who or in the manner I initially hoped.

Then at the closings of my eye lids that familiar void kept bringing me to this world of ever observing eyes? Do these abominations pity me? Judge me? Mock me? Want me to face the hellfire I deserve? It would not be until the law comes knocking on my door that I get my answer.

A couple of detectives came by today just to “ask questions”. I gave them half truths and they left. But they knew something was up. I felt it in my bones. The walls were finally closing in on my spree of terror. Eternal numbness swallowed me. Fate was on its way. Thy kingdom cometh.

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I heard sirens in the distance. It could be nothing but it could also be everything. But what to do next? All humanity has been drained from me at that point. I deserve only pity at best. Turning myself in? I was not about to be locked away forever in the overcrowded filthy maze known as the prison system. Suicide? If the followers of Christ are correct I just doom myself to eternal damnation. I was trapped with no way out or so it seemed.

My fears were all crushed It when they summoned me for the very last time.

Millions of saffron eyes surrounded me in that maddening void. I figured this was it, that I was about to be put down like a rabid dog.

It was at that astounding moment all their forums changed, revealing to me their unnatural nature. Surrounding those freakish eyes woke a kingdom of otherworldly shapes and supernatural colors that put the most bizarre imaginations of men to shame.

The came the most deafening of bestial sounds roaring proudly at me…yet somehow and some way unmistakably feminine? Not the fake and frivolous femininity of society no, this was different, much more pure and innate.

Have I gone crazy? Is all this happening inside a padded cell on the other side of Providence. Then again if that is true I’m too far gone to be brought back to sanity or to do anything also but play along with the unreal happenings before me.

My ear drums are now at last pierced by their songs and orations, I finally understand. I finally know the unknowable. These women were here to bring twisted help and strange compassion. At the heart of all this orderly chaos I felt it. I felt them.

I felt her.

A Goddess both collective and individual. A womanhood beyond and above all human rationality. An inherent femininity that puts all attempts of it in the corporeal world of utter shame.

A Mother of the old earth and the Grand Mother of the new one. Her wicked divinity evokes the rarest most inexplicable feelings in me. Of warmth, of not being alone. Of being something greater than myself. The all, the nothing. The ugliness, the beauty.

I smirk as I feel my soul fray into oblivion. I don’t need it anymore. The Sisterhood of Saffron has taken me into their sapphic grace.

Back in the lesser reality I can hear law enforcement at the door. They are too late. I open my eyes one last time. I tearfully mouth “I’m sorry” to the rotting hands of my undead victims that are violently breaking through the walls and floorboards around me.

I close my eyes. I feel my earthly body fade into light-brown dust all so my essence can soon be with my new family. My last wish, my last unheard thought that I give to this world is this: That all whomst be maimed by the mistake of birth will not be cursed to the same bottomless agony that I fell into. That all couples understand the crippling gravity of their mating. The fates the dangerous destines your future children could meet.

As it is, as it isn’t. I was here, now I am gone.

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Written by AudreyOwO
Content is available under CC BY-SA