“BRIDE / BUTCHER / DOE” © 2024 by Max Banshees

A woman drags a white doe out of the ice room; it hangs from the ceiling rails by two brass hooks, one caught beneath its pelvis and the other behind the scapulae. As she pulls, the metal wheels whine.

When she works in her lab, she is a butcher. She lays the doe on her bench and makes an incision from sternum to pelvis. Beneath translucent skin and shimmering hair coat, she expects to find the pink, glassy meat, which should flake against her scalpel blade like white-fleshed fish.

But when the butcher peels back the skin flap, exudate and tarry blood pour out of the doe’s abdomen. The stench is remarkable, sweet. The tissue beneath her fingers rolls with squishy lumps.

“Oh,” she says. “That’s fucked up.”

She pauses her music, leaving a sticky fingerprint on the screen of her phone, and taps the recorder app.

“Disseminated tumors in the peritoneal cavity,” she says into the microphone. She doesn’t have the time to find another specimen; her lady needs the serum tonight. She continues describing her findings, her fingers burrowing further, where she feels the distended, worm-like vessels which line the intestines, and the bloated spleen which dimples beneath her touch like kneaded clay. A slow, thorough examination, even as the sun dips closer to the tops of the rainforest, marking the butcher’s hunting grounds with rays of fading, red light. She should have drawn the curtains shut before she began.

“Likely tumors of blood origin,” she concludes. She’s seen these in older specimens before—though not commonly—and to the living deer, they are nothing but a nuisance. But in her lab, it must be destroyed; it is diseased at a fundamental level, and even seemingly healthy tissue may bear the seeds of cancer.

And there’s something else inside: a hard bundle just at the butcher’s fingertips. She forces more of her arm inside—thankful that her gloves reach all the way to her shoulders—even as the doe’s fluids drip over the side of the bench, until she can pull out the mass.

It’s one horn of the uterus, swollen and full. At a single touch of her scalpel blade, its membrane splits apart.

Curled up, the fetus is so small that it fits perfectly in the butcher’s cupped palms: its coat stained purple by amnion, a budding horn centered between its eyes.

This should be enough meat.

The Lady Ede Ginevene puts her elbow on the vanity as she wipes off her makeup. The powdered skin, severe red lips, and eyes encircled with malachite paste are all traditional—which her father insists on for public appearances. The butcher knows Ede Ginevene hates it; sometimes, when they paint her face, she screams.

Beneath every layer of cosmetics lies a face that is already perfect in every way. The butcher has made sure of it. At this point, she knows Ede Ginevene’s face better than her own.

“Clover?” In the lady’s bedchambers, the butcher takes on a number of different names. “Would you start? I’ve been waiting all day for you.”

“Of course.”

The butcher pulls a vial out of her pocket. The serum is created from tissue cultures in her lab, but those cultures never last for very long and neither did her frozen specimens. She finds herself hunting at least every month, if not more.

“What did you do today?” Ede Ginevene asks.

The butcher takes a moment to think of her story. The lady doesn’t want to hear about her lab. “I was walking through the gardens, and I found a tiger hiding in the brush, so I stuck my hand down its throat and I came away with a ruby as big as my head.”

“I’ve got enough rubies,” Ede Ginevene drawls.

“Then it leaned in and whispered to me—” She says this in the lady’s ear. “—‘I saw the Lord Issar fucking one of the maids in the root cellar.’”

Ede Ginevene squeals, then plasters her hands to her mouth. “You did not.”

“No, I didn’t.” The butcher flashes her a grin. When she dips her fingers in the serum, she feels an electric shock all the way up her arm. The tingling won’t go away until she washes her hands.

“Who told you?”

“You know I can’t give away my secrets.”

It’s easier to work on her face when she’s relaxed. The butcher sits on the edge of her vanity, painting her fingertips down Ede Ginevene’s cheeks. Ede Ginevene only wants to maintain her current face for the time being, but every day without the Art means her natural-born face floats closer and closer to the surface. The butcher isn’t even sure what that looks like, and she doesn’t want to know. She reinforces the lady’s cheekbones, brings fluid back under her eyes, massages the fleshy skin beneath her jaw. The change is only noticeable to the trained eye, but it is definitively there.

“Can I take you out to dinner?”

The butcher knows she’s about to ask for something. “You haven’t done that in ages.”

“Haven’t I?”

“I just assumed you stopped trying to impress me.”

The butcher burnishes the lady’s neck as she pouts. Her body is sea glass, worn smooth. There are no hard edges, no cracks in the golden skin. Her nightgown slips off of her shoulders and pools in her lap. The candlelight plays across the hills and valleys of her soft musculature, the swell of her modest breasts and her areolas, reddened as if by carmine paint. When she sneaks out, she wears leather harnesses and long shell necklaces and denim shorts that show off her hip dips, the waterfall of her hair freed from its braids.

“Did you hear that Rela Trinavine is hosting the spring festival this year? And the afterparty?” the lady asks. What she means is: can you keep your mouth shut? Or perhaps even: will you go with me?

“I didn’t.” The butcher paints lines down her sternum, over her belly—her skin is soft, softer than the softest feathers—and then taps on the lady’s hip so she angles her pelvis just a bit upward. Easier on the wrists. Ede Ginevene likes to keep her labia prim and tucked away; the pink skin is mildly iridescent. “I’m assuming your father already told you you can’t go.”

“What he doesn’t know can’t hurt him.” Then, Ede Ginevene whispers, “I heard she’s convinced Maggot Party to play live. At the Escapades? She must have sucked someone off.”

“Must’ve,” the butcher says, humming.

Cervus khepros, the white deer of the island Elirian, don't die until their heads are cleaved from their bodies or their cervical vertebrae are dislocated. They don’t age. When they are dragged into cages, they throw themselves into the bars until their spines break in two. When their fetuses are placed into the wombs of mainland roe deer, they are delivered as faceless lumps of gray flesh. They tolerate only those pure of heart, unsullied by childbirth, by marriage, by sex. They will spear men through the heart with the single horn that sprouts between their eyes; they will take children by the scruff and spirit them away. They will eat anything.

The butcher owes her livelihood to the Lady Io Bellanthe, who studied the deer’s cells and found that not-aging was healing, and that healing was transformation. The butcher has seen it, too—only once—as have all students of the Art. At first, the dividing, morphing cells form a kaleidoscope of color. Some students report that they see a face in those colors, one with three eyes, unblinking; others, words distorted and fractured, then whispers in their ears as if someone were leaning over their shoulder. The butcher made it sixty-seven seconds before her nose bled, but she still sees those patterns in her dreams. Io Bellanthe, who recorded and photographed over a hundred specimens, walked to the ocean and dashed her face against the rocks until there was nothing left.

The butcher heaves a stag’s body over the back of her horse and begins the ride back to Ede Ginevene’s tower.

In the storybooks, a maiden will recline in plush, green fields. A doe, big-eyed and beautiful, will press the tip of her horn to the maiden’s forehead before lying in the grass and placing her head into the maiden’s lap.

But the deer are smarter than that. Perhaps “smart” isn’t the right word—the butcher has no idea how to classify the intelligence within their violet, sideways eyes. They elude all categorization. Genetically, they aren’t even related to true deer, but they don’t seem to be related to anything else, either. Is it purely instinct which pulls them to suicide in captivity? Or a knowing plot to defy their captor? In either case, she would never expect such a creature to approach her willingly. By virtue of her maidenhead, they don’t kill her on sight.

When she finds her herd, she trails behind them, sometimes for hours at a time. She keeps them just barely in her sight, white pinpricks scattered between the vines; any closer, and the smell of her would send them fleeing for the horizon. When one of the deer lags just far enough behind, she releases her dogs—all bitches—to circle it, and they hold it there, biting at its legs and dodging each calculated hoof strike, until the butcher takes her shot.

The felled deer is still alive, always, still flailing like a hooked fish. Depending on the accuracy of her shot, she has about three minutes to break its neck before it stands again.

Her phone vibrates. Ede Ginevene’s text reads, Where r u?, and then as soon as the read receipt goes through, send ur location. The butcher turns it off. She’ll deal with the consequences later, she tells herself; she ignores the twisting dread in her gut.

As she continues along her path, she spots a figure between the ficus leaves. She stops, squints. She assumed she was hidden, but he meets her eye.

Ducking beneath the branches, she ventures closer to him. It’s rare that she ever sees anyone out here. Even tradesmen avoid entering the rainforest whenever possible.

The man is leaning against the mouth of a cave, a joint pinched between two snarled lips. He nods toward the stag’s carcass.

“I used to know that one,” he says. “Not a gentle sire.”

“I’m sorry?” the butcher asks.

“You know you’ve got quite the mark on your head, carrying that thing around.”

The herds are not captive, but they are stewarded, their populations strictly observed by outriders in the courts’ employ. Poaching is punishable by death at the discretion of those black-cloaked riders. The only thing worse than poaching a unicorn is using their serum on anyone without noble blood.

“I’ve got a permit,” she says.

She tries to get a better look at the man. Long, ratty hair falls down his back, and his eyes are so dark that they might as well be black. She’s never seen someone with skin so pale. The gentle arch of his lip could have been carved from marble, but his fingers are too long—spider leg fingers—and caked in dried muck.

“I’ve seen you before,” he says, “haven’t I?”

Her brow furrows. He doesn’t look like a farmer or a village hunter. He’s dressed in a robe that goes all the way down to his ankles, cinched at the waist and embroidered with intricate designs all but lost to dust and brown stains.

“You must be mistaken,” she says. “I’ve never met you before in my life.”

“Doesn’t mean I haven’t met you.” He leans forward, and the movement is accompanied by the chiming of metal. A chain runs from his ankle into the cave. “You’re owned by the lady in the tower, aren’t you?”

Her horse dances backward, neck stiff and nose pointed to the air, but she keeps her seat steady until it calms. He must be some sort of criminal. When the outriders aren’t allowed to kill their prey, they chain them up in the forest to die of exposure.

But how could he know who she is? To most, she’s Ede Ginevene’s lady-in-waiting, and nothing else. There are only five other practitioners on the island—and, with the exception of Wry Velience, even the butcher couldn’t pick them out of a crowd if she tried.

“I’d like to offer you a deal,” he says. “Kill the lady, bring me her body, and you’ll have your freedom.”

“I’m already free.”

“Are you?”

“In a week, you’ll be dead,” the butcher says. “The deer will be gnawing on your bones.”

He smiles. Smoke seeps out from the gaps between his teeth.

“Come back,” he says, “and find out.”

When they first met two years ago, Ede Ginevene’s face was not as feline as it is now. She said once that the aesthetic came to her in a dream: her new face, round like the moon, doe-eyed and oceanic; her new body, a reed bent over by the wind. At the time, court style leaned towards sharp angles, but Ede Ginevene didn’t follow trends. She started them.

She gestured for the guards to leave once the butcher stepped in.

“Do you listen to djent?” Ede Ginevene asked. Lounging on a bed of woven grass, she speared candied peaches onto her nails. She was flanked by shimmering glass bowls of pomegranates and dried dates and melon water so cold that the jugs sweated in gemstone drops.

The butcher blinked. “What?”

Ede Ginevene’s mouth twitched downward. She reached over to press a button on her radio, but the music sounded more like white noise. When she settled back into her bed, she regarded the butcher coolly, head tilted to one side.

“I’ve never had one so young,” she said, squinting.

“I’m not—” Sure, the butcher was the youngest apprentice the sculptor Wry Velience had ever taken, but Ede Ginevene looked younger still. She was so small. “Young?”

“What are you?” Ede Ginevene’s lip lifted. “Like, twelve?”

“Nineteen.”

“What can you possibly learn in nineteen years?” the lady whispered, as if to herself. Then the butcher saw her eyes. The deep blue irises and the flea-dirt pupils, fixed on the butcher as if they could see straight through her. Old eyes. Could the butcher fix old eyes? Surely, if they could have been fixed, Ede Ginevene’s last practitioner would have done so.

“Hm.” The lady was unimpressed, and she was doing a terrible job of hiding it. With a wave of her hand, she said, “Why don’t you strip?”

The butcher’s face went hot. “I’m sorry?”

Ede Ginevene didn’t say anything else. She dipped her finger in a bowl of yogurt and popped it into her mouth.

Clenching her teeth, the butcher undid the ties of her dress and let it fall to the floor. She had to be selected. “This is your bride,” Wry Velience had said, coaching her. “You will sleep in her bed. You will sit at her feet like a dog. We will not even consider the possibility that she casts you aside.” But the butcher didn’t care about Wry Velience’s pride; she cared about her own.

Although they were high in the clouds, surrounded by sandstone walls dyed berry red, the arid breeze from the windows made the butcher feel as if her organs were on display.

When the lady’s eyes—night-sky eyes, too-old eyes—fell on her, the butcher wished that she only felt shame. A small part of her that hoped the lady would like what she saw, and that was so much worse.

She carefully trained her gaze at the floor, her face curtained by her dark hair, but when Ede Ginevene walked in front of her, the butcher couldn’t escape the pink pearls of the lady’s toes.

“Yes, this will do nicely.” She lifted the butcher’s chin with a finger. “I don’t surround myself with ugliness. I may not have a hand for your Art, but I’ve known enough of you to have developed an eye for it. There’s something beneath your skin.”

When the butcher returns to her chambers, Ede Ginevene lounges on the sofa. An excess of silks drape from her body. She’s picking at her nails, sharpening her claws, preening. When she looks at the butcher, her eyes are stretched too wide, and her lips are pressed shut so tightly that her whole face has gone white. Her throat works convulsively in trembling, fluttering movements.

“How long have you been here?” the butcher asks, her coat still hanging from the crook of her arm. She’s covered in sweat, blood, and horse hair. All she wants is a shower to wash the smoke-smell from her skin.

“Long enough.”

The butcher flicks on the light. It’s then that she sees the shattered CDs strewn across the floor.

“What the fuck did you do?”

“They were trash anyway.” Ede Ginevene scowls. “Who the fuck listens to ambient EDM?”

The butcher gapes. “I do!”

In a flurry of silk, something sails through the air. The butcher ducks out of the way just before a porcelain figurine hits the wall beside her. Little pieces of it fall across her head. Ede Ginevene must have taken it from the butcher’s bookshelf; it must have been one the butcher sculpted herself.

“Answer my fucking texts!” God, she’s so good at screaming. Ede Ginevene practiced breaking glass with her voice. Now she’s on her hands and knees, her acrylic nails digging furrows in the seat cushions. Her chest heaves.

“You’re pathologically insane,” the butcher cries. She picks up one of the porcelain shards that fell on the floor. Her fingerprint is baked into the surface.

“So, what if I am?” Ede Ginevene pulls at her neckline, baring her breasts like the grieving Medea. She can’t hold back her tears anymore. “You could have been dead! And I wouldn’t have known!”

“You were worried?”

“Are you kidding? Of course I was fucking worried!”

The butcher holds the porcelain shard to her breast. She wants to cry. She wants to hate Ede Ginevene so badly that her chest hurts. A collection of little porcelain animals lives on the mantle above Ede Ginevene’s bed, each one born from a kiln purchased by the lady herself. “They watch over me while I sleep,” she would say.

And the butcher says, “I want you to go.”

Ede Ginevene wavers. Before she can speak, a whimper escapes her lips. “You hate me, don’t you?”

“Edie, I don’t—"

“I’m sorry,” she sobs. She crawls to the butcher’s feet. “I’m sorry.”

“I know, I know.” Kneeling, the butcher holds Ede Ginevene’s head between her hands. Her cheeks have gone tacky with tears, and her eyes are two big lakes, and her whole body is shaking. How is she so small?

“I know I’m crazy. I can’t help it. It’s like there’s something inside of me and it makes me do awful things. Like, right now, I wanna tear out my hair and eat it.”

“Don’t eat your hair, baby.”

“Do you hate me?”

“I don’t.”

“Swear it.”

Sighing, the butcher pulls Ede Ginevene’s head into her lap and strokes her hair. “I love you, Edie,” she says. The lady sniffles, curls up.

“Please come to the party with me. Please.” She sinks her claws into the butcher’s pants. “I’ll replace all your CDs. I’ll buy you so much porcelain you could bury yourself in it. I just want you to come with me.”

“I promise it’s okay, Larkspur,” Ede Ginevene said. “No one will know. They won’t even remember what you looked like before.”

The butcher sat in front of the lady’s vanity and in front of her, the serum. Ede Ginevene draped her arms over the butcher’s bare shoulders.

When the lady had officially hired her, the butcher didn’t expect the whirlwind of events she was dragged into: galas and fêtes, movie premieres and private concerts. Ede Ginevene dressed her up like a doll in silks, leather, and ermine; she gave the butcher a dual-name at events, to pretend that she had come from a good family, and introduced her to hordes of beautiful women before sailing away to talk about the newest paper on synthetic polymer vectors for pesticide distribution, or Abyss in the Eye of the Worm’s latest album. On the return drives, Ede Ginevene would pull the butcher into the corner of the back seat, into a nest of discarded gowns, and laugh as their lips nearly touched. “Who did you meet?” she would ask. They breathed the same air. “Tell me everything.” In that time, the butcher found, there was quite a lot to love about the lady; even the things that she hated, she loved, too.

The butcher remembered what Wry Velience had told her, just a year prior: Ede Ginevene’s family rose to prominence when her fathers became the favorites of the emperor. Wry Velience always laughed, because she had seen how much the court hated them for it: the nouveau riche? Fucking the emperor? Nobody knew which one sired Ede Ginevene, nor which one bore her. Did it matter? They had enough money to solicit the practitioners, enough to convince them to send replacement after replacement when the last died of old age. Ede Ginevene was first touched by deersblood serum when she was sixteen years old—long before the butcher had been born, and likely before the birth of the butcher’s mother, and the one before her.

“Here,” the lady in the mirror said, “you should be taking notes. See the arch of your nose. We can bring that down. Put some more fat in your lips and cheeks. Lift the corner of your eyes—that’s going to be in style, soon. I dreamt it. A whole decade, at least, of cat eyes and sad lips.”

She took the butcher’s hand, cradled it in her palm, and squeezed a few drops of serum onto the butcher’s fingertips. This time, it burned.

“Go on,” the lady said. “Just your face, first. We’ll worry about your body some other time.”

“I could be killed for this,” the butcher whispered, a half-hearted objection. Ede Ginevene’s magnetism inspired obedience—and it made her like it, too. Wouldn’t anyone want to glow like Edie? Wouldn’t anyone be flattered by this fatal little secret? She had earned her lady’s trust, and that was enough to make her heart flutter.

“But you’ll be beautiful.” Ede Ginevene pressed her lips into the butcher’s cheek, then spoke muffled by her skin. “I want you to be beautiful.”

Nodding, the butcher drew a line of serum down her nose.

When the butcher returns to the cave, the prisoner is accompanied by a doe. Her front legs are draped over his shoulders, and she leans in, snout to his ear, as if she were trusting him with a secret. His white fingers weave through her flaxen mane, in and out like the shuttle of a loom. Back and forth, her plumed tail flutters over the underbrush.

“Come here,” he says to the butcher. Both his and the deer’s eyes turn to her. “She won’t hurt you.”

He sits, and she sits in the dirt beside him. He has forgone his robes. Now he only wears a few rags and the fluttering cloak of his hair.

“What are you?” the butcher asks.

“A prisoner.”

“Do you have a name?”

“No.”

“Me either,” she says.

He rolls his joints himself—where else would he get them? There’s a valerian bush just within reach of the cave. Already, he’s picked it bare. He plays with the last leaf now, tearing it to bits.

“Have you thought about my offer?” he asks.

“I’m not a murderer.”

He grins. “Sure,” he says. “Why did you come back here?”

“I wanted to be right.” The butcher shrugs. “It’s a shame you’re still alive.”

That makes him laugh. She doesn’t like the way he laughs: like a dog barks, like it’s a warning.

He asks the doe to come over again by reaching out, palm up. When she bows her head, he slices through the thick of her neck with a fingernail that is far too sharp, and though her body goes stiff, she doesn’t fall, nor does she try to stop him. His hand slides between the fleshy, gaping mouth of her wound and comes away with a handful of dripping tissue. The doe, heaving for air, lowers herself to the ground and lies still.

“How did you … ?”

“Have you ever heard of one Tei Philovane?” he asks.

The name elicits disgust. Yes, the butcher has heard it before.

“She used to do something like this,” he says, holding his hand to the light, until the deer’s meat shines like a ruby. This is how deer meat should look: not murky and cancerous, but gem-like in its translucency. “Her herd loved her so much that she merely slid her fingers inside of them and took what she needed.”

“They didn’t love her. They killed her.”

“She took a stag as a lover. It was only a matter of time.” He laughs. “I didn’t like her much, anyway.”

“They tell us that she was naïve,” the butcher says, “and stupid.”

“Perhaps she was. I always thought she was arrogant. The way she pranced down here, so full of love, so sure that love would protect her and that it would protect us.” The prisoner gestures with his bloody hand. “Have you ever tried to use it in this form?”

Once. Once, just when she had first gotten her own lab, blood dripped from her specimen onto her bare hand. Even after scrubbing with alcohol and lye, the sensation lingered in her whole body. She was afraid that it would never leave her; that the lady would smell the stink on her and know. She never again handled her specimens without gloves.

The butcher shifts away from him, her skin itching. When she sees the dripping meat, her mouth waters and her body thrums. She thinks, suddenly, that she never should have come here. Dragging herself away now would take willpower that she does not possess.

“Your serum is tempered,” he says, “domesticated. Much harder to fuck up your lady with the serum, but much harder to make art, don’t you think?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Sometimes, I wonder—” He is rambling now, the blood dripping down his arm. “—what happens to the serum that you use on your lady. When it’s absorbed inside of her, does it stay in her veins? Forever? Does she filter it into something that is unique to her, and her alone?” Then he sighs and fixes his gaze on the butcher again. “Hold out your hand.”

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t you?” He tilts his head to the side. “Didn’t you like it, the last time?”

She thinks: that’s why I’m so scared of it. It’s hard to say no, and she’s losing. Sucking in a breath, she holds out her palm, and he squeezes the meat like a sponge.

When the blood touches her, she gasps. A feverish heat sinks into her hand immediately. It’s terrifying how quickly it absorbs in the skin, how quickly it travels through her. Her whole body flushes hot, first, and then she starts to pant, and then the heat travels: through her belly, between her legs, until her thighs are slick. When she squeezes them together, she can’t help the moan that escapes her. She clamps her clean hand against her mouth.

“Christ,” she says, “I’m sorry.”

The prisoner snorts, shrugs.

She didn’t remember it being like this: so aroused that it hurt. Is it worse when the blood is fresh? She wants to pull her skin off her bones; she’s going to pretend she doesn’t like it.

“I don’t intend on fucking you,” the prisoner says, “if you’re thinking this was some sort of ploy to get inside your cunt. Although I would if you asked.”

“No, thank you,” the butcher says. “I would like to keep my job, I think.”

She notices that he’s erect, too. His phallus has escaped from the confines of his rags, veined in violet and pink like an agate river stone. The fur surrounding it is more similar to the doe’s mane than his own hair. But his face is blank—perhaps faintly amused—and his skin is still pale, and he breathes with a slow, easy cadence. She finds his face too unsettling to look at.

“What do you want, little magician?” he asks. “Do you want scales? Claws? Antlers? Horns? Do you want a cock? Another womb? Do you want to be stabbed through the belly and knit yourself back together again?”

She can hardly think straight, but she lets herself interlace her fingers with his; she cradles the meat with both hands. In her periphery, she sees a web of connective tissue pull itself over the deer’s wound.

“Why?” she whispers.

“Because you can be whatever you want to be, and as long as you keep a part of yourself, you can keep changing again and again.”

“Are you a practitioner? You talk like one.”

“Not anymore.” He smears a blood-sticky palm against her cheek. “Go on, use it. Change your skin.”

“They would kill me if they saw.”

He shows his teeth. The dog’s laugh, again. “I thought you were free.”

The butcher turns out the light and crawls into bed.

The prisoner gave her one of the doe’s legs. Pried it right off. As she was leaving, she saw the fetal limb sprouting from the doe’s shoulder. She’s never seen a deer grow back a limb, not with her own eyes. It reminded her of stories she once heard, of ancient guardian deer who couldn’t die, not even if their heads were cut off—they would amble over to their heads and lay the neck stump to the ground until they glued themselves together again.

Edie thinks guardian deer are all imprisoned beneath the towers; the butcher thinks they never existed in the first place.

She cradles the leg to her chest, even as the blood soaks through her shirt. She feels as if the water inside of her is rolling like the tide, as if there’s an ocean inside of her.

Bunching up her shirt, she presses the flat of her hand against her stomach. She paints her skin with deer’s blood. When she digs her nails into her flesh and pulls her hand away, feathers sprout from her skin, reaching up to touch her fingertips.

“Oh,” she says, “my god.”

She shivers and grins. She sculpts bronze scales, so shiny and so little that they become star-like against the dark expanse of her skin, and downy black fur all up and down her stomach, her chest. She paints eye-shaped spots into her feathers.

When her fingers run dry, she plunges them between the muscle fibers of the deer leg. The pads of her fingers slide against the ulna and emerge with a stringy sanguine trail yoking her to the hole. Once, Ede Ginevene wanted her liver changed so it processed drugs more slowly—so she could stay high for longer. The butcher remembers how Edie groaned when she made the incision. It was a low, rumbling noise, so unlike the lady’s normal cries, but she didn’t ask the butcher to stop. When the butcher let the serum drip into the wound, Edie’s back lifted off the bench and her toes curled up.

The butcher carves a chasm into the flesh of her belly. Muscle becomes hard gums, mesentery becomes teeth. This new mouth stretches from flank to flank. Within, a tongue curls up between the canines, and it smiles. Once, after the butcher messed with Ede Ginevene’s liver, she smeared some of the blood onto a glass slide and looked at it under the microscope. The lady was curled up with a pillow, snoring softly, sated as a cat after dinner, and the dusk light made the whole lab a brilliant red. It took a while for the hesitant, quivering cells to do anything at all, but soon they formed lines of chatoyancy: shuddering delicate iridescence so easily destroyed by a gentle breeze, a stray breath. The butcher sees those cells, not the deer’s, when she closes her eyes.

Ede Ginevene did end up cutting her hair. All the way up to her chin. She slept in perm rods and brushed out the curls so her hair now floats around her head when she walks. She pulls on leopard print pumps, a mink coat, and a pearl necklace so long that she can wrap it around her neck three times over and it still falls between her breasts. She holds the butcher’s chin in one hand and an eyeshadow pencil in the other, carefully outlining each eye before smudging the lines with a saliva-coated pinky.

“Is this how you feel, Celosia?” Ede Ginevene asks. “When you fix my face?”

No. Not even close. “Exactly like this.”

“I wanna bleach this coat,” she says, “and dye it with indigo.”

“Can you do that?”

“Why not?”

“I think that would look nice.” The butcher means it this time.

Ede Ginevene steps back and regards the butcher. “I think your shirt clashes with mine. Actually, I have just the thing.” She grabs something from her closet.

“I—” The butcher clears her throat. “I really like the one I’m wearing, actually.” And Ede Ginevene shrugs.

When Ede Ginevene sneaks out, she palms her guard a piece of last season’s jewelry. The both of them are spirited away to the Escapades, a spa and resort on the northern shores. They will slink back into the tower in the dead of night, and Ede Ginevene’s fathers will be none the wiser.

The butcher always brings a pocket knife with her, just in case. She convinces herself that stabbing an assailant will be just like killing a deer. That—if she has to do it—it will be easy.

The Escapades is built entirely with glass tinted the same blue as the ocean. Its balconies overhang the sea. Ede Ginevene falls into the arms of her friends, all radiant in their denim skirts their glitter eyeshadow their black-lipstick-white-teeth smiles. The butcher feels the music in her chest. For the first time in a long time, Ede Ginevene stays by her side, banging her head and screaming when the right lyrics come on. When the lights die down, they trickle out to the alleys between the concrete towers, to the shore, where the revelers run, tear off their clothes, and dive into the sea.

“Come here, come here.” Ede Ginevene’s nails are claws, drawing red marks down the butcher’s arm. Her words smell like gin.

“Where are we going?” the butcher asks as she stumbles after her lady. Ede Ginevene’s laughs echo like the chiming of bells. Her limbs, uncoordinated in their drunkenness, remind the butcher of a newly dropped foal. They round a corner so quickly that the butcher can’t tell up from down, and then suddenly she is pulled tight against Ede Ginevene’s cocktail-scented body. They’re flanked by concrete walls, shuttered windows, and the ever-present breath-like music of the tide.

Ede Ginevene turns intoxication into an art form: her wild hair sticks to the sweat on her forehead; her crop top is wet with sea spray, as transparent as cling wrap, so her red nipples might as well have been printed on the fabric; her lipstick is smudged like a bruise. She peers out from beneath sleepy, hooded eyes, beneath the curtained shadows of her lashes.

“Aster, Jasmine, Nettle,” she purrs. “You are so hot.”

The butcher’s breath catches. “Am I?”

“I want you inside of me again.” Her cheek is against the butcher’s. She speaks in a whisper. “Remember what you did to my liver? I think about that every night before I go to sleep. I want you to fuck me.”

When Ede Ginevene nibbles on her ear, the butcher forgets that she’s the butcher. She’s one of the women at the rave, undulating against each other until they couldn’t breathe anything but their own sweat and their own perfume. She’s the prisoner’s canvas as he paints with the blood of his lover. She’s a doe buried in the dirt beneath the paws of her bitches. Her second mouth begins to drool.

“I can’t,” she manages. “You know I can’t.”

Ede Ginevene whispers in her ear, “You can do whatever you want.”

The butcher can’t even conceptualize what she would do if she couldn’t hunt the deer. She would only be able to hide it for so long: her failed hunts won’t fit neatly beneath a long-sleeved dress. The other practitioners would shun her. No amount of money would keep her in Ede Ginevene’s chambers, not when Wry Velience threatens to abstain from sculpting the emperor’s face in protest. Surely Edie knows this?

Isn’t she as afraid of losing the butcher as the butcher is of losing her?

She tries to slip out of Ede Ginevene’s grasp, but the lady holds on tight. Her fingers are tangled up in the butcher’s hair and her legs weave in and out of her own and she hangs the whole of her body on the butcher’s shoulders. The lady laughs again, showing off the pretty pink of her gums. She must think it’s a game.

“Baby, baby, baby,” she says, all lips, all tongue, “it’s okay, I promise. It’ll be okay.”

“I said I can’t.”

Something about the butcher’s tone finally makes Ede Ginevene pause. Her brow furrows, mouth slightly agape, and her eyes go wide.

“Don’t you love me?”

She doesn’t let go. From the depths of her belly, the butcher starts to snarl. Teeth scrape against the inside of her shirt.

“That’s not fucking fair!” the butcher cries. “That’s not fair, and you know it.”

Ede Ginevene’s lips tremble. It hurts to look at her face; it’s all crumpled apart. Her mascara is running. “No,” she says around her tears, “no, you just don’t understand. I know you love me. You have to.”

And she puts her hands around the butcher’s waist, slipping her fingers beneath her shirt. Fear and shame, red hot, strike the butcher in equal measures. She can’t breathe. She pries the lady’s fingers away, but it’s too late. Ede Ginevene’s face has gone pale.

Before the butcher can run, she tears the fabric away and finds it: the tooth-filled mouth, and the feathers, and the scales. Ede Ginevene snatches her hands away, as if the butcher’s body burned her, and presses them to her breast. Although her mouth gapes, she’s so silent that the butcher can only hear the sound of her own heart thundering in her ears.

Then, Ede Ginevene screams.

“What did you—” She pants for air, and cries out again, and tries to speak, but the words tangle in her sobs. The butcher can’t understand a single thing. Each of her cries reverberate down the alleyway.

“Edie,” the butcher pleads, “Edie, please, be quiet.”

“You’re disgusting.” Ede Ginevene doubles over. “Jesus Christ, I touched it.” And she begins her chorus again: the glass-breaking, moaning screams. She sounds like she’s dying.

They’re still close enough to the afterparty. Someone is bound to hear.

She grabs Ede Ginevene by the shoulders and puts a hand over her mouth. Together, they fall against the wall, tangled up again, the air blisteringly hot. “Shh,” the butcher tries, desperately, her voice shaking, “Shh. You know I love you. I said I love you. You don’t have to cry.” But the lady only shrieks. As she tries to find purchase against the butcher’s chest, she bites into her fingers until blood wells up around her teeth.

“Help!” Ede Ginevene manages to cry. “Someone help!”

The butcher fumbles for her knife. When it’s in her grasp, she presses it to Ede Ginevene’s neck. A strangled sound escapes the lady as she tries to get away from the blade, but she can only press herself harder against the wall.

Every part of the butcher’s body pleads with Edie: please, please, please. She can’t bear to hear that scream again.

“You need to be quiet,” the butcher whispers. “I’m begging you to be quiet.”

“Get the fuck off me!”

The knife sinks into the hollow of Ede Ginevene’s throat. The lady’s hands rush to touch the wound. When they come away red, her eyes stretch wide. She tries to say something before she falls, and in the nest of her mink coat, the butcher is on top of her.

The butcher wonders: what if she hated Ede Ginevene? She can still feel where the lady touched her: fingerprints carved into her belly. What if the butcher truly hated her and loved the feeling of the knife sinking into her flesh? Could anyone truly blame her for putting an end to that awful, pathetic sound? The butcher roars and sobs; she shoves her entire weight down until bones snap underneath her. Again and again, she brings the knife down until her fingers are so slick with blood that it slips out of her hands.

Swallowing the bile in her throat, the butcher sits back. Now that it’s quiet, she manages to catch her breath.

And Edie doesn’t even look like Edie anymore.

Edie tries to breathe. Instead, there is a rattling in her chest. Her gut is split open, her rib cage caved in, and her face bruised black. One eye dangles out of its socket, attached by a thin, red thread. When she sees the butcher, she laughs, and then she snarls: the purple worms of her lips stretch over her stained canines.

“Kill yourself,” she spits. Each word has to claw its way out of her throat. “Wouldn’t that just be so romantic? If you fucking died, too?”

The corpse slides off the butcher’s horse. She dismounts shortly after it hits the ground and stands before it. When the prisoner crawls out of his cave, she draws her rifle.

“Why do you want her?” She chokes on her words. “She was my Edie.”

She didn’t know where else to go. Didn’t know what to do in that alleyway, already soaked through with blood.

The prisoner gives her a pitying look: brows drawn, eyes big. “Little magician, if I could be killed, they would have done it a long time ago.”

“What are you?”

He nods toward the trees. “Once, I was a doe—an old doe, older than you can possibly imagine, and when they cleaved my head from my body, I stood again. I was forced into this form by one of you. They took my fur, my hooves, my horn, my heart. Even my womb, so that I couldn’t bear another one of me. I’ve tried to use my sisters’ bodies to change back, but it never works. They stole that from me when they stole my blood. So I have to use something else. Something stranger, I think, than my herd. Something newer.”

“What does that mean?” she cries. “What are you going to do to her?”

“Why does it matter to you?” the prisoner asks. “You killed her, not me.”

He wraps a hand around the barrel of her gun and pulls it from her numb fingers.

The butcher’s voice becomes small. “You have to help me,” she says.

At his beckoning, she kneels beside the corpse with him. He runs his knuckles down her cheek, and says, “Watch.”

He sinks his claws into the corpse’s gut and tears it wide open. Inflated with gas, its intestines resemble pythons. He opens it from pelvis to rib cage, holding its viscera as delicately as he held the doe’s meat. He laughs as he admires it.

"What artistry,” he says. “She had one of you stitch her cervix shut. I can see your fingerprints on every one of her organs. Did you have to open her up to do that? Was she awake when it happened?”

“She was,” the butcher whispers, remembering. Where Edie touched her, she feels as if she had been stabbed.

He slips inside the cavern of her corpse, head-first. He coats his skin with her muck; rolls on top of her until she breaks apart, her blood seeping into the mud. When he emerges from the pond that he has made of her body, his hooves struggle to find purchase on the blood-slick grass. The doe shakes his head until drops of exudate fall from the tips of his woolen ears. His coat is stained a scarlet red. The butcher can only cower in the doe’s shadow as he drags more and more of himself out: his haunches, the delicate curl of his tail. He stands as tall as the treetops, dripping, dripping, dripping like the leaf canopy heavy with old rain.

He exhales once, a whole cloud of air emerging from his lungs, before he slips between the trees.

“Wait!” the butcher cries. “Wait! Aren’t you taking me with you?”

The doe looks over his shoulder. His eyes are still black, but now they are the deep, reflective surface of a lake. The butcher could kneel at the surface of that lake and stare for hours, and still never see the bottom. She could drown in that lake, and the forest would march ever onward.

“You’re free, butcher,” the doe says, “but I think you had better run far, far away.”

Editor: Kat Weaver

First Reader: Hebe Stanton

Copy Editors: Copy Editing Department

Accessibility: Accessibility Editors