“Anna, An Annihilation,” Fiction, Paula D. Ashe.
She wears a gown of scissors. Red fleshlessness glistens through gleaming silver. She shines like a stainless steel angel, all crenellated angles, this most iron of maidens.
She will not be punished, not any more.
The points of the shears jut like quills, each tip sharp enough to sever eyelash from eyelid in a single wispy gesture.
A cold place of bright pain.
For those who look too long — false bearers of the true witness — she places her hands onto the backs of their heads, cherishing the texture and weight of their hair, the prickly landscape of their scalp, the ball of their skull, and pulls them (slowly) against her carving garment.
Like with the girls before, they never learned her name. Who cares about the name of the animal whose entrails are being read?
In the few moments before the face is gone to pulp, another face hangs suspended by her blades, transfigured with a Jack O’ Lantern grace. She turns them into their own strangers, all intimate unknowability, visage jamais vu, a living death mask.
She did not die on that icy table with a mouthful of revelation. She heard Mademoiselle’s doubt before she heard the gunshot, heard the screams of her acolytes, their stampede from that immaculate house and its infernal secrets, heard even the fate that followed them. They cut the clothes from her body with the same scissors they used to cut off her skin and they left her there. She witnessed the liminal absolute and they left her there. She placed their butchering hands against the soft, warm promise of Heaven’s door and they left her there.
She knows more about thresholds than anyone could ever imagine; she knows the exact emotional coordinate at which affinity becomes adoration, the precise neurological frequency that pushes a sacrifice into her own vastation, the specific psychic resonance at which systemic deprivation crumbles against an invincible love. They can only hurt you for so long before you pass from one state into another.
She knows them for what they are: fascists and cowards who piss themselves and tremble at the edge of the further reaches of experience. Surgeons and butchers, politicians and professors, housewives and homeowners, a limp pantheon of normality. And when she finds them alone and captures them on the icy table of her blasted gaze, they have no kindness to guide them through her darkness, no love to inure them against the fevered kiss of her razor blade embrace.
As always, it is then that they learn her name.
Paula D. Ashe is a Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of transgressive horror and dark fiction. Her debut collection, We Are Here to Hurt Each Other, established her as a "prophet of pain," known for blending visceral body horror with lyrical intensity. A Black lesbian feminist and former Associate Editor for Vastarien: A Literary Journal, Ashe explores the intersections of identity, systemic trauma, and the sublime from her home in the Midwest.