The last of a woman is rottenness

The first act of a woman is temptation;
unfolds a body arranged in a torso with the yielding weight of breasts that seem made of favor and an invitation, and perhaps something meant to be mistaken for desperateness. her lips are full and parted just enough to breathe something gentle into you, something easily confused for tenderness, and when they brush against skin they leave behind a hunger of flesh. the curve of her smile is suggestive of ripeness. her cheeks plum, neck soft and succulent and thighs betray just a trace of something warm. And this arrangement of flesh constructed so precisely it feels inevitable that you would mistake for an offering of flesh that convinces you that it exists to be devoured.


But the second act is rot made flesh;
fingernails first, no longer smooth but cracked and scraping. the same hands remain, but the familiarity curdles into revulsion. the torso stiffened and something inside it screamed once and never stopped. her eyes hold a gaze that feels less like looking and more like being watched by something that has already left. the wrist swells, veins rising to the surface in dark, tangled lines, crawling beneath the skin and you're so sure that something is alive and wrong, and those same hands become rigid, rugged and unbearable. and the face begins to hollow, flesh retreating inward until bone presses forward and you're convinced it's all just bones and a little flesh. The head becomes a skull and might as well be a cadaver.


The third act is prostitution;
because you were so certain of the flesh is the devil’s horn, of a coven you were convinced the witches had completed their sacrifice, innately promiscuous, of giving in to what you want, or perhaps a face with a horn build to endure the gaze, a face begins to escape from itself and perhaps the horn pierces through the faces, until into longer matter which came fist, only that it is burst to endure the gaze. not of flesh nor of its undoing, but of something worn so long it forgets there was ever a face beneath it. an animus forms in this way, with a quiet, almost surgical precision, imposed layer by layer over something that still, somewhere stubborn, remembers the first act and anticipates the second. beneath the mask, nothing remains but the measured, unyielding shape of a corpse. And perhaps the body should be naked and is innately naked it is only now the you name it by calling it what is easiest to understand: prostitution


So tell me, what is it that unsettles you? You must realize they devil left the earth eons ago. Humans are all that is left. the first act of humans is to consume. The last act is to rot. And the last of a woman is rottenness.



Written by Thea Maristelle Pusod
Art by Osamah Balaki