The Head of Lilith

From Woods, Water, Women

The zombie oracle – and, for one unfortunate soul, a god – resides in a flowered patch of glen. Mostly, she mutters into empty air, her dead eyes rolling crazily incongruently in rapid spasmodic bursts. Less occasionally, her countenance becomes suddenly enervated, sublime and alert, intelligent and quite conversational. 

What has brought you here? 

He had never wandered so deeply into the forest. He only walked its perimeter, tracing safely among the fruiting trees. On occasion, he did peer into its depths, staring as far as he could until the weave of distant branches closed and crosshatched like the tightest wicker.

You look troubled. Come to me.

He drifted towards this siren-flower, this gruesome bloom. How could he not? The breeze carried a faint perfume, daffodils and wet pennies…

Sit, tell me your story.

He had never wandered this deeply into the forest. But today, an alien compulsion had propelled him into the wilds. One could argue that the momentum was self-inflicted, a kinesis summoned in the wake of his fingers unclenching slowly from his wife’s neck…

You loved her. You loved her…

The ground was soft and not unpleasantly damp. He kept breathing as she whispered to him, her voice filling his brain like spooling gauze. It wasn’t flowers or copper anymore, but a stronger odor, much stronger, like breath and blood…

Imagine me cutting your dick off and reattaching it over and over again, for all eternity. That would feel good compared to what’s in store for you.

If an individual’s agony could split the universe and manifest itself as a retribution-seeking, ghoulish head planted in a wood’s clearing… if only.

But as he ran deeper into the forest, further and further from his wife's freshly strangled corpse, he swore that something was tugging at his feet. The tugging feeling never abated. Sometimes he wonders when the woods will stop spinning around him, or when the worms will cease threading his sockets. But mostly he just rolls his head and babbles, wheeling nonsense into the empty air.