The First Time

 He hit her, and she saw blood. Her eyes filled up with it, overflowed with it. He felt his fists getting wet. He was himself then, elated and brimming with delight at the intoxicating freedom of mayhem. To him, it was her tears on his knuckles.  The truth was  that it was her blood.

The next morning, she woke up. Everything looked new. Everything was so bright, blazing hot like him. She turned her head from the sheer heat of it. Her eyes stung.

She touched her hand to her face, felt where her lip was broken, where it opened like a crevice spilling over with darkness. Yesterday, they were just her lips, but now, when she tried to speak, tried, even, to cry, there was nothing. There was nothing, as if somehow he’d made her swallow her voice, and now, it was irretrievable.  Now there was no use for the old kinds of words, and for safe, soothing speech.

He had given her another language. Suddenly, she understood all those words: 
fuckin bitch evil cunt come here i’m gonna kill you. 

Before, she could never fathom them, could not understand the violence of them. 

When he choked her, the air went out of her, and his language filled her with fluency. When he gave her that last shove, that last crack of the storm that finally freed her to hit the ground and rest, his violence passed into her. It occupied the void he’d left in her as quickly as he’d created it.

He did not intend to teach her this language, the language of his own freedom. It had only been a night nursing the terrible seedling, and already, it was growing unstoppably, in and over her. The cuts, the bruises, the gashes where his nails dug into her skin – they all became creeper vines. Already, their hold was so strong. She could speak to him, now. There had to be another exchange.