Cassandra Khaw

For all that humanity professes to delighting in its own sophistication, it longs for simplicity, for when the world can be deboned into binaries: darkness and light, death and life, hunter and hunted.

They nuzzle their jaw into my hands, allow my fingers to cinch about their skull. I could snap their neck, dislocate the vertebrae stacked upon each other, sever the blood flow. They know this. I do too. Nonetheless, they place their faith and their breakable flesh in my fingers, eyes closed.

The ritualism of my dressing, the attention they invest in the act, every motion elegiac, elegant; it proposes the presence of an unconsummated tenderness, something more profound than camaraderie.