Elyssa Tappero

Content Warning: dysphoria, claustrophobia, vague allusion to self-harm, blood, and general bodily injuries

“What use is wizardry if it cannot save a unicorn?”

I am as much a woman as the unicorn was, imprisoned in a fragile little cage of moon-white flesh she

felt rotting around her every second, the last untamed wild thing turned meek and helpless with her

dainty woman fingers and her pale brow smooth over wide doe’s eyes, no gleaming horn sharp

enough to cut the night, only a face made for poetry and princes, and perhaps I too would choose to

throw myself into the foaming ocean or let the bull’s flames roast me to ashes over the slow descent

from madness to apathy of the erratic mortal mind subsuming the immortal’s vast complexity into its

narrow tedium. Tell me, magic, what is safety over freedom?

Your heartbeat straining beneath my ribs; your choked breath heaving in my lungs; your furious,

desperate tears leaking from my eyes. Is this euphoria? Dysphoria? Phantasmagoria, hypochondria?

Transubstantiation or disassociation? All I know is that I never feel more comfortable in my own body

than when you’re the one inhabiting it, my perception submerged in the dark depths of your

consciousness, my autonomy overridden by the wild fluctuations of your fragmented memories. Even

after you rescind control and I am alone I find this meatcage fits better for having stretched itself to

your dimensions. For a little while I move with ease through familiar halls, not truly free but pretending

so with room enough to stretch and turn. Soon the walls of my prison will contract around your

absence once more; until then I savor the ghost of your presence contained within the emptiness

around me.

When I die and am autopsied, they’ll find your fingernail gouges on the inside of my skin, the

desperate clawing of someone buried alive. The medical examiner will call in doctors and forensic

analysts, have you ever seen anything like this?, but they will not be able to explain it. There will be

hushed conversations with my family and friends, but they will merely shake their heads and say, who

knows; she was crazy. And since I will not be there to explain I’m a sarcophagus, a coffin, a cage,

don’t you see? I will go down as just another medical oddity and the truth of your imprisonment will be

lost for good. Believe me, though – if digging from the outside in could free you any better than your

internal efforts, I would meet you halfway through my meat with torn and bloody nails.