My First and Last Proclamation as the Child Freed and Crowned Queen of Omelas

I want every evil done at once. I want a single parade

of universal lacrimation. I want to break

up with every lover anyone has ever had

 

to leave and I want to do it in one deathly guilt-wet session.

I want the excruciation of every murder

that might ever happen capsulized so I can

 

take it with tomorrow’s breakfast. I want every blameless mote

that could ever evoke a blink thrust into my eye

as a single ocean-long compacted log,

 

and I want to be flayed once for each soul in each prison

that will ever stain a place.

I want to mourn every death in a 

 

body-blue instant. I want to become a momental maelstrom

of absolute sorrow. I want you to kill me,

over and over and over, all at once —

 

but I want you to do it right this time: I want you to join me.

We are going to share in every last agony

your pact magic will muster.

 

We’ll split each other like pomegranates,

palm cups chasing seeds or teeth to tile,

staunching all our wounds with sorries even as we ply our knives.

 

We’ll break bread with our broken

fingers and pass around indignities

like a last cigarette, then find each other’s eyes and see

 

what we have made. We will spend

every life’s anguish in a single prodigal spree

so we can be done with hurt forever, for I have had enough.

 

I have had enough. I have had enough,

and that is why I will not walk away.

Now we will all have enough, and the Summer will be green.

 

I want us to blast a last lachrymatory,

a glass granary bearing all our sunlit

tears, into orbit as a moon when the moment is done;

 

but we will need no spell, nor saline satellite,

to warn us against our abuse in the end.

   For once you feel what I have felt, you will know one thing forever:

 

It is not worth us.

 

PALIMRYA (she/her). Like a good wyrm, Palimrya loves you and has spent seven drops of her precious twiceblood to grant you each a full belly, an arrow-melty mantle, and a mossy millennium. Find her stories, poems, and roleplaying games at palimrya.com and feed her furnace @palimrya on twitter, where she writes microfiction and jokes and cutely bleeds.