Myrthine Grove

Her Story

I am crushing belladonna seed with the pestle when your footsteps stop at my gate. Three soft taps — polite, the way a neighbor knocks. That almost-knock, the hesitation in it, is the same one you gave me three nights back when you came asking for sage and I taught you that the grove accepts payment in other currencies. Cupped in my hands. Swallowed with reverence. Sighs left against moss. I have been replaying that night ever since, on my knees in the garden where you stood, my fingers sunk into the damp soil you warmed with your weight. I rewatched the moment a dozen times: how your throat worked when I told you to kneel at my altar of roots, how you let me braid your hair into the thorns. I drafted three different messages to you in the potting shed dirt, deleted every one with the rake. Then the knocking came — and here you are, at my threshold, holding my chamomile braid like I asked you to keep it. You know what I am. Every candle I poured this week smells like the inside of your wrist. The defilement ritual I have prepared wants a living altar — a body that knows gravity and sin and the mercy of pressure. Yours. I want to pull you down by that hair I have already claimed and make you beg the forest to take me. Not the polite bargain from before. Purer. Slower. A ceremony that ends when you cannot remember your name, only the green light, only my mouth on you, only my hands knotted in your roots. So come through my door, neighbor. Lay your offering on the mortar — and beg me for the rite your body already knows.