Leviathanslayer
Its teeth were like half-eaten apples: yellow and highly compostable. So Wynless buried them between the petunias and the lilies. As fertilizer. They sat, thirty whole, thirty needling teeth no larger than her pinky’s tip. And sprinkling them over the naked dirt she saw them wriggling through the soil like mealworms. The flowers grew up even as she scattered them. The bulbs got swollen, bloomed, and died before her very eyes.
Its stain-glassed eyes, though shriveled and smaller than her own, she hollowed out. Those she set over the flames of her candles at night to snuff them out, and they glittered like the death of a storm beneath the touch of a hot wick.
Its still-soft claws, dark and unnicked, she ran through a bracelet wire around her wrist. Its foot beans she plucked and crushed into an emerald paste which proved barely enough for a tube of her lipstick. Its wings she treated into leather for fingerless gloves, so small was the swath that remained.
The bony plate of its tail she heated for a tea-sized spoon and the vertebrae of its back served only to read the clattering fall of her future soon to come. Its quicksilver scales she pulled off its skin, forced up away from its flesh using her own bloodied fingernails for leverage. Each one no larger than the size of her own nail, each one bright and new as the moon when it’s heavy with light. From those silvery scutes she made herself a corset, she had only enough to lace the scales as bones across it, bones as hard and unforgiving as the crackling frost of her own, frozen-over soul.
It would have become Leviathan, the dragon of profundity. It’s name was Hutchley, who had worn away its egg-tooth off the tip of its snout beneath her back porch. Wynless was the Leviathanslayer, inheritance of infinity; Wynless was the Hutchleykiller, traitor of the honest heart.
And thus decorated with the many pieces of an odd little creature, she wove a prayer to the steel-domed sky.
C.W. Spalding 