power

When she opened her mouth, all oil and flush and darkness spewed out. The sounds she made split men's eardrums and boiled the blood in their veins. Though she collapsed upon herself she drew their souls into herself, leaving behind heaving sheaths of body, thin paper exoskeletons to be swept into eternal orbit. Like pink snakeskins, dry and brittle and crumbling.

Her eyes flashed and hair frothed around her head; a violent thunderstorm. Her body was stillness. Her face was the event horizon: to look upon her was never to look away.

Her arms reached so far to either side that her hands disappeared into space. She enveloped the universe. She contracted all the matter around her into a pebble, into a grain of sand, into an atom. She expanded her body into everything.