October 13, 2022 - Elizabeth Lerman’s “Cat, call”

If I have it in me, I like to stare back and laugh. Smile, maybe, until they think something is very, very wrong, and I look at them long like that because I need them to know I could snap at any second, because I could snap at any second, and what did they say? It matters less now and sometimes, when my eyes erupt and I start to see stars, I think they could say next to nothing, could say the word nothing and still, I would be on them, scratching and screaming, they way I do in my dreams, limbs loose and lucid. I would become a creature with claws and the dark would look like day and after a while I would be dragged away, the way women who scratch and scream usually are, when animals of all kinds wake up inside them.