She raised the axe. Her grip, inexpert but powerful. The heft of the wooden shaft in her palm, the glint of the flared blade, droplets of rain reflecting the meagre light shining through the clouds. That first sundering had seemed so impossible. A primal roar ripped through her in release as her triceps tightened and loosened and the blade fell with her breath. It didn’t do much damage, but she had all the time in the world for this.

Her strength was depleted from the time she spent in this place already, the months of her life she used to feed this thing in place of her own growth. It could contain her, this patch of land, that was hers. It could encase her human form, just barely, yet with ease consume all she ever was. Her chest heaved, sweat pooling between her breasts as she lifted her arms high again.

The descent split the planter that she had so lovingly made. It was a struggle to separate the axe from where she had lodged it, so she abandoned the weapon and dropped to her hands and knees, fingers groping through the moist soil for roots. She felt the cuts in her fingers responding, pulsing. Fibers of her flesh pulled away from each other, eagerly stretching to split themselves and moisten this earth alongside the rain. The feeling too familiar, she withdrew before the roots latched on to drain more from her. She was here to end this. She yearned for some destruction with her bare hands and pressed her palms together, compressing the head of a buoyant red bloom, the feathered petals slight and delicate; its spiral offshoots usually layered and lifted, rubbed between her hands until they fell away, curled into themselves, with white seams cleaving through the clot of red.

She brushed off her hands, staggered to the communal shed, and found the large shears. They trailed behind her as she returned to her plot. Her blood streaked down the handle as she adjusted her grip. She dug the shears into where her hand had reached and sliced along the rivulets of her blood, opening and closing the blades as if hacking at weeds. They weren’t weeds. She had created something beautiful — at least, to a fresh eye she was sure it would be, but to her these bloated buds were decay even when bursting into bloom, in that moment when they were all potential and wonder. She could find beauty in other things, she knew, at lower cost. She hacked at each exposed bit of root until it was too weak to hold on and the soil released it to her destruction. Uncoupling, extracting, discarding.

As she proceeded, any remaining tightness in her movements released, her attention drawn inwards, her mind in her body. Suddenly, she was gripped by the strong desire to burn these roots and dance on their ashes. She wanted to dance. She carried the shears to the spout and rinsed off her blood into the communal drain before returning them and taking a large fork. With that, she tossed the earth.

Everything she had learned to rear these plants, she used to destroy them; every kind word she had thought to help them grow, she reclaimed for herself. The contraction of the muscles in her thigh, her knee joint swinging forward, her heel pressing down, her biceps finding the strength to pull up; the rhythm — it felt like dancing, like a prayer to herself. And she was so afraid it would feel like sacrilege. At the thought, she let out a laugh. She invited each breath to reach the deepest part of her lungs to mark the moment she carried the feeble stems to the compost, dropped them in; never returned again.