Lily follows me nearly everywhere I go. This was true even before the world was being torn apart from the inside.

Stripped wires, power sources live and exposed. A magma core that doesn’t explode in an epic’s end. But, rather, leaks. Just a little at a time. Just enough to fester at different rates of volatility, become ‘something’ that is of ‘somewhere’ else as it reacts to the subtle changes in the environment. Evolutionary, but more destructive than what we understood to be the nature we knew. “Mother” was angry and she aimed for blood.

Plasma, even. The deepest, juiciest parts of our vain existences carrying oxygen to our limbs as if we deserved to breathe air. She roasted the confit of man’s existence in a dazzling display of disease, peppered in resentment. Embedding rage in the recipe, I’m convinced.

Lily, not as delicate as she may seem but, hardy in her survival. I remember when her scales started:

It was June, 2022. My husband and I had gotten married earlier in the year but had to wait on the honeymoon. We were still a bit behind on the financial front and needed to still have normalcy, despite the joy of a wedding. Or, what we called a wedding. We were never party people. We enjoyed our life. Our interests aligned, our needs were met. It just floated. We floated. We were the frequency that hummed below depths. And we aimed to preserve it as a life-preserver.

We operated on our own station.

There were seasons to it, of course. Sometimes we were doing the same types of things at the same time, on the same page. Others were off-world, otherworldly axes, tilted away from one another. That’s the way it goes, though. Neither Lily, nor Dexter minded. They acted like the mortar we needed to build. But still, we weren’t prepared for the winter. I miss Dexter.

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Dexter was our cat. “Food-motivated” was what the adoption people told us. What they meant was “this cat has a brain disorder in regards to how he processes the permanence of a resource.” It didn’t matter that we fed him at the same time, twice a day. It only mattered to him to scream for food. I’ll never forget that sound. Just the right pitch to get your attention. And the whining! Lily picked that up from him. We only got him for five years. We had no idea how old he was when we adopted him, but we thought we had an idea—apparently not. He’s buried in a small patch in front of our porch. I made sure to cover him in wildflower seeds, but they never got the chance to take.

Lily loved to tag along to our usual haunts. She was good off-leash and friendly to any lucky passers-by. She had a good trot to her, confident and a little goofy, but she looked like a dog. A small hound, but a hound just the same. She had something more than a lap dog in there, she loved trails and tracking. She adored swimming in rivers. But I had one too many heart-attacks about alligators in said rivers.

I don’t think I have seen an alligator since the last time I was pulling Lily out of a river near Columbus, GA. How does an alligator scale over, I wonder. It’s already scaled.

But, the honeymoon trip was the first time she started gnawing at herself. We thought it was anxiety.

It started small, like these things do. Like so many other things…do. And then it just took over. Like it was always supposed to be there, or was already there.

Lily follows me everywhere. But, I think she thinks I like the company. When in reality I’m trying to keep my eye on her. She can rip into herself faster than anything I’ve ever seen, able to draw blood in less than thirty seconds. You can smell the iron in the air. She’s panting from the contortions. Her eyes sit a little deranged.

> “Come on, girl. Let’s get you cleaned up. Doesn’t look like you got yourself too bad,” I would lie. It wasn’t long after Lily started that Dexter left us.

“Mother” wanted her pound of flesh, I suppose.