Under the Constellation of Virgo

-It was always thus, woman.-

‘You shoot like a woman. Cold, calculated, between the eyes.’

She liked his thinking. It was nonsense of course. But it was so much easier to start from there and then convince him otherwise - that she was tender and maternal instead. Here, in the wilderness, there was nothing of the social order to protect them. Only their own thoughts and stereotypes; the ones they dragged through the mud.

Some nights she dreams. There are hairpins down the drain. Women’s losses. No one has time to unravel truths.

She wakes up, tears in her eyes. She whispers, ‘You are the reason why I don’t know what to do with my hands. In the darkness my fingers still reach for yours’. Instead, she reaches for the gun.

I have the gun. I rule here.

There was no makeup in her belongings, nothing could set her apart from the rest so she had to make do with what nature provided her with. Parading around with feathers, once belonged to a bird she had to strangle with her own hands. ‘When I return, I will become a vegan’, she thought. But for now this had to do. She put earth colours on her face, pinched her cheeks and bit her lips for colour, old tales she had read in books, before women had rouge imported from Paris.

Under the Constellation of Virgo

Some nights she looks up at the stars. There are all sorts of answers amongst their burning glory but none related to her questions.

When a man died, some went for the flesh, she for his bright coloured check shirt. It was not vanity or an attempt to be different, to be identified as She who must be obeyed, a fiction of non-existent times, before or after. She was starving for colours.

Some nights she dreams of a portrait. Two people. A kiss on the hair. Her long hair enveloping his face - a painful image, like breaking teeth on Inox surfaces or falling over as a young, soft-skinned child.

It was her fault. She knew. But admission would equal death. She was gathering strength.

Somewhere in there, she had the colours and the words. Sooner or later, stories and images would be all they were after. She was almighty.

Existential anxiety meeting apathy. Words fail. A primal urge to scream or kill. In any way, take control over the silence. A gunshot in the distance.