They sat there beneath the waning sun, their faces—what was left of them—shadowed and strange. The ritual had been performed. The darkened altar, the whispered words. Each step carried out in perfect cadence, like a sentence passed down long ago, inexorable. Four girls become one. Flesh, melded. Souls, forgotten.
The land around them was dead. No birds cried out, no wind stirred the grass. Just silence. A silence so thick it weighed down the sky. Feminominatrix—though they did not call her that, for names meant little in the void they now inhabited—sat still, looking out into the distance, where nothing awaited her.
And what was there to say?
There were no wishes. No dreams. What they had thought they’d wanted, that too had withered like the brush along the dry creek bed. They were what remained. A thing built of hope that had curdled into despair. She sat alone, and yet not alone. Inside her, the four girls twisted, shadows upon shadows. Jane. Sarah. Lucy. Emma. Once they had names. Now they were just memories rattling through the cage of her bones.
Her skin was flawless, unmarked, perfect. But beneath it was chaos. You couldn’t see it—no, you couldn’t see it—but it was there, the way a knife lurks in a drawer. A terrible violence, silent and waiting.
Jane had wished for beauty, and she had it. Her beauty was such that to look upon her was to feel a kind of pain in the chest, an ache for something lost, something that could never be. But Jane was gone now, her desire stretched out like skin on a drum, taut and brittle. She’d wanted to be beautiful so the world would love her, but the world was gone. And who was left to love but the void itself?
Sarah had wanted competence. A life without failure. A mind so sharp it could cut through the riddles of existence like butter. But what good is competence when all that’s left is the dust? She could solve every problem in the world, and yet the world itself was unsolvable. Sarah's dreams had been eaten by the thing she had become, and now she wandered through Feminominatrix’s mind like a lost dog, scratching at the door of some place she’d forgotten.
Lucy wanted power, and she had it. All the power she could ever want. She could have moved mountains. Split the sea. Commanded the very stars. But there were no stars left. There was only the endless, empty sky. The horizon stretched out before them like a wound. Lucy was still there, she thought, somewhere deep in the marrow of Feminominatrix, but her power meant nothing now. She was a god with no one left to worship her, a king with no throne.
And Emma. Poor Emma. Emma had wanted happiness. Simple, radiant happiness. And when the four of them had fused, when their souls had stitched together into this monstrous unity, for a brief moment, she’d felt it. Joy like a light that could burn through the night. But it had flickered and died, swallowed up by the immensity of what they had become. Now Emma wandered too, lost inside Feminominatrix, searching for that light, knowing she’d never find it. Knowing that happiness had been a lie from the start.
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The land was flat. It stretched out for miles, the ground cracked and broken, as if the earth itself had given up trying to hold its shape. Feminominatrix walked. There was nowhere to go, but she walked anyway. Perhaps it was a memory of the girls—some trace of the human need to move, to do something, anything, even when there was nothing left to be done. The girls were all fragments now. Thin and ghostly, they twisted inside her like leaves caught in the wind, brittle and faint.
She stopped, staring at the horizon. It was meaningless, a line drawn by gods who no longer cared. The sun hung low, a dead thing in the sky.
Was Feminominatrix happy?
Could happiness exist in a place like this, a place so bereft of meaning that even the earth refused to remember its own shape? She had fulfilled their wishes. The ritual had been perfect. She was all they’d wanted to be—flawless, invincible, a construct of power and beauty. But there was nothing left to want. Nothing left to strive for.
Inside her, Jane whispered. Then Sarah. Then Lucy. Then Emma. Their voices came together, like water dripping in a well. And then they were gone again.
What had they been before? Who were they now? Did it matter? The ritual had made them perfect, but perfection was just another kind of death. And perhaps they had died already. Perhaps they had died the moment they’d decided to become this thing, this amalgamation of shattered dreams and fading souls.
Feminominatrix took another step. Then another.
In the end, it didn’t matter who was happy. There was no one left to be happy. There was only the horizon, stretching out before her like a scar, and the silence, waiting to swallow them all.
