“It is not death,” she says.
The crack in her chest gets larger every day, skin peeling back like mud drying beneath the hot summer sun; she's splintering, breaking, the damage opening up parts of her you never knew she had—
She doesn't like when you look inside, when you dangle a webcam down through her cracks, but you can't help it. Her body is like a cathedral, a sacred grove, a many-chambered fantasy full of strange creatures and beautiful ornaments—
And the rot.
Always the rot.
It's in the walls of her chest, in the arching vines of her bones and the gentle spires which mark her spine; it's in all the things that aren't quite organs, that slowly meander through her body, that pulse in time with her breath and sing in harmony with every word she speaks.
She tells you that she's not dying, that the fetid decay choking out her thoughts and splattering about her with every agonized cough is just another form, another her; that new life, a new symphony of being, will be born from all those sticky greens and blues and blacks dripping from the sacred smoothness of her bones.
“It is not death,” she says. “I'll always be here with you, and someday you'll learn to see that.”
You can feel the truth in her words, the weight of belief and magic that makes them more true than mere reality could ever hope to be, but …
She doesn't understand.
You're not sure if you do either.
On those long sticky nights when you lie with her, when your bodies entwine as if you have never known a life without her in your arms, it's not her which fills your thoughts, not her scent that pools in your nose and whispers lust into your mind.
It's the rot.
It's the decay ruining her body.
It's that horrible smell that makes you gag and shudder and groan, that speaks to the life and love in you in a way that she never could; it's the knowledge that she's failing, the taboo you know you'll break as soon as she's gone, the stink that lingers in your nose and your thoughts just like a long-forgotten lover—
It's that sick little kernel of desire burning in your chest and your mind and between your thighs:
That longing to share her fate with the world.