Journal: Entry for Novo

on my hands, on my lips, thriving and multiplying with dank green chemistry. You can see the signs on my thighs and my fingertips, they say you can get cancer from this, or worse: warts, frogs, a bad reputation.
The hotbeds are between the eyes and the legs, dark wet fertile places with room for corruption. Bind the ankles, pray, drink, do anything but there is no forgetting - it's like blood on the conscience and the right light can find it, a good forensics team, a matter of time.

Of course there are soft religions with their rulers to the wrists, indulgences en masse. All it takes is letter of apology, promises and abjections, kiss some feet and bite your tongue and don't do it again, miss. Secrets, red faces, a guilty conscience.
Then there is Mister Old Testament with his plagues and his massacres, more satisfying but also less real. They won't condone everything, burning witches has fallen out of favor - only the desire remains, a red thing on the brain, malignant tumor, eroding slowly in peacetime.

Maybe they will pore over this later, they will miss the particular lilt of phrase, they will not have time for italics, for emphasis, for the smooth words like stones.
They will scour the woods, find the rose petals and the styrofoam cups, the stray hairs, the footprints, all things that point and say this went on here. There will be tape and lights and sirens and gruff men, a red inverted urge to raze the forest, burn the trees, cleanse the ground, stone us or hang us - the biblical impulses, you will make us swear on holy books of every sort, you will tell us we should be sorry for all the things that we have done.