Vultures

An avenging song wearing scripture. Prepare to meet thy God, it opens, twenty years evaded and the poison already in the cup, judgment arriving in a woman’s name. Behind him a family is left with the wreckage, a mother awake at night in tears and a father who followed him out the door without ever knowing why.

She runs into the woods to find a man who never loved her and finds what the vultures left. The finding repeats like a litany, in the mouth of vultures, in the grip of Cain, until it reads as scripture, and she walks out a woman born again.