You draw your shirt closed over your breasts, lining up the buttons until they kiss the soft spot beneath your chin, shoes abandoned at the doorstep. You are gifting me this truth: you have left willingly, and all that I am is tucked inside your skin. We rouse the same hour of dawn, with enough time to chase after you. We ready our rifle, the silver gleam of metal the color of your eyes. The rain softens the ground outside, and your tracks are easy to follow. We believe this to be your mishap.

You have named us Älskling in every iteration of your hunt and come into our houses invited. Into the red-paint wooden one with the apple trees, the one with broken windows, the stable where we slept on the hay, the yellow cottage by the brook with nothing but a bronze kettle in the kitchen. You appear in the yard, or outside the window with a knock, or by the maypole in your summer dress, or in the rain with your hair down to your ankles, or at the side of our kill in the woods. You bare your teeth in a smile too angular to be kind, and in our love for you we affirm your humanity.

We forget the hardness of your shoulder blades when we wrap our arms around you from behind, the scent of rotten wood seeping from the slope of your shoulder into your back. You tear our hair from our scalp with sharp fingers as we sleep and place the strands upon your tongue in ritual as the self that lives in our ribs and heart and eyes falls into the pit of your stomach. We dream of your hands scavenging our bodies for the only thing you want, a sheen of faith coating our tongues from half-hearted prayers. You try to salvage whatever bit of human you can from us. Enough to last the night and some.

We should have closed the windows and turned our backs when the door rattled. We should have let the rain soak through the linen of your dress until you yowled and chased yourself into the woods like other animals do, overturned into paws and tail and prowl. But before you tumble into the clovers and the cow parsley, before you lap the lingonberries from their stems with your ridged teeth and fatten yourself on the squirrels, before you seek out another lover for your list—know that come sunlight on the crest of pine trees, we have stirred in the absence of your hands rummaging through our bodies.

Shelter in the moss when our feet break the wet branches on the ground. Leap at the turning of our eye to your position. Trample the cloudberries beneath your paws and trap your breath between your teeth. Know as you close your lips around the pith you have scraped from the roof of our mouths, each man-burrow you upheave is another rifle seeking the perfect shot. Know your legs are swift. Know we are more numerous than you are quick. Know that we will find each other.

Know that as you pause, holding your tongue in your soot-color maw, all you have devoured longs to be killed.

Faye Wikner was born and raised in the lingonberry forests of Sweden and now resides in New Jersey with her cat, where she teaches Intro to Creative Writing. She is the Associate Editor of Map Literary and reads prose for the Adroit Journal, and her work has been published in CRAFT Literary, The Colored Lens, and elsewhere. She was the fiction runner-up of the 2025 Hayden’s Ferry Review Fiction & Poetry Contest and the runner-up for Feign Lit’s 2025 Reign Prize. See her site.