BIRTHING IBINU

They were beautiful and selfish. All they did was take and take and leave her empty with no remorse. Slowly, she became sick. And the only cure for her illness was murder.

A murder of love, a murder of self. She killed her emotions with pills and alcohol, and then she killed herself. She squashed her former self into a bag of old skin and pushed it deep into her stomach, and then gorged herself with someone wicked and new. She called her Ibinu, the name for rage in her mother tongue, because that was the only emotion she could not kill.

Ibinu grew her hair into a thick unkempt mane and lived in tight black leather, because she was convinced it was the only thing keeping her together. She hated to be touched and took to tying her lovers in bed, riding them to oblivion and then disposing of them afterwards because they could never really take her there.

She was a beautiful, furious thing who took what she wanted by force and broke whatever refused to belong to her-both things and people. She was glorious and frightful to behold. When she walked in the streets she smashed the faces of those who dared to look away from her into the hard concrete and forced them to look at her, because she wanted them all to see just what she had become. She wanted them to stare, to give her their eyes and their fear. It made her feel giant, it made her less hungry.

Ibinu took whatever she wanted by force, and anything she couldn’t have, she devoured.

There wasn’t a thing they could do to stop her.