Rosemary Graw

❝ [she was a collector of things—broken watches, old scars, bodies that didn’t belong to her]

Rosemary Graw was born bad. She didn’t make herself that way, didn’t try to be anything worse than what the world had already turned her into, didn’t wake up one morning and decide this was who she’d be. No, it had been built into her bones long before she knew she had them.

Her childhood was a long, slow drowning. An open wound, a series of locked doors, a lesson in what people could live through if they had to. A farmhouse where the walls were thin but the silence was thicker, where love was a closed fist and kindness came with a cost. She learned early that pain was the language of the house and love was a ghost that never knocked on her door. She never cried. Not when her father hit her, not when her mother turned away, not when she learned that survival meant being worse than the world expected. Her father drank himself mean, her mother prayed herself empty, and Rosemary—well. Rosemary learned.

She learned that pain was a language everyone understood. She learned that you could put a hand over someone’s mouth and they wouldn’t make a sound. She learned that being quiet wasn’t the same as being safe, and that safety was a lie meant for weaker things.

She was already dead inside by the time she was old enough to do something about it, so when she finally cut her father’s throat, it didn’t feel like anything at all. Just another chore. Just another night. She did the same to her mother, because a dog too broken to bite back doesn’t deserve to keep breathing.

The first woman she ever loved was a girl with wild hair and a mouth that never stopped moving. Rosemary loved her so much she couldn’t stand it, loved her so much that one night she wrapped her hands around her throat just to see what it would feel like. Just to see if she could. Just to see if love and death were really all that different.

They weren’t.

That girl is still with her, in a way. Or at least, her skull is. It sits on Rosemary’s nightstand like an old, favorite thing, like something soft and worn-in. Sometimes she talks to it.

Sometimes it talks back.

Now the farm is hers, and the farm is hungry.

It’s a place m