Free while the black stars burn by kucy a snyder

suicide again, for I cannot bear to inflict such nightmares on her. Furthermore, in my dreams she orders me to do their bidding, to do whatever I must to survive. That’s always been our family’s way. My ancestors survived every sort of war and atrocity. My great-great-grandmother, as a little girl, survived the massacres in Rwanda by hiding in a pile of corpses for three days. Two hundred years ago during WWII, one of my Jewish ancestors was put in the camps in Poland. They set him to work prying the gold out of the mouths of the people they gassed or shot. He survived, and afterward moved to the U.S. where he became a very successful dentist. Just to spite the Nazis, no doubt, because I’m sure he had no real desire to touch a tooth ever again. Even if he’d been a sadist, he’d have hated the work.
    I wonder if I will be able to cook again, if I ever get out of here alive. I wonder if I will ever be able to hold a child or lover in my arms without my fingers automatically seeking the places a knife should be inserted to crack apart their joints.
    The boy is completely dismembered now. I set his hands, arms, and shins on a rack for the barbecue. Then I slice open his abdomen to figure out what will be sausage, and what will be chitterlings.
    I wonder if I and my mother are the first in our family to have shared minds, shared souls. It’s hard to tell because we’ve kept our connection an utter and complete secret for fear that we’d be locked up for examination. No doubt any others would do the same. But such a thing has to be as much a matter of genes as it is a matter of spirit. How can a four-year-old girl find the courage to stay still and silent, without food or water, in the midst of stinking corpses for half a week? How can a young man be made to rob the corpses of his friends and neighbors for five years and survive sane and unbroken? Perhaps they, too, dreamed of freedom through a loved one’s eyes.
    *
    I work hard and fast the rest of the day (if it is in fact day; all the clocks in here tell me how much time I have , not what time it is ). I make the pie crust, chop the apples and tomatoes, stew the collards. The boy’s large muscles are breaded and fried and covered in cream gravy, his limbs and ribs coal-smoked for hours and drowned in sweet barbecue sauce, stomach and large intestine chopped and stewed for chitterlings, skin chopped and deep fried into puffy rinds. The rest of him becomes sausage.
    I never taste the meat dishes directly, only the sauces and the vegetable dishes. I have a good knowledge of spices and how they blend, so if I’m careful with my measurements I don’t make mistakes.
    Not that I really have any idea of how the Jagaren’ sense of taste works. They aren’t human, after all. Although they are warm-blooded, they don’t resemble any Earth mammal in the least.
    It took the Resistance some time to capture a Jagaren for study and vivisection. The Jagaren’s slave troops are composed of species from many other worlds, including humans and even some Earth animals now that the Jagaren have had a few years to study the mammalian brain. All their slaves are turned into murderous automatons via viral reprogramming of their brains and are fitted with bioelectronic radio receivers in case their orders should change. No officers, just the soldiers in battle ’til they die while the Jagaren are well away from the fighting.
    But the Resistance captured a tourist in the rubble of Boston: one of the Jagaren had apparently wanted to see a little blood and thunder up close. Mother, knowing full well the risk of telepathy, made sure it was kept in a dark, soundless chamber until they found an anesthetic that would keep it under.
    I saw some of the inspections and vivisections through my mother’s eyes. I suspect I may have appreciated the procedures more than she, since I studied biology in college. A squat creature it was, beautiful and hideous at the same time, its tentacled body