SHE KILLED! Bestiario Femina

The most terrible. The most brave. The most fatale.

Seven tales about seven women, reifications of a feminine archetype.

Terrible, brave, fatale, visionary... gothic women.

The meaning of gothic is in the hidden shadow inside us. A shadow that marks a thin thread, an almost invisible border between decorum and indecentia. A thread on which, in equilibrium, the main women of this collection run.

"SHE KILLED!" is a term coined by the author to honor them and it means "SHE IS BLOODY COOL!".
Each of those women faces a life experience meant to turn her different from what she was before. And she will unconsciously be guided by a beast symbol, a mythological beast.

Terrible, brave and fatale itself.

***

Vol. I: PERSEPHONE

With her bare hands, the young and beautiful Zelda Zei pulls out of the grave her beloved husband, Noah Napnei, victim of an apparent death phenomenon.

The people around them no longer seem to recognize him, so devitalized and disrupted, to the point that Zelda herself wonders if his soul is irreparably broken or if she has invoked a demon, raised from the grave a dangerous creature who is no longer the man she knew and because of whom he begins to fear for her own life.

Is a metaphor for a love crisis.
Zelda, thriving and vital like Persephone, is observed from outside, with the eyes of ordinary people, linked to this sad figure, so different from her, the "God that everyone receives".

Is also a metaphor for inner transformation and spiritual awakening. Zelda sought, desired this experience.

And now, like a serpent, she is going to mutate and dress a new skin.

***

Noah sat on the edge of the bed, his broad back slightly bent, in a pose so rigid and dignified that he seemed motionless, but so motionless, to the point that I wondered if he was breathing. I took a breath, realizing that, while looking at him, I was the one who forgot to breathe.

"Do you think they are right, Zelda?" he spoke, without turning to me.
"Do you, too, think I am dead?"
My heart was squeezing in pain, unable to bear see him like that any longer.

"I am sorry." I whispered.

"For what?" He said, as a matter of fact tone.
"For what you are sorry, since you are the victim here."

Like a metal pincer, Noah's fingers pushed mine to grab his jaw and in a slow outburst, like a desire to be possessed if not the spasmodic need to belong to someone, my hand closed on his neck.

"If indeed you think you called me back from the eternal rest, my wife" he said like singing a sinister melody "Perhaps you have every right to kill me again. Do you agree?"

Smoothly and slowly, he lay down his back on the bed, making sure I followed his movement, holding my grip tightly to his throat.

In the action, the blackish vines on his face opened a little, and between them two cold and lascivious eyes appeared staring at me, the eyelids at half mast.