🐚 You don’t know how sharp your beak is.

🎧 Listen to me read it — just the way I meant it.

💬 Prefer to read? Here’s the original text.

View from KittyAnn’s Window

“I’m going home,” I say.

She licks her spoon clean and sets it on the counter, opens the cupboard and pulls out a mug. “I made coffee,” she says, reaching for the pot, and she pours some.

My Wild Woman laughs out loud. But the laugh catches in my throat.

“Do you ever wonder why Raechel felt unheard?” I ask. I want it to come out like a scalpel, but I’ve never been as talented as Mercedes at hurting people with subtext.

She smiles slyly and cocks her head. I can tell by her eyes that she caught what I was casting. “You think I don’t know what you’re trying to say. But I do.” 

She pushes the coffee across the table. She thinks I’m going to drink it, that this is a peace offering. 

But I don’t move.

She rolls her eyes — just a little bit, she’s trying to hide it — then turns behind her and takes the sugar bowl down from the cabinet. Puts it on the counter.

I watch her. Stare at the bowl. My arm wants to jut out, step forward, bring that coffee she imbued to my lips and swig it down all molten. Burn my throat. Swallow her whole, make all this go away. 

But my feet are rooted. My arms are lead. 

I can’t move.

She pushes the sugar bowl closer to me.

I look at it. Flick my eyes up to her face. She’s waiting. My tongue feels swollen in my mouth and my solar plexus is flaring and that Wild Woman is dancing barefoot on a pit of coals like Jesus walking on water.

But then her smile falls away, and the woman standing in front of me isn’t Mercedes anymore. She’s ice. Gore. “What are you getting at, KittyAnn?” she asks. The tone hasn’t changed. But the energy has.

Just below my breasts, in that space beneath my ribs, I’m glowing hot. Metabolizing rage, radiating. Beams of light like sun through fog, heat like a house fire. I see the fractals bounce off the cabinets, her face, the dust mites in the air.

Mercedes really is a slob. I don’t think she ever dusts.

“This isn’t about Raechel,” I say.

“I know,” she purrs.

I open my mouth to reply, but she cuts me off.

“You always do this,” she says, drolly. “Play wounded bird.” She taps her fingers on the countertop. “Like you don’t know how sharp your beak is.”

The back of my throat throbs with a gag. I can’t tell if I’m more desperate to hurt her or convince her to love me. But the words come, regardless. Because she’s right.

So I let myself speak.

“You know,” I say cooly. Gingerly at first, but gaining traction. “I was intrigued by you because you were a mystery. But I’ve solved it now. And I’m ashamed of myself for staying this long.”

I belch out that cannon ball, and it lands at my feet.

Then something happens. I smell it. Her perfume, that sugar bowl. She’s wearing a crown of sugar, crystalline like ice. It sparkles like cubic zirconia and other forms of deception. 

“You think I don’t feel pain,” she says. It’s a declaration with a hint of surprise, riveting but explanatory, like she’s conducting lecture. She drags her hand across the edge of the counter as she walks around it — either for effect or to steady herself. (Who would know the difference? She doesn’t even.) 

And then she stops, right in front of me. Too close, and it’s on purpose. Then silence. And eye contact. Because she still thinks she can scare me.

“You didn’t see me break, but somehow you know I’m broken,” she says. Measured but cracking. I can feel her adrenaline rising in my own spine. “While you’re the one just fucking losing it in the bathroom,” (she’s yelling now), “with the door locked because you don’t have the fucking guts to talk to my face like a big girl!”

Spit flies from her mouth, and I instinctively recoil like she’s going to hit me. But I’ve already been hit, I realize: she hurled that cannon ball straight through my heart, and my blood, dark and warm, is coagulating in a puddle on the tile.

Mercedes is right. I’m a judgemental coward, elitist, and avoiding accountability for my bad behavior.

Apparently she and I aren’t as different as I thought.

But I am hollowed. And all I have left is, “Yes.” 

I whisper it like a prayer.

“But somehow you’re the only one bleeding!” she continues, still screaming. Her eyes are wild, rabid. 

But I can’t walk away. She’s holding me like a rabbit in a great clenching fist, my eyeballs swelling, afraid I might pop.

I dart my eyes and notice her hand is wrapped around the base of the coffee she poured me. Without looking at it and probably without thinking she lifts that cup up and hurls it across the room and screams. Feral, depraved. 

She probably hoped it would hit the wall and explode, but it lobs past me and hits the back of her couch, landing on the cushions and soaking everything in coffee.

The shock of her outburst leaves me frozen. I’ve never before seen Mercedes come unhinged like this, and I’m scared. She’s different. This is unpredictable.

“Goddamit!” she screams. Her whole body is trembling, and her eyes flick around the room like she’s looking for something else to destroy.

But she doesn’t. She holds on. Closes her eyes and breathes. Then again. And again. 

The red smoke of her anger dissolves, morphing blue – a cold, tidal grief that sweeps in and turns the room upside down.

Everything is still.

And I’m standing knee-deep in a stagnant ocean. Hair drenched, arms dripping. Seaweed plastered to my legs. The water is warm, the sky tinged pink. Night is coming.

But then her body softens. Her chest stops heaving. And when she opens her eyes and looks at me, her face is wet. 

“I feel a fuck ton of pain, actually,” she says. Her voice has shifted back to that trance-like cadence, the magical lull she employs when she’s performing. “I’m just very good at disguising it. See?” She gestures upward like she’s releasing a butterfly. “I’ve done it just now. I just…turn it off. And now it doesn’t exist.” 

She takes a beat, then turns back to me. “I think you should leave now, KittyAnn. You want this…thing between us to be destiny or something. But maybe it’s just damage.” She shrugs. Like it’s nothing. “I don’t have anything left to feel about this.”

***

What comes next isn’t pretty — but it is necessary. Sometimes we need to burn things down, strip away the untruths and dysfunction, so we can see what’s left.

That’s scary, though. What if it’s nothing?

That’s the risk. But only when we stop pretending can we build back something worth having.

This is the last week, for now, that I’ll share fiction. The creative sands are shifting. I’m finding new inspiration, in my own voice – and I need to let KittyAnn hermitize for a bit, so we can finish revising her novel.

It wants to breathe. 

She’s not done. Not by a long shot. But you’ll have to wait to hear her tell the whole thing – just the way she meant it.

With all my wild heart,

Sadie xo

P.S. If something I said resonated — and you’re craving a space to unpack your own story — get in touch with me. I’d be honored to hold that space for you.