2nd: Off With Her Heart by Gretta McCutcheon

Mother was dead. Her head was sat on the throne, her body nowhere to be seen. 

Then the red guards came, everything was a blur as they dragged me across my land to the Red Kingdom, where I was thrown into a cell where I found the other half of mother’s body, already starting to stink. 

The days seemed to pass with every blink of my eyes, a disgusting cycle of meager meals and pissing in a bucket. I would sometimes cuddle close to the corpse beside me, pretending that it was still my mother despite the sloughed off skin and exposed bone. 

Eventually, when I thought my eyes would close and never open again, she came down to see me. Despite it being since childhood, she somehow still managed to be so terrifyingly beautiful, even as she glares down at me as if I were a cow pat she stepped in. 

“It has been too long, Gweneth.” Her voice is cold yet still manages to fill me with warmth. 

“Cordelia…you killed my mother.” The anguish is almost too much to bear, yet I can’t look upon her with anger. 

She unlocks the cell and steps inside, the axe she holds aloft dripping with the blood of some other poor soul. “I must kill you. You know that.” Despite her hard eyes, she sounds troubled. 

I come to with my hands covered in blood, I am soaked in the stuff, but I am not bleeding. Cordelia, my Red Queen, lies on the floor unblinking, the axe lies between us. I realize with horrifying certainty that I have killed her. 

I don’t know when it started, but my hands were somehow around the axe handle again and I was cutting her down the middle, my hands plunging into her intestines, searching. My hand grasps her heart and I pull it out. 

It’s chewy, I have to work to bite a piece off, but the sweetness is delicious. I always knew my Cordie was still sweet inside. I finish my meal and lie down next to her.

“This is how it’s supposed to be.”