This is not slaughter. This is the red of remaking.
She sits back on her haunches, supported by the curl of her heels, the arch of her feet beneath her weight. Her fabric pulls, stretched tight across the pyramid of her knees, her hips She rests her arms across the planes of her thighs. She holds the athame in the fold of her hand.
The kid bleats, eyes rolling in its skull. It stinks of fear and animal musk, of the base terror before reason or thought. There is something ancient and pure in the manifestation of it, this antediluvian instinct. She can taste it, just barely - it sours the air like a color she cannot name. She is hungry for it, for the knowing of it, the possession of it that comes with the knowing. But she only ever touches the current; plunges her hand in and feels the icy rush of feeling, colder and more vivid than the ether around it - but she has never been carried by it. She may touch, and feel. But the currents cannot move her.
The kid kicks out with knobby legs, snapping back vainly joints painfully restricted. They are bound, inverted, hung like a pig on a spit. It was not designed to be a degrading end.
Still, she sits and watches it die.
It bleeds as though it had given itself to her. Gravity does not betray it as deeply as the greedy pulse of its own heart, draining itself in an arterial gush of living plasma. She blinks, but does not look away until she feels wetness squelch between her toes. She lunges forward with the intimacy of a lover, knee pressed down into the gore, and splits the kid from belly to groin.
It expires without a final cry, steam spooling out from its heated viscera, entrails and organs spilling from the ruined seam of flesh. She stares yet longer, with the alert defocus of one listening to a conversation held in private conference. The athame drops from her fingers. It is she who is consecrated by this blood. This is but a tool of her becoming. The kid gave its gift. They transform one another, but she has the comprehension to understand it. They are made what they are in the change, the crossing of boundaries. They become.
She leans, hands pressed with a cautious, fluttering reverence, to the hide of the dead beast. The scent of it rises high and foul in the air, disemboweled meats stewing and pungent in its ripeness. The distended flap of its engorged belly makes the carcass look fecund; it gave birth to something greater and newer than what it had been.
With agonizing patience, she drives her fingers into the pulpy anatomy, fingernails snagged with viscera. She has touched the deepest parts of it, she has known it and been inside of it. She braces a hand to its wiry hide, smearing its own death upon it, and sets her ear to the swell of its rib cage. She waits.
It sounds like a thunderclap swallowed by deep water. Powerful, too wild to be tamed by anything but a force of nature met as its equal. The heart throbs. To her, it is a newborn in the fluids of the womb.
Her awe comes as a sigh. Her eyes close, chryselephantine lashes tacky with blood. She must blink rapidly to release them.
The cutting begins, a process of harvesting that leaves her bloodier than before. She bears her own bruises, fingers raw beneath the ichor. Her own sacrifice. It is small, but it stings, and the pain reminds her. She tucks the kid's tongue into the belt of her apron, and the rest of the carcass she butchers. The bones, she knows, will be reclaimed by her in time. That is the promise they each gave, though the beast did not know.
Her muscles grow taut with her exertions, field dressings shearing the flank and legs and the weight of its skull. But she carries it all. There is no waste in sacrifice.
And when she feeds it to the herd of her children in the quiet of her grove, she knows they will be touched by transformation of their own. And they will be beautiful.
