Carnage had never given her monsters. His magic never worked on her the way it did on others (part of the reason he could never quite forget her – she was a mystery, an enigma). It only works when she allows it to, like when they had first gone there, to the apocalyptic beach, when the langoliers sounded distant and time had not yet stopped.
She wonders, sometimes, if that is why she could not fully come back. If there was some part of her that did not want to.
She loves him, he is a vital organ to her, a heart sewn up in her chest, but she’d given him so much, perhaps she could not give him any more.
It’s a mystery she doubts will be solved in her lifetime (or her existence, she supposes – she wonders if she will exist forever, and the idea is strangely horrifying).
They are, after all, indefinable.
“I’m glad,” she says, and she is. They are changed, too, from this – mediums and ghosts, souvenirs from their time here.
****
“You’re strange,” says the girl, unware of her own strangeness, her tenuous existence between ghost and flesh, that she’s at the cusp of something, a crossroads.
****
Gail laughs a little, touches her muzzle to the girl’s body. Sometimes she seems solid and sometimes not. Today is a more solid day, she can almost feel the warmth. She wonders what she’ll do without her.
(If she can go, of course.)
Part of her wonders if she could bear children here. She wonders if they would be born flesh or ghost, or something in between. She misses children – she’d always been happiest as a mother, though her children seemed to meet gruesome ends (Shiv had been struck by a silver woman’s lighting, she’d learned, and she knew the fates of the others, having outlived them).
Ramiel poses the question, and Gail waits for her reply.
****
The strange ghost-not-ghost looks at her. Asks if she will accompany him. Fear bubbles forth, a new emotion. There are other worlds than these, and the idea is overwhelming.
But she wants a story. There are no stories for her, here – she’s learned that, in the years. She doesn’t grow or change.
“I’ll go,” she says, sounding so much braver than she is.
.
graveling
the worms crawl in, the worms crawl out