"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
10-07-2018, 12:26 AM (This post was last modified: 10-07-2018, 12:45 AM by Eilidh.
Edit Reason: html drama x3
)
Eilidh
It feels like her ribs are migrating, like they’re each on tectonic plates that flee toward opposite poles. It feels like she’s coming apart, like her seams are unravelling, and when they do so her heart laughs at a newly risen opportunity to burrow down through her muscle and her flesh to make its final escape. These days it aches so much Eilidh is certain its pumping acid rather than blood, anyways. She wanders the meadow like a ghost might, lingering here and there at landmarks that stir memories still inside her - and it feels like sorrow.
It doesn’t feel like being home.
But she was born into the wildgrass, here, under the dappled shade of this ancient oak with the spring wind chilling her back. And she first found her legs by the river, there, when Moselle had stepped away and Eilidh had first learned that gravity could also exist between souls. The meadow is the closest place to home she’s ever known, but it held darker secrets, too. Like the last time she saw it, when Carnage had taught her lessons in anatomy, because nothing he laid his hands on was ever clean.
Since that day Eilidh has existed in a thousand different settings, floating from place to place like a feather caught in a breeze; she never stayed long enough to settle and make a mark. She had never felt belonging like she’d felt next to Moselle. She was an alien to this world. She was an alien to this life. Unconsciously, perhaps she had decided that to never love anything was to never have it taken away.
She does want to move on, though.
It’s why she hasn’t left again, why she wanders the meadow now drowning in reminders, because she can’t help but taste the dirt in her mouth. And she can’t unsee the earth opening up and her mother being swallowed by it. Eilidh still remembers how her fragile bones had trembled with the effort, how slick her body was with cold and sweat, and how finally when she was finished and Moselle was buried there was no relief that swept in to reward her for her momentous struggle. It was just quiet. It was just empty. She can’t stop herself from thinking about the decay that would take place; how the flesh would rot from her cheekbone and eventually pull away from the bone, and how that same cheek she’d kissed a thousand times before, sweetly.
But she’s trying.
Her bones are just fragile, after all.
kissed by the moon, released to time and circumstance. Watch them weave down the river farther and farther apart until, suddenly, they arrive at each other.
They could be sisters,
kissed by the moon, two silver doves come to rest on a branch once stripped bare by winter, now full with spring.
One comes to a stop (when did she start walking?) beside the other. Lately she is living on the edge of restless and angry, like her body is too small for what lives inside. She feels so much like fire these days, illuminating all the mistakes carved on the inside of her too-tight skin.
"Hello stranger," she says slowly, feeling nothing strange at all. Her voice is grey smoke in an otherwise unremarkable morning. They look at the landscape together and each woman paints it a little differently with her own memories. Both use the color blue in excess.
Hello, little sister.
"Do you have stories to tell?" If her breath catches with excitement it is only because she would like to lose herself in someone else for a change. Just for a moment.
- - - - - By morning, I had vanished at least a dozen times N O R T H Into something better
Through the meadow ripe with wildgrass they drift like ships at sea; instead of waves, wildflowers and thistles curl and break across their backs, and in their wake they leave behind only half-moon prints rather than sea-foam and spray. Tucked safely away in the warm cabins of each is a compass that points directly at the other. Like they are magnets somehow; north, and south.
Because there are some people that you meet in life that are just bigger than others.
Sometimes you see them coming for miles, and miles.
Sometimes they float in on the river as silent as apparitions; humble, transparent, and in the dark.
“Hello stranger,” the other says, drawing close but not impolitely so. Eilidh finds that looking at her might be like seeing into a magic mirror, because the gentle sway of her back and the light peppering of silver through her flaxen hair are all tokens of her own impending future. The way they stand in close proximity, mirror images in too many ways, and the softness Eilidh finds in the strangers eyes then makes her think that there is nothing strange about them, too.
“Hello,” Eilidh answers without needing to, because her body leans forward in greeting on its own.
The other asks about stories, and Eilidh finds that her eyes are drifting off towards the mound of earth behind two of the largest oak trees. For a moment she bites her tongue between her teeth to stop everything that’s inside of her from pouring out.
“Most I am afraid to speak aloud,” she admits, wrapping herself in the strange familiarity between them because the way that their bodies speak silently through morse code makes her feel as though they’ve known each other for years.
In North's eyes are storms spun of copper. Those eyes do not follow her companion's gaze to the two oaks. Those eyes rest on a face that could have been hers, once-- but different. For North, sorrow would come later.
"Most I am afraid to speak out loud," the younger says. There might be wisdom in this, but there is more likely folly. Fear is what give words the power to hurt-- without it they are just dead leaves buffeted by the wind.
(or else they are spoken with hope, and they take flight like doves-- but this isn't a happy story
, and we don't know a thing about flying)
Dead leaves rustle in the afternoon breeze. The air has a chill to it that excites her. "Don't be afraid." When she smiles it is almost a wistful thing, as though the memory of fear reminds her of something funny and long forgotten. Maybe she is remembering the girl she once was.
She extends her muzzle, offering her breath in greeting. "North."
The other mare smells like memories. Her silver hair reminds North of something-- "My mother always said we silvers are favored by the moon." North, she goes back and forth on believing. Sometimes it feels like there's magic in her blood, like mother must be right. Most of the time she feels the opposite of favored. " Do you think it could be true?"
Mostly — because Eilidh’s eyes don’t roll, wild and white. She doesn’t quake on her thin legs, weakened right down to her marrow. Her heart doesn’t race when the shadows stretch longer and longer before they blend, harmoniously, into the night. She isn’t afraid of what killed her mother. She had shed that skin a long time ago; molted that fear as though it were only feathers.
What she is afraid of is forgetting.
Like finding the words and spilling them out in these quiet moments will somehow release them out into the atmosphere, like she’d watch them rise and rise and rise until they were completely out of reach.
But she said: “Don’t be afraid.”
So, Eilidh tries.
She is still watching the horizon, though she’s moved on from the oaks now. The birch trees make her sick; they remind her of bones, stark white against the vivid colours of everything else, then fractured with dark. Don’t be afraid — but it’s hard when you’re drowning in your own swallowed secrets, when you are alone, when the only place you’ve ever belonged before was now six feet under the earth.
Maybe they could belong together.
“My mother always said we silvers are favoured by the moon.”
“Do you think it could be true?”
“Yes,” she breathes, a hopeless confession, closing her eyes and feeling her dark eyelashes furl against the tops of her cheeks. She pretends she can feel a veil of moonlight that cradles her in one silvery palm, pretends that that palm is Moselle’s in another world and another life.
“At least,” she continues, her eyes opening to meet those of her companion once more.
“I like to think that it could be.”
