10-18-2021, 09:17 PM
T
he sunny glare is in her eyes. What happens when a child finds a wolf who has been hungry for a century too long?
There is the thrill of danger, the headiness of feeling skin and tooth and fur. And perhaps the wolf's eyes glimmer softly like it's only waking up from a long slumber. Perhaps there is innocence too in a beast driven by instinct instead of cruelness.
But that hungry wolf will still open its mouth and swallow the child. It will not taste the sweet sweetness of smiles or pleasant greetings, it will not grow heavy with guilt or lament at the fragile crack of too young bones. The wolf will only growl with the feeling of its hunger finally satisfied. And then that wolf, will curl into its den, a paw tucked under its nose and sleep for a century once more.
The curl of her mouth bows into a smile. What makes the forest remind her of home with the sun dappling over her skin like puddle of molten light, is the weight in the air. It grows heavy, heavy, heavy. She wonders if his shoulders bend and break.
What. He says. She feels like there are wildflowers caught in her throat and they are blooming so tightly that the words she wants to say settle into the roots. She almost forgets that she was a princess—once.
Her smile bends and bows to a deeper look, a feral look, a look that she has stolen from the face of a unicorn that once slipped blood red flower petals between her lips. Still, it feels strange on her face, but she wears it anyway, because for just a moment, she thinks she feels the bristle of hounds at her ankles, and she is both terrified and enthralled.
Which terrifies her only ever more.
“Are you talking to the trees? Or to me?” She asks, because she is not her mother’s daughter.
She speaks like this.
some are ghosts before they are dead.