like the moon, we borrow our light; chantale

[chantale]

my corrupt nature is empty of grace; bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. Monsters slumber, and they rise. She exists in fragments, her life is pieces, stitched together – there are gaps, sometimes years of them, when she slumbered. (Not that the body slumbered. But her mind was not there. Or, not her right one. If there is a right one, in a thing so warped as she.) Chantale was here. Then she was not. Blink, and there was a girl, blood-stained, throwing a heart at her feet. Blink, and there was a foal with wings folded delicate and bones as brittle as a sparrows. Blink, and someone is screaming, and there is blood on her legs, on her lips. Blink, and nothing. Blink, and here she is again. She looks as she always does – a thing of plastic, more sculpted than bred. It’s beautiful and horrifying, the way she’s put together, an ideal come to life and sent to walk among them. (Not that come to life is the right word, not exactly.) She is gray, a color of wet skies, of dishwater. Her skin is cool to the touch, slightly waxen, like a creature dead and waiting for rigor mortis to lay hands upon it. (Perhaps she is.) Nothing brought her here. Only the faint whim of her – a switch thrown, and the monster rises, once more Chantale in the body, once more my corpse masterpiece returning home in this queer gray vessel with eyes that are somehow too bright and too dead all at once. Something speaks. A shadow. Queer, that they speak now, and my zombie’s ears flicker idly as she processes this information. But then the shadow moves, is drenched in moonlight, and it takes the shape of a girl. It touches her, ink-black against wet skies, and it is warm. She leans into it, letting the warmth drench across her neck. She lets it speak. It calls her curious. “You smell like night will come forever,” she replies. Nonsensical, really, and a lie – she smells nothing on the girl. Her senses dull, sometimes, grow muffled. “I’m curious about you,” she purrs, another switch thrown, and the shadow is something to be tasted. “What are you?” chantale how original a sin.