12-03-2015, 07:05 PM
Loam has no sense of longing. No true sense of it, that is.
She had aspirations once, to be as grand as her second - only, really - mother had been (the first was bones now and bones still, bones in the earth, deep almost-dust talking of death in the flutter of moth-wings and dry leaves skirling underfoot), but not to be as queenly as she was, almost but not quite. No, Loam was not meant for titles grandiose and cumbersome - she was dirt, shadowy, in the shadows, a gleam of eyes and teeth in the darkness that invited none to come close. Even now, they shy away and pretend she isn’t there, thin and dark and lovely as only nightmares can be. To say that she is altogether gruesome is a lie, but Loam is dark, no niceness here except to the foals that swell her belly or those she finds abandoned and motherless, just as she had been.
Thoughts! Where did they come from? Madness sparks in her eyes, the gleam sudden and bright and fades as fast as a star shooting across the sky, leaving her gaze raw and dark again. She remains aloof, practicing no small disdains towards them as she slinks through the thorny undergrowth until he stops her dead in her tracks, struck dumb with memory and a feeling she has not thought to feel ever again. She could not say what that feeling was, but the memory sped up her heart and flushed her veins with a delicious heat that made her shiver until his voice came out all wrong and his eyes flashed green like moss on the underbellies of rocks. No, no, this was all wrong! It wasn’t him and her heart sank, subsided its pace a little to a slower cadence of disappointment that showed briefly in her emerald gaze then passed like it had never been.
She was about to scoff and say “What do you care?” but something about the color of him (as if that mattered at all, but in the back of her pathetic brain, it did) stopped the meanness from slithering out on her tongue. “They’ll either fester or heal, makes no difference which it is to me.” and that was true, because Loam knew death and it would not come from infection, that she knew without really knowing. She eyes him suspiciously, not sure why it should make a difference to him if she was careful or not, and she almost asks him who he is to caution her like so. Again, she bites her tongue, out of sheer stupid deference to a long ago that doesn’t exist any more and that buckskin fur that encases his muscles and bones and beating heart.
“Loam,” she mutters, since names never mattered except to go with faces that often end up forgotten anyway. “Of nowhere,” and she smiles, a bare-bones kind of smile because there is no malice nor goodness in that slight curve of her lips.
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