and he told me i was holy; falla

[elve]

it's strange what desire will make foolish people do.

He releases her, but she still feels trapped. She can feel him, the weight of him, inside her heart, pulling her down; her name still runs across her skin, makes her tingle as if it is acid. When he lets her go, sends her away to find her mother (she does not know if she goes because she wants to, or because he wants her to), she backs up quickly, as if some spell was keeping her legs stuck to the ground.
But he is still there.

She rushes back to the place where she left her mother, but everything has changed. There are different horses here; she wasn’t with her mother for long, but she knows her colour, her smell (though the smell has been tainted by him, it is now edged with something dark and rotting and bleak). She stumbles on green-and-red legs as the hope she had allowed to fill her up is ripped out. She calls out, loudly, but she doesn’t know the name she should be shouting, so she just has to make as much noise as she can.

Her spirit breaks before her throat goes sore.

She falls, a green-and-red thing with a name that fits like a strait-jacket, weeping. She should never have left (but go back in time and would she do it again?), she should have clung to her mother because her mother would have clung to her. They would be together, now, and this fist around her heart, this hunger that rakes her stomach, they would not be here. Only her mother would be here.
She wouldn’t see his face every time she closed her eyes.

ELVE