the c r o o k e d youth {any!}

[chantale]

my corrupt nature is empty of grace; bent unto sin, and only unto sin; and that continually. Herd tried so fucking hard with you, didn’t they? Jammed and crammed you into a mold never meant to old madness, never meant to hold killers like you. Of course, you could argue Herd would have been killers if you’d given them the opportunity (instead you left, a feverous whirlwind, her blood on your hooves and his on your lips, your terrible smile. We can use all the similes we want – you were a square peg in a round hole, the wrong puzzle piece, a pawn in the wrong fucking game – but what it all boils down to is you didn’t fit in, you were never going to fit in, and nobody realized this until your baby was dead and she was dead and Prince Charming was dead and you were there, laughing and screaming and dead, too, in your way. Dead she might be, but only barely, for the doesn’t rot – instead, she exists perpetually like a fresh-killed corpse, cool but not cold, stiff but not in rigor mortis. Dead she might be, but the years have passed since Herd and Prince Charming and in those years there have been children and women who smelled like saffron and a black king following her into the shadows. And now there is a girl, dressed in her own weighty past, full of philosophy and questions too grandiose for my corpse masterpiece’s febrile mind to answer, especially when she preferred to watch her lips move rather than listen to what came out of them. “I must be all, then,” she murmurs into her ear, close now, feeling the heat, letting it leech from her into her bones. The warmth is so sweet for a moment she thinks she might weep. What are you, who are you, beseeches the woman, who is breathing her in like a dying man, and it makes her old heart flutter at the bitter tannin sweetness of it all, dark wine across the tongue. “I’m dead,” she says, “I died so I could live.” That’s my girl, always so dramatic, proclaiming poetry to the sky. “I died because I destroyed everything I loved and everything I hated and the madness rose up up up and the only way to survive it was to go down down down, into the crevasse, into it, and it changed me, it fixed me, it killed me,” she’s babbling, but there’s a frisson of coherence in her words, a hint of what happened as she lay across the swan-girl’s body, her coat stained with blood, saying do you love me now, do you love me. “That’s how it started,” she says, and that’s half a lie because truth be told it started in her blood, when her mother leapt from the cliff to chase madness, when the baby died beneath the willow. It started every time Prince Charming took her, struck her, left her with bruise-jewelry across her withers, tears in her skin almost to the bone. (The scars of those experiences – of all her experiences – are gone now, made smooth by her plastic prettiness, as if she is a blank slate begging to be writ upon. chantale how original a sin.