09-13-2018, 06:06 PM
There are things that she knows that she shouldn’t. Things that had happened before she had even drawn her first breath. The kinds of things you can’t tell others about, because they’d think you mad - horrible, and wicked, and beautiful things.
(A willow is growing aslant a brook that spills its water out into a violent sea, a violent end. They look like lovers, cradled against each other as the water carves trenches against the flesh of their sides. Glinting white beneath the waters surface are her bones, because one of them is dead.)
Once, they stood here, too.
Tangled in the oatgrass and wildflower, lazing under the dappled shade of hazel trees, years ago, their lives began. And now, with her wildly dark eyes and her champagne skin, with this meadow ground underfoot, she has become a perfect reflection. Only, today there is no oatgrass. There are no wildflowers, no lemon balm, or purple thistles - only snow, moved in wisps and spirals; delicate and deadly all at once. It buries the hazel trees, and cloaks the winding rivers edge where mermaids once rolled water off their hips and backs like pearls (a shoreline that also once ran red with blood ).
She saw them once, in a dream that felt more like a memory.
The cold is suffocating; her throat burns with the fire of it, but still her lungs feel empty as the clouds of her breath roll out with every exhale. She has stopped along the meadows edge even if she shouldn’t have (because once, they stood here, too), even if the sweat and fervor of her efforts had left her damp and quaking as the cold eats through her skin and fat to find the marrow in her bones, leaving a wave of prickled hair in its wake.
Because she has run for hours, long since a watercolour sunset bled into, and beyond, a tree-lined horizon.
Because she has run for hours, until those colours gave way to a velvet blackness, which in turn gave way to the feeble light of a thousand stars that would become her unwavering compass. The cold could kill her, she thinks.
(“I have your heart.”)
Let it, then.
(A willow is growing aslant a brook that spills its water out into a violent sea, a violent end. They look like lovers, cradled against each other as the water carves trenches against the flesh of their sides. Glinting white beneath the waters surface are her bones, because one of them is dead.)
Once, they stood here, too.
Tangled in the oatgrass and wildflower, lazing under the dappled shade of hazel trees, years ago, their lives began. And now, with her wildly dark eyes and her champagne skin, with this meadow ground underfoot, she has become a perfect reflection. Only, today there is no oatgrass. There are no wildflowers, no lemon balm, or purple thistles - only snow, moved in wisps and spirals; delicate and deadly all at once. It buries the hazel trees, and cloaks the winding rivers edge where mermaids once rolled water off their hips and backs like pearls (a shoreline that also once ran red with blood ).
She saw them once, in a dream that felt more like a memory.
The cold is suffocating; her throat burns with the fire of it, but still her lungs feel empty as the clouds of her breath roll out with every exhale. She has stopped along the meadows edge even if she shouldn’t have (because once, they stood here, too), even if the sweat and fervor of her efforts had left her damp and quaking as the cold eats through her skin and fat to find the marrow in her bones, leaving a wave of prickled hair in its wake.
Because she has run for hours, long since a watercolour sunset bled into, and beyond, a tree-lined horizon.
Because she has run for hours, until those colours gave way to a velvet blackness, which in turn gave way to the feeble light of a thousand stars that would become her unwavering compass. The cold could kill her, she thinks.
(“I have your heart.”)
Let it, then.