10-27-2018, 01:35 PM
With that red gaunt and colloped neck a-strain, And eyes squeezed shut ‘neath rusty mane; He’s not a smart man – never was – but even he can see how she lies, how the smile cuts her face like broken glass. He sees it because it’s practically a mirror, his own cut-glass smile slicing his features. He does not recall her being so broken, but then, was he, when they met? It was years and years ago, and so fleeting, maybe he didn’t learn anything about her at all. (And, of course, the obvious – that time is cruel and unfailing, that it leaves wounds, some that scar and some that never quite heal.) “I’m fine,” he says. He can lie too. He is aware that she creeps closer, and his breath catches for a moment. He was a mistake on her part, he’s sure – for who could ever love a monster, and all that – but she hasn’t left yet, her and her broken smile, and now he can breathe in the scent of her, see the way light glints on her scales, as if held there. She whispers her name, grants it to him – a gift he doesn’t deserve – and he nods. Shiya. Of course. “Of course,” he says – echoes. And then, he stumbles, and tells the truth. “I died,” he says, “and then I came back. I don’t know- I don’t know why.” He’d wanted to die. His time had run up long ago. He had not wanted to wash back up on the shores in a new body, new but the same, just unmarked, younger, but with the same awful heart, the same awful orange eyes, the sins of the father. “You,” he says, still looking at her, at her green eyes, the scales, the features that have gone unchanged, “you are still so beautiful.” Seldom went such grotesqueness with such woe; I never saw a brute I hated so; He must be wicked to deserve such pain. |