North says: “Don’t be afraid.”
Mostly she isn’t.
Mostly — because Eilidh’s eyes don’t roll, wild and white. She doesn’t quake on her thin legs, weakened right down to her marrow. Her heart doesn’t race when the shadows stretch longer and longer before they blend, harmoniously, into the night. She isn’t afraid of what killed her mother. She had shed that skin a long time ago; molted that fear as though it were only feathers.
What she is afraid of is forgetting.
Like finding the words and spilling them out in these quiet moments will somehow release them out into the atmosphere, like she’d watch them rise and rise and rise until they were completely out of reach.
But she said: “Don’t be afraid.”
So, Eilidh tries.
She is still watching the horizon, though she’s moved on from the oaks now. The birch trees make her sick; they remind her of bones, stark white against the vivid colours of everything else, then fractured with dark. Don’t be afraid — but it’s hard when you’re drowning in your own swallowed secrets, when you are alone, when the only place you’ve ever belonged before was now six feet under the earth.
Maybe they could belong together.
“My mother always said we silvers are favoured by the moon.”
“Do you think it could be true?”
“Yes,” she breathes, a hopeless confession, closing her eyes and feeling her dark eyelashes furl against the tops of her cheeks. She pretends she can feel a veil of moonlight that cradles her in one silvery palm, pretends that that palm is Moselle’s in another world and another life.
“At least,” she continues, her eyes opening to meet those of her companion once more.
“I like to think that it could be.”
“Do you miss her?”
⤜ nobody's watching, drowning in words so sweet ⤛
@[Kahea]