They perch together like feathers on a precipice waiting for the wind, for the blowing of their thoughts, to push them past the point of no return. But there’s an impossible balance and they cling to it uncertainly, willing and unwilling. There is something in the loneliness and shame of the not-nightmare that makes her want to stretch this moment with the purple stallion just a far as she could. To fill in the dangerous stretches of silence with the sound of their trembling breaths, to chase away old ghosts with new ones.
You need a friend.
It’s a dangerous thought and she pushes it away immediately.
There’s no one else.
She can feel desperation blooming in the pit of her stomach. It worms its way through her belly, up her throat, and she chokes on it. Unbidden she remembers the clown, that faded smile tattooed across a worn out face. She remembers the promises made, an alliance turned friendship. She remembers dozens of teeth tearing into him as he fell beneath vicious plastic raptors and a falling snow of his own stuffing.
You don’t deserve a friend.
She reels back further, further, despite the ache to push her mouth against his skin, real skin, in that frantic, desperate way she had come to know so intimately. Her chest heaves as she watches him, her eyes a disconcerting green against the black band painted around them like a blindfold. It had been a blindfold until she had scraped back to the surface. No, stop.
But his question is full of thorns and they sink like hooks beneath her skin.
Tethered.
She balks.
“I don’t,” there is panic seeping like shadow over the delicate angles of a tormented face, “I can’t.”
You must.
For a moment she searches his face, trying to decide if there’s another way to make him stay. To keep him for just a little longer without trading truths and baring bits of her soul. She doesn’t think there is. So she considers his question again, her eyes flashes of a wounded green. There’s a name she could give him, the name she had used. But she can’t make her lips shape out the letters for those two simple words.
Try harder.
“It belongs to someone that wasn’t me. A different me. But it isn’t mine.” The confession comes easier now, the words taking shape on their own. “It’s the stain of an impossible memory, of the realest dream I’ve ever had. The worst nightmare.” But it wasn’t the worst, not anymore. Worse was the scattered family she had returned to find. Her face softens and caves with a pain too real to understand. “There was a girl,” her eyes sink to the shadows at her feet, “not like us.”
Vague.
Vague is safe.
And then her eyes return to his, and the ache returns to her chest. “This color is a scar.” She wants to feel the warmth of his skin again, to be reassured, but her feet remain frozen in place. “Maybe that does make it mine.”
This is the worst confession of all.
MALIS
makai x oksana