the church bells were all broken; malis/jenger pony

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He is used to being alone. He was alone for years when Garbage left with no explanation. (He’d said ‘I love you,’ before they went to sleep and when Sleaze thinks back on it he thinks Garbage’s voice shook, but he doesn’t know if he’s falsified the memory in trying to explain it.) He was largely alone in Beqanna, adrift with no home or friends (much less lovers) and no particular need for either. He had his prayers, his own thoughts to mull over. Until – Until someone or something carved a chunk of memory from his waking mind. Until his thoughts turned to class, encased within the purple; until other names – other lives - rose up with their beliefs and memories and began to consume him alive. Until his mind was no longer entirely his own, slipping into others – birds, wolves, horses. He wrestles his mind down, tamps it. He does not want to touch her mind again. Not in that way. He thinks she might have the purple, too. Ghosts of memories shouting from the abyss, and he doesn’t want to know what they say. But her words are familiar, déjà vu but not – instead, it’s the strange feeling of having a stranger describe the dream you had as if it was their own. A different me – (I am Cloud. I am Velvet. She loves us. She loves us.) The stain of an impossible memory— (There was a girl. There was no girl.) It’s surreal and terrible but there’s a sprig of hope to it, a ghoulish hope that someone knows, that he was not alone in this. There was a girl, she says, and he reacts as if she’d shot electricity into his veins. (There was no girl.) “There was a girl,” he says before he can stop himself and the words feel like a wound opened, the infection spilling out, both something disgusting and a relief all at once. “Two girls,” he says, adding to the story – two girls, one who carved her name into his belly and one who nursed him back to health, but ah, hadn’t he loved them both? (There was no girl.) “Please,” he says, but he doesn’t know what he’s begging for, only that he’s begging. sleaze cancer x garbage