love on the water, love underwater, love, love and so on; spyndle

[Cordis]

They are my everything, she’d told the boy, the one of rain and cryptic words, and it had not been a lie. She may have left them, the pain of losing their daughter too fresh and raw in her to face them, but she loves them. It’s the one constant in her life – the one good constant, at least – and it’s the thought of them she clings to in her aching nights, where her thoughts crowd too large in her mind, when she thinks she should sleep but can’t for the nightmares it brings. Time has grown strange to her and she doesn’t know if days or months have passed. She wonders how old their son is now. (She wonders if their daughter is alive, or if He was merciful enough to kill her.) She feels guilty for it, now – she was selfish, to leave them, but she had been the beacon calling Him to them. She is the one who forgot, who looked away, who let Him creep in. She is the one who bore the girl, her dead spit, who birthed herself in miniature, whose heart swelled too much with love and who forgot. (“I creep, Cordis.”) She finds her. She will always find her. She knows Spyndle in every iteration and her body knows where she is the same way birds know to fly south in the wintertime. Spyndle is her magnetic field, always calling her home. She does not see their son. She does not know if this is because he is grown or is simply off elsewhere. (She does not fret over this, she thinks she would feel it if He had come about again.) “Spyndle,” she says, the name sweet in her mouth even as her voice is low, meek. In her name she says ‘I’m sorry,’ because she never wants to leave her but she understands now that sometimes leaving is all they can do, that the foundation they laid for each other in these years is both terribly fragile and astoundingly strong. “I missed you.” c o r d i s she said it was a mistake to let them burn her at the stake and she learned a lesson back there in the flames