07-17-2015, 09:47 AM
Imagine this: you are born damned. Not in a romantic way, no prophecy foretold, but this way: you are glass. You are a thing sculpted to be broken, draped in paper-thin skin. Wings at your back, not to bear you aloft, but to make a mockery of you. When you try to fly, there is a sensation of tearing and pain lighting an inferno in every nerve of you.
The tear remains, a twist in the wing, a memory of a flight failed.
You are a glass house in a world of stone throwers.
Delicate in ways no creature should be, sometimes their eyes fall on you and you can read the sadism there. The notice, an annotation scribbled in their thoughts, of how easily the glass boy would break. The curiosity of what the bones would sound like, snapping.
Contagion tries to forget, sometimes. Tries not to compare his body to the others, that he is papier-mâché where they are steel and strength. Tries not to meet their eyes and need the macabre curiosity there, the wonder at how long he’ll last.
(He wonders, too. He tries not to, but he does. Of course he does.)
He is unique amongst them, save for one. For Adaline, his twin, the encore for two doomed lovers, born of the dead and the dying.
But she had left. There had come a day when he had woken up and she was gone, left him alone.
That he is still alive is a miracle. He doesn’t expect her to be. He doesn’t expect a lot of things.
contagion
be careful making wishes in the dark