[open] save yourself, any

[elodie]

If she had known that this is where it had all started, she might have been more careful.
But she has no way of knowing that this is where her mother met her father.
Or that it had been just as cold then as it is now. Because her mother had been too tired to accompany her on her wandering, though Elodie sometimes suspected that her mother’s exhaustion had more to do with grief than anything else. And her mother had never told her the story, though she had never been shy about telling the child exactly who her father was, how much he meant to her, how much he should mean to his daughter, too.

There are still so many things that Elodie doesn’t know. Not only about her mother and father but about the world at large. So, she journeys and thinks that maybe someday she’ll have to find a place for herself. For now, though, she is content simply to wander down to the edge of the river, to test the ice. Foolish like her mother, perhaps. But she never leaves the shore, merely presses a foot against the surface and lets loose a secret kind of laugh when she feels it shift and crack under her weight.

And then she moves back up the bank, because the water is frigid and there is no one around to save her should she fall through. She hums quietly to herself, quite used to being alone, and moves slow along the river’s edge. It is cold here in a way that makes her shiver, makes her teeth chatter, but it is so much more than she’s felt any place else and she prefers the cold to the crippling heat anyway.

She does not know that this is where her mother met her father or where her mother learned the true nature of her family. She cannot smell the history here, cannot taste it, so she just goes on humming to herself, going wherever her legs carry her.

Until she hears the ice cracking and she turns to face the sound, just as her father had once. And her breath is a strangled sound as the ice continues to crack and she does not know what else to say but, “be careful!”

but i knew love as a caging thing
just a killer come to call from some awful dream

e l o d i e