jamie
from the destruction, out of the flame
He sounds ill.
And he wonders if ill and exhaustion are perhaps one in the same.
It occurs to him that he has no way of knowing. Because he is real like she is real but he is nothing like her. He has convinced himself that there is a beating heart and breathing lungs and bone buried in all that darkness, but he has no way of knowing if they are real or if they are imagined, like him. If he has dreamt them up to convince himself that he is real.
A fever dream.
He cannot feel her flesh but he knows that she moves, that she reaches for him. Can feel her mouth like a secret as it glances through the soft edges of him. And she asks him her question, if he’ll leave and he unscrews his ink black mouth to say, “yes.”
And then she asks him her second question, which should make him feel something. But there is nothing but the way the fog curls sweetly around his legs and then through hers so that they are intertwined. There is nothing but the labored breath and the weary head laid against her shoulder. There is nothing but the exhaustion in the muscles, whether real or imagined, the trembling in his knees.
He sighs then and he unscrews his ink black mouth to say again, “yes.”
He lifts his weary head then, takes one of those odd, shuffling steps backward so that he can look her in the eye. “Will you tell me your name before you let me go?”
you need a villain, give me a name
