you pour the water —
She was born with a heart twisted wrong.
It was a deceitful thing. A hungry thing. It gnashed its teeth and roared in her very blood. It beat its fist against her ribs—a song that she could not ignore, could not drown out. She ached with it, bent to its every terrible want. She did not know how to look her parents in the eye and not give up these secrets. Did not know how to look at her sister and confess (confess, the word screams within her and she smothers it every night and every morning) and so she swallows the bitterness down.
Down and down and down.
So she smiles prettily and steals away when she can. Feels the brutal pounding of others around her with a savagery that she has never comprehended—their emotions so vast, their hearts so wicked. It warps her more than she was already warped. It presses a thumbprint of cruelty into her darkness, shaping her into a thing of shadow, a thing of longing, a thing carved from the darkness between every breath.
A heaviness for a thing so young—a year barely upon her, adulthood just on the cusp of the horizon. She feels the pending weight of it looming before her especially this night, an otherness she can name no more than every other strange want and fear within her. She shifts her growing wings, the darkness of them like an oil spill over the ink of her coat, and sighs, haloed head dipping so that she might brush her lips against the summer grass. Brittle and dry, crackling beneath the weight of her slender hooves.
Another sigh, a breath caught on her lips, as she glances upward.
A motion catching her attention.
The sound of another perhaps.
The brush of foreign emotion against the very corners of her awareness.
Regardless, it is enough to stiffen her spine and loosen her expression, hiding that which lurks below.
— I would haul the stones
