11-13-2021, 10:32 PM
Here, here, here, the river says.
Even beneath the ice, she can hear it murmur.
And she goes because these are the things that speak to her: the things of death, the things of ruin. She goes and she does not pause at the river’s edge. The ice does not deter her because you cannot kill that which is already dead. You cannot stop a heart that does not beat. You cannot arrest lungs that do not draw breath.
The ice splinters beneath her feet because the reaper constructed her something already half-grown. (He had found the discarded things and pieced her back together. Everything different. Nothing fit together quite right.) She is not an adult but she is not a child either. Rather she is something caught between the two.
The ice splinters and then falls apart completely, plunging her into the water. But the cold cannot touch her. She is already dead. (But she is not altogether dead, is she? No, because he had dredged her up out of the muck and the mire, dragged her out of the Afterlife and set her loose on the world of the living. How strange it is to be something that is not quite either. But she is a study in the in-between.)
The water eats at the flesh and she plunges her mouth beneath the surface, swallowing. Because she does not remember what it means to be a thing that needs water to survive, a thing whose stomach cramps with hunger. How strange it is to be alive.
But the water merely slides down her throat. The water does not mean anything at all. It merely pools in her gut, where it will stay. Forever, perhaps.
Forever, forever.
Even beneath the ice, she can hear it murmur.
And she goes because these are the things that speak to her: the things of death, the things of ruin. She goes and she does not pause at the river’s edge. The ice does not deter her because you cannot kill that which is already dead. You cannot stop a heart that does not beat. You cannot arrest lungs that do not draw breath.
The ice splinters beneath her feet because the reaper constructed her something already half-grown. (He had found the discarded things and pieced her back together. Everything different. Nothing fit together quite right.) She is not an adult but she is not a child either. Rather she is something caught between the two.
The ice splinters and then falls apart completely, plunging her into the water. But the cold cannot touch her. She is already dead. (But she is not altogether dead, is she? No, because he had dredged her up out of the muck and the mire, dragged her out of the Afterlife and set her loose on the world of the living. How strange it is to be something that is not quite either. But she is a study in the in-between.)
The water eats at the flesh and she plunges her mouth beneath the surface, swallowing. Because she does not remember what it means to be a thing that needs water to survive, a thing whose stomach cramps with hunger. How strange it is to be alive.
But the water merely slides down her throat. The water does not mean anything at all. It merely pools in her gut, where it will stay. Forever, perhaps.
Forever, forever.
@laura