my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
They say time is a flat circle. If it’s true, she’s in the center, and she’s laughing.
It doesn’t touch her, time, not in the ways it should (the ways it should - she should be dead, god, what I’d give to have her rotting in the ground). Time slides over her, like raindrops on an oilslick. Untouched and untouchable, my corpse queen.
Sometimes she looks dead – a glassiness to the eyes, see, and a sluggishness of the gait. She lacks grace – always has – and yes, sometimes she moves like she’s climbed out of a grave.
(And her smile, oh - like a dead thing, a rictus on those wretched lips, yet girls fall for – fall to – it.)
But looks and are are not the same, no – Chantale, she persists.
She is an erratic thing, my corpse masterpiece, she slumbers and rises again like some great old god (though she is nowhere near so formidable, even in all her maddening glory). She does not know what happened, not really, only that Beqanna shook and stumbled and cried out. She slept though most of it, she doesn’t remember it, not really – a hazy idea of a figure or two, a taste of blood, the snap of a wing.
But now she wakes – she rises – and she moves in the meadow, gait lurching but eyes fever-bright, the madness awake and well within her. She eyes them with her own animal cunning, an intelligence that does not befit her to discuss philosophy, but something baser – the kind of cunning that finds the sick, the needy.
The kind of girls (or boys) who don’t mind the way she feels cool, like plastic. Who don’t mind being smiled at by dead things.
chantale
how original a sin.
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(‘She isn’t right.’ He wrings his air-clear hands; he is always worrying.
—everyone is always incessantly fucking worrying around here.)
“Right?”
(‘Right. I mean ‘Okay’. She isn’t that.’ Wind hangs onto her tail, woooshing bonelessly behind, much like a flag in the way his legs flap and flick. But unlike a flag, he never hangs still and solemn, for he lives carried by a perpetual phantom breeze.)
“Okay?”
(‘That is to say… well, what I mean by–’ his voice is gusty, like the sound of air rushing through tight slits of rock or over a vast, open tundra; it contains a multitude. Voices, made small and insignificant, that he has caught and bottled, like fireflies in a mason jar, on his journeys. ‘She isn’t normal. I can tell.’)
“Normal.”
(He is gone, with a high, agonizing wail, whipping through the trees.
Wind is a fickle friend, always at the mercy of the changing westerlies and easterlies and so on. But friend he is. The only one she has ever had, plopped down by her side when Crone – that horrible, beastly, surprisingly durable nag – had pushed Aurane from her beautiful, idyllic womb.)
She smiles – toothy and deeply, deeply unpleasant.
“Silly old thing. She looks normal to me.”
She is not cold. She is like an errant ember coughed up from literal Hades – just, not as mighty as the ones that might consume whole worlds in wildfire with one bite;
—she is dying and glowing. Too hot to hold in the palm but too tempered by her own mediocrity to sear to the bone.
She watches from the trees – those leafy, succulent bodies make castles and they make caves for her to move in; they bend and twist as she walks, for the red woman sees the world as her mind wishes her to. (Around the grey creature – the not normal, okay, or right one – the trees bend ever inwards, reaching for her with hands that are bark-for-flesh and blossom-for-nail, but five-fingered and wanting, all the same.
But when they touch her they still – their bellies stop heaving with laughter – and they begin to shudder.
Trees are great judges of character.)
The red woman isn’t. She lacks that thing that makes her viable, so it is by the grace of luck that she is not dead and rotting, thrice over, by now.
Her wires are crossed, one could say. The pulsing, lively red one that says flee lays in naked embrace with the flat black one that says fight. Their intersection is electric and sparking and it makes her dumb and senseless instead; makes her enticed by things that are not normal, okay or right.
“Hello.” Her voice is just a voice, bright and fleshy, but her eyes are lewd and leering.
She is always so hungry – she has been fasting.
This woman is not the most interesting things she has ever seen – she is not like Firegod, with his steamy, smoking fissures; or like Michaelis with his shadow pets – but she is as tempting as and honey left out bare. Aurane gets but the slightest whiff of that cold and slow body as she stops, stricken still and staring.
A ghost precedes us. A shadow follows us
And each time we stop, we fall.
my corrupt nature is empty of grace;
bent unto sin, and only unto sin;
and that continually.
The girl is an ember, a fire, and my corpse masterpiece is cold.
Moth to flame might be the obvious metaphor, but she is not a thing that burns easily, so that’s not right (ah, and with her, what is right? Such aberrance made flesh).
She is bold, this flame of a girl, and her eyes are bolder, they sear into her and she shivers from it. Shivers, and grins, the smile unfurling on her face like some terrible flag.
Like knows like and strange knows strange, loves it, craves it.
Immediately she wants to touch her, to acquaint herself with the warmth (let her be burned, scorched), with the curves and secrets this wandering woman promises. But touching too quick makes them worry – she knows this – so she doesn’t. Not yet. Instead she watches, with those horrible eyes of hers – feverish and glassy, but cunning – and she tilts her head, slightly. Considering.
“Hello,” she says, the word a purr, then “you’re staring.”
Which isn’t unexpected – she is beautiful, in a wrong sort of way, a thing poured from plastic, wax-cool. She is perfection personified, and in doing this it’s cycled back around, the lack of flaws makes her unnerving, somehow less beautiful. Further reason to stare, of course, is the pure strangeness of her, the lurch to her gait, the lolling tilt of her head.
And besides – she’s staring, too. Her gaze stabbing knife-sharp into the brown curves of her, weird and wanting.
chantale
how original a sin.
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