I never cared for anyone so much. I was born with a bomb inside my gut.
She wonders if the name sticks sideways in his throat like it does hers.
Sometimes she cannot remember if her father had given her the name or if she’d taken it for herself.
It is inherently light, despite all of the sadness it evokes in her.
But it turns down at the edges in his mouth and she wonders if he feels like it doesn’t fit quite right.
If it is cumbersome, like her. Not worth the trouble.
She doesn’t mind the gravel, she thinks, because it’s better than nothing at all. She has been called by name so scarcely in all the time that has passed that she would have delighted at him shouting it at her. Spitting it like poison. Because she is such a simple girl, has always wondered the shape it takes in other mouths.
“Brigade,” she says. From any other mouth, it might have sounded flirtatious. Anyone else might have battered their lashes and grinned, carefree and airy and untainted by that depthless well of sadness. But she merely tests it. Rolls the peaks and valleys of the letters across her teeth. It hitches at the roof of her mouth and she thinks it has a specific taste. It tastes like smoke. Smoke and fury.
Her question plunges her back into that sick sea of shame and she looks away again. She had thought she’d found her nerve, some solid ground. She had scrambled for purchase and summoned the nerve to look him in the face and now she looks away again, swallowing thickly. She had tried to find a home, she had. But no place had any use for her.
She summons the ghost of a grin there, tries to assemble some flimsy scrap of hope when she shifts her focus back to his face. “The meadow,” she says and tries to make it sound like something it’s not. A home worth having.
lilian
