|
For her it has always been an easy thing to blink, and stutter, and become nothing more than a mirror.
And it is as easy as it always has been to settle her paper-bird heart into a roaring drumbeat of war promises. Her skin crawls like it's begging to be remade into something lovely, something with all the hunger gnawing on the outside instead of in. “It should not matter.” The tide-song in her voices settles to a low hum as she presses her lips to her own chest (as if it might muffle all the ache coming through like a flood).
She almost says, it should not matter, but it does to me, but somewhere between the tide and the song the words turn to dry moth wings and catch in her throat. The falls turn to snarls echoing in her ears and the sound burrows down, down, down into the current of her bloodstream. And although she wants to drown herself back in the icy flow, she only tucks her shoulder back against his.
It's like growing roots and sinking deep into the realm of dirt and bloated worms. It's like coming home.
The look on her face turns sad as rain over as a garden that's been walled in before spring. It waivers on her face because there is still too much wanting and mirror sharpness behind her teeth. “Anawar. She echoes, toying with the vowels on her tongue and letting the wanting turn it as strange, and heavy, and cloud gnawed as their hunger. It fills her up like grass, and frost-water, and brine.
To have it sit in her belly like stones (while she swam in the sea) would not be so terrible a thing. The thought runs behind her eyes like flickers of all the deaths she's known, and dreamt of. It flickers with all the same colors she's known each time she burns.
Again. Again. Again.
She's burning again as she leans her paper-bird weight against him. And their bellies still talk to each other like lions tangled up in the tall-grass beneath a high noon sun. She plucks at a bit of her chest like it's not flesh but threads on a worn out tapestry.
Aridela wants to break herself down to brittle thread, and rotten grass, and water that races downhill to the sea.
But instead of picking her self to pieces, she looks back at him and the violence leaking form his skin even in this stillness between them. Her body quivers as she tries to mirror that too, the grace of his wrath and his brutality whispered in the crystals of blood shining beneath his eyes.
She tries to be violent, and dangerous, and a thing full of sword sharp bones. It's a strange look on her, this wild flash of ember-gold in her eyes. But somehow when she asks him, “what is it that you want in this life Anawar?”, the tide in her voice barely manages to do more than whisper a roar.
And the mirror shatters.
* * * * *
nothing can breathe in this space
|
|
