Private the honeysuckle bride | festival

BUT YOU KNOW THIS ALREADY
you and the others who think / you live for truth and, by extension, love / all that is cold.

I am knee-deep in a sea of flowers.

(They want to eat me alive. I know it, I know it, I know it – but their mouths aren’t big enough.)

I think that it is probably – most likely – normal for girls to like flowers. I look at them, and I think of all the ways that their roots are knotted beneath the ground, feeding on dead things. I don’t think that I like them or hate them, but these are not the desert roses and cactus blossoms that grow on the edge of the oasis. Those love me; but these bloom bloodred with malevolence, coil grass knots beneath my hooves as I make my way through the fields, and I do not think that they are lovely, or anything else. I wanted to see them regardless.

There are crowds of people scattered across the field, but I ignore them; the young lovers, and the playing children, and the two-parent households weaving crowns to put on their children’s foreheads, and the ever-so watchful guards, which blend so easily into the crowd that you might miss them if you aren’t looking. (I am always looking. It was the first lesson my mother ever taught me – or, at the very least, it was the first one I remember.) I do not weave crowns, and I am more sculpture than child, and I do not wander about the fields with anyone else for company. I linger near the outskirts of the field, unsure of what to do but observe. The tall grass rubs at me the wrong way, a small offense. It leaves my legs itching.

Mother taught me better than to talk to strangers, or to stray too close to them. Mother knows better than to trust people, and she regards the world with the expectation that it will be cruel, if not the promise – and all the parts of me that are desert and little bright-shard-of-light know well enough to agree with her, and they do not much care for the near-absence of company (but for Mother, and Ambrose, and Ereshkigal, and the desert and all the things that occupy it) in my day-to-day life. When I am at home, I am never lonely. It is only when I cross the threshold into the outside world that I find myself curious, wondering upon wondering things I know better than to think or to ask.

I wonder how long it will take for those feelings to wither and rot and decay altogether – how long it will take me to grind them to sand. I don't want them.

I give a shake of my veiled head, gold clasps clicking against my horns, and I begin to prowl the edge of the field, just as though I am standing on another threshold. The wind bites against my cheeks in a sudden uproar, colder and crueler than it would ever be in the desert – but reeking of nothing but afterbirth of winter or new-flush of early spring -, and I twist my head against it, keeping the coiled masses of my hair from straying into my eyes. The field presses and tangles against my hooves, and the flowers, in their precious new-bloom, beg to keep me out.

(I wonder, like my father's daughter, if I wouldn’t like to grind them to sand, too.)

@~~Elliana~~ || <3 || louise gluck, "lamium"

"Speech!"