i just want to know;
did lucifer smile,
when he fell?
✧
T
onight, I don’t have to wear my own face. Tonight, I do not have to be Vercingtorix Morgenstern. Tonight, I can lie.I have never attended a costume party before this moment; the idea, at first trivial, began to intrigue me. I would be a liar if I were to say the idea of being someone else did not enchant me. I am enchanted because, when I go into Denocte, I paint away every aspect of myself I cannot stand. The scars on my body become filled in with bright ivory dust. The designer, occupying a stall just outside of the festival, offers me a multitude of cloaks and shawls to wear until night’s end. I select them sparingly; I think of the color I would normally choose.
“Give me anything but red,” I demand, and the woman, coy and elven, pulls out a spring-green, silk cloak embroidered with sleek silver. The designs shift in the light, nearly coming alive with each shiver the fabric gives. I fasten the cloak around my shoulders and watch, pleased, as the distinctive rosettes of my haunches disappear beneath it. The shopkeeper does up the side, tucking it under the chest, so the rich fabric coils and pools as robes ought to.
“And your horns?” she asks, with eyes that seem to shift as the green-silver fabric, mystic, half real and half not.
“Make them something else,” I beg, breathlessly. And she does. With practiced care, the witch, the shopkeeper, the woman, binds them from base to tip in white ribbon. The mask she offers strikes me first as extravagant and too pretty, a kind of faux beauty I would never submit to. But then I decide that the masquerade in and of itself belongs to a not-me, to a shade, to a memory. And so I say, “That’s perfect.”
She, with the same practiced care, secures the pleated silver mask to my face with two leather straps, one behind the ears and one at the base of my jaw. She adjust the feathers that fan out from the ends, so the brilliant adornment compliments the white-lace of my horns. The mask in and of itself does something to resemble a peacock’s unfurled tail; further disgusting my archetypical horns.
With a patient brush, the shopkeeper-turned-witch-turned-artist paints my neck silver-bright and when she offers a mirror, I do not recognize myself.
“And the eyes?” I ask, in a voice that shakes.
“Those,” she answers. “I cannot change.”
I walk away hoping what she has done is enough, and for the night, I tell myself I will be a better version of myself.
(I might have succeeded. I would have succeeded. If I did not recognize him immediately. If I did not feel myself drawn to the bright color of his eyes because those, those, we cannot change, no matter how badly we wish we could).
Perhaps, one day, he will tell me his sickness changed them. Perhaps he will tell me the truth to being not ourselves requires a step toward insanity, a delving into the deep waters of illness. But even if he does, I cannot guarantee I will listen, because the floor of my heart has fallen out and there’s water in the sinking ship of my soul.
“Who are you tonight?” I whisper, into the soft nook behind his ear and cheek. I whisper into his skin, pretending the feather-soft touch of my lips and the feather-soft sound of my voice is not the lion’s purr at the throat of his slaughtered lamb.
I learn, of course, the only lie I am incapable of telling.
I am, who I am. And even if I try to pretend, the truth comes out.
Because existing there in the silence where I wait for his answer, I want him to say my name again, and again, and again. I want it carved into the fibers of his being, an irrefutable fact. I want to dominate so large a part of his life that, even masked and living beneath a guise, I make the bird in his heart come alive.
"I think I will call myself Ronan," I continue, in that hollowed space, holy as a church. "And I want you to tell me who I should be, for you."
