T
here are promises waiting on this island like seeds waiting to root and blossom.Ipomoea can taste them caught there between his teeth like flecks of rust, flashing bright as blood in his smile. Each time he speaks they are bleeding from his mouth, working their way down his jaw like rubies wanting to embed themselves into his bone. And they are sharp, so sharp — even the ones growing their roots into his tendons, the ones pressing petals and leaves against his skin, even those are broken up by the sharp shard points of their thorns that do not settle the churning of his blood.
He wishes it would. He wishes he could forgive the pain for the joy of watching something grow. He wishes he could reform the monster rooting along his bones into something gentler, something that looks more like a boy who had once wishes for nothing more than to grow a garden.
But he is sharp now. He has been made sharp — or was he born sharp, like a knife in a sheath that has only just now learned the taste of blood along its blade and begged for more? Was it the evil things, and the fires, and the hunger that has burrowed down into his soul like disease takes to roots, or was he always a bad seed?
Every time he closes his eyes he can see the golden sapling in the forest, the leaves that are dying over and over and over again while new ones take their place. When did he begin to find his salvation in growing life from the death he caused?
He knows it is not the same thing as saving. But still he tells himself it is, it is, it is, because it is the only way he knows how.
Around him the shops are spiraling tighter and tighter together like a noose tightening as he walks. He has stopped wondering where he was going, or where the hangman’s halter was leading him, or when he’d reach the edge of the gallows. He only follows it as it leads him in ever-tightening circles, and he tries to not listen to the whispers of the island. He tries to not look into the rooms, tries to not see the false-wonders tempting him like a anglerfish leading its victims to their deaths. He is trying —
he is failing —
he is walking into the room that is pillars of ash and salt and driftwood waiting to spark. And he is lifting his head when he smells the sea, and hears the waves crashing against his knees (he can feel it, the brine soaking into his skin — but when he looks down there is nothing there, only a smooth plane of water like a mirror that his hooves barely break.)
The ground rocks beneath him like the floor of a ship when he steps across it. But the only ripples come from his hooves as he walks across the surface of a smooth ocean, and lays his cheek against a rock crowned in driftwood.
And again he tastes its promises between his teeth.
i'm just living like a man on fire
