[P] instead, it catches butterflies in its mouth

[Ruth]

☼  RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN  ☼
רות


"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."

It is mid-afternoon – the hottest part of the day, even in winter – and I am standing in front of my sister’s door, freshly-washed. (My hair is still wet, at the roots, but I think that I managed to scrub the smell of hospital and blood from it; the moment that I walked in the doors, this morning, I had a near-dead patient all but thrust upon me. Something about a fight in the marketplace. I didn’t care enough to pay attention to the specifics, but I noticed the man’s jutting ribs and the way that Ishak’s stare seemed to darken a shade during the doctor’s explanation.)

I pace a few steps to the left, then a few steps to the right. I don’t know how long it has been since I have seen Miriam. It could have been days, or weeks – time has blended together, recently.

Ishak is on the next floor down. Last I saw him, he was speaking with one of the maids, a familiar and easy smile pulled taut across his lips. It’s the sort of look he gets on his face when he is prying for information, but he doesn’t want to make it too obvious. (It’s obvious to me, but, then, I am the exception to his rule.) I don’t know what it says about my family that my guard feels the need to spy in our own house. Nothing good, I’m sure; but what’s worse is that I didn’t stop him.

What’s worse, or worst of all – is that I feel the same way.

My gaze drifts to the knocker. I pull it up halfway, then leave it suspended in mid-air, unwilling to take that last step and let it drop. (I can imagine the sound in the hallway; deafening-loud and sudden as a shock against the empty silence.)

I don’t feel the sisterly obligation that I know I should towards Miriam. I am not at her door for her, even though I should be. Of all my siblings, I have always loved her best, and, if ever I could ache for anyone, I want to believe that I could ache for her; but, even now, even as she seems to be slipping from my grasp (and everyone else’s), I don’t ache. Not like I should. Any pain I feel is purely self-interested – if I were to trace the tangle of emotions that roil quietly in my chest as I stand in front of her doorway, I am sure that they would lead right back to me, not Miriam.

The realization should be a horrible one, but I am not surprised by it. I know that she has sacrificed much for us, and I-

I am from a family of priests, and I have never learned to sacrifice at all.

(But this isn’t – shouldn’t – be about me. She has been troubled, recently, and not in a way that I know how to fix. I considered bringing her something, because I have seen enough visiting families to know that they tend to bring gifts to ailing relatives, but, when I tried to decide what I should bring, it occurred to me that I don’t even know what Miriam likes. Sometimes I wonder if I even like Miriam – or if I just like what she does for me.)

I take a breath that rattles in my throat and drop the knocker. It resounds, and somehow the noise is more jarring than I expected; I don’t wince, because I never wince, but my teeth grind together in the back of my jaw. “Miriam?”

I say it like I don’t know if she is there or not, but I know that she is. I’m not sure if that is some kind of strange courtesy or- or if I am hoping, although I know it is futile, that she is out.

I want to see my sister. I don’t want to see what I’m anticipating. It’s a rather strange feeling, though it is one that just might be normal – I have seen it on the faces of strangers in the moments before I lead them into the operating room, or into a back room at the end of the hospice ward.

The sentiment is almost comforting. But I have always had a strong stomach; it troubles me more than it soothes me that I am troubled at all.

It is harder to lie, that way; and it is much harder to forget.

---

@Miriam || first posts are an Experience, huh || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"

[Miriam]

princess Miriam 
of House Ieshan

I told my soul to sing
she said her strings were snapt

M

y hair has not been washed in days.

It is the first thing I will think of when I open my door and see her there: my sister, her dark hair dripping like a siren’s, anointed with sweet-smelling oils to cover the death-scent that usually follows her. I will taste the wild orange drifting from her skin and wonder what I smell like. I don’t wash my hair enough; I can’t remember the last time I had enough energy to put on my own perfume. And slowly the realization will dawn on me that I am no longer my siblings’ keeper, running their baths, ushering them to and from class according to schedule. Now I am the one being kept.

But this is what will happen. What will happen a few minutes in the future, a door barely opened at the end of a long, dimly lit hallway. 

Right now I am deeply, darkly, blissfully asleep.

---

Under my feet the sand is caked with blood. I know I am getting married, because my mother’s necklace lays cold and heavy as a corpse against my chest. And despite the eye of Solis unblinking overhead, the desert around me is capped with white frost, and I think to myself it’s winter, and then no, it doesn’t snow here, even in the winter, and then I think more and reach the only reasonable conclusion following those two facts, which is: I am dreaming. Otherwise, I am in hell.

I don’t recognize my fiancé. I can safely assume he is a royal—why else would I be getting married?—but his body is shrouded in a thick cloak of red, his face in a veil of black, and I cannot make out any of his features. The priest stands between us. Her hair has been shorn into a short, dark, streak, and her cheeks are painted in gold, a sun on each side connected by rays in the middle. She’s pretty, I think. Prettier than the nothing I can make out of my to-be husband. 

I want to kiss her. I think about it, and then I chastise myself: I know I am getting married. 

So I turn back to my fiancé. He says I do in a voice made of rocks, and I say I do in a voice that barely manages to leave my mouth, and when I reach out to kiss him, I move the veil aside and—

There is nothing underneath it. Not a skeleton, not a ghost. I move the veil aside and I am staring right through the space where his body should be and seeing nothing but sand, sand glittering with that awful mixture of ice and blood, sand now covered with the thump of the cloak as it falls to the ground, unlatching itself from a neck that never existed.

“Look what you’ve done,” says the priestess. Her eyes are glowing now: the dark of them threatens to spill, past the line of kohl and the paint on her cheek, over and over again, but never quite does. 

I open my mouth. I almost say, it’s not my fault—but—

---

My mother did not raise liars. 

A pit of self-serving, almost-evil vipers, but not liars. (Except maybe Pilate, but then he has always worked to make himself the odd one out.)

So when I hear my voice being called through the door, in a tone that implies whoever it is does not know whether or not I am in my room (where else would I be?)—there is only the briefest moment in which I debate not answering. I could stay silent. Go back to sleep and pretend I’m not available. It would be much easier than dealing with whoever this is. I am already so, so tired…

My mother did not raise liars.

I pull my hair back, stumble out of bed, make my way to the door. And I don't bother checking who it is through the peep-hole, because there is no one in this world who has not already seen me at my worst. I only throw it open and brace for impact. I am watching the arrow on its way to strike me. 

The arrow is my sister.

My hair has not been washed in days. The realization slams over me like a tidal wave as I look at Ruth's dark hair, dripping like a siren's, anointed with sweet-smelling oils to cover the death-scent that usually follows her. I taste the wild orange drifting from her skin and wonder what I smell like. I don’t wash my hair enough. I can’t remember the last time I had enough energy to put on my own perfume. And slowly I realize: I am no longer my siblings’ keeper, running their baths, ushering them to and from class according to schedule. Now I am the one being kept.

"Ruth," I say, and my voice is hoarse with exhaustion and surprise. I clear my throat. Taste acid. I step back and let the door swing wide, but the room behind me is so dark it's hard to see into. "Come in?"

[Ruth]

☼  RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN  ☼
רות

"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."

My siblings like to think that our mother did not raise liars.

They’re wrong, of course – and lying. (Namely, to themselves.) I am not sure that anyone in this family is honest. Not in the genuine, down-to-the-bone way.

I hear my sister moving around inside of her room. It takes her an almost unbearably long time to come to the door; I am not holding my breath, but the growing tightness in my chest makes me feel like I am suffocating. The door swings open. Nearly slams. Nearly slams, and then I am looking at Miriam, at her red hair and her coal-pocked body-

Her hair is wild. Unwashed. I’m not sure that it’s been brushed in – some time. I can smell her, faintly. Not roses and honey; more of sweat, though not the amount that would come from exertion. I barely spend time at home, anymore. I work long shifts – and when I am asked to make them even longer, I always find myself agreeing to it, often without thinking. I like my job. I like it better than being in the house, at any rate – and I like it much better than feeling idle.

Miriam does not look like herself, lately. She hasn’t since the other Miriam-

(But we don’t talk about that.)

I have a strong stomach, and I do not want to look at her. I don’t know why. I don’t empathize with her, not like I should. Not with any of her misery. I understand it intellectually. If I were asked – and I don’t want to be asked -, I think that I could even put a name to it. But I don’t – understand it. Not like I should.

And I want to understand it. I want to understand her, I want it so badly; and I know, too, at the likely-vile heart of me, that it is a purely selfish want. It isn’t for Miriam’s sake. It is for mine.

There is something wrong with me, and I know it. Technically, I think that I could put a name to it, like I could put a name to the thing haunting Miriam. (I am not a psychiatrist, or a psychologist, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t studied any ailments of the mind. And – I work just down the hall from a few of them. And – we’ve had them in the house since we were children, checking up on all of us, as though Mother knew what she had done when she created us.) I know what it is, really, that many-headed and ugly mass resting at the heart of me, that condition that I am suffering from, the thing that gnawed away at my wholeness before I could ever be whole at all. I could put a name to it. But I won’t. If I don’t put a name to it, I can pretend that it isn’t real. If I pretend like I don’t know what it is, I can pretend that there is still some hope of fixing it; that it can be fixed.

I’m a liar, like all the rest of us.

Miriam invites me in.

“Thank you,” I say, and I follow her inside. My eyes scan her bedroom, though it takes some time for them to adjust from the bright hallway (all open, gilded windows) to the inky darkness of her room. I am not sure if I am just looking at some reprieve from Miriam-as-a-shadow or if I am looking for more symptoms of decay. Her covers are ruffled, and I wonder if I woke her up. I wonder if she was still sleeping past noon.

Miriam has barely been out of her room, lately. I wonder what she has been doing all this time. I think that all of us have coped with – everything – in different ways. She has receded. Somehow, it wasn’t what I expected of her.

I tilt my head at her, slowly. I should be concerned. (There is a black, gaping hole inside of me where the concern is supposed to be.) What do you say when you are concerned? “How are you feeling?” I ask. It is a doctor’s question; that is the only way that I know how to care about people. How are you feeling, with my mental checklist of symptoms to tick off, observations to analyze – to add them all up and find the root of the problem, and, once found, dig it up.

Dig it up. Wishful thinking. Nothing is ever that simple.

---

@Miriam || <3 || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"

[Miriam]

princess Miriam 
of House Ieshan

I told my soul to sing
she said her strings were snapt

S

ome living things can only be honest. Plants, I think: a plant will never lie, simply because it gains nothing from being dishonest about whether it needs sun or water or something else entirely. But for most of us—for conscious creature’s—I’m not convinced it’s a question of whether you are or aren’t a liar. 

Honest, in my mind, is not a personality trait. In my mind, very little is a personality trait. I look at myself, and my siblings, and I cannot help thinking that we are less ourselves than mirrors of the way we feel about each other: Pilate is only jealous when he talks to Adonai, and Hagar is only bitter when she talks to Delilah. It’s not what they are. It’s just what they look like. 

Sometimes I wonder whether anything at all, about anyone, is permanent. I have changed too much too quickly to sit comfortably in words like honest or liar or anything else lazy enough to remain black-and-white. I am mostly honest. Sometimes I’m a liar. I’d feel guilty forever if I had to pick just one.

(Picking just one—it doesn’t matter which—wouldn’t be… real.)

My mother did not raise liars for the simple fact that she did not “raise” anything. I am nothing. No one. There is not a part of me that would not bend to the will of the world, if it were to push hard enough.

It only makes sense that my siblings would be the same.

If I ever had the energy to think about it, I might have realized by now that, of all of us, it is Ruth that must be the most practiced at lying. I’m not sure whether she does it for her comfort or for ours; I’m not sure that it matters. The outcome is the same. 

I love her as much as I love any of them. In some ways I might even love her a little more. She doesn’t love me nearly as much, if at all, and—I know that. (I comfort myself sometimes by remembering that if she doesn’t love me, she probably doesn’t love any of us; at least it’s not me in specific that she’s withdrawn from.) But she’s been lying since she was a little kid. Almost since the minute she was born. I saw it in her from the beginning; I have the same nose for trouble in my siblings that a mother would in her children.

I saw it at the funeral—before that, when the news broke—before that, when I took her down to look at the bodies in the basement, when I signed myself over to be used for her science after I died—before that, too many times to count. My sister has been living a falsehood since the day she entered this world; and if there is a light in her eyes at all, then it is the light of an electric pulse—cold, purposeful, carefully contained—and not a candle.

When I look at her, I can only think of how exhausting it must be.

How are you feeling? 

Ruth looks at me. I can’t look back at her. Instead I blink, disconcerted, and bat away the glare in my eyes of the too bright-hallway, turning my head away from the lights as I shoulder the door closed.

Dark. And it’s cold in here, too cold—I realized I’ve left the windows open. But my room is... not as bad as it could have been. There are no dirty dishes, no empty glasses. The stacks of books on the floor almost make it look as though I've been reading. My bed is rumpled, the laboriously knit blanked bunched up in one corner, and my all my candles are burnt out, but otherwise it—and I, hopefully—look almost normal. Finally, I relax. The door creaks as I lean my weight against it.

"Fine," I say. (My mother did not "raise" anything.) Then I add, with painful effort: "...Tired. How're you? The hospital? What have you been working on?"

I hope, if she is talking about her own life, it will keep her from asking anything else of me. I want to reach out and touch her.

I want to kiss her cheek and braid her hair, like I did when she was little and would amuse herself while I made the plaits by peeling apart the wings of butterflies.

[Ruth]

☼  RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN  ☼
רות

"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."

She looks away from me, when I ask my question – when we walk into her bedroom. The room is, mostly, neat. The curtains are pulled, but Miriam has left the windows open, and an uncharacteristically cold winter breeze has chilled the entire chamber; I’m sure that it is several degrees colder than the hallway. Books are piled up on the floor, candles burnt down to the wicks, her bed an organized mess.

She leans back against the door with a creak. Fine, she says, and then she adds, …tired. Ostensibly, she is telling the truth. It isn’t quite the answer to my question, though. How’re you? The hospital? What have you been working on?

I don’t have to think much about the answer. (I swear that it is the only thing that anyone but Ishak knows to ask me about, anymore.)

“I’m the same as usual, I think,” I say, softly. I shouldn’t be. I know that I shouldn’t be, and it needles me most days – not that I feel different, in the wake of two dead parents and one dead sister and one dying brother, but that I don’t. “My hours have been longer than usual, lately. We’ve lost a few doctors. I know that someone was here from Dusk, a little while ago, but I think that she’s left.” Solterra does not prize her medics in the same way she does her warriors; or maybe it is better to say that she raises far fewer doctors than she does soldiers, more people to cause the wound than to heal them. “I’ve had a patient in with some sort of wasting syndrome, recently – I’m still trying to pinpoint the cause. There was someone in this morning who lost a limb in a teryr attack; he survived it, but I had to amputate-“ I decide to spare her the gory details. “-ah. Ishak and I made it up to Veneror, recently, and to the island…it was covered in strange shards. Like mirrors.”

It doesn’t take me long to run out of things to say. I wonder-

I wonder, sometimes, how to make Miriam better. How to make all of us better. It isn’t because I care. (I can’t.) If I had to explain why it matters to me, it is because it is a problem to be solved, and I have always been motivated by solving things, by unraveling them. Ishak says that he can never decide if it is one of my better or worse qualities, but that it is certainly a troublesome one.

Two dead parents. One dead sister. One dying brother. I can’t bring back the dead; that is one thing that I cannot fix. But Adonai…

Adonai’s corpse-like presence lingers in the back of my mind like a knot of thorn. I don’t know if I could fix him – I don’t know if he wants me to so much as look at him. (I have never been close to any of my brothers.) Still. If he were better, I cannot help but think that we would all be better for it.

He’s been hard to find, lately; receding. I suppose that I could ask Pilate about him, but, for a myriad of reasons, I don’t want to. I’d rather ask Miriam.

Miriam is Adonai’s twin. I have no twin to call my own, though I’ve never particularly wanted for one; I am closest in birth, I think, to Corradh (Hagar and Pilate are more similar in age, but, then, they have each other), but he is younger than me by a measure of years, and, with his carnivore teeth and taste for violence, just as unlike me as all the others. My other closest sibling is Delilah, and it troubles me. I am sure that we seem entirely unlike each other, as different as a beautiful spring day and cloud-covered night. She is a speck of bright-burning fire, and I am as dull as ash. Still. Sometimes I think that I understand her better than anyone else in my family. I am never sure that I want to.

(In truth: I am sure that I have never been close to any of them but Miriam. I love all of the others, of course, but sometimes I find myself wondering if I only love them because I know that I am supposed to.)

“Do you think…” I consider, “…that I should ask Adonai if I could examine him? Do you think that he would agree to it?”

There are some things too tender to touch. (I have a habit of touching them anyways.)

---

@Miriam || <3 || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"

[Miriam]

princess Miriam 
of House Ieshan

I told my soul to sing
she said her strings were snapt

I

 can’t stop watching her.

I lean up against the doorway. The sharp corner of wood digs so deep into my shoulder it’s the only thing I can feel, but at least—I am feeling something. That dull, throbbing pain hurts less to focus on than all the rest of it. “The rest of it” is:

My little sister has grown up. She is not “little” anymore, by any standard of age (though some part of me is comforted that, even grown up, she remains a little smaller than I am). My little sister is a doctor, who has gone from picking fights with our brothers to cutting them apart with scalpels. She is her own person now—free, more than any of the rest of us, from the clutches of our family name. She has made her own path. Written her name in the stone doorway of the hospital. (Sometimes I wonder—if she had been so practiced at the time our parents died, could she have saved them?)

My little sister, I think, doesn’t need me anymore. And nothing could ever hurt worse.

I bite my lip. Pain flashes through me, and a half-second later I taste the sharp bitterness of iron, so strong it almost feels like heat. It’s small enough a drop of blood I don’t think she’ll see it. But then again—without the distractions of love and pain Ruth is better than any of us at really seeing things, whether they are or aren’t there. 

(Sometimes I wonder if the thing she has—the way she is—is like seeing ghosts. I think her eyes could go right through me. She doesn’t see what she wants to see, because she doesn’t want, or expect to see anything in particular. Knowing people without the distraction of what you want from them, I think, is like existing without the distraction of a body. People are ghosts, whether they know it or not.)

“Ishak,” I say suddenly, repeating her like a well-trained parrot. “I should meet him properly, someday. He—I mean, do you—“ 

I realize as soon as I start talking that it’s a question I couldn’t bear to really ask. 

Do you love him? Yes and no would both be terrible. Yes, I love him; if she said so, I would know that she is capable of love and simply unwilling to give it to me. That at some point in the dark fog of the last few years I lost her heart and Ishak gained it. Yes, I love him; I would realize I do not know her, not really. And I would think of the girl whose name I cannot bear to really say and wonder if I still love her, if I ever did—

Do you love him? No, I don’t. Maybe this is the better option. This is the response I would lean toward expecting, the response some slimy, almost monstrous part of me wants her to give. But she is my sister; I want her to be happy, and no, I don't love him, wouldn’t be a sign of happiness. 

I think. I don’t know anymore.

My head feels fuzzy. Ruth asks me a question, and I replay it in my head until the words stop sounding like words and start sounding like music: Do you think that he would agree to it? Something rings in my ear. Blood-buzz. Or cold wind. I swallow so roughly my throat threatens to close. 

“I don’t see why not,” is my answer, soft and unattached. Some part of me wants to add, bitterly—it’s not like you could make things worse—but the age-old impulse to protect her kicks in, and I bite back the snappish remark. Instead, a creaky sigh slips out. My chest aches like I’ve suffered a battle-wound.

I don’t know what to say. What to ask. But the silence is more painful than anything else could be, and I burst out, my voice wet with almost-tears: “But honestly, Ruth. I am not worried about him dying. Our gods are not that kind.”

If there is a glower in my eye that says I wish they were, or I would trade my life for is, then maybe it is lost in the darkness of my room.

[Ruth]

☼  RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN  ☼
רות

"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."

I know what she is going to ask before the words are out of his mouth. (It is the same thing that almost everyone does.) It is still strange to hear the question come stammering out of my sister’s mouth, and I think that it is because it is somehow unlike Miriam – to stammer. To even have to ask. I watch her unblinking as she asks her question, and I know what she is really asking, even if she doesn’t say it, and even if she doesn’t want to know the answer.

Do you love him, Ruth?

The answer isn’t so simple. If I were anyone else – if I were normal, and proper – I’m sure that the answer would be an easy yes, but, if I were that girl, the kind of Ruth that I’d seen reflected on the island’s mirrors, Miriam would never have to ask me if I love him, and she would never have to stumble over her words in the way that she does. (If I were that kind of girl, I wouldn’t be standing beside of Ishak. That kind of girl, I’m confident, would never have attracted his attention in the first place; she wouldn’t have saved him, either, or, even if she had, if she’d been the right type of bleeding heart, she wouldn’t have kept him at her side, or he wouldn’t have stayed.) But that doesn’t answer the question.

Do I love him?

If I am being honest, I don’t think that I can love anything. Not in the way that I should. Not in a way that matters. Not in any way that means love.

(That isn’t quite the same as saying that I can’t – or don’t – try.)

“You should meet him,” I agree, with a slow nod of my head. “I think that he would like you.” I’m less sure as to whether or not Miriam would like him, but that is mostly because I’m not sure what kinds of people she likes at all. I’ve never known any of my sister’s friends; I’ve never even known that she has any. If she has ever loved anyone, it is as much a mystery to me as any love of mine must be to her. The only difference between us in this regard is that I’m sure that Miriam could love, if she were so inclined, because she loves all of us and means it.

(What I don’t say, Miriam, is that, if I could love anyone, I would have loved you first of all – and most.)

If Miriam’s question felt somehow uncharacteristic of her, it still seemed more like Miriam than her answer. It is lukewarm; almost entirely distant, bordering, somehow, on the apathetic. Of all of us, I would have thought that Miriam would have cared the most for Adonai’s illness, because she is his twin, the closest to his heart. “We’ve never been close,” I say, after a moment’s cautious contemplation. “That's all.” And – it’s true. Adonai and Miriam have had each other, and then there was the younger Miriam, the one who is gone. Pilate and Hagar are two of a kind, and, though they are not twins, Delilah and Corradh are closest to each other in heart, if not in temper.

I am the plainest, and the middlest, and the least a member of this house. And I am the one who was made alone – who never had another heart carved to match mine.

I don’t bother Miriam with those thoughts, however; least of all when she speaks again, in a voice that is like a sob, and I recognize her prior apathy as something more like repression. But honestly, Ruth. I am not worried about him dying. Our gods are not that kind. Something shifts in my chest, dark and confused and nearly-unpleasant. Would it be kinder for him to die? I do not understand. Adonai is not the same, now, and not pristine, and hindered, and-

(I do not understand why life has value. I have simply been told that it does, time and time again, until I have taken it for simple fact. Normal fact. Another thing that I should understand and must pretend that I do for the sake of politeness, but don’t.)

-and I cannot understand her words in any other way than that it would be better for him to be dead than to be sick or imperfect. My lips twitch, but they do not make any expression, and, for a moment, I draw closer to my sister, brushing my shoulder against her own. I have never been good at embracing anyone, much less offering the soft kisses and gentle touches that Miriam has always given so easily, but I linger there for a moment, my heart beating bird-frantic in my chest, and I manage to say, softly, “I’ll take another look at him. Perhaps there is something that the other doctors haven’t noticed-“ Or something that they’ve chosen to ignore, I think, but I do not say it. “-but, even if there isn’t, his recovery has been nothing short of a miracle already. He might continue to recover. He might still…live a normal life, with further care, and a bit more time.”

(The worst thing, I think, when the words are out of my mouth, is how they sound like they belong to a doctor discussing a patient, not a sister. They don’t sound like consolation, and there isn’t the barest scrap of love in them at all.)
 
Even I know that Adonai will never be normal, in the medical sense or as our brother, again. Even I know that his life has never been normal, and that it never will be again. But what I mean is that he might have normal things. What I mean is that I haven’t been given reason to give up yet, and I still won’t-

I’ve never liked Adonai. He and Pilate would tease me ferociously, as children, and ignore me entirely as they grew. I’ve never liked Adonai, but I’ve never been able to abide by a challenge, and I do not want Miriam to have that look on her face, either.

I linger a moment longer, pressed to her side like I might have when I was much, much younger, and then, abruptly, I turn on my heel. I don’t know what to say to her. I don’t know how to make this better; I don’t even know how to not make it worse. I look back at her, once, rolling my tongue between my teeth, and I say, “I’ll talk to him. And I’ll…visit again soon, when I have a break from my shifts.”

I make myself promise to mean it, this time.

I slip out of her door and into the bright light of the hallway again, and it is only then, out of the dark, that I can breathe.

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@Miriam || <3 || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"