someday i am going
to walk out of here free
to walk out of here free
W
hen the girl says her name, like a curse, Angharad falters a little in her confidence. She feels the earth around her intently, too intently - like it is an extension of her, like her locked legs have become roots running deep - she breathes in the smell of impending doom, somewhere between fire and fungus, and tries desperately not to think about just how far she is from her homeland.
Thana. Is that supposed to mean something? Would the people who live here know her? Like they know Bexley? She wants to know but she can’t seem to ask, too embarrassed to relay her own foolishness so quickly. At the girl’s back the sun lingers in red and purple like it is begging the moon not to make it leave, and it washes the both of them in a light that looks too much like blood to make Angharad comfortable.
She watches the slow rise of Thana’s hoof.
The way black starts to drip from it like tar, singing the grass underneath her feet. How the air fills with the smell of something newly dead. How it glistens in the light. How the space that stretches between them has evolved, in only the last few moments, from bright green to rotting and dark. She is surprised to see that Thana has no shame in it; if it were up to her, Angharad would leach the magic out of her blood like oil from water.
Are you like me?
And she would love to say no, more than anything, but she can’t. For every one of her childish faults, none of them let her act in dishonesty. And the way the dirt between them leaves no marking between where one’s reach ends and the other begins means it would be foolish to lie anyway.
Yes, she answers. Tightens the hinge in her jaw a little. I suppose so. It sounds weird in her mouth, too formal, but it is the only manner in which she’s ever heard someone talk. So she repeats it, like a parrot. Like a slave. Like a girl who has been told, from the very flurries beginnings of her consciousness, even before birth, what to do and how she should do it.
I’m Angharad, she says, although Thana didn’t ask, too self-conscious to talk any longer without introducing herself. The light has deepened to a semi-bloody carmine, striking Angharad’s golden skin in red and red and more red so she looks as though she’s been dipped in the thought of murder. Where are we? And if her voice breaks a little, or even wavers, it’s lost against the defiant stare she does not let move from Thana’s.
@thana | "speaks" | notes: text
