Isra and the silent words
“Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain”
“Its soul--a twisted wreckage of despair and pain
And the spiders inside are just praying for rain”
H
er heartbeat is telling her a story when it stutters and reshapes itself to Marisol. It's a tangled web of sea-great sorrow, and fury, and rotten fruit that tastes so sweet when shared in a kiss. Each word of it inks red and hot against the inside of her muscles, and the hollow places of her heart that have known the sea. The words run together like tides and the shore. Isra does not think that the marrow of her bones has ever heard a sweeter, more violent song. It is a lullaby she will sing her children someday, when she tells him of all the ways a heart works to crack open things like bones, and bodies, or mortality.
“Do not pretend to misunderstand, Marisol.” Isra almost wants to pull away from the brush of a soft muzzle (too soft to smell like sun, sand, and root). She almost wants to catch a ray of moonlight on her horn and turn it into a double tipped sword with one point at each of their throats. She almost, almost, almost-- there are a hundred almost wants running broken and jagged through her storytelling blood. But in all the end all that comes out is another touch of their muzzles together.
Isra thinks that they touch like weeds by the sea, salted, bent and full of seeds that will never grow honeysuckle and pears. She inhales the moment, the sea, the sorrow, the want. She drags it on, because she knows what's about to come out, what words her blood-story is going to say. The kiss she gives to Marisol's ear is a whisper of skin, hair, and something else.
“It's not your help that I want.” Maybe once, she wants to say, maybe once she would have wanted nothing more than help or love. But now there is a terrible magic, and an awful hate running along with the blood-story. Now her heart has learned to beat in just that same way as Marisol's. Her touch has learned about the way Marisol smells just like the sea, even though when they touch it can feel impossibly hot. “It was never only help that I wanted.” Isra inhales, but nothing more than another kiss of nose to ear comes out.
I wanted a friend. She wants to say but the words never form.
I wanted someone who knew how to ache like me. I wanted something fierce and wild against my skin. Those words do not form either, nothing does. She feels terrible, and sick, and like a monster. The glass turns pitch black again and her eyes sting a little without the shine of copper.
Isra pulls away, because she knows that she should (even though she still doesn't want to). “I'm going to be a mother.” Later she won't know where the words came from or why she said them at all. They are not the words her heart or her story wanted to say. She doesn't want it to cut the way it does and her heart stutters with the sound the words make echoing against her teeth. It starts to beat it's own song (and Isra starts to hate it for the melody).
Isra inhales all the salt and the pitch in the window.
I want--
forgiveness.
But those words don't come out either. Her teeth hurt with the effort to hold them back, and the knowing that she cannot go back now. She can never go back. Didn't she tell Eik once, forward until the end of the world? A part of her is saying to turn away, to go back, to do anything but stare at Marisol like she will tell her the secret to holding in all these awful, rotten pieces of herself.
Marisol is not the one who did not do her job. She never was.
It's always been Isra.
@Marisol | "speaks" | notes: <3
