BEXLEY BRIAR
everywhere kassandra ran
she found she was already there.
she found she was already there.
They say on this night the veil between life and death is thin.
His form shimmers in and out of its regular lines. The wavering light of the candles and bonfires is wreaking havoc on his solidity; he flickers from translucency to transparency every time the shadows shift. But all his freckles are in the right places. And the daring warmth of his ghostly eyes is like the living.
He tells her, in his warm, perfect voice: “They say on this night the veil between life and death is thin.” A grin punctuates his remark.
Bexley blinks and replies, with a kind of a snort, “Obviously.”
Smoke fills her lungs. It is scent-heavy with pine, pumpkin—the smell of curling, ashy edges of parchment. In the wild air, there is howling laughter and wailing strings making music that hurts like a scythe. And underneath it a gauze of white noise, overlapping waves of conversation, hoofbeats on stone. All of Denocte is uproarious. They go dancing in their fine silks; the bright white lines of their grin flash in the darkness. She envies them for celebrating. And still she cannot understand it, how they turn such blind eyes to life’s cruelties.
Light glints off the stained windows and pools over the cobblestones. And like her own kind of ghost, Bexley stands removed from it all, silent in a side street, her eyes turned down to the gravestone and not the figure that stands just behind it. Her heart pounds against her teeth. Blood buzzes in her ears. With some effort, she manages to close her eyes against the urge to watch. Against the sparks, and the torchlight, and the temptation that groans insistently at the pulse points in her neck.
If I look, he’ll leave.
If he can hear her, there’s no way to tell. He says nothing. She’s not sure he can. At least not anything original. They had all said the same thing—the priests, the prophets, the kids with the carving knives: The veil between life and death is thin. He could have picked it up from any one of them. He could have used their voices, even. Bexley is not sure that she would notice. It’s hard to remember, now, what he’s supposed to sound like. Or what he is supposed to be like. Not kind and not unkind, not perfect nor awful, not alive but not quite dead.
He glances up at her. It could be mournful; she’s not looking.
Underneath the pale script of his name on the gravestone, there is nothing. No flowers. No fruits. Candles, just a few, and all of them have never been burned. (She blows a little puff of fire toward the wicks and watches as they go up in perfect yellow flames, spinning thin smoke toward the sky.) No paintings, no champagne, no paper-wrapped packages. Nausea rises in her stomach, entwined with icy, acrid fear; she grits her teeth, forcing a breath, and does not look, don’t look, If I look, he’ll leave.
Out of the corner of her eye she can still see him. Broad-shouldered, wide-grinned, ebbing in and out of real visibility. The pretty, roguish gleam of his eyes. If I look—
“I miss you,” Bexley says abruptly. The words stilted with embarrassment. Disembodied. Who's talking, even? He gives her (or at least she thinks he does) a sheepish, pitying kind of look. A soft I know kind of look. A self-satisfied sure you do kind of look. Her whole face twists in self-hatred at the impression of it. Bitterness is a knife that punctures the curl of her lip.
“Fine,” she snaps, “I don’t.” Like a taut string her body vibrates in anger, right down to the bone.
The altar is still empty. But what is there left to give that he does not have of her already?
Not their child, not her heart, not a life to trade; not a country to betray, not a scar to be tattooed. And far too late for a wedding band.
With all the carefulness in the world, and for the first time she can ever remember, Solterra’s golden girl unlocks the golden chain around her neck.
And when it hits the grave, it makes much less sound then she thought it would.
