MINYA
take that look from off your face
you ain't gunna burn my heart out
you ain't gunna burn my heart out
The voice cries, a wail that slips like an ache through the night. Minya feels it, deep in the scars of her heart. Each cicatrix stings as if it is a fresh wound still. There are nights, like this, when time seems to be no healer. There are nights like this when her scars cry blood as if freshly cut. She feels that way it pours from her in a grief she cannot stop.
It is easy for her to dance, it is easy to lose herself in music and never look at the girl in the mirror. It is easy to live each day with her soul numb and her lips the most wicked thing about her. She pushes and pushes and pushes everyone away. Is it not safer to defend your heart with vicious words than to smile that to let one in and feel their touch upon the ragged flesh of your brokenness?
Minya had followed that night shattering cry into the woods. Its hurt was a ghost of her own. It sounded like a small slave girl crying over the death of her mother, wracked with the guilt of her death. But it was not, Minya knew this, even as she had stepped into the woodland. That child, that girl with fuschia hair and a smile soft as petals across her face, was gone. From her ashes grew a serpent girl with a cage of iron about her heart.
This is a night of monsters and ghouls. Now the woman’s cries are met with a myriad others. Ones who reach across the boundary of earth and life as if it were merely cobweb thin. They move with their agonies and in their faces she sees the scars of her heart and Minya trails them. She drifts like flotsam upon the River Styx, floating from one forlorn ghost up to the next.
Her lips are not a serpent’s line. Nor are they tiwsted in cruel ways… but they are pressed with heavy sorrow and a desperate grief that beats against her breastbone caged and as frantic as a starling. As she looks into the sightless eyes and barely-there faces of the silver wraiths of those now dead, her breath catches and holds and waits for her to sigh out both relieved and yet more desperate.
Each night she comes to this maze, each night she feels the throb of potential in her veins - as thick as oil and blissful as hope. Minya watches each and wonders if her mother might show, if the woman looks for the daughter who stole her life. And each night Minya wonders what apologies she will repeat like a litany of repentence. Each night she wonders what her mother might look like. Each night she wonders how she might feel, for already she has forgotten the touch of her mother beneath her lips, her touch…
So she moves, beneath the gold of lamplights and through the maze of creeping corn that reaches forlornly for her. They limns her silver skin in liquid gold as she passes beneath their light. She trrembles in the spaces between, where the dark of midnight falls like a cloak about her shoulders - thin and cool as the fraying cobweb veil between worlds.
But Minya has strayed too deep into the beckoning dark of the maze. She has let it tangle itself in her antlers, leaves and twigs and thorns hanging like wicked totems from each tine. Above her the stars blink, watchful, and she wonders what they see up there as she drifts deeper into the dark. Soon cobwebs hang in gossamer silk from her skin. They glitter like dew, and are more wonderful than the silk she adorns herself within.
The maze here feels old, its skin as thin as tissue. Moonlight dapples across the silver iron of her skin and turns her liquid and as pale as the phantom’s who wander was if waiting for their loved ones to visit them and remember. Only Minya’s shock of bright pink hair is enough to remind those with living eyes that she too is alive. Still. Still breathing. Still aching. Still dancing her agony out. Still dealing her own hurt out to others with a viper’s tongue.
How long does she wander this night? How deep does she go?
She goes until her cheeks are wet with the dew of moonlight tears, warm with loss and sorrow. She wanders and looks and never finds the ghost of her mother. She turns from dead ends that whisper, not here, not here in her ears and then she turns and looks elsewhere in the night that sings of sorrow and unearthly wakefulness.
Slowly she closes her eyes, extinguishing their silver light like a lamp int he breeze. Within the dark of her, where bitterness and sorrow reigns and the light of hope is a wicked thing, she whispers and prayer with the fervour of a girl upon her knees, her prayers a desperate bruise within her throat.
And as the maze sighs with sudden life - with the presence of thees living who brush their corporeal body past bowing corn - Minya sees a sudden spark of light in the black of her. Her eyes fly open and her heart ascends like a dove. She turns, keen and desperate, with eyes wide with hope and wonder, mother… Mother! The word presses itself up to her lips and begs to be spoken and her lips part and her breath draws in to give it voice and…
… it is not her mother.
And deep is the dark that falls upon a foolish girl’s hope.
@Orestes | "speaks" | notes: <3
