like flowers
we can also choose to bloom
we can also choose to bloom
I
t is still hard for him to walk between the trees and not search for blood staining their trunks. He has to remind himself to relax the arch in his neck to something that does not make him look more wolf than horse, to not stare at the shadows in the distance like they’re a feast and he a starving man.Even when the beech trees lower their branches and sweep their blood-red leaves against his sides like a lover, still he stands there and thinks only of the bodies that had been stained the same color. And when they whisper against his skin it’s okay and you can rest now, he cannot bring himself to believe them. He only presses his cheek against a knotted, woody scar, and relives the cutting blow that had made it.
He has spent too long staring into the darkness he knows, he knows. The world outside seems too bright now compared to the forest, the sounds of laughter from the festival too loud when he has accustomed himself to the silence of death.
Ipomoea does not know how to stop hunting, how to return to the normalcy his court aches for.
He does not want to rest.
And he does not think he remembers how to. Not anymore.
He watches the firefly game from the safety of the trees. It makes him feel other somehow; like he has become the monster hiding in the shadows. But the flowers are there to press themselves against his ankles and remind him: they would not love him if he were. They are there to press their petals into his skin like memories, their touch reminding him that he once knew how to dance, and sing, and laugh while chasing fireflies. He’s still that same boy to the trees; their roots remember him, remember the feel of his hoofbeats over the earth from past festivals, and the sound of his voice lifting with the music.
It feels like an echo; or like another Ipomoea, standing in his skin, stepping into the lantern-light. Go, the flowers whisper. And he goes, stepping in the hoofprints a younger-him left all those years ago. He goes to the river, and this time it is not to seek forgiveness (there was none for him to seek).
He doesn’t recognize the music, but he dances along to it anyway because he used to know it, and he used to love it. He dances along to the music and each step is a prayer, each bob of his head an invitation, begging the fireflies to come near to him. A few do; he feels their wings brush like gossamer silk against his skin.
But most of them drift past him like he is not there at all, like they know he is only a ghost.
They drift past him and wrap themselves like a blanket around a unicorn’s horn, until she is the brightest thing standing in the river and all her reflection looks like is light. But beneath them all, beneath the magic and the music and the fireflies, she is only—
"You look like a shooting star," he whispers against her skin, when he goes to her. The water churns around his legs, pulling, always pulling, like it’s his turn for the baptism and it doesn’t know how to turn a sinner away. He closes his eyes, and lays his cheek against her shoulder.
"If I were to make a wish, do you think it would come true?"
His heart flickers like the fireflies.
@isra "speaks" <3
