The fox is orange and fragile and open upon the beach. It yields itself up to Anandi’s prying teeth. No longer is the air just salt-laden, but now full of metal and the sounds of worked meat.
Where one sister delights, the other shudders. Sereia breathes shallowly, cautiously. Studiously she does not look at the broken body at her feet, nor at her sister’s crimson smile. Anandi has always been beautiful. The fox blood on her lips makes her ever more so. Maybe it is only another kelpie who could appreciate such a sight. Even Sereia cannot deny how she is made to find beauty in the hunt, the kill, the blood. Yet it does not stop her rejecting such thoughts. She does so with every fibre of her being, the effort drawing from her energy day after day, moment after moment. It saps her until she has become too thin, too angular.
The sisters press together. Anandi smooth and rounded curves, full of health. Sereia, angular, pointed, her body ailing, her soul striving for something other. Her sister’s joy is feast enough in this moment. Reia smiles, presses herself into the silver of her sister’s skin. It is warm here, filled with childhood memories of sleeping together, playing together.
With her muzzle, Sereia bumps at her sister’s cheek, “It is beautiful.” The girl agrees with a smile, always too small, never letting the full length of her lips bear such a curve. She takes a breath, “Have you seen the Night Markets? They trade in all manner of items. Some from the bottom of the ocean and others from foreign places.” Now Sereia’s smile is growing. It creeps its way along her mouth, unstopped by sorrow. Her control slips as her joy pervades. “There are things worthy of fairytales there,” the kelpie laughs, low and small. Then, as Anandi reaches to lip at the shells and deep-sea trinkets woven into her mane, Sereia sighs contentedly, “Do you remember the stories we used to make for all the trinkets we used to find in the shipwrecks?”
They were an escape, each and every tale that fell from her lips. It was easier to imagine herself embroiled in a fantasy than to remember reality of hunger, the pain of wanting meat and the grief, the guilt, that accompanied such desire.
Ah. Sereia’s smile falls away like ice into the sea as her sister offers her catch. The shadows stretch and darken upon her mouth and she looks to her sister with regret. Anandi knows, she knows. Yet was this not a broken tune of her childhood? Always they hoped she might relent and join their feast of blood and flesh. “No, Andi.” Sereia chides, sad, disappointed. She does not even lower her gaze to the poor, spilled fox.
Her kelpie’s chains run along her ribs like a stick along railings. Anandi has seen her sister’s kelpie, she knows the savagery that Sereia keeps locked away, chained. “You know what happens when I eat meat.” She takes a breath, it is full of blood and sweat and salt. The girl shivers, “Besides, I had a carrot and an apple on my way here.”
And she smiles a small, shallow smile. Beneath its thin guise is a kelpie’s scream. Can anandi hear the sound of rebellion within her sister’s ribs? It is the clank of chains as a prisoner riots.
@
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
