You are a literal thing, girl-from-the-bottom-of-the-sea. Where is your poetry?
The kelpie turns Sereia’s head and silently she regards the woman who moves beside her. The boys struggle with their cart and the air is full of their laughter, their bravado. Sereia offers them nothing. She is too embroiled in the mystery of the woman before her.
Where is Sereia’s poetry?
How long is Sereia silent? How long does she mull Amaunet’s words over, listening to the way she laughs. That laughter, it matches her kelpie. The monster presses against her flesh, her bones. It puppets her body until the girl moves like the rippling ocean beneath the sunrise sky. There is a terrible thing dawning within Sereia, a hunger ravenous and soul deep.
Where is her poetry?
Such a question is enough to make her feel one-dimensional. It is as though she has no depth, but is that not the whole point of her. Sereia breathes her lips a sharpened line of cutting sorrow. “The poetic parts of me are the ones that do the most damage.” Such truth aches, it scolds her tongue as it takes flight into the air. “There is a creativity to broken bones and flesh and blood painted in red across the sand.” Sereia’s chin tips up, her forelock falling away, her too-wide smile illuminated by moonlight and lamplight. “My poetry I keep locked away. I live on other people’s poetry.”
Amaunet’s purr slides against her skin. It rumbles into her muscles, her bones. It stirs the violence of her kelpie. Violence. Ah, the promise of it seethes around the two girls. It dances slow and wicked through cedar smoke.
The boys turn towards them, enchanted, drunk. Sereia sees their too-heavy eyes, the way they smile and trip as if walking through treacle. Their bodies are no longer their own and slowly the kelpie turns her gaze from them to the woman beside her. “Just one secret will do,” the girl muses. She smiles at Amaunet’s threat. Her kelpie laughs at her purr. The sound of chains breaking rattle through Sereia’s body, her ribs ache for all the time they have spent containing her savage soul.
The air tastes too sweet, too delightful. The boy’s blood turns the air sweeter than honey. The kelpie watches them and knows how soft their skin will be. Little more than butter beneath the knife of her teeth. “What makes you think I still need water.” The girl rasps, battling her kelpie, resisting the cry of the ocean in her veins. “Sometimes the further I am from the water, the better.” Sereia breathes, her eyes pressing along the crimson line drawn across Amaunet’s face.
The boys edge closer, closer, the taste of their blood, the song of their pulses in their air is a delight to her kelpie. Sereia slows, even at Amaunet’s purr beckons her on. Slowly the girl tips her gaze to Amaunet. “What makes you think I need water, Amaunet? I am in need of a new ocean. No matter how black.”
Her eyes trail over the boys and then slowly back to Amaunet. “Enjoy your night.” Swiftly, before she can let the want of stories and the need for meat overwhelm her, Sereia turns back into the crowd. Falling away as if into the sea. She does not breathe again until she emerges from the crowd.
@Amaunet
an unspoken soliloquy of dreams
~ Ariana
