ISOLT
All those dead things in the ground, all those bones and half-rotten bodies buried in unmarked graves. The field mice caught and left by the barn cats, the sick fox that crawled into its den to die, the unnamed man buried six feet deep in the garden. All of them groaning, turning over in their sleep when I pass by them.
I can hear them.
If it were not for the whispering earth, the garden might have been silent tonight. Isolt might still have been still been sleeping, tangled up leg to leg with her sister, with the hollow curls of their blood-red horns locked tightly together. But in the black night when the moon disappears over the sea, she comes awake with a sigh.
At first she hears only the creak of the winter-bare trees overhead, wringing their branches together like hands and turning restlessly. She lies there and she listens, while they groan and shiver and tap, tap, tap against each other’s trunks like a song without words. The sound of it makes her teeth begin to ache, makes the frost in the air begin to taste like iron and blood. And it is only in the silence filling the spaces between the trees that she thinks to wonder at the way they move when there is no wind to guide them.
She turns and drags the curl of her horn down her sister’s neck like a prayer whispered on the lips of a sinner.
Come awake, she prays with each line she draws into Danaë’s skin. Come awake with me. And she does not stop twisting until she feels that other body begin to stir, until the heart beating just below the surface speeds up as if to say yes, yes, I’m here, yes. Her lips trace the path her horn had cut almost-tenderly, the only apology she’ll ever know how to form. But it doesn't stop the way the bones in the earth are grinding, and the way the bones in her body are snarling.
There is no wonder or joy in her voice when she speaks, only the bottomless pit of her hunger coming awake in the night. “I can’t sleep.” She presses the words into her sister’s skin, presses them hard enough that she might feel the way her teeth are aching for something to sink into.
She breathes in slowly, holds the taste of the young winter night on her tongue. In it she can feel the snow in the air, the rot waiting for her just below the half-frozen earth. It sings to her, for her, makes her lungs tremble like a flower trapped somewhere between rotting and rooting. And it is the song that makes her decide she can’t go back to sleep, not now, not when the dead things have already been sleeping for far too long.
“Let’s go.”
And when she moves, when Isolt untwists their bodies grown together like roots and takes off down the narrow garden path like something wild and furious and unleashed — she does not even notice the way the dry leaves crumble to dust beneath her hooves. She only thinks that the bones and the dead things are quieter when she runs, when her blood is rushing in her ears and drowning out the groans of the earth.
And as she runs, death runs with her in all the places where her hooves cut edges into the soil, spreading black and brittle like disease.
@danaë ❁ I am so ready.
"wilting // blooming"
"wilting // blooming"
