She wonders what lives below the surface of him. Does he have the same insecurities she does? Does he wake up in the middle of the night thinking he might have heard the shadows crying? Does he find himself alone in the middle of a conversation? Does he think he sees something in the corner of his eye and scream because it looks so very real? Or is he something else entirely?
She realizes she has no real way of knowing, but, all the same, it makes her feel better to think they are the same.
So she does.
Elli wonders if he has ever tried watering them to make them grow, like her mother does her flowers. Still, she keeps such childish notions to herself, tucking them away where they cannot embarrass her.
She shakes her head in response to his question and then laughs, one petal of bellsong laughter, quiet. “It’s not sad.” she defends it. Her mom tells her that she prefers her daughter painting flowers, not ghosts inside her head. “But you can think it is sad if you want.”
Art, after all, is a prisoner to subjection, jailed inside its canvas. A slave to praise and critique.
Her lips pull into a more genuine smile that she lets grow when she tilts her head back to join him looking up at the sky he will one day take to. She wonders, a girlish wonder, if one day he could take her flying. Elliana wonders if she could fly, if she would still hear the voices from the all way up there. She forms the thought and swallows it, it sits light and airy in her stomach.
Wonders if it might be enough to make her fly here and now.
She cannot stay lost in her thoughts for too long, not with the way he is looking at her, like he is trying to hold her like a kite tether. Her eyes are a little wide, framed by dark lashes when she stares back at him in a way that is reserved for doe eyed children.
The grass comes back. But while she felt cold when it died, she felt nothing when it returned. She wonders if death is more tangible a thing than life. Little girls shouldn't be thinking such things.
“For now,” she confesses, a secret just between the two of them. And then the child ducks her head and whispers across the distance that separates them.
“But not forever.” She adds, just as quiet.
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