I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.
I am looking at my corpse from ten feet away.
It might be wrong to call the bloody body in the mirror “mine.” That is my last moment as her, but now I am Nicnevin – we are not quite the same, or not even enough of the same to make me turn my head when she took her last, ragged breaths around the blade caught between her ribs. I stare at it, caught somewhere between utterly detached and strangely curious. I had nearly forgotten the look of my own face, as her; I had certainly forgotten the green of my eyes, glossy and veiled in milk-sheen as they are in death. It only hurt a moment. It doesn’t hurt anymore.
I only remember this part of the story in fragments. I know, at some point, that my body will be found. (I do not know how it will be found; I do not know who will find it. I wonder if they will collapse to their knees, sobbing, or if they will look at my body like a stranger, with no expression on their face at all.) I know that it will be skinned, at least in parts, and I know that one of the rib-bones will be taken from me. (I do not know how I will be skinned. I do not know who will commit the careful deed of scraping away my fur, then the meat that keeps them from my bones. I do not know why they chose the rib. I do not know why they cut me up, though I know – I feel – that it was an honor.) And then I know that my oldest friend will carve me, press divots like vines and blooming flowers into the white canvas of my bone. Even this I only know from my reflection in other mirrors, his form slumped over me as he worked. A sword does not know what it looks like. It only knows what it means to cut.
I have seen myself as many things, as I have walked through this maze of mirrors. But – standing in the very center of a circle of jagged, toothy outgrowths of crystal, staring my dead body in the face – I finally freeze. I am not quite perplexed. I am not quite disturbed. (I accepted her death countless years ago.) Still, I don’t want to tear my eyes away from her. I don’t need closure, and I’m not upset about that life; I don’t even miss it. As I stare at her eyes, which are cooling and becoming less like eyes and more like glass marbles with each passing moment, however, I cannot help but think that this might be like what closure would have been.
(But, of course, there is no closure for your own deaths. No one is ever granted that.)
I only see the unicorn because of her emerging reflection, which is cast over my corpse – because of the thin red spire of her horn, which seems to catch in the light in the way that most dangerous things do. I turn in a flurry of chestnut hair to meet her, and I find that I don’t know what to say. I don’t know anything about this land; I don’t know what to say about my reflection, which is so different from Nicnevin. I don’t know what to say when I look at her eyes and find that they are red – in a different way from the one of mine. I settle for a soft, “Hello.”
My past life lingers behind me, curved like a pale, bloodied halo.
@Danaë || terribly excited to write w/ you again!!!
"Speech!"
EVERYTHING IS RISK, SHE WHISPERED.if you doubt, it becomes sand trickling through skeletal fingers.☙❧please tag Nic! contact is encouraged, short of violence
