☼ RUTH OF HOUSE IESHAN ☼רות
"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."
"The mouth was open / stretched wide in a call or howl / (there was no tongue) / of agony, ultimate / command or simple famine. / The canine teeth ranged back / into the throat and vanished. / The mouth was filled with darkness. / The darkness in the open mouth / uttered itself, pushing / aside the light."
She looks away from me, when I ask my question – when we walk into her bedroom. The room is, mostly, neat. The curtains are pulled, but Miriam has left the windows open, and an uncharacteristically cold winter breeze has chilled the entire chamber; I’m sure that it is several degrees colder than the hallway. Books are piled up on the floor, candles burnt down to the wicks, her bed an organized mess.
She leans back against the door with a creak. Fine, she says, and then she adds, …tired. Ostensibly, she is telling the truth. It isn’t quite the answer to my question, though. How’re you? The hospital? What have you been working on?
I don’t have to think much about the answer. (I swear that it is the only thing that anyone but Ishak knows to ask me about, anymore.)
“I’m the same as usual, I think,” I say, softly. I shouldn’t be. I know that I shouldn’t be, and it needles me most days – not that I feel different, in the wake of two dead parents and one dead sister and one dying brother, but that I don’t. “My hours have been longer than usual, lately. We’ve lost a few doctors. I know that someone was here from Dusk, a little while ago, but I think that she’s left.” Solterra does not prize her medics in the same way she does her warriors; or maybe it is better to say that she raises far fewer doctors than she does soldiers, more people to cause the wound than to heal them. “I’ve had a patient in with some sort of wasting syndrome, recently – I’m still trying to pinpoint the cause. There was someone in this morning who lost a limb in a teryr attack; he survived it, but I had to amputate-“ I decide to spare her the gory details. “-ah. Ishak and I made it up to Veneror, recently, and to the island…it was covered in strange shards. Like mirrors.”
It doesn’t take me long to run out of things to say. I wonder-
I wonder, sometimes, how to make Miriam better. How to make all of us better. It isn’t because I care. (I can’t.) If I had to explain why it matters to me, it is because it is a problem to be solved, and I have always been motivated by solving things, by unraveling them. Ishak says that he can never decide if it is one of my better or worse qualities, but that it is certainly a troublesome one.
Two dead parents. One dead sister. One dying brother. I can’t bring back the dead; that is one thing that I cannot fix. But Adonai…
Adonai’s corpse-like presence lingers in the back of my mind like a knot of thorn. I don’t know if I could fix him – I don’t know if he wants me to so much as look at him. (I have never been close to any of my brothers.) Still. If he were better, I cannot help but think that we would all be better for it.
He’s been hard to find, lately; receding. I suppose that I could ask Pilate about him, but, for a myriad of reasons, I don’t want to. I’d rather ask Miriam.
Miriam is Adonai’s twin. I have no twin to call my own, though I’ve never particularly wanted for one; I am closest in birth, I think, to Corradh (Hagar and Pilate are more similar in age, but, then, they have each other), but he is younger than me by a measure of years, and, with his carnivore teeth and taste for violence, just as unlike me as all the others. My other closest sibling is Delilah, and it troubles me. I am sure that we seem entirely unlike each other, as different as a beautiful spring day and cloud-covered night. She is a speck of bright-burning fire, and I am as dull as ash. Still. Sometimes I think that I understand her better than anyone else in my family. I am never sure that I want to.
(In truth: I am sure that I have never been close to any of them but Miriam. I love all of the others, of course, but sometimes I find myself wondering if I only love them because I know that I am supposed to.)
“Do you think…” I consider, “…that I should ask Adonai if I could examine him? Do you think that he would agree to it?”
There are some things too tender to touch. (I have a habit of touching them anyways.)
@Miriam || <3 || atwood, "projected slide of an unknown soldier"
She leans back against the door with a creak. Fine, she says, and then she adds, …tired. Ostensibly, she is telling the truth. It isn’t quite the answer to my question, though. How’re you? The hospital? What have you been working on?
I don’t have to think much about the answer. (I swear that it is the only thing that anyone but Ishak knows to ask me about, anymore.)
“I’m the same as usual, I think,” I say, softly. I shouldn’t be. I know that I shouldn’t be, and it needles me most days – not that I feel different, in the wake of two dead parents and one dead sister and one dying brother, but that I don’t. “My hours have been longer than usual, lately. We’ve lost a few doctors. I know that someone was here from Dusk, a little while ago, but I think that she’s left.” Solterra does not prize her medics in the same way she does her warriors; or maybe it is better to say that she raises far fewer doctors than she does soldiers, more people to cause the wound than to heal them. “I’ve had a patient in with some sort of wasting syndrome, recently – I’m still trying to pinpoint the cause. There was someone in this morning who lost a limb in a teryr attack; he survived it, but I had to amputate-“ I decide to spare her the gory details. “-ah. Ishak and I made it up to Veneror, recently, and to the island…it was covered in strange shards. Like mirrors.”
It doesn’t take me long to run out of things to say. I wonder-
I wonder, sometimes, how to make Miriam better. How to make all of us better. It isn’t because I care. (I can’t.) If I had to explain why it matters to me, it is because it is a problem to be solved, and I have always been motivated by solving things, by unraveling them. Ishak says that he can never decide if it is one of my better or worse qualities, but that it is certainly a troublesome one.
Two dead parents. One dead sister. One dying brother. I can’t bring back the dead; that is one thing that I cannot fix. But Adonai…
Adonai’s corpse-like presence lingers in the back of my mind like a knot of thorn. I don’t know if I could fix him – I don’t know if he wants me to so much as look at him. (I have never been close to any of my brothers.) Still. If he were better, I cannot help but think that we would all be better for it.
He’s been hard to find, lately; receding. I suppose that I could ask Pilate about him, but, for a myriad of reasons, I don’t want to. I’d rather ask Miriam.
Miriam is Adonai’s twin. I have no twin to call my own, though I’ve never particularly wanted for one; I am closest in birth, I think, to Corradh (Hagar and Pilate are more similar in age, but, then, they have each other), but he is younger than me by a measure of years, and, with his carnivore teeth and taste for violence, just as unlike me as all the others. My other closest sibling is Delilah, and it troubles me. I am sure that we seem entirely unlike each other, as different as a beautiful spring day and cloud-covered night. She is a speck of bright-burning fire, and I am as dull as ash. Still. Sometimes I think that I understand her better than anyone else in my family. I am never sure that I want to.
(In truth: I am sure that I have never been close to any of them but Miriam. I love all of the others, of course, but sometimes I find myself wondering if I only love them because I know that I am supposed to.)
“Do you think…” I consider, “…that I should ask Adonai if I could examine him? Do you think that he would agree to it?”
There are some things too tender to touch. (I have a habit of touching them anyways.)
@
HE FEEDS ME RED MEAT / HE WATCHES THE BLOOD POOL IN MY MOUTHlaughs at my red teeth❂please tag Ruth! contact is encouraged, short of violence
