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.
When the unicorn speaks, her voice comes out as a paper-thin whisper, like the frailest gust of wind. (I remember being the wind. I was in the forest, and always soft, but never gentle – and her voice is not gentle.) They are lovely, she says, and I don’t know exactly what she is talking about. Her eyes are on me, but I do not think that she is looking at me; I think that she is looking behind me, right through me. I know, too, that unless the image in the mirror has changed, what lies behind me is my corpse, a dead Green Knight.
I keep trying to remember her name. It troubles me less than that I cannot remember the name of the one I served, but I still feel a distinct sense of loss when I try to grasp for it and come up empty.
There is a significant part of me that does not want to turn my back on the twisted coil of her horn, thin and crooked though it may be, but I do, regardless – I look over my shoulder, and I meet my own eyes again, which are nearly white. (I am sure that they would not have cooled so quickly; time seems to flow faster in the mirrors, or slower, or in ways that make no sense at all.) I see the curve of vines, and small weeds growing between my legs, yellow sprigs of jewelflowers splashed in blood. I see the barest silhouette of ancient trees, and fallen leaves, and red-gold grass, though much of it is upturned or flattened from battle. I see faint trails of smoke, perhaps the prickle of embers and ashes, but those are all at the edges of the image, only a suggestion that the fighting has continued beyond the image of my – her - corpse. I think that there might be something poetic to it, nearly voyeuristic, the way that my body seems nearly arranged, but, then, there is no guarantee that the mirrors show anything properly, much as I would like to go looking for the past in their fragmented reflections.
My head turns. I look back, slowly, at the unicorn – and into the red of her eyes. My head tilts, and, when I speak, there is no condemnation to my tone, only simple curiosity. “What’s lovely?” And then, rather abruptly, I add, “The – corpse?” It is the best guess that I have, or, perhaps, the only one, but what I can’t quite understand is what of the image is lovely.
Perhaps it is because I am missing something, or perhaps it is because she isn’t referring to the reflection at all, or perhaps it is because I am the dead thing in the mirror, but I can’t quite understand.
But maybe – I look at her, and I wonder if I can.
@Danaë || <3 || aline dolinh, "unbecoming extraterrestrial"
"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
