PUT ANOTHER WAY, I WAS ALMOST
on empty, and though no one / believed it or cared to see, I was just another / animal, and like all animals / desired, we would suffer.
Ereshkigal is like a stain of ash against the snow.
She watches her from a distance, dismal and listless. It isn’t late enough in the day, she thinks, to know if this will be a good one or a bad one. Lately, they have all been bad, pointless cycles of waxing and waning; and always waxing at the sides and waning somewhere inside. She gnaws at herself. She eats herself alive. She feels like she is always hungry, lately – and sometimes she isn’t sure that it is just the result of the twin pair of lives growing inside of her.
(She is too afraid to admit to being hungry to think too deeply about what that means.)
The vulture-demon is hunting something in the snow. White rabbits, she thinks, or a fox. Her laughter resounds in the back of her mind like the echo of thunder, and, when she hears it, she knows that she has found her query. She turns away before the great, dark bird swoops down and catches the unfortunate creature in her talons, though she knows what comes next; a stain of red on white, and a horrible crunching. Seraphina is familiar with violence, though she has never been comfortable with it. Lately, even Ereshkigal’s simple act of devouring has been enough to twist her stomach into knots.
(“You’re softening,” the demon hisses, her voice high-pitched with disapproval. “It will be no good for them.” But she doesn’t feel soft – she feels harder than usual, and colder, and more distant, like she is stumbling further out of reach each passing day. Maybe she is softening; maybe all of the things that could not matter to her before are now bearing down on her shoulders like an impossible load, and she is crumbling like a pillar of salt beneath their terrible weight.)
She does not want to be seen, lately. Every set of eyes that see her feel like they are taking her apart, make her skin burn with shame; and she knows that no stranger on the street would care, but she always wants to explain. (Perhaps it is because she can barely understand what is happening to her herself, beyond that – she thinks that she is falling apart or collapsing in on herself, and she isn’t sure which.) When her eyes catch on the dark form of a young stranger in the snow, she nearly turns back the way that she came and avoids him entirely. She nearly subjects herself to the sight of Ereshkigal pulling some poor thing’s corpse apart, rather than subjecting herself to any interaction with a stranger.
But, instead – she moves forward like a shadow, half-braided white hair trailing after her like the snow. Perhaps it is because there is a certain melancholy to him, a placelessness about the way that he pulls himself from the grove of trees, the way his breath trails in the air, the way he shakes the snow from his coat almost-tiredly. She can’t say for sure, but, though she keeps her distance from him, she calls out with a soft, “Hello.”
(There is more that she should say, she is sure - are you out here alone? or are you lost? But she cannot decide what to say, of course, so she says nothing at all. She is sure that she used to have – some scraps of eloquence, at least in public. Nowadays she feels like she trembles whenever she opens her mouth.)
@
"Speech!" || "Ereshkigal!"
I'M IN A ROOM MADE OUT OF MIRRORSand there's no way to escape the violence of a girl against herself.☼please tag Sera! contact is encouraged, short of violence
