[P] my skeleton lies dormant

[Nicnevin]

WHAT IS DEAD AND WHAT WILL LIVE SHARE THE SAME BED.
tomb-cradle: another definition of Stigma.

I am left wondering, in the silence between my question and an answer: am I frightened? Should I be? I feel – I don’t feel like the shudder of branches when the wind runs through them. I do not feel like the mouse in a fox’s paws. I don’t feel like I am standing on a crumbling bridge, either, and falling with the buckling wood into the rapids below. If I had to describe it as anything, I would say that I feel like the moment before any of those things happen. I feel a bit like brittle branches, clinging desperately to their few, frail leaves. I feel like the mouse who suddenly shudders and looks over her shoulder, her black eyes growing by a fraction or two. Most of all, I feel like I am standing on a bridge, and I hear a creak that sounds unnatural.

I don’t know what she wants from me. (I don’t know what I want from her, but I am starting to think that I, in some barely-remembered way-)

Is there- she says, and stumbles over it in a way that, somehow, does not suit her; I do not feel like she should be an uncertain creature. (But maybe that makes her a bit more charming, a bit easier to grasp, a bit more less like some thing or force and a bit more like a girl who just happens to possess a blade between two red, red eyes.) I wonder why she is hesitating. I wonder more when she asks, Is there something I should want from you?

Two things come to mind immediately, when she says it: I’m not sure, and, more innately, more certainly, with a voice that is not Nicnevin’s but instead comes from someone else (perhaps the blade, though I do not think that it ever learned to speak but for the way it sung when it was swung, when it carved through bone), yes. I am not sure which one of the two is true, or right, but I do know which one is easier to get out of my mouth.

“I-“ My tongue catches over the words, and I am forced to admit, “I don’t know.” I don’t. I haven’t been able to guess at her intentions; she is somehow alien, a collection of familiar parts pieced together in unfamiliar ways. I am not quite sure what I make of that, yet. I am used to finding outsiders strange, but she is not quite strange in any way that I think an outsider should be. I am curious in ways that I am not sure that I should be, curious in ways that I am sure that the priestesses would scold me over. It is one thing to stumble into something by accident. It is quite another to look too deeply at something you shouldn’t, to apply pressure to a blackening bruise.

I find myself continuing, regardless. “When I saw you approach me – I thought that there was.”

Maybe it was the way that she was moving. The shift of her form, like a drip of blood, in the snow; the way she is like a wound, carving and carving, spreading and spreading. Maybe it was simply how close she came to me, the proximity of my skin to the tip of her horn, or maybe it was the red gleam of her eyes, which remind me, somehow, of what it felt like to decompose. Maybe it was the blade that I could not see at the time, but finally noticed, because it is tapping some halfway-familiar melody against the snow. (Maybe it has been singing all along, and I just didn’t recognize it.)

All I can say is that I saw her, and I thought-

---

@Isolt || <3 <3 <3 | preface of Stigmata, Cixous

"Speech!" 

@