in the end, everyone is aware of this:
nobody keeps any of what he is
and life is only a borrowing of bones.
✧
T
he party already feels disjointed; nearly drunken. Perhaps it is the music, or the thunder of voices, or the dancing of the flashy patrons. I cannot decide why when I glance at the young unicorn, there is at first one, and then the rising voice of another. You should not tempt death so.
If only death and killing were so poetic. If only it were so easy as slipping a blade or horn gently through flesh and bone. Sometimes, it is. Sometimes, it slices the same way music does through the air—the music does not sound like any one thing—sometimes, it is as simple as breath tiredly leaving the lungs, a hat hung up at the door, a goodbye without words.
Sometimes.
But not usually.
Death is blood that pools, congeals. Death is screams that rattle in blood-soaked lungs. Death is the glamour of the battlefield; but mostly it is the silence that lasts so long after. It is ravens at the corpse of those you once loved.
It is not unicorn girls marked with the color of wine, despite the way they make my skin crawl.
It is too many different notes woven together to sound like anything but life. Can you hear it?
She is too young to to be saying something so profound; but the depth in her is the same depth I have seen in the haunted trees, the trees that have bore witness to the suffering of men. I do not trust her uncanny eyes; and I trust her sister’s even less, when she arrives with her comment whetted like a blade against stone.
They do not frighten me.
They do not frighten me, because death is not a ghostly child in the life I have lived.
And so I answer: “No. I can’t.”
It does not sound like life, to me, but pandemonium. Even chaos has always had some semblance of order, some rising discordant symphony. It sounds like too many things rising for attention, clamoring for it, screaming for it. The violin shrieks. The flute screams.
I nearly turn away then, less interested in them together than the first had intrigued me. Instead, I glance at the wine-red girl, her voice having been a snarl, her horn still held so close to my skin. I drop my head and spin on a heel, letting one of my onyx horns tap, tap, tap against her spiraled one. It says what I do not.
Perhaps you shouldn’t test me, so.
But then I smile.
And that, too, is a wolfish thing.
