[P] trees become ghosts

[Nicnevin]

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.

If I look over my shoulder at the mirrors behind me, I can see things that shouldn’t exist. A ribcage sprouting out from the ground, growing skin; a starling with its face half-burnt off, one wing a skeleton, which flits about in the branches of some gnarled and only vaguely familiar tree. I decide to look at the girl instead. She isn’t much more natural, somehow, and there is something about her just as dark and strange, but she is decidedly prettier, with all her stark whites and bloody reds.

Will you let me know, she asks, when you discover which? It is a perfectly innocent question, and almost a childish one (and we are both children, aren’t we? But not at all in spirit, I think, not at all), but it is spoken with none of the cadence of innocence. Still, I don’t deny her; I don’t even want to, because I’d like to know the answer to her question as much as she does.

(As much as I insist that this lifetime is a renewal, and I am not the same as any of my other lifetimes, I have always struggled to let the first one go.)

I look her in the eyes, as she lifts her cheek from the mirror. “I will,” I say, softly, “if you tell me how to find you again.” She seems to me like a wisp, or some other strange forest creature that I might find in the depths of the Gold – the sort that was not quite alive in the same way that you were, the ones that might lead you astray if you let them. Still, I have never been one for caution, even before I knew that death was impermanent, and-

I’m curious about her, somehow.

Her lips curve up and into a smile that is not a smile at all; it reminds me of what I know of lightning strikes, or the ashen black burn that comes after them. She comes closer, closer again, and although I know that I should – one look at the coiled spire of her horn would tell me as much -, I do not step away from her, not even as she asks me if I ever wondered what happened to the starlings, when they burned.

Her question gives me pause, for a moment. The starlings burned; I know as much. Several centuries passed before I could give much thought to the concept, and, by then, I don’t think that anything was left of them, even their bones, or the residue of the grove that they used to inhabit.

“I don’t know,” I admit, almost reluctantly. “When the starlings died, I – died too, and then I couldn’t think about them anymore.” I’d been a sword in my second lifetime, after all, and swords did not care about starlings, or groves, or fires, or life, or death, or what came next; the only thing that a sword was good for was cutting.

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@Danaë || <3 || aline dolinh, "unbecoming extraterrestrial" 
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