[AW] the changeling [fire]

[Diana]

NOW, SMITTEN WITH THE CRISIS
of a love who hates her own reflection, / my obsession won't rest.

In my dreams, my mother is braiding my hair and singing me a story about a girl who is cursed.

Mirrors are too scared to show her reflection. They always crack when she passes, a spiderweb of impact-wound arching away from the imprint of her face. When she drinks from a well, it goes dry in a week, and, when she plucks dates and sweet pears, the crops all fall fallow and worm-ridden in her wake. She travels from town to town with her family, trailed by swarms of locusts and sudden flash floods, and it’s a wonder that all of them survive her. It’s a wonder, probably, that anyone does.

Her father, who always loved her the least of any of his daughters because she was so troublesome, engages her to a desert rattlesnake, in spite of her protests, and it tries to devour her on their wedding night; but the girl peels off skin after skin after skin, scale after scale after scale, and, when she has pulled off every single one of the snake’s false skins, she reveals that the creature in snakeskin is no snake at all. He thrashes in her grasp, wild-eyed and miserable, desert wind in a cage, god of many faces – she holds him still as a hawk, and a gust of wind, and a thousand-eyed dragon, and a half-formed teryr, and a cactus mid-flower, and one of the waterfalls that feed into the Oasis. He bites her and bleeds her and nearly sneaks out of her grasp time and time again, but she holds him fast, and, for the briefest moment, when the two of them are almost the same – or as close as they can be to it -, she leans forward and kisses him. (Mother doesn’t say it, but, in my mind, she bites his lips when she does; what kind of cursed girl could do otherwise?) After that, he settles, tamed as much as any shape-shifting serpent can be, and she settles a bit, too, because a cursed creature like that would never much hate her for being cursed, too.

They’re still out there, somewhere. Mother says that he made her like him, when she died, and now they skip across the dunes as gusts of wind at night, that you can see them in every little thing lost to the sands; that every time a peach goes rotten before it’s due or you find the shards of a mirror half-buried in the dunes and the rains come a few weeks earlier than expected, it’s because they’re passing through.

(If it’s true, I might know it, but I’m not telling.)

I know my mother too well to think that she believes in things like a true love’s kiss or happy endings, or – if she does, she only believes in them for Ambrose and I, and, even then, only halfway, half-hearted. What I think that she is trying to impress is technically persistence.

(What I think that she is trying to impress is that even strange girls, half-cursed or god-touched, can find their way in the world, their own little enclave where they will no longer be strange or cursed at all.)

--

This place wants to hurt me.

If I stray too close to the fire, I know that it will bite my heels like a hungry jackal. If I stray too close to the trees, I know that their roots will find every way that they can to trip me, short of reaching up out of the ground to wrap my ankles and pull me down themselves. The air smells sweet, and I don’t know what to do with the crowds. All I know is that the pulse of the landscape, the multi-colored smoke, even the soft blades of grass pressed gentle and green to my heels – all of them want to make a skeleton of me.

I’ve strayed too far from home again. Mother won’t be happy, when she catches me.

There are more people here than I have ever seen before in my life. Veritable swarms of them, swaying in the field like a vast carpet of multicolored waves. I linger near their edges, cagey, my heart throbbing against the edges of my ribcage. I do not know what it means to feel like you are being stalked by anything; most desert-born girls know the familiar prickle on the back of their neck that tells them they have crept too close to a sandwyrm, or that a teryr is watching them from above, or they know that, when they hear the mourn-whisper sound of jackals in the distance at night, they are in an intimate danger. I’ve never felt anything quite like that. Still. If I had to compare it to anything, the feeling that creeps my spine as I skirt the edges of the crowd is something like that.

I don’t know what to make of anything here. Fire-races and newborn seeds, shed-stars with broken eggshells, paints and jewels of colors that are nearly impossible in a desert, ones I only learned by watching passing merchants from a distance, crouched like a ghost in the shade of rocky outcroppings. I want to look at everything, and I want to run from it. The sweet-smoke air – colder than I am accustomed to by measures - is catching in my lungs whenever I breathe it in.

I settle by the paints, finally, half-entranced by their bright coloration and all the people painting designs on each other – friends and lovers, perhaps even strangers. But I am not like them. I look painted already, or carved, a thing made of stone-

And if I were to settle my eyes closed, if I were to hold my breath and stay silent in the growing shadows of the treeline, if I were to be perfectly silent, I am sure that I could make myself an unfitting part of the landscape, rather than anything like a girl at all.

(But a statue wouldn’t keep looking hesitantly towards those forbidden jars of paint; a statue wouldn’t tilt her lips just so, and a statue’s eyes wouldn’t gleam with something that is half-longing and half-fear and very nearly envy.)

---

for anyone || <3 || atwood, "fox/fire song" 

"Speech!"

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