THE MOON ROLLING IN HER / MOUTH, BURNING AWAY THE BLACKNESS. / COCOA EYES HALF-CLOSED. LIPS / PARTED. A SONG BUILDS IT BODY / WITHIN HER, A PSALM / NOT EVEN THE SNOW CAN SAY.
☼
I think that I know, even before he pauses, that he will not know how to answer my clumsy question. I think that I can guess it from the way that he stumbles to a halt behind me; but I give him the time that he needs, and I study his features while he thinks of his response. The faint grin that pulls at the edges of his mouth when I call him a little falcon. The furrow of his brow. Uncertainty, perhaps a bit of embarrassment-
I spend most of my days with Mother and Ambrose and Ereshkigal for company; I have not met many other people before, up-close. I still haven’t decided what I think of him, but that he can dance properly, and that is admirable enough to make me dedicate careful examination to memorizing the shape of his face, the curve of his ears, the way that his snowy-white hair falls between his grey eyes.
A chimera.
My lips hook up like the blade of a sickle, only half-amused. A chimera. I suppose that makes two of us – but I wear mine more obviously, more inescapably, in the canvas of mismatched obsidian and marble that compose my skin. (Sometimes, I look at my reflection, and I nearly feel like all the gold is there to keep me together.) I don’t say a word to his admission, only smile that harsh-edged smile, and I try to decide what parts of him are chimera.
(Maybe, I think, it is in the way that I felt him shift – again. The way that he was dancing with me like a falcon, like he should, and the way that now he is like this, awkward and lanky and halfway-ashamed. A boy, not a bird. Maybe he’s caught between them. I can understand that more than I would ever admit.)
(Here’s a secret: sometimes I want to be a girl, just a girl, so bad that it burns.)
His eyes trip over me, clumsy and uncertain. He can’t seem to look at me straight; and I, like any good carnivore, can’t quite bring myself to look away, even or especially at his obvious discomfort. He tells me an anecdote about his father. (I do not think about how I have no father of my own, though I struggle to think of where I should settle the story inside of my chest. There is only Mother, and then there is Solis, the perpetual absentee, and neither of them are a father to me, but I think that a father, surely, would be a different presence than Mother, even if she is unfeminine – almost unwoman - in most every conceivable way.) That he was marked with gold, too, but he chose it – he had it done to him. It was to keep his Soul in. And then he backtracks, stammering over him own words, voice half a stutter. I do not mean to say that happened to you—no, you seem all Soul.
All Soul. Perhaps that is what makes me speak, the idea that I could be all Soul, not all-
“I wear,” I say, very slowly, “my mother’s scars. She was nearly struck down, once, and the woman who saved her filled in her wounds with gold. They’re too bright, almost. She can’t forget them.” And then my head inclines, almost jackal-like, certainly not with the face or the eyes or the mouth of a girl. “I think that it is not so different.” I know that my mother hates those scars. She has plenty of them, but the ones on her cheek – those are the worst. Every time she looks at her own face, I think that she sees them over again, and she remembers how she was given them. Still. I would rather think of the gold that veins my body as hers than I would consider it some extension of Solis. If it were, if it were-
(I might be golden all the way through. Not just on the edges.)
(There is something palpable in the air between us. A sort of crackling. It is there and gone before I can catch it, but it does make my ears twitch upright and my eyes narrow by fractions, though only for a second. There is something half-familiar to it, almost a pull, almost a pressure-)
He turns my question back on my unwilling ears, though his voice is softer, quieter, in all ways and manners less certain. I should have expected it, but I still have to consider my answer. The truth of the matter is that, most days, I am not entirely sure what I am. I know that I was created, not quite born. I know that girls should not bleed gold or cry gold, and I know that they should not dance with sandwyrms and sleep with rattlesnakes. I know that the sun god has impressed himself into every little piece of me like a brand, that there is always something building inside of me like a swell, moving towards a fever pitch; that I should not be able to sing to the cadence of the wind.
The most honest way of putting it is probably: a broken-off chip of sun.
But – the boy doesn’t know me, not yet. He doesn’t know what Mother knows, and what Ereshkigal knows, and what Ambrose knows, and what every other creature in this desert – and the desert itself – knows, innately. He doesn’t know all the ways that I was carved where a proper girl would have been conceived. He doesn’t know that I wake up at night, sometimes, an antsy jerk in my legs and something wild in my eyes, sure that I have a bit of sunlight stuck in my chest where most girls have a heart. He doesn’t know any of that, and, because he doesn’t-
“A bit of desert wind,” I say, and I mostly mean it. I mean it. I mean it – in all of the ways that the desert wind is free and unbending, in all the ways that it dances across the dunes. This is when I pause, returning to my study of his features, and I say, almost unthinkingly, almost absently, "Maybe you need to be the wind, too."
Because no one else has danced with me, but he did. Because he is better as a falcon than a boy. (Because, though I would not admit it, I am chimera, too; and that small similarity is enough to make me like him more than I normally like people who are not Mother, or Ambrose, or Ereshkigal.)
@Aeneas || <3 || "girl dances like a sufi in a lit field as someone off-camera blows bubbles," jeremy radin
Speech
☼
I think that I know, even before he pauses, that he will not know how to answer my clumsy question. I think that I can guess it from the way that he stumbles to a halt behind me; but I give him the time that he needs, and I study his features while he thinks of his response. The faint grin that pulls at the edges of his mouth when I call him a little falcon. The furrow of his brow. Uncertainty, perhaps a bit of embarrassment-
I spend most of my days with Mother and Ambrose and Ereshkigal for company; I have not met many other people before, up-close. I still haven’t decided what I think of him, but that he can dance properly, and that is admirable enough to make me dedicate careful examination to memorizing the shape of his face, the curve of his ears, the way that his snowy-white hair falls between his grey eyes.
A chimera.
My lips hook up like the blade of a sickle, only half-amused. A chimera. I suppose that makes two of us – but I wear mine more obviously, more inescapably, in the canvas of mismatched obsidian and marble that compose my skin. (Sometimes, I look at my reflection, and I nearly feel like all the gold is there to keep me together.) I don’t say a word to his admission, only smile that harsh-edged smile, and I try to decide what parts of him are chimera.
(Maybe, I think, it is in the way that I felt him shift – again. The way that he was dancing with me like a falcon, like he should, and the way that now he is like this, awkward and lanky and halfway-ashamed. A boy, not a bird. Maybe he’s caught between them. I can understand that more than I would ever admit.)
(Here’s a secret: sometimes I want to be a girl, just a girl, so bad that it burns.)
His eyes trip over me, clumsy and uncertain. He can’t seem to look at me straight; and I, like any good carnivore, can’t quite bring myself to look away, even or especially at his obvious discomfort. He tells me an anecdote about his father. (I do not think about how I have no father of my own, though I struggle to think of where I should settle the story inside of my chest. There is only Mother, and then there is Solis, the perpetual absentee, and neither of them are a father to me, but I think that a father, surely, would be a different presence than Mother, even if she is unfeminine – almost unwoman - in most every conceivable way.) That he was marked with gold, too, but he chose it – he had it done to him. It was to keep his Soul in. And then he backtracks, stammering over him own words, voice half a stutter. I do not mean to say that happened to you—no, you seem all Soul.
All Soul. Perhaps that is what makes me speak, the idea that I could be all Soul, not all-
“I wear,” I say, very slowly, “my mother’s scars. She was nearly struck down, once, and the woman who saved her filled in her wounds with gold. They’re too bright, almost. She can’t forget them.” And then my head inclines, almost jackal-like, certainly not with the face or the eyes or the mouth of a girl. “I think that it is not so different.” I know that my mother hates those scars. She has plenty of them, but the ones on her cheek – those are the worst. Every time she looks at her own face, I think that she sees them over again, and she remembers how she was given them. Still. I would rather think of the gold that veins my body as hers than I would consider it some extension of Solis. If it were, if it were-
(I might be golden all the way through. Not just on the edges.)
(There is something palpable in the air between us. A sort of crackling. It is there and gone before I can catch it, but it does make my ears twitch upright and my eyes narrow by fractions, though only for a second. There is something half-familiar to it, almost a pull, almost a pressure-)
He turns my question back on my unwilling ears, though his voice is softer, quieter, in all ways and manners less certain. I should have expected it, but I still have to consider my answer. The truth of the matter is that, most days, I am not entirely sure what I am. I know that I was created, not quite born. I know that girls should not bleed gold or cry gold, and I know that they should not dance with sandwyrms and sleep with rattlesnakes. I know that the sun god has impressed himself into every little piece of me like a brand, that there is always something building inside of me like a swell, moving towards a fever pitch; that I should not be able to sing to the cadence of the wind.
The most honest way of putting it is probably: a broken-off chip of sun.
But – the boy doesn’t know me, not yet. He doesn’t know what Mother knows, and what Ereshkigal knows, and what Ambrose knows, and what every other creature in this desert – and the desert itself – knows, innately. He doesn’t know all the ways that I was carved where a proper girl would have been conceived. He doesn’t know that I wake up at night, sometimes, an antsy jerk in my legs and something wild in my eyes, sure that I have a bit of sunlight stuck in my chest where most girls have a heart. He doesn’t know any of that, and, because he doesn’t-
“A bit of desert wind,” I say, and I mostly mean it. I mean it. I mean it – in all of the ways that the desert wind is free and unbending, in all the ways that it dances across the dunes. This is when I pause, returning to my study of his features, and I say, almost unthinkingly, almost absently, "Maybe you need to be the wind, too."
Because no one else has danced with me, but he did. Because he is better as a falcon than a boy. (Because, though I would not admit it, I am chimera, too; and that small similarity is enough to make me like him more than I normally like people who are not Mother, or Ambrose, or Ereshkigal.)
@
Speech
WHETHER YOU LOVE WHAT YOU LOVE OR LIVE IN DIVIDED CEASELESS REVOLT AGAINST ITwhat you love is your fate.☼please tag Diana! contact is encouraged, short of violence
