widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
H
ad she known a single thing about religion, or trees made to never fall, or girls who wandered around pretending they were more than a shard of glass shattered from a mirror and cursed, she would have thought they sounded like this: three unicorns meeting in a graveyard. Her soul and the marrow of her made bones whispers to her echoes of that same sound. The heart in her chest, with chambers that expand by breaths, stumbles to catch the whispers and turn them into something (into anything) that the unicorn can hold.
The thorns in her throat close like fists of magic around the whispers. They drag them down, down, down, into the place where the wolves, and lions, and snow-bears roam. It’s a place unicorns who grow flowers in eye-sockets and broken-ribs cannot follow.
But she tries, oh she tries, anyway.
And when her sister lays her skin back against her, a cliff to hold back the tide of salt and sorrow, the thorns in her throat rise again. She feels like a doll in a garden frozen but for the limbs twitching in the memory of summer. She feels like a thing waiting, with breaths stuttered out between thorns, for the touch of a horn to pull taunt the fragile strings of her waving aimlessly between spires of bones.
Danaë steps closer as elegantly as a clockwork monster with oil instead of blood. The look in her eyes answers the winter of the wolf with the winter of the doll grasping for summer. Her horn whispers against the glass as she drags the point of it across the images she barely tries to hold (she’s too busy with her breaths to fret over the future). “Sunflowers belong to mares not unicorns.” When she blinks, and taps her horn to the pale bone crown upon the other girl’s brow, the shine of her eyes is as bloody as a new-furled dahlia.
This time when she blinks it is dahlia, dahlia, dahlia, instead of look. “Someday we will show you why.” Her smile, pale as a lavender stalk crusted in dawn dew, is that of the doll on the eve of summer. And her limbs, long and terrible, do more than twitch when she lays her shoulder to the glass and blooms dahlias from the fermented bones of the cosmos.
{ @Isolt @Aspara"speaks" notes: <3
