widows, ghosts and loves sit and sing
in the dark, arched marrow of me
in the dark, arched marrow of me
In
the deep of her, in the black center, she knows how terrible it is to grow her body from the bloody garden of a stag. She knows how wrong it is to look at his eyes turning to ghosts and pearls and see something ripe for a lily seed. But the wrongness is so very, very deep and far away when she watches her sister sprout and grow to godhood with a mouth full of blood. And how easy it is to lay her tongue against a rib-bone as if she is only afraid of being left behind as her sister blooms. How easy.
It does not taste like blood, not to her. Danaë closes her eyes and tastes grasses up to her knees in spring, dandelions hiding the fawns from wolves, the musk of an elk as it passes too closely to a bear. On her tongue there is every season, every animal, every dead thing already reaching upward to carry the stag’s body home. She sighs with the taste of life and her body sparks and smolders as it stretches to match the size of her sister.
What Isolt makes dangerous is frail and pearl-shimmering on her body. Instinct has her tail dragging against a bone, a stone, a dead tree, a mouse that was not fast enough. Her horn whispers in the wind without blood filling the hollow of it ( unlike Isolt’s that weeps holy water down her perfect brow). Her joints crack as they fuse together and her neck lengthens and blooms with muscle. When they started, when their godhood slaked it’s thirst with blood, she had thought there would be pain.
But there is only the rejoice of her touch when she draws a bloody kiss down her sister’s eyes. There is only violence when her tail tangles desperately with Isolt’s (as if that deep, deep part of her is begging something to keep her from falling upon the throat of the corpse and feasting). There is only her bloody adoration as she scratches her teeth down her twin’s neck in a gesture that is as much a caress as it is an affirmation.
“You are always right.” And she is, she is, she is.
But Danaë still pulls away to watch with a different sort of rejoice when the first daffodil curls outward from the stag’s pearl eyes like a ray of sunlight bursting free from the clouds. The deep part, the black center that is so full of every color instead of nothingness, sings a hallelujahs when the roots of that same daffodil explode like a star through the remnants of the stag’s heart.
With her mouth full of blood Danaë smiles like a mother instead of a child.
Until the flower wilts and the hour turns, she smiles.
{ @Isolt "speaks" notes: <3
