prayed to keep my soul
T
hey race round each other, to fill their baskets first, but Elliana is much more deliberate in her task. She goes from tree to tree, and finds not just any offering, but the perfect one from each. She reaches through each of the piles and adds them, as if practice for when she will eventually throw them into the flames. She does not run off in a group of giggling children, no, she is a serious child who is content to keep mostly to herself, but she cannot help the way she loves to wander. So she goes from tree to tree as a butterfly may float from flower to flower. Elli collects piece for a collection, a collection to give to the flames, to become ash, to become smoke, to rise to the heavens above in their starry abyss. Her mother once told her that her ancestors live there, up there, way up there. Elli looked at her and whispered quietly under her breath, “not all the time they don’t.”
There is a buzzing in the forest, she knows it is them, all of them. She had come here before and seen the dead, the unicorns had taken her to them, she had seen them, staring and vacant. Blue eyes look around her, she sees nothing, but oh she can hear them. They buzz and hum and she tries to imagine that is the crackle and burning of the fire, but she knows the truth. She has always known the truth.
She emerges from the forest to him, her basket and offerings in tow, the lemur perched on her shoulders, an ever present guardian, her guardian, given to her by the fates. She watches him fumble through the crowd and she cannot take her eyes off of him, she watches. A shoulder digs into his own, another barely brushes him as the party goer tries to miss him, others are so much less forgiving. And then he comes into the light and blue eyes (so much like her mother’s) spot the bandages wrapped around his own. What color are his eyes? She wonders, heady like smoke.
The little girl starts walking towards him, to the edges of the fire. The lemur on her shoulders tries to stop her. No, no, no, we are not supposed to go up to strange men, when will you listen, Elliana?
Ash catches in her hair, embers send flittering lanterns all around her. She moves through the crowd like a dancer, like her mother’s daughter. He would know if he saw her, he would know. The shadows the fire casts press against her, running through blonde locks with loving grace. And she is beside him, the glow of the fire is warm and comforting, his presence more so for reasons unexplained. “Do you want to help me with my offerings?” She asks, her voice is quiet on the night air, the soft whisper of moonlit crickets echoing in a nighttime chorus. She can taste the smoke and the heat on her lips.
And what a curse it is for a daughter to see her father and to not know him.
@Tenebrae elliana speaks
elliana
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