in my heart a garden grows
Red is all I can see. It spiderwebs behind my eyes when I close them. It hangs there in place of the moon when I open them. It leads me up the mountains in a trail of bloody poppies when I press my cheek to the red spots on my sister’s hip.
And all of it pulses together like a heartbeat, on and on and on and —
And all of it pulses together like a heartbeat, on and on and on and —
Every flower her sister grows in the midnight soil makes the hunger in her belly growl that much louder.
She presses her jaw against the edge of Danaë’s hip hard enough to stop it from aching (but nothing stops the aching, not for long.) And below it she can feel nothing else, not the feel of the stones turning beneath their hooves, not the dying gasps of the weeds and young trees as they bow to her shadow. There is only the echo of the monsters growling in her stomach, and the way it is as if red is the only color left in the world when she tilts her head back and looks up, up, and up at the mountains curled around them like a fist.
There is a warning in the way they lean in, she thinks. In the way the backs of them are like malnourished spines tearing open the sky.
The points of her own spine is sharp tonight. And Isolt nearly snarls a warning of her own back to the not-monsters that look hungry enough to consume the two unicorns walking into their embrace.
Instead she only swings her tail back and forth like a noose, and with every flower and leaf and trunk that turns to rot in her gaze, she silently begs her sister to grow a garden from. Grow me poppies, Danaë, she does not say, and roses, and dahlias, and marigolds, and morning glories—
She does not say it. But she has never needed to ask, not when their hearts are beating to the same death-knell and the flowers are rising bright and bloody before she has time to ask for them by name.
Her bones are trembling by the time they reach the hemlock grove (but oh! how her heart leaps a little higher at the poison-water flowing through the veins of them.) Later she will say it was the call of the disease-to-be waiting in the leaves that called to her. Or that is was that knowing look in her sister’s eyes, the way she always (always) knew what was best for her, what she needed, before she knew it herself.
Later she will know it was only her selfish magic that whispered to her heart this is what you’ve been looking for.
And if she is surprised at all that leaves feel different than bones between her teeth, she does not show it.
She only crosses her horn with her sister’s so that she can feel the grinding of Danaë’s jaw alongside her own. And when her heart begins to slow and her pupils become wider, and wider, and wilder, and in her chest a rabbit begins to blink itself awake —
the only thank you she knows how to speak is in the way the nightshade at their feet grows twisted and curled, but does not wilt.
@danaë
"wilting // blooming"
