And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.
Death has always started like this: a tremor of a hummingbird caught in the chambers of heart, a moan in the blood that is more lament than desire, a knell of the stomach when it eats away at poison instead of the soft, pale and sweet flesh of an apple. It leaks into the blood like rain into the soil and knives into a tender spine begging to fold. It leaks, and leaks, and leaks.
The poison has turned to rain sinking into all the seeds, all the rotten wishes, all the frail and tender rabbit hopes of her. The hummingbird in her heart has fallen to the bottom of a ventricle and his wings have started to molt like the skin of a pear left out in sun and storm. And when her wide and wild gaze meets that of her sisters (eye to eye, close enough that she can feel Isolt’s eyelashes weaving into her own) she is glad that the hummingbird has got to rot in the face of the wolf.
This is better. This will always be better.
Somewhere a herd of mountain sheep are rising up on their legs to run, and run, and run through the rock and soil. Their eyes are dark with fairy hills of ash, and soot, and their teeth are bloody with the remnants of icy embers. Danaë wanders in their bellies on her legs of ivy roots and sugarcane. She curls up to slumber in their hearts, her horn another vein by which their soot and blood might run, and course, and gallop onward into a new half-life.
But even in her slumber, even pillowed upon the soft trees of tissue and sinew, she feels no more whole than the soot-eyed sheep. Her own life feels like another half-life, another spine empty and wanting of winter embers.
And so she searches through the livers of the sheep and swings her neck of palms back and forth like a lost lion on a snow-fat mountain. Her hooves of truffles scrape and scramble over the fields of nerve endings wavering in the wind of a starved-for-air lung. Her eyes, wild and wide, are rimmed with dandelion seeds waiting for a wish to carry them away as she searches, and searches for the thing (the exact same thing) as the ewes and the rams she wanders in.
Danaë, and the moss-hearted herd, are always searching.
The poison has turned to rain sinking into all the seeds, all the rotten wishes, all the frail and tender rabbit hopes of her. The hummingbird in her heart has fallen to the bottom of a ventricle and his wings have started to molt like the skin of a pear left out in sun and storm. And when her wide and wild gaze meets that of her sisters (eye to eye, close enough that she can feel Isolt’s eyelashes weaving into her own) she is glad that the hummingbird has got to rot in the face of the wolf.
This is better. This will always be better.
Somewhere a herd of mountain sheep are rising up on their legs to run, and run, and run through the rock and soil. Their eyes are dark with fairy hills of ash, and soot, and their teeth are bloody with the remnants of icy embers. Danaë wanders in their bellies on her legs of ivy roots and sugarcane. She curls up to slumber in their hearts, her horn another vein by which their soot and blood might run, and course, and gallop onward into a new half-life.
But even in her slumber, even pillowed upon the soft trees of tissue and sinew, she feels no more whole than the soot-eyed sheep. Her own life feels like another half-life, another spine empty and wanting of winter embers.
And so she searches through the livers of the sheep and swings her neck of palms back and forth like a lost lion on a snow-fat mountain. Her hooves of truffles scrape and scramble over the fields of nerve endings wavering in the wind of a starved-for-air lung. Her eyes, wild and wide, are rimmed with dandelion seeds waiting for a wish to carry them away as she searches, and searches for the thing (the exact same thing) as the ewes and the rams she wanders in.
Danaë, and the moss-hearted herd, are always searching.
