This close to the jewels and paints strewn haphazardly across the meadow they seem brighter than the stars. The part of me that is still my mother’s daughter draws constellation lines between the ember-bright shards of color in the dark. A dragon lays waste to a field of wheat. Below him a wolf snarls at the head of a man with his mouth gap-jawed so that he might swallow him whole. In each line I draw, in the story that fills my head, there is so much violence in that there is no room for a happy ending.
I don’t think I’d want one anyway.
When I move deeper into this strange cacophony of art-not-yet-made all those stories move with me. They are still moving with me when I take a brush and dip it in blood-red paint. For a moment I consider painting my body in the marks of war and death. I imagine drawing a wound across my throat, a smear of someone’s death below my eyes, or a gaping hole right above where my heart is.
But when I turn, when I see her, I stop thinking about painting myself with remembered wounds of war. And I do not ask for permission, I am no chivalrous thing, before I draw a bloody and secret star across her cheek. The color turns her to a creature gilded in gold to one gilded in bloody promise.
Red turns her into a creature, a girl, a thing that just might be able to keep up with me.
“I thought about you,” I draw a bloody line across my cheek to mirror the star on hers, “when I went to war." Another line joins the first and still, when I look at her, all the blood-red seems pale against the white.
@Aster
