[P] my cherries and wine.

[Elena]

Some girls are full of heartache and poetry

At the beginning of this story, there is a little girl who smiles.

She smiles, a small smile. It’s simple and hardly attractive, but it is Elena.

She watches his head fall back, Elena wonders what does he fight to fight against sleep as such. She has tried to make herself hard, stoic, daring them to push her, to hurt her. But it is so difficult to hold it on there. She thinks the solemness of his face is one he has developed over time, with great practice. She has to think this as she looks at him, because to not think such a thing means he would have been born with it. Angry at the world before it had the chance to disappoint him.

“We wouldn't want that now would we,” she laughs. “We would have them thinking you some great, strange bear, who has forgotten when to come out of hibernation,” she teases him. He reminds her of her stoic, silver black cousin, all frowns and stern glances. The reminder makes her fight the urge to bump his cheek and place an annoying pretty flower in his dark mane.

When he looks at her work, she is finally able to sit back. The blue-eyed woman watches her work carefully as he bends and move the appendage where his wound had been so great. She resists the urge to fly forward as he moves, to make he had some support nearby. She thinks this the man who keeps careful track over the debts he owes, and he wishes his from her to be no bigger than what it was.

She does not tell him when they are in the water how thankful she is of him. For the distraction. He was always at her calmest when she was healing. She likes to repair others in the way she feels she can no longer repair herself. A heart can only break so many times before it no longer pieces back together (there are pieces of her scattered everywhere, pieces of her carried by others that she will never get back). She is a girl born with a glass heart in a world full of people holding stones in the palms of their hands.

Elena stares down at the blood in the water. She imagines slipping below it, inside it. The blood becomes her own. Sometimes, she dreams she is drowning.
She thinks it may be reminiscent of how her great-grandmother died.

Alone.
A broken mermaid with lungs of water.

“I don’t think I am so creative,” she says, her voice is like the gentle and chiming sound of the rippling waters that ran softly and peacefully over a shallow bed for pebbles and stone and sand. “That is a good name,” she says, her eyes finding his as she smiles once more. She smiles a lot. She is not usually one to comment on a name, but she has thought differently once she gave her daughter one. Names are important. This why she gave a name that holds such notes as the girl’s godmother.

It is so easy to talk about her daughter. Could talk for ages about the look of concentration she gives when she paints. Could speak for eternity about the way the way she rolls her shoulders is in the same very fashion of a grandfather that Elena’s own shrug matches perfectly. Could spend forever to start talking about the blue of her eyes. It had been both a kindness and a cruelty that Elli should have received her mother’s eyes. (For though Elena’s match, they will always be her mother’s eyes and not her own.) It is a memory, happy and blissful, but it too is a taunting memory of what she will never see again.

“Oh I am certain I will,” she says. “I can tell her about the mysterious shadow I met in the swamp,” she says. “What happened?” Elena asks him because she likes to believe herself bold, that she can handle the stories to the big wonders.

She laughs, and of course, she smiles at him. “I am sure the world looks different from up there,” she says. and she remembers that there was a favorite game in her youth that she and Lilli used to play. Tell me about something good. “Tell me about the most beautiful thing you have ever seen from up that high,” she says as they reach the Hospital. “I have never seen the world from up there except in my dreams,” she says, dreams she has not had in some time. Since she left Hyaline behind.

those are the kind of girls who try to save wolves

instead of running from them