There she was, my new best friend
High heels in her hand, swayin' in the wind
While she starts to cry
Mascara running down her little Bambi eyes
✧
M
y mother thinks that the first emotion a girl learns is anger.
She confided this to me one morning back when I was no taller than her knee. It was late spring, because the dogwoods were blooming in creamy white bouquets and Ma had called me spring-bird. My name kept time with the seasons, to help me date all of my memories.
Come here, spring-bird. Your hair is undone. That's how she began every story; that's how, no taller than her knee, I knew to tuck in my smile and approach her on heedful-fox feet. She had beckoned me over to her before I could go to wake the willow-tree sparrows and fill their marble bath with well water. It was irregular. I disliked irregularity.
Ma's long black braids were pinned into a beautiful crown on her head and my hair was tumbling snow, untidied and grotesque in comparison. She hummed her secret thoughts to me while weaving my hair into a mermaid's tail. Dawn stole in through the open window.
The first emotion a girl learns is anger. She arrives into her mother's arms primed for it: slick from the womb and red with the shame of being born a daughter. Her first sound is a scream, her next a cry of injustice. Her tears are salty instead of sweet, her hair a sacred talisman never to be cut short.
Her shoulder blades are wings but her body is wood, kindling to feed a struck match. She is never the one to hold the match. It is always held for her, for safekeeping. Everything she is and owns is made to burn. Her room is a cage carved from oak and her bed is a funeral pyre. Anger is her oldest friend and bitterest enemy. She sleeps with it. She wakes with it. She is in love with it.
I knew my answer to her question before she asked it of me.
“Do you ever feel it, Bird?”
“I don’t feel it, mama.” She looked into my eyes with the ignorance of a mother. The black ribbon at the end of my braid circled my neck like a coil of rope. "I would like to go wake the sparrows, now."
I have always been a proficient liar, and the only one who has ever caught me at it is dead. When I told him this story, he asked me at the end why I had lied to my mother.
"About what?" I asked.
"About not feeling it," Rook said.
I wound the stem of a snowdrop into his mane. "Because I don't want to be like her."
When the girl made of shed blood curls her cold breath across my cheek, I know that she is the one who holds the match. Drop it into the snow. The command drums against my ribcage, demanding its release. Drop the match into the snow, so that it will be extinguished.
I picture her hesitating; holding the tiny flame up to the light, examining it, then blowing it out. It would be for the best. Ma isn't here but I am, and I am my mother's daughter. I wish that I did not just have the skull and tail of a bird but the body of one too, so that I can fly away whenever I wanted. So that I can fly and laugh and picture the girl's body melting back into blood and snow without fear of making it true.
But then I hear my mask screech with horror when her horn slices across its beak. “All the dead,” she says, “are mine to love, and mine to command, and mine alone.”
And then, softer: an echoing, furious Bird! I don't feel the fox's teeth sink into my leg until I look down at it and blink at the ribbon of blood watering the frozen grass. An onyx hoof, cloven, stamps down on its smiling skull. I turn to Rook and swallow a laugh when I see the horror carved into the lines of his stag's face. I try and think, isn't this what you wanted, too? but run headlong into a wall bricked with a pulsing, writhing river of energy. It is impenetrable, uncrossable. I mistake it, at first, as Rook's doing.
He stands between me and the girl. Has the cold sapped away all of your sense? he snaps, his antlers glinting with liquid malice. This glade is thick with her magic. And you, daughter of witches, did not notice? It is easy to ignore him; his voice is but a trickling to the roaring red river.
I wonder if the girl's soul is as shredded as mine, except that it was not stitched back together as carefully. I don't realize that I am shaking until I shove Rook aside and nearly fall in the process. I right myself and limp forwards. Rook cannot hear me because of the river. He cannot move, either, because I do not allow him to. It is the first time I have exerted this type of control over him; he greets it with silent shock.
The bare trees around us are giant hulking beasts; they are ugly creatures, and I feel a hatred of the forest and its lost children sink into my bones in a sweet homecoming.
I don't stop until my shoulder is flush with the girl's. I stare down at her crushed creation, at the blackening pinecones, before plucking a wilting snowdrop from my mane and tucking it behind her ear.
“You will regret doing that to me,” I say softly. “You may control the dead, little cardinal, but they will never hold a candle to the living.”
My mask bobs like a boat on the sea. Smiling, I turn back, to Rook and to the end of the forest. As I pass, I kick snow over what remains of the fox's carcass with my good leg.
A burial; something only I can give.
felt like this was a good place to end! this was simply the most enjoyable thread ever <3
