prayed to keep my soul
I
n the darkness, all stood still for a sweet, fleeting moment before chaos erupted. Faces flash before her, those voices taken form. (Whatever it is – sometimes it’s a clown with a Glasgow smile, sometimes it’s a tiger with no face. Sometimes it’s the smell of gasoline and a match catching fire.) She has seen a girl of skin and bone and dying eyes, with ribs like welts across her sides. “Careful, I might steal that smile from your lips.” A man told her with a blue scarf wrapped around him. It is too much, too much. So she closes her eyes and thinks ‘go away, go away,’ but they never do. So she goes instead. ‘Bring me back, bring me back.’ ‘No, no.’ And ‘I cant, I cant.’ Elliana rises from her bed (for when the ghosts come out to play she feels so much less like Elli and like Elliana because that name is heavy, that name is weighted and all she feels is all this weight of spirits hanging on her back.)
She sidesteps inside her mother’s cabin, dancing over dead feet that grow around her like tree roots. She ducks beneath cold, dead lips that long to press into her, to feel any warmth that can lay against. She twirls with invisible dance partners as tears well up in their eyes and slide down sad, broken, dead faces. And then she is free, breaking through that door and running, running, running. She is not so unlike her mother. She closes her eyes again and thinks ‘go away, go away.’ But they never do. She thinks ‘go away, go away,’ as she runs, runs, runs.
Go away, go away. And then they do, they are gone, she cannot feel them, cannot hear them, she cannot see them. Blue (too blue) eyes see only empty air below her, and hear the whistle of wind as it rushes past her ears. The world pauses and she wonders, do they know? Those spirits? Do they know she is so close that bridge that they dare not follow her?
She thinks she should scream.
And maybe she does inside her head.
But on the outside, that scream turns into something like a smile as she hits the water below.
@Aeneas elliana speaks
elliana
—
« ♡ »
—
« ♡ »
