She has never been asked for a story, never asked to learn the taste of it as it rises like sugar instead of bile from her throat. The only things she knows about stories is the way they sing. She knows how they crackle in the echo of a fireplace. She knows how they purr like lion cubs when they bed down in the garden of her liver. There are a hundred stories buried away like corpses in her, a hundred roots woven in their endings, but none of them have grown there. Each of those stories, each of those secrets, had been consumed instead of watered. They had flowered not by way of sun but by way of blood.
But the seeds of one are watered by the look in her father’s eye when he asks her for one. She inhales and the seeds turn to seedlings. And when she exhales it is not with a mouthful of flowers but with one full of her own secret, her own purring lion cub, her own garden hanging from her gums where teeth should be.
She tries not to choke on the roots of it as she begins.
“There was a unicorn we once knew, or at least we thought she was a unicorn the first time we saw her.” In her voice there is no Danaë, no made girl. Her voice only carries roots, and buried foxes, and the low howl of the wind rustling through a millions leaves to make them sing, and sing, and sing. “She has been caught in the tangled net of our shadows while trying to chase a silver-ray of moonlight through the belly of the forest. A net of darkness had caught itself on her horn and begged her to linger, to stay, to stop hunting and grow roots instead of hunger. At first we had thought she might pull us out root, by root, and leaf by leaf, when the red of her eyes turned to ruby-stone. Surely, we thought, we were all fools for tossing a net upon the horn of death and asking her to stay.” When she blinks a forest blinks with her, lines and lines of birch trees in the sunset breaking up her bloody gaze. She exhales the ocean brine of the night court so that she has nothing of the sea in her garden when she lays her head against her father once more.
Beneath her father’s skin she can still hear the lub-dub, lub-dub of life growing in a frozen forest and a dusty, dead desert. “But as she laid her cheek against our bark, and her hip against our thick roots bursting from the ground, we could not feel the weight of her as we felt the winter. We realized she was not a unicorn, or death, or a thing made of flesh and bone. She was a ghost, a ghost of our seeds that never broke from the ground. She was a ghost of every egg that fell from a nest hidden in our branches, and the corpses of every owl, fox, and mouse, that stayed a newborn in the places where our insides had been hollowed out.” Danaë does not lift her ear from her father’s ribcage when she opens her eyes and blinks away the lines of birch shadows in the red light glow of fire.
“I think the hollowed up tree would tell the mortal that the ghost carried every seed and every fallen tree in her stomach like a fallen star. I think the forest would tell the mortal that it would never die, never wilt, never fade, until every god was buried in the dirt of it or swallowed up by its ghost. And then I think it would tell the mortal to close their eyes and wish.” And she discovers, as the echo of her own voice becomes free of wind, and root, and fox, that she too knows how to sing like a story.
Danaë, in that realm between unicorn and ghost, had wondered.
@Ipomoea
