when you're born in a burning house,
you think the whole world is on fire.
you think the whole world is on fire.
I sit, still as a dead body, for the painters.
Still as a statue feels trite, considering Adonai’s place in the hall; considering the way his body has been locking up at joint after joint as the days pass on, and he looks less like a living boy, closer to a marionette. (Stiff. Dead-eyed. I worry about him. I want to give him my heart. And anyway—I feel more like a corpse than a piece of art. I know I was alive at one point and am no longer. I know that, at one point, my mother breathed life into me; and even if that breath is gone now, or muted, I had it, which is more than any statue can say.
My siblings can make themselves into a museum. I belong in the dirt.
Pilate has hired the best of the best. I am not, in any way, surprised. The best of the best just so happens to be this set of native Solterran triplets, who don’t seem to speak common, but giggle and speak to each other in a sleek, clicking tongue I don’t think I’ve ever heard before. The one working on me is tough-looking and rangy, all shiny-black with deep green eyes. I can feel her glancing at me every so often; her gaze is cutting and hot, and under the weight of it I almost shift and flinch, but I only blush, coloring the white parts of my face pale pink.
She sees this and grins, sharp, sly. But she won’t look at me head-on. She only glimpses at me, shyly, up from beneath her lashes. I understand that to talk to me—assuming she can—is a risk of its own. So I say nothing.
Around me the sky is dark, freckled with stars. When I breathe I taste a cold like mint. I have shed my usual adornments and shiver a little in the wind that rushes through the courtyard, but at least it makes me feel alive. I have no idea what she’s painting on me, and no idea how to ask. I only know that it takes effort not to flinch at the tickle of her paintbrush on my ribs. But still I’m curious what it’ll be, curious to know more than what colors she’s using and the shapes I feel on my skin, and so when I see Hagar walking past me—my darling little sister, the most magic of us all—I call out to her. (Sometimes I wonder how long it has been since I talked to someone not my siblings. And then I always realized I love them too much to care.)
“Wardatī, would you come here?”
wardatī meaning"my rose"
