in my heart a garden grows
My sister has always made me feel softer. When she presses her cheek to mine and shushes me to sleep, when we gallop together in our dreams. In the rest of the world I am breaking, each fractured piece of me whittling down into knives and spears and blades.
But here in the galaxy we swim through together, I am finally content.
But here in the galaxy we swim through together, I am finally content.
Some things, Isolt knew, were made only to take into the grave.
Most days she is looking for those things. The last prayer on the lips of a sinner-turned-saint, before the sickness in their lungs drowns them. The hope of a dying mother for her children. The quivering instinct of a field mouse to run, run, run the instant before the owl descends upon it. Isolt is there — always, she is there — for that last wish to tuck between their teeth like clover before laying them into their graves.
But today it was her turn. Only it was not clover pressed to her lips, but nightshade. And it was not death her sister was leading her to, but a dream.
Danaë is trying to become sharp but oh, Isolt would tear the world down to its bones to keep her soft (she would do almost as much to become soft herself. But only almost.)
Tonight she is as light as moonlight as she dances and swims and runs through the marrow of another world, like blood inside a bone. She holds tight to her sister’s mane between her teeth (because to let go was to drift away, to lose her in all that space of the galaxy around them. And that is not a thing Isolt could bear.) In the spaces between each of her ribs are those of her twin’s, as though they are not two bodies but one — and this, this settles a piece of her that had been torn free since the moment her legs were untangled from her sister’s at their birth.
With their hips and shoulders and necks tucked together, Isolt can taste daisies between her teeth instead of gore. She runs on birch-legs with flower-lungs that are blooming instead of wilting. With each breath she feels their petals fluttering in the wind she makes. With each step she feels them going to seed, and rooting, and rising. So she runs, and runs, and runs; she runs as if the sun will never rise, as if the nightshade will never run out, as if the galaxy where they are the brightest stars orbiting each other will never collapse.
She runs until her waking-dream becomes one of sleep, tangled leg-to-leg and horn-to-horn with her sister. And this is the only thing that can bring her peace.
@danaë
"wilting // blooming"
