when you're born in a burning house, 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.)
please don't lean on me
cuz i don't want your heart between my teeth
B
efore I go downstairs, I glance at myself in the mirror, stretch one slender leg after another to admire the lines that they make. Dressing, I felt like I was strapping on armor: something light enough to dance in, something chic enough to stun, carefully avoiding the thin line between what Pilate would excess and enough luxury to feel like a god in my own body.
In the end, there is something to be said for dressing down. Without the necklaces, the curve of my neck and the sharp lines of my shoulder are drawn into focus. Without the chain looping from my ears to the plate on my nose to the piercing inside it, my face looks dark, sultry, dangerous.
Pilate would be proud, I think. I look in the mirror for just one second longer and don't look like the same person. I braid my own hair on the way down the stairs.
It is some time into the party before I bore myself, surprisingly few drinks in considering I seem to be the only creative mind in the whole of Solterra when it comes to truth or dare.
"Truth or dare isn't a game you win," says a man dressed in red, freckled enough that they shine in the winking lights strung across the courtyard from post to post.
I smile. "Isn't it?"
"How does one win truth or dare, then?"
"Well," I say, coyly, batting my lashes with a practiced sort of charm. "Truth or dare?"
His turn to grin now. "Dare," he says.
"I dare you to lose." The few others around us, two other Solterran girls and the man's friend, Frederick I think he said, erupt into uproarious laughter as the man searches the dark courtyard, my face, then Frederick's face for something to say. I pause for just long enough to see him start to panic, or grow agitated, then touch his shoulder with my nose and say, "Kidding, though I must take a break."
The second I turn to walk across the courtyard my face falls into what might be a scowl if it were not dripping with aristocratic patience. If it is a scowl it is the way mothers disapprove of children when their backs are turned: a slight narrowing of the eyes, mouth pulled into a tight straight line, and then gone like it had never been there at all. It is as I'm pulling myself back together, scouring the place for a drink tray, that I hear her.
Wardatī, she says. Miriam. I cannot remember the last time I saw Miriam, let alone spoke to her. When I turn and see the alternating gray and white of her face, the fierce red of her hair knotted back in braids, and one of the artists dobbing paint on the face of her ribs, I almost don't know what to say.
--but, she asks me to come, so I come. It is automatic.
"Miriam?" I say, "How's this going?"
I appraise the art made of her body for a moment. It is still blocky colors in undefined shapes. They seem to be making her a proper painting, or something close to it. "Looks great."
when you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire.
I am trying very hard not to breathe. Whatever this girl is painting on me, I’d like to see it the way she meant it to be done. Her focus is inspiring; endearing, even, and as I look at her I think grimly: I don’t want to mess this up.
Like I’ve done with everything else. I wonder at times whether it is my parents’ fault we turned out like this or mine. I was supposed to be my siblings’ guide, their good influence: there is reason the term is my brother’s keeper. Perhaps, I think—and in thinking this I can’t help but grit my teeth, because it is a thought that puts me in real, physical pain—if I had not been so preoccupied with Sofia, her introduction into my life and her abrupt departure from it, I would have been a better sister.
I would have been there. All there. When the news broke, and at the funeral. When Adonai collapsed. I should have been the one to see it first, the one to take him to our doctor—I am his twin, after all, and the oldest sister. I should have been there—all there—when Ruth started her doctor’s training, when Hagar discovered her powers; when Pilate donned my father’s diadem and sent out letters so that everyone knew he was now the first prince.
I don’t know where I was. I don’t quite know where I am now. I just know that it’s not where I’m supposed to be.
Hagar turns toward me, as soon as she hears me call. My chest hurts. My heart aches: I think it might be bleeding. How long has it been since we’ve talked? And still she looks right toward me when I ask for her, no thought, just feeling—my sister is calling me.
I don’t deserve her. I’m reasonably sure I don’t deserve any of them.
What a beautiful girl she is, my sister. I watch her as she comes toward me. Sometime in these dark and hazy past few years she became a woman, not a girl, and the realization sparks both fear and awe: she is so beautiful, and I am so old. I swear my bones would creak if I walked the way she does, if I swayed my hips like that. In the low blue light she is like a doll, so perfectly made—russet and amber, slim and slender with her little neat socks and her eyes a bug-trap yellow.
How’s this going, she asks? “You tell me,”I respond, almost wry, almost smiling. “I have no idea what she’s painting. I don’t think we understand each other.”
At that the girl’s eyes flicker up to Hagar briefly, then drop back down in quick reticence. She returns to painting without a word.
Without really thinking about it, I rest my forehead against the flat of Hagar’s shoulder.
i am angry.
i have nothing to say about it.
i am not sorry for the cost.
I
f I were not blind I could see how much Miriam loves us-- all of us, even our unsavory bits, the chaff that peels away from our best selves and rots before it hits the ground. She is the best of us, I think. I wish I loved anything as much as she does.
My affection for pilate comes closest I think: unchanging, warm, unconditional. There is nothing he could do in this life or the next that would make me love him less, this I know. If he smote Miriam where she stands, if these talented artists died alongside her and their only crime was being alive and present, I think I would still love him just the same. Even our mother would caution me against this-- but it changes nothing.
I don't look at her when she speaks. I'm watching the painting take shape, the sharp points of the sun, the blue gash of the river, darker in some places to suggest depth, and a long series of lines that connect them. The girl pulls a long, dark line down the cage of Miriam's ribs-- the horizon-- and I purse my lips.
You tell me, Miriam says. I look up now, just my eyes moving, and smile. "It seems to be some interpretation of the Mors." I say, and think I am correct: most of it is a soft orange and red that only those who truly know the desert see when they imagine it. I take a moment to appreciate the decision: to make it more clay than gold sand, the sky more white than blue. It looks more like me than anything else.
"And it is beautiful." I add, chased by a hot pang of shame. Miriam looks at me like I am some lovely secret now that I'm grown. Miriam looks at me like she is cracking in half just to see me. Miriam leans her head on my shoulder and the weight is surprisingly unfamiliar-- now that the actions of others are mine to dictate I'm not touched, much, anymore. I find myself wanting to be worthy of her love, painful as it is.
I realize seconds later that I don't think I am, really.
I reach for a spare paintbrush because if I reach for anything else it will be her, and her, and her, and I will never stop. "Let me help." I demand, sternly, and the girl stops stippling to hand the brush to me and make room for my body as it rounds Miriam's. I know what she will think. I don't meet her eyes.
"I'm going to stay out of the way, I promise," I say both to her and the artist-- little consolation, I think, for the manipulation, but I am beginning to think that if I do nothing but stand here I will die on the spot. I begin mixing, some of that same clay-red and some pink like a cherry blossom, and ask:
"Have you been enjoying yourself? I hadn't seen you during preparations. I didn't expect you to come, somehow."
when you're born in a burning house, you think the whole world is on fire.
This is the first time in a long time—or maybe it is just the first time, ever; I can't remember anymore—that I feel almost normal.
I feel as though I have been pulled back and back and back in time. I remember this night, though I have not lived it before, this night cool and dark and speckled with stars. The air smells like petrichor and cool wind and perfume, and it is filled with the sound of laughter. I hear footsteps in the distance. Glasses being clinked against one another for toasts. This is the same music I remember being played at my parent’s parties; the same happy, swinging jazz-song, the band set up in the same corner of the courtyard. Suddenly my heart is dizzy and warm.
I am happy—really, incandescently, stupidly happy, because I am home.
I am a child again. If I just looked a little harder, I know I could see Sofia’s face smirking at me from behind a glass of wine. If I just listened a little more closely, I could hear the voices I know are there, waiting for me, just out of earshot in the next universe over—my father’s proud introduction of his eldest daughter; my mother’s voice gracefully accepting the compliments bestowed upon her children.
I recognize the rush of the breeze coming in from the desert; I recognize the violins, the flicker of excitement in my chest, the beautiful buzz of a good party as instinctive to me as breathing. I recognize everything. I know this—I lived it. I know that I will fall asleep easily, my little body exhausted from the excitement of the festivities, and that I will have a dreamless sleep.
It seems to be some interpretation of the Mors. And it is beautiful.
I feel like I’ve been stabbed. I’m yanked out of my daydream so fast I have to bite down a gasp, so fast that when I blink and look up at Hagar with wide eyes, I panic at the fact that she’s not still a child.
Is this an alternate universe? Am I seeing the future or the past? I don’t know anymore. How is it possible for this night, this moment, to be so familiar and yet so strange? Hagar is supposed to be young still. I am supposed to be young too, for that matter; young enough to be trailing my parents with Adonai attached to my hip.
But Hagar is grown. My parents are dead. And Adonai is too weak to walk with me anymore. I don’t know what this is, this moment that I’m stuck and panicking in—past, present, or future. I don’t know if it really matters either way.
I grind my teeth. “I’m glad,” I respond softly; to say thank you seems trite, when really I haven’t done any of the work myself. At this point, my head is still laid flat against her shoulder, and I am glad—this way, she cannot see the crease in my brow or the sudden, teary pain in my eyes.
But then she pulls away. She reaches for a paintbrush. Her shoulder slips away from me, and I am just steady enough that my head doesn’t snap down when she moves—but only just. The suddenness of it is startling. I feel like I’m falling, for a brief moment; my heart rushes through my chest like a cold gust of wind. I watch her circle me with a gaze that, despite my best efforts, feels almost dejected.
“I didn’t expect to, either,” I admit. She draws what I think is a half-circle on my side; I feel all the fibers on my skin, and I shiver. “I saw the party, and I came down to check on Adonai, and then… I don’t know. I didn’t want to be alone, again, I guess.”
It feels unnecessarily honest. But she keeps drawing—dotting and stippling my hips, my ribs. Pulling lines over my shoulder. I purse my lips.
![[Image: fhOESb6.png]](https://i.imgur.com/fhOESb6.png)
