[P] trees become ghosts

[Nicnevin]

I'LL BE YOUR SWEETEST MOUTH IF YOU LET ME -
watch me reach down my throat, cut my teeth / on a new name. If you open wide / and swallow deep, you can even forget / the taste of all that blood.

Around us, the world feels like it is spinning. The seasons move too quick; the flowers that sprout in the mirror behind her bloom and decay all at once, drip hot, red blood in the place of sap and pollen. The ground cracks and splinters, gone fallow, and I can see the protrusion of bones beneath. Behind me, there is fire and my ribcage and dead starlings, halfway reanimated and still burning. I don’t look back any longer. I know better, but I still swear that I can smell smoke and taste ashes in my mouth.

She comes close again. I think that I might step away, that I surely could – there is a faint touch of a smile on her lips, but it is dark thing, and her breath is warm, but it curls up hot as smoke -, but I don’t want to, even when the sharp tip of her horn touches my forehead.

She does not press down hard enough to so much as draw blood – but I know that she could. I know that she could, and I know that she could pull the life from me on its corkscrew edges if she only wanted to, twine my life around her horn like the unraveling of a thread. What I don’t know is whether or not she wants to. I look into her blood-iron eyes, only breaths apart, and I think that they might be better-suited for the face of a tiger than a girl; but a tiger has no choice in its own nature.

I don’t know why I am not running. I do not know why I am standing there, allowing her horn to come close enough to stroke my skin; I feel like I am standing in the middle of a thunderstorm, staring up at a crack of lightning. It does not feel like a whip without a lash, or like any other threat of violence. I don’t think that her touch has that kind of malevolence.

You need only look for your starlings to find me. I wish, I wish, I wish – I wish that it were so easy to find the dead. Still, when she says it, there is some part of me (a part, I will think later, that is surely foolish) that believes her. I am standing still when she pulls away from me, like she must fight some tangible force to pull away, and I am still standing as she begins to draw away, and I am not quite sure if I am relieved or disappointed by her sudden absence. There is something to her that makes me – remember.

Her tail drags the gash of a scythe down one of the mirrors. It is strangely lovely, in all the way that it is so very sharp and precise – and the part of me that used to be a blade unfurls its rows upon rows of teeth and longs to do the same, to cut open the landscape and remake it in its wake in all the way that she does, the afterthought of flowers blooming up in the trail of her reflection.

But I don’t. Until she is gone, until she is not even a slip of white in the labyrinth, not even a refraction in the face of the mirrors – I do not move.

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@Danaë || & fin. || aline dolinh, "unbecoming extraterrestrial" 
"Speech!" 

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