Dust yourself off, girl, keep your chin up
You wanna hold a gun but they made you a pinup
A
utumn days are spinning away into winter ones like grains of sand. I've always thought it was strange, how the desert both changes and doesn't, a new shape every day but all its old bones are the same: the dunes, the canyon, the city, going on endlessly, crumbling and rebuilding and crumbling again like any of us were meant to be here at all.
Then there is we, a family crumbling, too, like so much sandstone. I wonder if this is our fate, to return to the sand that had borne us, to fall to pieces until we are no more than another old bone buried out in the desert.
I would never admit it, but to think this makes me sort of sad. It would not be so hard, to embrace each other like brothers and sisters. It would not be so hard to look in someone's eye and feel something that is not our carefully cultivated apathy or our tepid politeness or our-- anything.
I think this is why I prefer the servants, watching them cook in the kitchen when I rise for the morning, sit among the baking nut bread and oranges sliced into halves and pretend that they see me for what I am and what I am not, which is more than I can expect from any of us. (Myself included, though I loathe to admit it.)
I don't expect to see him when I do. It is like looking at a stranger, like there is someone that is not my brother skulking through the hall with his eyes--too blue now, blue enough to make me feel sick sometimes--far off and distant. He looks like one of our statues, I think, something unreal examining something equally unreal, like he's looking into a mirror and not at stone carved to suggest something like him rather than be it.
I didn't realize I had gotten so used to the estate without him. I didn't realize that I missed him, like I miss all of them, until I am looking at Adonai and I do not recognize the man he now is.
"What are you doing?" I call over his shoulder. My voice is quiet, and smooth, but I don't know if it's to keep from startling him or to keep from being heard at all. "I feel like I haven't seen you in years."
In spite of my disdain for that practiced patience, the faces carefully drawn into inoffensive lines, I realize mine is one of these, now.
I wonder if it's because he feels like a stranger.
i think of the red circle, ever-widening in the still water. i think of his silk shirts in the winged air—
❦
I
don't remember when exactly it was that I first realised my brother wanted to be loved more than he loved me.
All I am sure of was that I was young still, and he younger. My hair had hung down my back in thick gold ringlets—for our mother had liked my hair long, back then, and it had not been until her death that I had shorn it—and Pilate's scaled cheeks had been years away from their transformation into cut diamonds, dazzling to others and offensive to me.
The younger ones had been too little for us to bother with, then, barely capable of walking; and our twins Miriam and Hagar were too obviously girls for us to talk to, at least in public, without risking our princely image. For boy-princes did not play with their angelic sisters in court. Boy-princes played with each other, and when they got bored of one another, with fantastical desert beasts like teryrs.
If we were not stabbing wooden swords into each other, we would be dreaming about stabbing real swords into a teryr, or a wyrm, or a rampaging, barbaric Denoctian. (This was during the height of Zolin's reign. Hating Denoctians was national sport.) It was the fantasy of choice for us. A mark of esteem.
So, ill at the idea of my peers finding me inadequate in any way, I joined in their ridiculous schemes with a carefully calculated amount of eagerness until this constant calculating tired me enough to return me, gladly, to the side of my bright-eyed brother.
Deprived of Mernatius' company at court, I would bring Pilate with me the days our father was summoned to the king and keep him close by me so that I would not have to speak for too long with the sneering sons of Hajakha and Azhade.
We kept each other company. I was the first-born, and so I never gave him a say in the matter because he belonged first to our mother and second to me. I belonged to him, too, if he asked, and only because I was obsessed with the concept of perfection in every way and being fair, as our priests had taught, was half of the effort.
I told him often that when I became king, I would appoint him as my regent. I didn't trust anyone else for the job; my own brother was surely a sound choice. "It is not so bad being Regent," I would add, before touching his head fondly. Such gestures of affection, I knew, would keep him loyal to me. "When I die, you shall have my throne." How gracious I was, to allow him this honor. I did not have to. Many kings had not, yet I would not be like them.
I would be fair. I would be pious. I would be loved.
Was it then that I realised? That when I was crowning myself king, Pilate was too. That when I assured him of his regency, he was hearing instead my last words: when I die, you shall have my throne.
When I die, there is only Pilate.
§
When Hagar enters the statue hall, at first I pretend not to notice her. This is a skill I have honed, in the span of a few months, to a knife point. It is never them ignoring me, but me ignoring them. It is pathetic. It is all I have.
She never came to visit me.
What are you doing? my sister asks me, and my lips pull back into a sickening smile. Gallivanting. But because she is Pilate's twin, and will hear Pilate's words in my mouth, I bite the word back behind my tongue.
I don't turn to her yet. Instead, I run my eyes across a miniature canvas in front of me because I wish to stall before answering and because I wish for Hagar to know that I am stalling.
Perched delicately inside the miniature is a golden canary, its legs shackled to a splintering wooden shelf. Slowly, I bring my wing to the canvas' gilded frame and hover it there—unwilling to touch, unable to reach. I feel like I haven't seen you in years.
I don't think I have ever understood Hagar. I don't think I have ever understood any of them.
When I turn to her at last, my smile is worn with the courtesy of a stranger's. "Hello, Hagar." There shouldn't be an accusation in such a benign greeting. But I am skilled now in ways I have never been before, and the one I must thank for this is her twin. In front of me, they are inseparable. In front of me, they are the same.
"I am about to practise my lyre. Out on the terrace."
Dust yourself off, girl, keep your chin up
You wanna hold a gun but they made you a pinup
I
am a deceptively simple girl, I think. Easy to figure, easy to please, just another beautiful, waifish shape in the courtyard. I have only ever wanted one thing: to be seen-- and I have only ever truly hated one thing, in all of my life: to be ignored.
I shouldn't, and a small part of my knows I shouldn't, but when I speak and Adonai's ear tilts my way but not his face, I feel like I am all twisted up, and hot, and rotten.
I remember, too, when we were young, the line drawn between the lot of us: brothers and sisters, like we were a different species in a different world altogether. Our father would gather up Pilate and Adonai and take them to court, and I would stay behind with Miriam, back when she would look at me and see the face of a child, and not the face of her own--often imaginary--shortcomings. I never wanted to be them, not really. I did not want all the trappings and business and the severe, sharp faces of other boys, who might be king, or might not, one day down the line-- but most of all, I did not want to be left behind.
Perhaps if I resent him, it is for that; in a way, he and I have always been at war over Pilate. First, for his time, and then for the privilege of peeling back his layers to find anything underneath that resembles the boy he once was.
Only, Adonai stopped searching, and then got so incredibly sick, and I was left with my prize: a brother, that loves me. A brother that I know. The only sibling I need-- I think.
So, no. I did not visit Adonai.
--which brings us back to the room, and the eyes, turned away, and my stomach tying itself in knots as I try to stop myself from screaming, or crying, or something equally unforgivable. I think he is cruel. I think he is mean. I do not see the irony.
Finally, Adonai turns to me, his mouth tucked carefully into a smile, his voice sharp, and trite, and warm in the way that a hot knife is warm, not like cider, or wool, or summer. I do not know this Adonai. I wonder how he became this. It would make me sad if I were not still one large, red-hot tangle of thorns. Hello, Hagar, he says. I'm about to go practice my lyre.
Out on the terrace, he adds. Away from here, away from me. I smile back at him with clenched teeth. "Great, I'll come with you. It's been so long since I've heard you play."
try as much as possible to be wholly alive with all your might—you will be dead soon enough.
❦
T
here is nothing to covet about being the first.
There is nothing to covet, because I cannot even speak this truth without inciting a curl of self-hatred to curdle in my chest. How easily I rest upon this bed of privilege. To complain about anything in my life, I know, is as tasteless an act as the rich man scrounging for the sympathy of the poor man. It is hypocrisy; sadism on a teaspoon; begging, simply to know how it feels.
It is why I wear my piety like a noose around my neck: for a god born from Chaos and Time cannot possibly find me guilty of hubris.
But my siblings can. Hagar can. And because I am the first, the eldest, the proudest, the weakest, I have nothing to say in my defense. The shadow I cast from my marble pedestal will always devour the best parts of them. They will always hate me a little more than they love me, and I will always forgive them of this.
In benevolence, I am absolved of guilt.
"Great, I'll come with you. It's been so long since I've heard you play," Hagar says, and even in affront her voice is the loveliest of us all, her smile as bright as morning. My back brushes up against the low plinth of a rearing statue as I breathe out evenly, my surprise worn with an edge of caution. I am reminded of how my sister with the snake charmer's tongue hides her hurt in the melody of her voice. I know I have hurt her; I have yet to know how to feel about it.
Yet—"Of course. I am glad for company," I nod, and there is no longer any frigidity in my tone. Clutching to bitterness exhausts me; I envy those who are built to coexist with it. I had never expected an apology and, in truth, if I had received one I wouldn't have known how to respond. She wouldn't have meant it—I wouldn't have believed her.
It is the same reason why I will never ask her twin, who she loves more than anyone, the one question that splits us like a chasm.
I make for the door leading out to our terrace, the one hemmed in by a wall of white azaleas. My lyre hums by my side, eager to be given life. "You can request a song," I say to Hagar, glancing back to see if she is following. "There are some from our childhood I no longer remember, but—I'll improvise."
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