no-one 'round here's good at keeping their eyes closed
the sun's starting to light up when we're walking home
tired little laughs, gold lie promises,
we'll always win at this, I don't ever think about death
✧
R
unning away, Daisybird?
You know I prefer not to.
Ah. You only tell others to.
And then they don’t listen.
You left out the part where your mother would butcher me like one of her butterflies.
I feel Rook’s anger begin to glow inside him like the blade of a red-hot knife. I know what I have to say to calm him. I know what he wants to hear.
Then I’m sorry. Sincerely. Does that make it better?
I am brushing away a sinister branch of brambles when I feel antlers dig into my back and I yelp, half in shock, half in baffled, slow-gathering anger.
You don’t mean it. Before, he used to think that I meant it. When I had dragged his head out from the muddy swamp water he had said, between hacking coughs, that he knew I would come to save him. Even when I had blamed it on the will of the flowers, he had insisted on thinking the best of me.
I feel what you feel, Bird. But do you know what I feel when you apologize? I curl my lips back, the bramble branch snapping towards me. But I don’t reach out to stop it. My eyes are wide beneath my mask. If I had a mirror, I would see that they were wide yet still blank. Like a doll with painted-on irises.
And then I would be disappointed. But I don’t have a mirror, so I allow myself to believe that my wide-open eyes are showing the proper amount of shock as expected of one so cruelly accused.
I feel nothing. Rook presses his head to my mask. His eyes, blindingly white, sear into mine.
“What do you want, Crow?” I say aloud, my voice echoing through the brambles and the trees and the flock of jeering starlings. I jerk my mask up and he ducks to avoid it, before I step forwards and the tip of the dead beak digs right into the center of the triangle branded against Rook’s forehead.
“To hurt me?” His antlers dig into my neck but I continue pushing forwards, forcing him back, my hooves breaking twigs as thin as sparrow bones.
I see his answer in his eyes. He can’t hurt me. He can’t. “To kill me?” I am an empty shell. All I can do is rattle. I have known this since the day I was born. Ma knows this. Elder knows this.
Rook had always refused to believe that he knew this, too. Deep down.
“Are you done trying to save me?” I watch, my eyes perfectly blank and visible now with my mask flipped up to the sky, as my words sink their teeth into his flesh.
“Are you alright, miss?”
I startle, freezing in place like a bug-eyed fawn as a voice seems to come straight from the dreary clouds. I feel Rook tense against my shoulder, his anger momentarily held at bay, and I follow his milky gaze until I see the girl.
She is painted in the red-gold-browns of autumn brought to magnificent completion. Immediately I remember, as if I’d forgotten it, that autumn is my favorite season. Things are not born in it, like spring, and things do not die in it, like winter. It is not loud and full of itself, like summer. It is a quiet season. It sits inside itself and contemplates, feeling no grief for the leaves that fall, putting no real effort into making itself beautiful. It simply is, and is at peace.
I like, too, how it's sometimes called 'fall'. It's one of the few names, like mine, that gives it to you straight.
The autumn girl is as tall and slender and lovely as a golden ginkgo tree, and thinking this, I decide at once that I like her enough. To help her case, no one has ever asked if I am alright.
Slowly I unstick myself from Rook's side and step gingerly towards her. “As well as can be expected.” In one of the few books in Ma's house, there is a scene of a girl greeting politely a beautiful lady from the city. Is your mother well? —Very well, thank you. And your father, is he well? —Very well, thank you. And what about yourself, Lucille? —As well as can be expected.
I can't see him but I know Rook's mouth is twitching. I've told him about this scene, before. About how funny I'd found it.
With my mask still flipped up (like Rook's anger I momentarily hold it at bay) I can see so much better—so with great interest I watch as she watches Rook, and discern quickly that she is afraid of him.
“Oh. He won't hurt you.” I wonder if I am supposed to say are you well? so that she can say very well, thank you. After Rook, the autumn girl is the second I have met from outside the swamp.
And the first I have met far away from the reach of Ma.
