[open] send me back to where i roam, any

[spectra]

all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone

The viper does not understand, but she listens. She listens because she thinks she would very much like to die but the hunger won’t take her and she is too young to know any other way. She simply dissolves each time she approaches danger, shifting seamlessly between something alive and something that is just vapor. She does not want to be this real thing anymore, she does not want to be the viper.

Her mother had not loved her, Spectra knows this, but at least she had not peeled off her skin. The viper glances around the meadow, at all the bones, and wonders if their mothers peeled off their skin, too. She blinks and pulls her focus back to the child in front of her, a question fully formed on her tongue. “Where is the Gatekeeper?” Maybe the Gatekeeper can help her die.

She doesn’t know that you cannot kill something that is not fully alive, something that can shift so easily between life and death.

The child touches her and all the viper can see is teeth. But the touch is soft like velvet and this chases a tremor down the length of her spine. “I don’t know,” she says, the truth, “I just let go.” As she does now. And her edges fade and she is just vapor. It takes enormous concentration to pull herself back into focus again. She is getting weaker.

S P E C T R A

@[Sintra]