like a prayer for which no words exist; any

[contagion]

What are you?
A boy.
No. What are you?
His son.
No. What are you?
Her brother.
No. What are you?
Glass. Breakable.
Yes.

Here’s a riddle: does glass know it’s glass? Does it know it exists in perpetual fragility, the world around it – already so treacherous – made even more dangerous by its delicacy?
Now, give the glass a brain, the ability to think. To compare its delicateness to stouter skins. Give it a heart that shouldn’t beat too hard or too loud lest it burst through its fragile prison. Give it lungs to inhale (but not too deep, mind, lest it shatter its own ribcage).
Give it all this, and what does glass know?
Worse, if it does know – what does it mean? Does it mean it should live in a bubble, constant hinged with fear for itself, for the stone-throwers amongst them who find beauty in shattered pieces at their feet? Does it mean it should live recklessly, each breath already such a ludicrous concept that it has nothing to lose?

The boy knows. Of course he does. The knowledge that he was something other was written across the lined faces of his parents, for the brief time he knew them.
(They marched into the sea, a romance he’ll come to know, come to idolize.)
He knows his skin is like paper, red-tinged but near translucent. It hints at the network of veins and arteries beneath. A roadmap for anyone to destroy him.
What are you?
Scared.
Scared because he did not follow them, he stayed with Adaline. He needed her because she was like him; he needed her because her story was unwritten. He needed her but she left him and he is a glass house in a world of stone throwers.

contagion

be careful making wishes in the dark