08-24-2016, 04:20 PM
tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;
Try to wake up.
She will do it. For one moment, she will bring them back – bring them all back – and she will leave this girl – this intruder - and then they will go to sleep again, go back, go back to the world she has built.
(Surely it won’t crumble in her absence. It is stronger now. She had learned from her mistakes.)
It’s like swimming, trying to wake up. Like drowning. She doesn’t want to. She doesn’t want any of this. But she can’t have her world crack again. Not again.
(The memory of it is like waves, rising – salty and dreadful, unable to nourish her. A panther dripping jewels, a feral scream, her daughter collapsing, nothing but skin and bones.)
try to
try, try, swim up up up -- they clamber into wakefulness and it’s slow, and when she tries to suck in air it’s like molasses and for a moment her lungs seize, she chokes on this, on air, on life.
wake up
She can do this she can do this she can do this.
Breathe in. Breathe out.
***
Irisa doesn’t know what this feeling is – like being dragged under, like being shaken. She doesn’t know the word for disaster, but had she, it would have been the first word to spring to mind. She cries out, soft at first, then screams – fear rises in her, a wide and previously unknown emotion, now a wild animal shrieking and clawing in her bones. The world around them is dissolving, changing, and then blackness –
***
They wake in the meadow. It is dull and terrible. Heartworm sees the girls sprawled out beside her and for a moment her heart stops before Irisa’s eyes blink open, dazed.
“Irisa,” she croaks. Her voice is rusty and disused. She is a pale gray again, like dishwater. Irisa, though – she looks as she always had. White as clouds, shining rainbow in the sun, great wings folded on her back.
“Let’s go back, darling, we’ll be safe again, now,” she says, and pleading oils her voice, makes the words slide easier. She beckons sleep, summons it, she is ready to fall back under, back to the their palace, their animals, their kingdom.
But Irisa is looking around, taking it in. No one is close, but other horses can be seen in the distance. And their sister, slumped out on the grass beside them. And something is dawning in her eyes, a terrible sunrise of realization, and Heartworm tries to make her sleep, but she cannot do such things unless the other is willing.
And Irisa is no longer willing.
Irisa is climbing to her feet, unsteady as a newborn foal, and taking in the world.
Irisa is alive.
HEARTWORM
I DON'T REALLY KNOW WHAT THIS IS BUT IT NEEDED TO BE WRITTEN