however bent and badly drawn; malis

[sleaze]

I’ll worship like a dog at the shrine of your lies tell you my sins so you can sharpen your knife He thinks, sometimes, that he is getting better. He learns to compartmentalize, to place certain memories away, to bury them like corpses in a mass grave. It works, mostly. There are stretches of time where he is not consumed by memories of a world that did not exist. (It did, though. It did!) They are not long, these stretches, something innocuous will happen – a whiff of smoke, a glimpse of purple – and then he spirals again. It’s progress. Slow and limping, but it’s progress. One thing he hasn’t forgotten is her. She’d been one of the first he’d seen, After, and their conversation (“There was a girl--” and “There were two girls”) had affirmed that perhaps his madness was not so mad, or that it was, at least, somehow shared. It was a queer intimacy, that, to share in what could only be a delusion. And so – he does not forget her. Malis. She’d touched him, nose to his cheek, before leaving. Her horns had been cool to the touch. He winds through the meadow, the cold air searing in his lungs. He doesn’t mind, it makes his mind feel sharper, forces him to focus. The sunlight is thin and watery, yet when he sees her, it’s like light, dazzling, glowing. Blue as anything, horns curving from her forehead and down to her nose, just there, and he suddenly doesn’t know what to do with himself, he stumbles. “Malis,” he says, and the words feel like they’re stumbling, too, “hello again.” It’s only then that it occurs to him she may not remember him at all, that she’s long moved on from a shared delusion, that her life has not devolved from one stupid catalyst. But it’s too late now, so he’s left before her, waiting. sleaze cancer x garbage