and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love
in this city that we love
There was darkness, in their conception.
Darkness, and bells chiming.
But Heartworm does not – cannot – think of these things, because they are but the topsoil that covers even worse skeletons
(skeletons that you once were)
and she has long cast the shovel away.
Let dead things lie, and the past is a dead thing.
The ache of birthing is a dead thing, the two bodies tangled that poured from her are dead things, his lips on her neck is a dead thing.
They are in paradise, now, where smiles are set and graves forgotten.
Heratworm flinches as they say her name, as if they might recognize something - someone - that she had once been.
The air shudders around the girl.
(The birds fell sick and she could not help them. The animals lost their language and gibbered at her because she was the god and she could not help them. A mountain crumbled. God!)
She cannot have dead things in this place, even though it’s a place built because of them.
***
Irisa knows none of this.
But the memory – the warmth, legs tangled – itches at her. She wants to know why something in her skin calls out at this girl, this stranger who isn’t supposed to be here.
Irisa has never known resistant – all the animals play with her as if she is their own – so she shows no hesitancy as she walks to the girl, wings folded at her back. Behind her, mother moans something – it almost sounds like don’t - but Irisa pretends not to hear.
She is not a worldly girl, but she is a smart one.
She knows her mother’s face better than she knows her own, knows the particular architecture of her bones, and she sees glimpses of it in the stranger. She examines her, curious – up close the similarities are more apparent.
Nyxia stammers out a question but Irisa mostly ignores it, asks a question of her own.
“You look like us,” she says, “not exactly. But you do.”
***
“Don’t,” Heartworm moans as Irisa leaves her side, but it feels like the words were drained from her. And she can’t stop her. Her beautiful girl, her dream girl, now standing side-by-side another girl, one who stinks of a reality Heartworm denies.
Irisa says it because she sees – of course she sees –
(they have the same eyes)
but Heartworm pretends she doesn’t.
She is very good at pretending.
“You have to go back,” she says. Her voice is almost gentle.
Irisa
tarnished x heartworm