and the walls kept tumbling down
in this city that we love
in this city that we love
“I don’t know,” she confesses, and her voice wavers, as if she is about to cry. Frustration and exhaustion and fear, all heavy as cement, because there is something in her, some switch flipped, and she knows so little of it, of what it is, or why.
She wants to cry, but she rolls his offer about her mind. She doesn’t know to what extent the power may extend. Mother could take others, sure - that much was obvious, as Irisa lived years as a perpetual child in the forced dream – but Irisa doesn’t know how to begin. She doesn’t remember how her mother put her to sleep, because she’d known only dreams, at first.
Even if she could – would she want to? It seems like the oddest kind of intimacy, to open up that world to outsiders. What would mother think?
(Mother hadn’t even let Nyxia in. Her own daughter. She’d chosen Irisa, and this is a guilt Irisa will bear for the rest of her life.)
She shouldn’t.
But she steps closer. She imagines an invisible hand, reaching out to touch him. She doesn’t know what she’s feeling for, but there’s something – impossible to describe, but it comes from time. Dark and intangible but something heavy, like weighted smoke.
Exhaustion, manifested.
Another step closer. She can almost smell the exhaustion, now that’s she’s feeling for it. She thinks she could push it into him.
“I think I have to…” she begins, but she doesn’t finish, she just touches him – barely, just enough to connect them, tether them. His skin is warm and her eyes close and she savors this moment, and then she exhales, and she pushes.
Sleep, she thinks, follow me.
He crumples surprisingly fast, and for a moment she thinks she killed him, but she watches his stomach move as he breathes, and is briefly reassured that she is not, in fact, a murderer.
She lowers herself to the ground, unsure of what will come next, and turn that heavy smoke of exhaustion back upon herself. Her head falls upon his chest as sleep overwhelms, keeping the tether.
To her, it is a blink, and she is back in the strange jungle, except this time, she is not alone.
Irisa
tarnished x heartworm