03-04-2016, 12:19 PM
tell me we’re dead and I’ll love you even more;
Irisa has none of her mother’s hesitancy, instead she looks at the girl who had materialized with a new interest. There is a way she stands, a discord that chimes between her and the world she stands in, a discord Irisa cannot entirely articulate but rather senses, feels in her bones.
(There’s something else, too, a certain yearning when she looks at her, the way we ache for stars and the sea from whence the most basic parts of us were borne, the yearn of our bodies recognizing something it knows.)
Mother hisses there is no father here and Irisa knows there’s a name, because mother mumbles it sometimes in sleep, sometimes moans it like it’s a thing upon her. She knows she came from somewhere but the details are obscure and faint and she’s never pressed the issue.
She doesn’t remember being in the womb but she can almost recall floating, warm, limbs tangled with another.
The girl offers her name - Nyxia - so Irisa smiles and offers her own before mother can tell her not to.
“I’m Irisa,” she says, “and this is my mother. Heartworm.”
***
Heartworm cringes when her name is offered. She doesn’t want any of this. She tries to dream the girl away but nothing happens, she is too real, too solid, she does not bow to her whims the way the rest of this world does.
(She’s never entirely understood this world. She doesn’t think about it too much. There is a lot she doesn’t think about.)
“You shouldn’t be here,” she says, and hates the croak of her voice, the fear that laces it like arsenic. The animals sense her distress and raise their strange heads, inquisitive. They are all linked to her.
***
Irisa glances at her mother, shocked.
“Mom!” she says, appalled, then looks at the girl again.
“She’s kidding,” she says, “we don’t get a lot of visitors.”
HEARTWORM