09-14-2021, 05:08 PM
liesma
There is a moment of quiet that passes between them, after she asks the question and before he decides whether or not he’ll tell her the truth. A moment where she simply looks at him, studying the plains and angles of his face while he’s lost to his thoughts.
And then he answers and her brow darkens with confusion.
He’d been born terrible and he’d called nowhere home because of it.
(Are they terrible, the three of them? Her father, her mother? Is she terrible? Is that why they settle in no place at all, but call the meadow and the forest and the river home instead?
The thought doesn’t turn her stomach, no. She doesn’t think she’d mind being terrible.
And she’d mind it even less if she knew what her father really was, the horrible things that he did in his dreams.)
She exhales a breath and goes on looking at him, wondering about the way he smiles even with the edge of uncertainty in his tone. And he bathes himself in fire then, as if to cleanse himself of the truth of it, and she nods her understanding.
Does this make him even more terrible? The fact that he’s not sorry?
She finds that it makes no difference to her, not really. And when the air beside her is displaced, she knows it must have been the friend that she cannot see who’s done it. She must not be terrible if she cannot see the things that he sees and she doesn’t know if she’s disappointed or comforted by this realization.
“You don’t seem so terrible to me,” she tells him and the thing she cannot see both. “Who told you that you were?” she asks then, head tilted to better meet his eye.
And then he answers and her brow darkens with confusion.
He’d been born terrible and he’d called nowhere home because of it.
(Are they terrible, the three of them? Her father, her mother? Is she terrible? Is that why they settle in no place at all, but call the meadow and the forest and the river home instead?
The thought doesn’t turn her stomach, no. She doesn’t think she’d mind being terrible.
And she’d mind it even less if she knew what her father really was, the horrible things that he did in his dreams.)
She exhales a breath and goes on looking at him, wondering about the way he smiles even with the edge of uncertainty in his tone. And he bathes himself in fire then, as if to cleanse himself of the truth of it, and she nods her understanding.
Does this make him even more terrible? The fact that he’s not sorry?
She finds that it makes no difference to her, not really. And when the air beside her is displaced, she knows it must have been the friend that she cannot see who’s done it. She must not be terrible if she cannot see the things that he sees and she doesn’t know if she’s disappointed or comforted by this realization.
“You don’t seem so terrible to me,” she tells him and the thing she cannot see both. “Who told you that you were?” she asks then, head tilted to better meet his eye.
i see you shining through the treetops
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore
But i don’t feel you pulling strings anymore