Of course it is too much.
Of course the atmosphere, the stars, oblivion is too much. And maybe it’s wrong. Maybe he is wrong to do what he does – to manipulate the world for a child naïve enough to believe in everything he has to show her – but they did this to him. He is what he is because they made him this way. They taught him to lie. They taught him to run. They taught him how to ruin, and then they gave him the tools.
“There’s anger in your heart,” she says, the child, and he cannot argue it. He will not, but it doesn’t mean he likes the idea of her unraveling his edges. There is a prickle of heat that rolls along the ridge of his spine that feels like defense, and a moment where he teeters on the edge of control and breakdown. But then she obliges him, and she says: “Take me to the sun.”
And his lips pull up ever so slightly on one side.
“Do you think it will burn?” She asks. The best things always do.
“You’re perceptive,” he says below his breath, and he wonders if she’ll catch what lingers between the syllables – the hint of doubt, the tangible fragments of mockery that exist in the spaces between his words. They exist in a place where she has the hips of a woman who has seen the world, but she is not grown. She is not worldly. She is not real.
She doesn’t know.
She doesn’t know.
There is a single flash, and the stars will melt away. The colours of the nebulas fade into oblibion, and all at once the familiar meadow grass licks at their knees and their bellies. They are home again, existing in the place where her legs are too long and her eyes are too wide. They are home again, because his ego is bruised and he held in his palms the power to take. They are home again, because he is what he is.
“There are worse things than burning,” he says to the child, because they made him this way.
elektrum
i am and always will be the optimist