"But the dream, the echo, slips from him as quickly as he had found it and as consciousness comes to him (a slap and not the gentle waves of oceanic tides), it dissolves entirely. His muscles relax as the cold claims him again, as the numbness sets in, and when his grey eyes open, there’s nothing but the faint after burn of a dream often trod and never remembered." --Brigade, written by Laura
all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone
It is a wasteland.
She has traveled from the Cove as an apparition might.
A ghost haunting the trails of those who have come before her.
She is a ghost because she cannot feel the pangs of hunger that plague her mortal form. How long she has been hungry, shunned by a mother who had never wanted her, had made no attempt to convince the girl that she was loved.
And love does not feed a child anyway.
So, the girl wandered. She a ghost, the rest of them just bones.
Bones with souls, it seems. Though she cannot tell if they’re dead. If she’s dead.
If her mother’s neglect meant that she never lived at all or if she had emerged from her mother’s womb already dead.
She does not stop anyone to ask them. Would they know it if they were dead?
She arrives in the meadow and steps into the sunlight, her form solidifying as she does. She emerges in the meadow decidedly equine, no longer just a specter. She breathes and blinks and lowers her mouth to the sweet grass and eats her fill.
And, when she’s finished, she lifts her head and studies the other souls here. They’re all just bones. She ducks her chin to press her mouth to her own chest, testing its solidness.
She is real, she is alive, she can feel the heart beating beneath her lips.
She lifts her head and waits.
12-17-2020, 11:38 PM (This post was last modified: 12-27-2020, 06:20 PM by Sintra.)
It is not incorrect to say that she is just bones. In fact, it is almost certainly the first thing to notice about her, the way her translucent flesh wraps around her bones, like glass or like a jellyfish drifting through the dark sea. Sintra thinks she would know if she was dead because she thinks that her sight would be restored, but more than that, the red splash of her heart clenching and twisting in on itself between the blades of her shoulders is a constant reminder that this is not the Afterlife, it is the meadow, instead.
In the autumn meadow, the girl stands apart from the others, wary, nervous. She does not trust any of them now, keeps well away from the twisted and the normal alike that mingle and graze and that sometimes copulate shamelessly now that the year wanes. She watches, though her head must turn left, then right, to see them, sweeping the meadow with one violet eye while her animated ears twist and pivot. The ragged, empty, socket with its pink scar leaves half her world plastered with darkness and the meadow feels full of that shade, full of the crooning of monsters. Everything else is stained the sallow color of fear. The world is full of horror. It is full of trickery and nightmares that make the familiar into the strange. It is full of predators who will not wait until you are dead to steal your eyes. It is full of the wicked who twist all the rest until they can tell you that the day is darker than night and you nod in agreement because you can't remember anymore.
This is what Sintra knows of the world. When the star-cloaked filly shivers out of nothing - a ghost come to life - she only freezes, as if by not moving she might become fully invisible. It has never worked before.
She has no other defense. This is a world designed for monsters, not stupid girls.
all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone
Spectra might have been intrigued if she knew. If there were anything at all to indicate that the girl looking back at her is any different than the rest of them.
But they’re all just bones and there is nothing that separates them. Just bones.
And yet, this girl has only one eye and this is enough to pique her curiosity, to coax Spectra closer. Slowly, at first. Hindered by her hunger. (How she loathes this corporeal form and all of its insufferable weakness. Between the ghost and the viper, she’d rather be the ghost.)
She had felt the heart beating in her breast, but she is no longer convinced. She does not see the eye’s puckered scar because she sees no flesh. She sees only its absence and this is enough to make her question herself. She is young still and does not know how to hold onto her convictions.
Her ribs ache with hunger.
Surely if she were dead, she would not feel the pain of it.
But when she gets close enough (not close enough to touch, but close enough to be heard), she calls to the girl.
“Are you dead?” she asks, quiet. Like it’s a secret. Like neither of them are supposed to know.
“Am I?”
And if you listen closely, you will hear a rumor of hope in her voice.
Questions fill the uncertain space between them, and they give Sintra pause because the voice that asks them wears nothing that sounds dangerous, only tired - and the soap-bubble girl knows too well the way the exhaustion feels when it creeps in between your bones and makes your skin crawl.
"We aren't dead," the frown on her dark lips matches the sullen rainbows that play across her skin, but there's a note of uncertainy in her voice. Her memory skips, trying to touch the recent past, to remember what it was like to be dead, if only for a moment, if only in a dream, but the memory is blunted and slippery and the effort of remembering creases her forehead, making the still-sensitive scar over her eye twinge. The pain only serves to distract her, she gets confused so easily. Was death before or after the boy covered in little mouths?
She finds that she isn't sure, now.
Maybe they are dead, and maybe that is why she can't remember.
But her heart still beats, even if the other girl doesn't seem to notice; that pulse of red just visible to her own eyes between the flat blades of her shoulders. Sintra shakes her head and the unruly locks of her young mane fall across her face. They are not quite long enough to hide the ruin of it Even one-eyed, she still can see shadows that mark the gaunt filly's sides.
"I did die, once. I think," Her head tips and half the star-mantled girl disappears into darkness. The memory's slid away again, "Maybe it was a dream? I... I can't remember now, but I wasn't any happier there."
Too much of Time stretches before her. The idea of suffering an entire lifetime just to face it in Eternity, too, makes her feel ill.
all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone
We aren’t dead.
The viper’s heart spasms with disappointment, though she had suspected as much.
Certainly, if she were dead, the hunger would not be so painful. There would not be such a dreadful ache in her ribs.
Her frown mirrors the girl’s, though she has no way of knowing this. She cannot see the expression her mouth makes because she can see no mouth at all.
There had been a time quite early in her life, the first day or so, when she could see them as they truly were. She saw her mother with skin and muscle and sinew. She saw other residents of the Cove looking just as fully alive. And then she had woke the next morning to find that they were all bone. Just bone.
But the girl’s mention of her death piques her interest just enough to have her linger there. She tilts her head and searches the girl’s bones for any clue as to how she might have died or how she might have come to be alive again. She sinks closer by fractions, her nostrils flaring.
“How did you die?” she asks, unaware of any social contract that might deem such a question inappropriate. She has no manners to speak of, the viper, abandoned by her mother rather promptly after birth. There has been no one to teach her nor any desire to learn. So she asks and she stares at the girl, unblinking.
It had been such a simple thing, to die. She hadn't had to do anything.
"I made a choice." What is a trick? Foolish child, and not a great deal wiser, now, but more fearful, more tentative, not nearly so free with her choices. It shows in the way she pauses between thoughts, agonizing over the right words until she feels as if she is floating far away from the meadow and the ghostly viper child at her side, and then the words come like disjointed memories.
"I was asked a question I didn't understand, then I woke up in the Afterlife. Someone's idea of a joke. My Mama was there, but she isn't," (wasn't,) "dead either, and she peeled off all my skin, and when I found the Gatekeeper again, I looked like this," Her dark nose swings back to nip bitterly at her sea-glass flesh and the shifting bones beneath. "Just bones."
Such a simple thing. It's easy to die, all you need to do run afoul of someone stronger than you, and everyone is stronger than Sintra is. She shivers, pushing the horrorscape away again and reaching out to the too-close filly with her velvet nose.
"How--- how do you turn invisible? I would like to be invisible."
all i want is beaches full of dead birds. a flood of limbs
washed up onshore. seascapes sparkling bright with bone
The viper does not understand, but she listens. She listens because she thinks she would very much like to die but the hunger won’t take her and she is too young to know any other way. She simply dissolves each time she approaches danger, shifting seamlessly between something alive and something that is just vapor. She does not want to be this real thing anymore, she does not want to be the viper.
Her mother had not loved her, Spectra knows this, but at least she had not peeled off her skin. The viper glances around the meadow, at all the bones, and wonders if their mothers peeled off their skin, too. She blinks and pulls her focus back to the child in front of her, a question fully formed on her tongue. “Where is the Gatekeeper?” Maybe the Gatekeeper can help her die.
She doesn’t know that you cannot kill something that is not fully alive, something that can shift so easily between life and death.
The child touches her and all the viper can see is teeth. But the touch is soft like velvet and this chases a tremor down the length of her spine. “I don’t know,” she says, the truth, “I just let go.” As she does now. And her edges fade and she is just vapor. It takes enormous concentration to pull herself back into focus again. She is getting weaker.
