Voice Like a Hyacinth

by Mallory Pearson

We filled every room until we made it our room. We named it together and we left it too crowded. No one else could squeeze in. No one else could speak the language.

We created a lexicon worth living in.

“Short Skirt Long Jacket” by Cake,

Each one layered color on color on color with the same frenetic energy I’d come to associate with Saz.

If I could look back on that moment now, even knowing all the ways that we might suffer, I’d still light up at the sight of her. I’d still be in awe of her, of all of them, of how they brightened every room they entered and made it somewhere I thought I could spend the rest of my life in.

“I’m Jo Kozak, and nothing bothers me. You could stick a palette knife in my hand and I wouldn’t even flinch. I climb twenty flights of stairs every day, and I do it all with a bag of rocks tied to each ankle. Let me play a sad song for you on the world’s smallest—”

once, drunkenly, Saz had fallen into one of those prickly roses, and it had taken an hour to pull all the thorns from her palms. My body remembered the hurt.

I was always such a sucker for a pretty girl.

“Pretty girls don’t open their own beers,”

upon first sight, I was immediately enamored with and intimidated by Jodie Finchard.

A life could pass like this, I thought. A life could walk right by me.

Maybe we should join like, a kickball league or something. Get some camaraderie going.” Finch rolled her eyes. “Do you have to be such a dyke all the time?” Saz gasped. “That’s rich coming from you, varsity softball player. You eat carabiners for breakfast.”

It’s more like . . . we need to be able to live with giving that misfortune to someone else. You gotta be willing to steal someone else’s joy.”

yet I always woke with the knowledge that I’d been watching something. An end of some form. An apocalyptic rapture.

“Sometimes you worry me. I think you spend so much time listening to the rest of them, and you keep important parts of yourself away. You’re not honest about when you’re going through something.”

“You worry us. Our tortured Jo.”

“In Greek mythology, hyacinths are supposed to represent devotion beyond death.”

“You fainted, baby,”

Like we actually held all the power we had taken from Kolesnik with our Boar King effigy. Like we were witches, conjurers, necromancers, animating the life out of his body, drinking it into our own.

“I need you to believe me. You especially, out of all of them, or else I have nothing to stand for.”

Finch’s hyacinth had crusted over on my arm and kept opening again every time I showered. I could feel its raw edges rub up against the material of my sweatshirt beneath my coat.

“Caroline Aster,” Moody began. “Amrita Balakrishnan, Jodie Finchard, Mars Jackson, and Joanna Kozak.”

Voice like a hyacinth in the mountains, trampled by shepherds until only a purple stain remains on the ground

“I always think of you when I see this painting,” I admitted after we’d been staring in silence for a while.

“Sometimes I worry that it’s a bad thing we know each other so well,” she said finally. “I think it’s hurting us.”

“I want to know you better than anyone. I don’t care if it hurts.”

I was afraid that by loving her, I’d leashed her.

Caroline paused, gaze floating over our heads and landing on Twombly’s Sapphic devotion. “I hate that painting,” she muttered,

If they forgot me, how could I show my face? How could I deal with the idea that maybe I loved them more than they loved me, that this mattered most to me, that they were okay with letting it dissolve?

“I love you, you bitch. Don’t make me out to be someone I’m not.”

It was difficult to delineate exactly when I had become so out of place in that house, but it likely fell somewhere along the timeline of my queerness. I came out to my family two years ago in a restaurant,

“I hate when you lie.” “I’m fine.” “What did I just say? Give it up already, I’m not Caroline.” “I don’t lie to Caroline.” “You lie to everyone. Caroline just lets you get away with it the most.”

“Finally, honesty. I like it when you listen.”

“Caroline would kill me. Amrita would put a stake through my heart. Saz—well, I guess Saz would love it.”

“That’s your goal, then. Make it through the rest of this year and eat baklava with me.”

“Like, you really scare the shit out of me.”

“It’s like you see everything that we can’t. You’re smarter than us, and you’re talented as fuck, and you get this look in your eyes when you’re painting or when the rest of us are talking that makes me think you’re somewhere else, far away.”

“You make it so hard to know what to do with you,” she said. Another kiss.

She turned to me, but I was already sliding off the countertop and away from her. The sound of my pulse in my ears was nearly loud enough to war with the music. “Jo, wait.”

The way my chest clenched for them.

“Are you fucking kidding me? Fuck you, Finch.”

“Hell yeah, get Prozac Kozak in there too.”

can’t wait until the rest of the world sees you for what you really are.

Beside it, there was a blank space in the calamity signaling where Finch’s blood-soaked rag had been. My eyes dropped down to the empty floor. The rag was gone.

If I told you it was forever love between the five of us, would you believe me?

If I told you it was a hurting love between the five of us, would you believe me?