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Small seeds grow into big, strong things.” He blows heated air onto my hands. “But they need sunlight and warmth to set their roots in the soil. And like it or not … you can’t get that under the bed.”
Trinkets of affection passed to me with silent hope I slashed and stabbed.
Making calm shushing sounds, I crawl forward. “It’s okay,” I whisper, softening my features with a smile I pray she can’t see through. I reach between the bars and cup her face. Her lids flutter, like she’d forgotten what it feels like to be touched with tenderness. It’s an arrow through my heart, lit with fire that ignites my veins. I may not be able to save them all tonight, but I can save her. I can save one.
We’ve both been forged by a conditional love that broke us into crumbs people still manage to choke on. Perhaps there’s something poetic in that?
Eyes glazed with lust, he explores my neck in the same manner I do a rock before I swirl paint across the perfect, unspoiled surface. If I live to paint another, it’ll be jagged and split, full of holes for heavy truths to burrow from the light. I’ll use nothing but the grayslades and their varying shades of silver and ash.
I step from tragedy to tragedy, toting death like tombstones collecting beneath my ribs. And I realize with heartbreaking finality that I got the wrong monster in that jungle. I got the wrong one.
I pinch the petals closed on the big, ashy blooms nipped with streaks of silver, tuck them amongst the vine’s coiled mass, then reach for one of my ready-made domes and ease it into the hollow, cradling its wilting corpse until I can no longer watch it slip away. Until I can no longer feel its dying breath kissed upon my brow. Don’t cry.
Small seeds grow into big, strong things,” I rasp, easing my hands beneath her bent body. I lift her, tucking her close to my chest so she can feel the beat of my heart. “But they need sunlight and warmth to set their roots in the soil.” Her body stays limp against mine … There’s nothing. No sign that she’s alive other than the soft whump of her heart.
I thought my home was a castle sitting on the edge of a cliff, looking over a bay that’s shaped like a monster bit the shore. I thought my home was a tower poked through the clouds, with my rocks and my paints and my plants. But I’d happily live right here for the rest of eternity and never feel another pang of homesickness. It’s a realization that just makes more tears slip from my scrunched-up eyes. Because this moment—this beautiful, perfect moment—is stolen. Not mine.
Because I refuse to live in a world where you don’t exist.” My heart cracks, the words passed to me so gently despite the rough timbre abrading my pebbling flesh. Glazing my eyes with another sheen of tears. “It saved me.”
