säffle troshaldr // {d8/fin/resub}

Smoke, billowing from her nostrils, cavorted up to the thin layers of the hoary strands she possessed, and her eyes surveyed out of sport. Watching the extensive hoard of exhaust in turn was like a child staring at clouds, the free form heap swallowing and expanding in the frigid air in front like a ghost, felt mesmerizing. From the top of the abandoned factory, the hoard of vapor simulated mist absent from the dawn's sky, while almost camouflaging the pale coating of the girl. All but the piercing eyes, perhaps, as they rested through the smoke the same intensified cyan. Safe for her hands, one licked with a film of abandoned grime from swiping the roof and the other grasped around the burning cigarette, her skin was hazed barely by the smoke, besides diluting the view on her muted skin tone.

In the swirling exhaust, she saw the stories her second mother told her, even with the heavily cheeky responses Saffle held against their liability. Over and over in time again, her adopted mother told her and the brother she clung to hand in hand, Elverum, a tale about a wise prince, and the love he fondled for a young princess, who refused his hand until he learned how to cook the most nonpareil grilled cheese in all the land. The wholehearted, but only half brained, brother she held dearly was enthralled by the simplicity, but Saffle held nothing but skepticism for the tale. Unlike the stories her father slapped into bruises on her skin, the whimsical tones her mother concocted like the smoke apparating in the air failed to tell truths or sense or morals. Instead, the memories sat distastefully on the young girl's tongue like bitter candy.

Nostalgic credence was one of few things to toy with in the vacant time, for her at least. As a child, teases swam from her mouth at Elverum as she taped smiling stickers onto his limbs after getting himself cut or hurt or broken. Like custom, he said he was dared by a boy named Salvador to, despite a different boy taking credit for it. Their mother saw Elverum as only visually impaired, although he would commonly mistake Saffle for an entirely different person if her voice had yet to enter the air. During quizzes his sister built (mostly as a source to tease him), he took up that their original mother was the same one who adopted them, which Saffle retorted with a fling of synonyms for stupid. Of course, she lodged on the interest of whatever her brother noted, writing down full scripts of his mis-talent wrongly mixing people up frequently.

Amidst in her sneer-inducing day dream, the nick of a spider on her wrist caught her and the upcoming string of slurs by shock. A thicket of dust and cobweb was pulled up along with her twin boots as she stood, wiping the grime off the clothes cloaking her tall frame. The slovenly trimmed ends of her hair shadowing against the ground, while the only make up trailing her body being a black eye from a fight. Dim light from a broken window gave way for the only illumination, stressing the eyes, which are accompanied by bags viewed as far less than fashionable.

Rambling about the outskirts of the district came congenitally, with both of the Troshaldr children wandering and materializing in scenes much like the abandoned factory. Predominantly, Saffle bore long bouts of vagabonding, but more periodically, since she was often the only one home until her adopted parents were released from work, so instead she can explore the nook and crannies between cushions and peeling wood panes. In a downgrading house as such, deteriorating wallpaper and shattered windows become decor, as the hollow rooms are vacant of lavish furniture. Ever since Death grasped around their second mother, the halls became more desolate; picture frames being smashed against the floor in a father's drunken rage, cushions and pillows ripped to the springs by either key, knife or Saffle's nails in an attempt to gather money for more smokes for herself or Axton. The pair of teens begin stick to each other, huddled against the window in their shared room with the sun painting on their faces while Elverum recalls the absurd stories their mother told and Saffle winced in abhor.

Dismay sat on her skin like the lesions painting her forearms blue and purple as the recollection of the house played at her heartstrings. Nicotine tickling the inside of her nostrils, while the torch laid loosely in her hands, near burning out, as she marched throughout the thin morning mist covering the wispy trees shielding city and smog from run down factories hidden. Lithe fingers tracing the rough barks on trees like braille, with the recollection of her bruises and their forming of soft in her mind. Disparate being from a debauched father a few years younger, adequate amounts of the contusions were from scuffles she or Axton galvanized, while a few, negligible ones originated from general clumsiness.

Both deaths lingered above the corroding house like a match of phantoms, the hollow air absent of sound, save for Axton's frequent felicitous coughs or grunts echoing from one of the back rooms. Effectively, neither sibling chose to bring up the execution of their father, as Elverum and him were the only two present during the hour, and the unspoken outcome implied and implanted itself against Saffle's conscience. Smog trailed through the flat from the igneous end of Axton's cigarette when to the entrance, which greeted she from the layer of life, the taciturn swallowing them fragile, like the silence stalking her throughout the life she held; the quiet days as a child when she read to her brother, the silence resting in the air the day their mother died, the reticent echoing through deserted factories and desolate halls and the idle forest, introverted exhales from having to manage the brother six months older and herself, withdrawn complaints of Axton's indifference towards the Saffle's requests.

Children like, the three of them, lay about the house immobile, shock-still with boredom and claptrap's chatter amongst each other. Their voices carrying throughout the canals of the domicile, Elverum shouting about whimsical nonsense from his hollow room, painted with Polaroids, while Axton shot them down from the living room couch, eaten by bugs and knifes and nails, with his meager interest invested in the book preoccupying his eyes. On the other hand, Saffle sat on a bar stool from the room away, smirking with contemptuous enjoyment from the two inane boys' conversations, while examining through the fractured glass panes of their broken house.