Diorite Fray // D1 // FIN

Trembling hands.

Trembling hands, they softly knead the gentle texture of the petals with fingertips as drops of crystal splash onto them; a soft rumbling of a storm as through a flood, through more thunder and through an earthquake all of it fail to drown, burn, and kill the beautiful flower.

"It's not weird," the trees whisper to me. It's not weird for a Fray to pick for rare gems scoured around the civilization that's dominated its home, polish them and turn them into her own pieces of jewelry when poison and intoxication leave aging lips. Using them as an outlet because she's forbidden to purchase ones of legitimacy, supposed to be piercing and breaking realistic dummies and supposed to not let her parents down.

We're all injected with poison and liquor, but thankfully we all possess our own antidotes which keep us going for just another minute, just another hour, just another day. We have each other to confide in and relate to, borrow cures when ours isn't enough to fight off an overdose of more toxicants and alcohol until they stick a needle in our arms again.

The beauty of what little nature we have around here, that's my medicine.

But of course, every medicine has its

side effects.

Shadows loom over me as they ask hushed questions,

"What if they find out?"

"What if this is weird?"

"What if they're right?"

They step closer and so do their curious minds into darker, personal territory, grab me by the throat and my shoulders raise, my teeth clench and my hands ball up into fists crushing my work into wrinkled, balled up paper,

I'm

trapped.

Trapped in their grasp and their own breaths of venom hit my face.

Why do freckles dot my face like the stars spot the sky? Why is my hair dark and unlike the rest of my siblings'? Why do I actually look the part of the word

weak,

why do I meet my parents' expectations in this way?



Why do I not look,

and why do I not act,

like a Fray?

Drunken and cold, mom and dad are shepherds and they see me as the black sheep, an especially pathetic excuse for a Career, for a Fray, for their own daughter. Our minds a sheepdog, they herd us into a barn but the dog I possess has a particular interest in me, I did move into the barn but it continues to be hot on my tail and I've

had

ENOUGH.

My blood is hot, a volcano erupts in the form of screams of boiling, menacing lava, I'm dropped and they shrink back before vanishing into thin air. The shrieks continue bubbling from its orifice as small hands' knuckles turn white, as the flower is let go and stomped on as I keep moving forward, as a small and thin frame rushes off and pushes past people. A brunette blur, my medicine is too weak. Hayden's, Peggy's, Xylia's, theirs are all too weak.

I can't help myself, my brother and sisters can't help me and neither will a stranger possessing a heart as soft as the flowers I'm familiar with the feeling of.

Something unexpected, what I least expected but what their pools of alcohol and hate would want to see.

Feet stomp into a building for training, a cry of more hot molten frustration seperating my lips as I quickly turn to a rack of bows and shoving it to the ground before moving forward. Chatter ceases, dead silent you can't hear an owl's hoot, a tree's quiet words, a cricket's chirp.

I watched the stars with them that one night, Hayden and Peggy and Xylia.

Dark sky with only a few scattered throughout the night. Trembling hands grasp a belt of throwing knives and look the specks dead in the eye before a yell sounds the signal of the first knife whooshing into the blackness.

Chest--they impale the lifeless patch of the heavens. Scout, for being a horrific monster of a cousin but for also taking off into it by choice.

Throat--the brightest one, Justice, for successfully claiming the spotlight and giving blizzard guardian figures more reason to see us as nothing but lowly dirt.

Ear--a dim fleck that doesn't flicker, but is there just waiting to go out. Pillar, for trying to steal it away from him but failing for she was too far out of reach.

Eye--two faintly twinkling together but the farthest away from the rest. Mom and dad, for only seeing us as a contest for glorification and not as their own children.

Rage and irony, disaster until the burning liquefied rock cools and leaves only a barren, ash-filled, devastasting landscape. I sink to the ground as clear quartz fluid streams down my pale complexion once more. All the suppressed pressure, finally released but into something I've never wanted it to find itself in.

All the knives were used, and as sobs wrack my body I slowly look up to the last still object in the blue.

Forehead.

One star flickering on its own, like it's about to give way.

Me.

For being nothing like the image they see of me in their heads.

Trembling hands engulf me in a sea of black, and I drown.