D2 :: "baby girl" Bones [wip]

Everyone who has ever known her is a fool for her, except for her mother because her mother does not know her. This girl — whose laugh is a glittering bell amongst an endless crowd of teenagers who've come to her home to scream with delight over untold displays of the strange, of the socially unacceptable, of the miraculous and the morbid that dare to display pride on the various stages of Cirque de la Mort — flits between shadows and spotlights without any differentiation. She has lived and breathed for seven years and not for one moment has she known if she is real.

A simple mind might assume this is because she was never given a name, the blank space on her birth certificate abandoned just the same as she was. The nurses called her baby girl and did their best to comfort her newborn cries when her mother's empty hospital bed did not have arms with which to hold even such a small weight, but their cooing might as well have been that of birds for all it meant to her. Even when her tiny fist wrapped itself around her father's finger for the first time — days later, when fear finally twisted his gut enough to convince him to search the local hospitals; hoping and dreading in equal measure that he'd find an answer of one kind or another, perhaps an answer he has waited decades for — she did not know herself. There was no great spark bursting unseen across the universe. She was just a baby. She held her father's finger because it was there and his touch felt no different than that of the hospital employees.

When her father was offered her birth certificate to complete his hands trembled and he could not touch it. Someone wrote Bones in the surname blank on his behalf, but he did not thank them for their assistance in doing what his own hands could not, because he did not know if it was right. Desperately, he wanted it to be right. This was the same desperation and the same wanting that he always feels when contemplating if he and the girl's mother truly share something in this life. It is not because he wonders if there is someone else. It's because he knows the woman he loves as well as it is possible to know a woman who cannot be known and so he knows there is no one. Sometimes not even him.

Cornelius Bones lacks the courage to speak truth nor lies to his beloved daughter, so when the day came for the girl to bluntly ask about her mother for the first time he could only say: Your mother is the circus, Little Rib. She frowned, rolling her eyes as she huffed in frustration, because while there are many things that children do not know, they are not stupid. Striped canvas is not a mother. Stage lights are not a mother. Tightropes and freshly bitten chicken heads and crowds of heckling strangers are not a mother. And yet...

Cirque de la Mort is her mother. Cirque de la Mort is her father, her sister, her brother, her cousins, and her friends. It is tents and stilts and spun sugar. It is skin and soul and hard earned sweat. It is her home both within and without and when it tucks her in each night a great spark of knowing does burst unseen across the universe. The girl may not know whether she is real or not, but she has no trouble believing in such simple and undeniable truths as magic. As belonging. She trust-falls into each new day without hesitation.

On the day of her seventh birthday the Strong Woman helps the girl dye her hair green to celebrate. It is the twenty-eighth time she has colored it green within the last year, but it feels as new as the first time. It feels as new as each time the strands are turned purple, orange, or blue. She is bright. She wills the world to know it, even when the temporary dyes are inevitably washed away, leaving a muddy blonde in their wake.

It is not that her father would refuse her if she asked for the color to be permanent — the word no does not exist when she asks him for anything — it is that she cannot decide, her whims as fleeting as the cake Cornelius baked for the occasion. When he carries it out, candles burning bright as the white-eyed Ringmaster leads the entire circus troupe in a chorus of happy birthday, her father's effort is obvious in the spilled flour clouding his tattoos and the stray frosting smeared across the side of his shaven head. They share a grin as she shamelessly digs a hand into the cake, having broken every plate on the premises when attempting to teach herself plate spinning the day before. No one minds. Everyone eats with their hands, committing the day to memory with riotous laughter as food is shoved in each other's faces and a competition breaks out to see who ends up the messiest. The cake is gone in minutes. Afterwards her father lifts her onto his shoulders so she can hold a lighter to the emergency sprinkler system in the Big Top, everyone dancing and lifting their faces to scream as the water rinses them clean.






wip wip wip gotta keep going over all the things with Ele but just tryna round up random bits of writing to see what's useful and what needs to be scrapped wip wip wip

Congenital insensitivity to pain (CIP) is a rare autosomal recessive genetic disease caused by mutations in the SCN9A gene.