elegy falling forward & down [ kip ]

elegy falling forward & down [ kip ] Jul 31, 2022 22:07:28 GMT -5

Quote

Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Jul 31, 2022 22:07:28 GMT -5

K I P T Y N

She doesn’t crumple like the girl Tex killed.

Her body, blood let and lightened, floats down to the cave floor, the motion of it slow and uneven, and still graceful. When her cannon sounds, it’s as if I can see through the haze, the illusion broken and bloody beside her. Flesh to flesh, the hurt we’ve been laying into each other this morning suddenly made physical. There’s the gash my glaive tore; there’s the place Tune carved. These bodies of ours are so resilient, and yet still so fragile, the light gleaning soft off the thin film of liquid covering Alice’s still eyes.

And then Tune’s gone and it’s just the sound of my breaths, each shallower than the last. We didn’t stay when Tex drove his spear through another girl’s neck, terrified that that motherfucker with the lute would break it over one of our heads, but we were really just worried about me, worried that I couldn’t take another hit and that maybe that would’ve been the time we finally couldn’t stop the bleeding.

When I found Tex and Cain after my extra time in the tavern, I remember seeing Tex’s hands stained with my blood after bandaging my arm, how even last night as he pulled them through his hair I could still see red, my body’s specific shade of red, stuck in the lines of his palms.

A part of me wants to go find him, and a part of me is terrified he’ll kill me if I do.

So I sit down next to Alice in the dark, a fact that makes being still that much easier, and that much stranger all the same. I reach my hand out as if to touch her, and then draw it back to place both hands in my lap. I can feel all the new wounds in me straining, and so I lay down beside her, and for a moment we’re just two bodies in the dark taking up space on the cave floor, and things are still and quiet, just for a moment.

Another cannon sounds, and the floor beneath us shakes.

I shut my eyes tight against the dark, and nothing in the world changes. Nothing at all.

I have to go, I whisper to her. My body protests the movement, the roll from my back onto my side, the feeling of my knees pulled into my chest. I’m sorry, I tell her, but I don’t think I am. I’m scared, and I’m alone, and there’s no light that can reach me so far back. And despite getting turned around, I can see faint glimpses of the afternoon fragmenting out from where I assume I came in, and I collect my glaive, my bag, my body, and head towards it.

I have to find Tex, I whisper to myself, and to Alice. I have to find Tex, I whisper, and then think to myself alone, because I think I’m about to die, and he’s patched me up before.

[ table: pogue ]