the seven circles of girlhood / perry, day 7

At some point before dusk, Perry ends up lying flat on her back beneath the coral arch of a giant maitake. The rain settles like a mist, second skin second sweat, it makes everything feel damp and disgusting and the air starts to smell like rotting wood. Caspian’s settled somewhere past Perry's shoulder, doing his best to blend into the mushroom stalk.

He doesn’t do anything but stare at her.

"You’re fucking annoying." She says when the silence goes on for too long. "And creepy. I think you caught something from Jayson. Crabs, probably. You should get that checked out."

It's something fungal, at least. He looks like a cheap trick at a horror show, head still on but barely.

"I’m not even the one that killed you, you know, you shouldn’t be here." She tells him plainly, pushing the palm of her hand against her forehead like that’ll dispel the vision. "Go pull the ghost shit someone more gullible."

There’s no response. Perry groans and thunks her head back against the ground.

There’s nothing meaningful to this, just in case you were wondering. There’s no greater message from beyond the grave. Rather, it’s the situation of a slow decline. A madness in singularity. There’s no magic here. And if there was then it’s just another type of science that hasn’t been named properly yet, something strange that's been shoved under that mystical blue umbrella encompassing things like witchcraft and hedge fund management.

But there’s no magic. No curse. The human body simply behaves certain ways after certain conditions are met. Sure, it can survive several days without food or water or kindness, but that doesn’t mean that it likes it. It will rebel eventually, and then the mind, since it's never really that far behind, will follow.

Myrtle arrives somewhere to the left of the maitake and the force of her landing pushes a breeze through the stems, reed whistling.

Caspian’s hair ruffles.

That doesn’t seem quite right.

"If you brought another rabbit," Perry grits out, not even looking at the gryphon, "Then you can fuck right back off."

There’s a moment of heavy silence, and then the sound of Myrtle’s tail thumping in the wet dirt. She’s lifting off again and disappearing, away from the foulness that clouds up like a smoke signal from the girl on the ground. Perry nods to herself grimly.

"It’s that thing’s fault, you know." She mutters to her blank faced, sopping Cas, "Made me eat something weird and-" She waves her hand around her head in explanation, "Scrambled me."

It’s a nice little half-truth. Blame the murder on the bad shrimp. Push your pathological dependence on free-will against the wall and pin it there with the red tack labelled food poisoning. What’s the worst that could happen? Maybe the waiter will take pity on you and offer a free dessert - blood orange and vanilla, on the house. Wash it down with your wine. Don't mind the way it stains your teeth.

"Whatever. Doesn't matter - you’re dead." She says spitefully, picking at her claws, "M'losin' my mind, I don’t care."

***

She's rolling her eyes, her entire body turning with the movement, her head tilting back, "Don't be dramatic, Bells. Get up."

She stomps her spear for emphasize, since she can't stomp her foot.

"Bellamy." She snaps.

The sad thing is, she’s just a little girl all alone, standing on the curb with a broken dolly, clutching at the pieces and not understanding that she played too rough. The yarn hair never grows back, the porcelain doesn’t scab over, she can’t sew the stuffing back in once it’s taken out.

She’s the boy in the barn, smoothing out the curls in the straw, unable to fathom why they’ve stopped bouncing.

Torian’s not even there anymore.

"What?" She tries teasing instead, shifting her stance to try and look appealing, like there isn’t blood under her nails and a dead boy on the ground, "Is this another ploy to get me to kiss it better? Maybe if you ask a little nicer this time."

She falls out of it just as quickly as she falls into it, "C’mon you’re a shit actor, I didn’t mean what I said about Larissa, cut it out."

***

She takes the pomegranate from her bag and digs her thumbs into the meat of it, nails thick and sharp and immediately splitting the skin open.

It'd been a stupid thing to do really.

The fruit - not Bellamy.

The pomegranate gushes red and then splits messily in her palms, shiny and pebbled and nearly glowing in the weak light from the moon. The violet makes the fruit look darker. Makes the blood look older.

Caspian's gone now and that's fine because Perry really didn't want to share.

Perry digs a claw in and scoops the seeds with a single gnarled nail, watching them stick and try to cling together like fish eggs.

That's cute.

Maybe they're friends.

She closes her eyes and the texture is almost brain-like. If she imagines hard enough, she makes it so. The seeds pop under her teeth like arteries and they go down smooth, there's something decidedly meaty about it. Her throat works around a chunk of tongue. It's not very close to real flesh, but she can pretend. Perfect little actress, evil little thing; she can suck the marrow out of a bone and make you believe it's a lollipop.

The stickiness on her hands is from the juice of a sirloin. The tartness of the pomegranate is just the acidity of the stomach lining. The squeak of a seed between her canines is just the last bit of the prey's fear dying out, like a delightful little echo, a repetitive motif, an f major being played in succession. It screams in the jaw twice; once at the kill, again at the feast.

But that just makes it all the more sweeter, doesn't it?

She's had this thought before. There's a rabbit in her lap and a pomegranate in her fist. She's going in circles.

***

"Bellamy, get the fuck up."









"...Bellamy?"

***

The very first face in the anthem has her leaping up.

She's screaming before she's gotten all the way there, a single shrill sound that makes her own blood curdle and her own ears hurt and she looks around to strange the source of it and only ends up hacking away at the trunk of a porcini like some kind of crazed beast, throwing her spear at it, throwing her bag at it, anything she can get her hands on, ripping out her own hair with her own hands, fists flying out and in and then out again because the sudden rage that takes her over is so primal, so instinctual, she's making this guttural sort of garbled noise and she's got pieces of mushroom and pieces of glass in her hair and her hands are bleeding, she can't hear over the sound of her own skull because the one thing she fucking wanted, the one thing-

Someone got to Ulysses before she did.

She misses Bellamy's face in her fit. Maybe that's a good thing. Maybe it isn't. The machinations in her chest start to try and reboot themselves, the fire burning low in her gut reaching up to scorch the gears and turn them into charcoal pieces. She grabs them with one hand and crushes them herself, smearing the kohl between her fingers until her nailbeds are indistinguishable from the ash.

It's rage in the purest aesthetic sense. There's nothing very pretty about it, no matter what words we wrap it up in. Her chest heaves, the whites of her eyes are bloodshot, she's covered in several unpleasant things. She's been in a forest for seven days and her foot is gone. There's no way else to say this. There's no other version of this except for what the cameras might catch or what the mushrooms might hear - and they're both focused on very different things.

It is though, in the most paltry of definitions, a tantrum.

It's not a very appealing word. Tantrum. It seems childish. Something someone shouldn't be doing. It works in contradiction with several others words - rage, as you have already seen. Fury, which has that underlying feminine connotation which might be better suited. It even opposes wrath, which as you already know, is a sin - and we say this as though it takes a Saint to be entertaining.

But it's such a bad thing, isn't it? A tantrum. Only little girls throw tantrums. Only babies throw their own toys out of their own bassinets and then scream over it. Only children cry over their own actions - there's no fundamental loophole there.

That lie should be making you dizzy. The language should be turning technicolour. You should want to be screaming too.

If you're confused, that's a good thing. If you're bored, that's even better. Look away. Turn the screen off. Let the kid cry itself to sleep, it'll tire out eventually, as all things must. Only wrath and rage are endless. And this is just a tantrum, see?. Go get the rest of your daily steps in before the clock ticks over and you have to tell yourself that today will finally be the day that you decide to fix you.

Go be stupid. Go learn to resent someone. Don't let yourself love them, it's awful. It's poison. It's opening yourself up to be flayed. You should be raging instead, you should be like Fury incarnate, winged and terrible, man-eater, flesh-eater, punishing and bacchic. Don't let your children throw tantrums because when they get older it'll turn into something much, much worse.

Or do let them. They're yours, after all.

Still, there’s nothing meaningful to this, just in case you were wondering.

Remember the slow decline. Madness of many meanings. Have you been distracted yet? Lost your grip on the thread? Good. Don't look behind you.