Can You Hear Me, Thunder? :: [Denali + Xavier]
Jan 29, 2015 12:17:56 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Jan 29, 2015 12:17:56 GMT -5
Mornings are meant to be new. The sun is reborn and blinks its eyes for the first time in a fresh dawn and the hush of its inhalation tricks me into believing today will be different — all beginnings and no endings. The tarry dark is chased away and I climb out my window into something clean and effortless. Starlight has always felt too pained to me, god-suns trying to squeeze themselves through pinprick holes in an old bedsheet. This is a child's sky woven messy with scattered color like mussed yarn and when I climb down the great oak sentinel that guards the backyard, dropping into the grass with bare feet and the skirt of my dress puffed out all around my knees like an umbrella, I have to do a double-take to be sure I'm not dreaming. Crouching down, I trace the crescent scars that pattern my knees, bitten and lightly scabbed but still defined enough to count the teeth marks through the freckles. "One, two, three —" Moons of my own mouth; marks of the dark. They have names, but I don't know them because I don't speak in tongues, despite the rumors. These are grave markers for a mouse caught in one of my mother's kitchen traps, but there are more on my knuckles for a broken bluejay splayed across the spokes of my bicycle like a crucifixion last Tuesday and on and on. My skin is a map of endings and starlight so frustrated it turned to rust, crumbled, and fell into me. The cemetery is full, the Reaper's Daughter is loaded up with the burden of all the souls she can carry, and there will be no more. The hope of morning swears there will be no more. A pair of leather boots hang from my fingers by their tangled laces, but I'm in no rush to pull my feet from the fairy dust frost of dawn, warm in a thick-knit cardigan with pockets deep enough to hold anything. I walk slow and easy across the yard and into the woods beyond, my free hand skimming across the trunk of every tree I can reach as twigs and brittle plants crackle beneath my calloused toes. Sevy tells me sometimes, when she's in the mood to practice conversation, that I could probably be prettier than her if I weren't such a wild thing. If I wore my shoes and brushed my hair before I went out instead of at the end of the night, when it's all tangled with leaves, salt, and wicked mystery. If I let her rouge my lips and powder my freckles into something less fierce. Braids, she says, twisting her fingers through the hellish hurricane I only know how to leave to its own desires, braids would be lovely. I let her fuss me into her image now and then until I really am almost as much of a living porcelain doll as she is, but that's a different kind of new than this walk is for. This is the path of freedom and so my hair whips around as it pleases and I laugh when a fuzzy moth flutters by to take a few cheap shots at my nose before hurrying away. It's not until I hear a hawk swooping along above my trail, stubborn and intent, that a nerve of paranoid guilt pricks at the smile I'd been devoting myself to and the next thing I know I'm sprinting, weaving between trees and trying to hold the remnants of my expression in tact because I won't right now. I don't have arms enough to hold a hawk and (Denali?) I'm sorry. I don't stop until the grass tugs itself back to reveal brick and mortar hiding in the middle of nowhere, half-overgrown but not swallowed up completely quite yet. Glass domed buildings bubble up a short ways away — cracked and perfect and shattered all at once — and mangled metal bars jut up from the earth everywhere like strange vines whirling into midair. The sign in front of this one shows a fuzzy brown something still trying to peek out from the peeling paint. North Panem Brown Bear. The remnants of the description are in bits and pieces: arctos horribilis; weighs up to 1,500; predator; unpredictable in temperament; may attack if; were once highly endangered until Capitol scientists; introgressive hybridization between various; renewed survival today. Curiosity has me leaning into the vacant cage through a wide gap when heavy footfalls steal away the morning's quiet. They're too fast and unfamiliar and although I know it's not the hawk, a different kind of paranoia sends me tumbling into the cage with a muffled exclamation of surprise. Horribilis — Fifteen hundred — May attack — Back pressed to the bars of the cage with both hands wrapped around the metal and all my knuckles whitewashed, I'm breathing too fast and it takes me a moment to work up the courage to turn around. Silence has returned, but there's a hushed whisper on the breeze that shivers up my spine. (Denali?) One deep breath and I whirl around, immediately screaming bloody murder. Above the sky is still pastel children's play, but a face with furry brown cheeks is staring back at me from the other side and I don't know how to check reality this time, because I have to be dreaming. I have to be dreaming. |
