pup's table testing

Shakily, I lace my shoes.

Lungs fluncuating to the beat of endless steel machines, a rhythm that I've lived by my entire life, and I pull pink strands back behind my neck and button the collar of my shirt to meet collarbone with morning sun and sawdust raying me as a canvas. I've never known myself to focus much about it. Whispers taunt my mind from the last second - sentences I've slept on for days now that still repeat like a still dream, like the moments Carsyn and Clarke were told Owen, Noah and Cody passed away and later they told me. I've always been a second hand child.

It still feels like I'm dreaming, sometimes. That the world around me is the fabric I weave and it's constantly caught around my ankle, elbows, throat, and my pink hair bleeds into the fantasy portrayed by a docile mind. And my pale fingers wrap around one weak thread I notice one day between treelines and fog clouds and a gentle tug unravels my entire mind. It's numbing. Imagined lives all around me, and maybe I'm not just Coralie, maybe my pink hair and fairy wings are something to help people and this isn't just a fantasy or a reality, but it's my sandbox and as I roll the cuffs of my sleeve into the larger ones of my coat I sway to the beat of my own heart.

What if I'm god.

And the conversation sways on my mind, ("Clarke,") and I question my own motiffs. As undying, adored and unchallenged ruler of this world, why have I made myself the least aware? The fabrics I thread resuscitating to life with factory fumes, bleeding from monochrome to my own spectrum as I rub my palms past them; I made this reality, then. Somewhere along the lines, I became a dreamshot, and my own interpretation became influential enough to sway the path of faith and- well. The heavy coat on my sweater chokes my hair.

That can't be right.

I breathe in the fumes of my hair, factory smoke following the life lines crest in my palms like that of my cousins. And I don't really think I can escape it, or if I need to. Noah never saw anything past the factory life, and my thin wrists can't hold up to anything past it like Bailey could. (Can,) she's still a beating heart that I have to remind myself of. I'm not made like the four of them - Noah, Bailey, Carsyn and Clarke - I'm just a factory girl, and I'm just living. And maybe I don't make my own fate, I know I'm not a god and the threads around me are just loose stitching, and I'm reminded this with every other waking moment, but I can still do something with the time I'm still alive.

("Yes?") Cold winter air blowing through the frame of my window, and with a hollow stomach and shaky hands I'm not so much abandoned, as forgotten. Dimmed by bright capitol lights, the natural ones don't seem so grand. I don't know why they don't tell me about my cousins, why they make sure I sit in the back at funerals and why I never get to visit their graves, and I know I'm no god, but I can still sway the path I think.

I'm scared. Black shoes clicking against the hard floor of our crippled house and I take my own path for once, as I press a mint to my tongue; I'm scared of it. Life is an anomaly, I think, in the idea that it's scripted, or by the idea that it's not, either man who believes either can think of the other, and on one side everything is influential. The mint dissolving in my mouth before I down milk could make me sick and take me from the graves once again as a sign not to challenge fate, but had I not I would've made it perfectly fine and Noah, Owen, Cody would be waiting for me. On the other side, no matter what I take the mint, and die. Noah and Cody were that mind, I believe, that they took the mint as they had no other choice and paid the price of taking the hand of fate; while Owen held hands with the first ideal and made his own grave, dying regardless.

But Duncan is something of a cosmic mistake that took neither paths, saved by something other than fate that I've never had the chance to see.

And the screen door hits behind me, cold winter air kisses the frame of my body as I tuck my hands in my pocket and button the ends of my coat together, ("can you take me to their graves?") I've never had the chance to see them. Clarke told me she'd take my hand and take me there, because someone other there believes that I can handle it at least. I'm scared. Of their graves, of the threads of reality woven together to portray the portrait of three singles tombstones, all abandoned less than me. This entire time I've pictured them as decorated, as Owen's adorned with stars and cosmos as the future he build for himself that led to the murder of two other cousins; maybe he did save Duncan, or maybe he killed Noah and Cody instead. And Noah's chipped and plain, the dirt around it riddled with factory smoke and something bigger than him, he had no choice.

Cody's would be empty, yet to be decorated by a family's tired hands that I've never been given the chance to offer.

I wait for less as the screen doors bangs shut behind Clarke, and I take her hand with morning voice as we start walking, "Clarke?"

"Yes?"

"What are their graves like?"

[ a small doe ]