yellow. — isabella v kiibo, day six.
Apr 6, 2022 15:47:37 GMT -5
Post by heather - d2 [mylee] on Apr 6, 2022 15:47:37 GMT -5
I S A B E L L A
[ Meditations on Belief ]
I
When Isaac wrapped his hands around my waist and lifted me from the ground in the midst of the Bloodbath, I thought the hands that would touch me would be different from the hands that snapped her neck. I thought that somehow we could make ourselves gentle and pure by intention alone. Perhaps he believed that—I’d venture he did, can’t imagine the effect without the cause, but I wonder where belief actually gets us, where the limits of its reach are. I have believed in the world, in it truly, every day of my goddamn life. It’s fear that accompanies belief like this, and nothing else. Fear of getting it wrong, the consequences of getting it right, how different belief can be from morning to the night that follows close and hungry. There’s nothing consistent about us, after all.
I believe he carried me away from that fight because he was sure I needed relief from the violence of it, the split knuckles and chipped teeth, and he believed that enough to act on it. I hadn’t really been there at all. I was, for a moment, nothing more than the object of his belief, a weight to be lifted and then set down, to feel better having done so after. We could mark time that way, I think: blind faith and reflection, the course of a life.
II
The quickest and surest way to win quarters is to not play it. The second is to hit the ground as close to your body as you can in an attempt to send the coin flying back toward your opponent. Once, when I had just learned the technique and was relentless in my want for a win, I made a fist, white-knuckled with the thumb sticking out, and brought it down as hard as I could on my own shin.
I had been too busy watching the girl’s face—where her eyes darted in the lulled seconds of spin and threat—to trace the path of my own hand, the collision of it with the earth, which is to say not the ground but me, the line between them thin and unforgiving. Dust to dust.
That pain had been solitary and single, a moment of something sharp and unrelenting, but this, too, must come to an end. All that hurt dulled to a bruise that purpled under my skin for weeks and ached, I mean ached, like unrequited love.
III
My mother called my father a gambler but I wouldn’t believe the man once bet a dime of what he’d ever had. Is this a requirement, that what you put on the line must be your own? If not, I’d call him a gambler, sure, but I’d think it of all of us, so willing to wager what we do not, and cannot, have.
After all, what’s the distance between belief and hope? If we drove all night, could we make it by sunrise? There’s a town called Hope somewhere deep in the country—a post office, a courthouse, a diner on the corner. It’s all neon and hospitality, dishes of it served twenty-four hours, though the coffee’s fresher if you come near sunrise. I’d let it burn my tongue if I had to—hope, that is—but I’m selfish, want the taste of it, too.
He's got it on his tongue, the dribble and spit of it trickling down the outside of his suit. Hope moves forward, the shadow of him eclipsing my body at high noon, and I find myself stepping backward, trying to take myself out into the light.
[ table: pogue ]
[ isabella attacks kiibo, knife ]
MvurxtVygJknife
[ shallow cut on left shoulder -- 3.5 ]
MvurxtVygJknife
[ shallow cut on left shoulder -- 3.5 ]
knife