M E L I T A
Melita nodded in response, but didn’t quite agree – it always hurt, and the pain never seemed to go away. Sometimes it was a throbbing anguish, other moments a dull ache, but still present, still alive, still hard, difficult, and excruciating. One simply learned to survive with the constant sensation of something, someone, missing – grief a wicked flame, insurgent or quiet, flickering deep in a soul. They were a part of the body, a limb, a rib, a lung, a heart, and when they were gone, removed, the echo, the phantoms, the catacombs and sepulchers remained in their place. It was never the same.
She wanted her sister. She wanted her mother. She wanted her friends, bright, indulgent faces that had dreamed of better worlds and kingdoms, that had pretended to be monsters with her well before they knew what fiends and shadows looked like. The girl unfailingly yearned for things she couldn’t have.
Perhaps it was the same for Kiada, and they were forced to drift in and out of horrors, treacheries, and terrors. Put on happy, content countenances. Pretend naught was amiss. Drown in the quiet of their own sorrow later, in the abyss, in the void.
Her gaze drifted to the tilled soil, repeating the same patterns as before; incandescent grins and careful inhales, exhales.
But Fangorn had never lost anyone, that she’s aware of (could all those gourds they slaughtered once been his family?), and didn’t dwell on those haunting, beckoning things (the claws that bite, the memories that catch and snatch). Instead, the notion of play seemed to curl and coil its way into his vicious little membrane, and he hissed at the luxere, a mocking, toying aspiration, pretending as if he was going to bite at the fawn’s legs across the cobblestones.
Kiada accepted her offer though, and they weren’t alone again; applying themselves, keeping busy with plants and notions of cheery, ebullient bulbs, instead of the brushes of darkness clustered, coiled, behind their eyes. The honeybee girl realized she’d been mute all this time, quiet and hushed, sinking too far down into doldrums, a place she tried desperately not to tred, and lifted her gaze to stare into the other girl’s for a moment. “Yes,” and the smile was wholesome again, not so mercurial, not so abandoned and lifeless. “My mother was a healer. She had a beautiful garden full of herbs and flowers.” Every day she’d pick some, cultivate and utilize them for their sacred desert dwellers, curing and soothing; while Melita and Clementine ran around her skirts, breathing in the sweet perfumes, losing petals from their floret crowns. “I was never quite helpful though,” and here she laughed, because she remembered her ridiculous inability to do anything but grind plants down in Phoebe’s domicile; she thought her mother would’ve been ashamed or embarrassed, but remembered, recalled, the sunny sonnets and stanzas resting on the top of her head, billowing and circling around her ears, peaceful, wondrous hums meant for the twins’ ears. “What about you?” Her stare was already back on the dirt covering her hands, before she grabbed hold of some seeds in her pockets, extending her palm full of their earth, their goodness, their light, out to Kiada. Perhaps they could both snatch some heavenly bounty, be declared liberated and free of the terrors, for a day, for an hour, for a moment.
