MELITA
She didn’t understand how he could be so quiet.She’d raged like a storm. She’d howled like a banshee. She’d been a deranged, molten, infernal little beast, gathering up every damned inch of sinew, flesh, and bone, and screamed. She’d promised and vowed and when those didn’t matter, didn’t become anything either, she’d merely defied the world.
That hadn’t maneuvered her onward either; but it was ferocious grieving, when she was sick and tired of sobbing.
Maybe because he’d done it before. Because this was a pattern, a ritual now. To chase after fires and watch them dim, turn into cinders, into embers, with no way to keep them alight. The bitterness, the rancor, tucked itself into the corner of her eyes and motioned for rapacity, longed for something to be torn apart – for him, for Lusea, for everyone else who’d tried and somehow couldn’t manage.
The girl wanted to throttle his smile, its pretenses, its glamor, its forced, fake indulgences. But she permitted him to keep it, said naught about it, her eyes either on the floor or on the wall, pressing into the lantern’s hues, into the threshold, swallowing down some noxious plumes threatening to gather in her tempest. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair; and she didn’t voice those either, for they sounded childish and naïve, when she’d only grown accustomed to the weight of loss. She knew better.
She didn’t answer him at first, taking the chalk in hand, grabbing hold of a stool so she could rise above the lantern, a ruler in place so everything was neat and tidy and straight, and drew enough, enough, enough, surrounding the entity of the lantern in its pale lines. She left space around it, within the square, the sanction, for more memories, for more beacons, than just the lantern’s light; swinging her head, her gaze to him, waiting for approval. “Is this enough?”
help tonight to split its seams
Give the bruises out like gifts
Give the bruises out like gifts
