MABEL
The sea began to release her; away, away, away from its tides and weeds, from its salt and sand, while she sat on dry land and old, ancient timber, trying to remember what it was like to be alive. To be something not decrepit, wind-tossed, and forgotten, indifferent to how she pulled or pierced her own hair. He was far more gentle, and she finally relinquished and gave in to the softer ministrations, eyes sharpening, honing, from beneath the tangled tassels. Elsewhere there might’ve been a brush to make the process easier, but this was cathartic too, to watch it all be unfurled from fingers and not the water. Not her grave.
His story was a distraction, a deterrent, from the suffering unrooting itself, intermingling, intertwining within ribs and flesh and bone. Not intentional, to be shut down and cut off, to be cast into the unknown, and she wondered vaguely if he was just one of many forgotten things. Like the Voice’s first experiments, the monsters that wandered in their ghostly rituals, with their claws and torture. Like others, gone and gone and gone in wars, in ashes, in ethers, in cinders.
A very long time.
Something chilled down her spine and she swallowed down another fracture; plucking out another semblance of sea-life out of her threshold, out of her presence, tossing it to the floor as more and more unfurled. Then more words, more words, crashed from her throat, and she didn’t know why she needed to know, to search, for those answers, for an understanding, a notion, into the shape of immortality and what it signified. “Do you remember anything from before?” Had it all changed – from vapor and vestiges, to emptiness, to hallowed boundaries? “The barrier?” When had he fallen? Why did it matter?
His story was a distraction, a deterrent, from the suffering unrooting itself, intermingling, intertwining within ribs and flesh and bone. Not intentional, to be shut down and cut off, to be cast into the unknown, and she wondered vaguely if he was just one of many forgotten things. Like the Voice’s first experiments, the monsters that wandered in their ghostly rituals, with their claws and torture. Like others, gone and gone and gone in wars, in ashes, in ethers, in cinders.
A very long time.
Something chilled down her spine and she swallowed down another fracture; plucking out another semblance of sea-life out of her threshold, out of her presence, tossing it to the floor as more and more unfurled. Then more words, more words, crashed from her throat, and she didn’t know why she needed to know, to search, for those answers, for an understanding, a notion, into the shape of immortality and what it signified. “Do you remember anything from before?” Had it all changed – from vapor and vestiges, to emptiness, to hallowed boundaries? “The barrier?” When had he fallen? Why did it matter?
I bare my teeth
and stretch my claws out
and stretch my claws out
