All expectations make her heart feel numb
Mabel hadn’t made any lanterns last year. She’d been dead.
But she’d come back on the throngs and throes of the eerie, similar festival – though hers had been flanked in ivory and mountains, in the confusion and flickering, volleying lights.
So she’d carved and whittled in the space of her empty farmhouse, remembered what it was like to do the same beside all her siblings, as they laughed, giggled, and played, as they painted and anointed, as they pretended this wasn’t all some god damned farce. By tradition, she committed to it again, making one for each of her family’s little lost souls, small and quaint, dignified by toys they cherished. Evelyn got a larger one, however, and Mabel wished she could’ve made it fly on its own, without gravity, without force, without a pull or a push. Alas, it was adorned and handled with care instead. Her parents received none. She had no need to see them again.
Only thereafter did she traipse into the meadows and barrows, barefoot and enigmatic, twisting and turning in her feral expanse, and then hung them all, one by one by one.
But she’d come back on the throngs and throes of the eerie, similar festival – though hers had been flanked in ivory and mountains, in the confusion and flickering, volleying lights.
So she’d carved and whittled in the space of her empty farmhouse, remembered what it was like to do the same beside all her siblings, as they laughed, giggled, and played, as they painted and anointed, as they pretended this wasn’t all some god damned farce. By tradition, she committed to it again, making one for each of her family’s little lost souls, small and quaint, dignified by toys they cherished. Evelyn got a larger one, however, and Mabel wished she could’ve made it fly on its own, without gravity, without force, without a pull or a push. Alas, it was adorned and handled with care instead. Her parents received none. She had no need to see them again.
Only thereafter did she traipse into the meadows and barrows, barefoot and enigmatic, twisting and turning in her feral expanse, and then hung them all, one by one by one.
MABEL
