Spoiler
A/N: I know that this is short and contains some references that you won't get, as it's part of a bigger project. These are just two little clips that give a glance at one of my main characters. My main point of request is regarding characterization--in these two tiny clips, do you get a taste of who she is? Her personality is supposed to be dominant over the narrator's, so that should be quite obvious. Let me know.
the field
Mal and I lie back against the bushels of black Halloween hay and just stare at the trees overhead. There's nothing there, really, but the old decay, the dying limbs of a tree. Mal, her hand touches mine and my nerves twitch back from her skin, but I relax and she smiles very softly. Quietly, she turns her head towards me and says that this moment is destiny, that nothing matters beyond now or behind now. She blinks and I get a glimpse of her eyes, no color visible in the darkness. Those thin lips spread into a grin and she looks back to the trees.
I say that this is a good destiny, and she lets out a tiny bit of air in a tiny bit of laugh and says how this moment, with our hands touching and trees dying, it is the past, present, and future. A conglomeration of memories and dreams.
It's then that I know that Mal is drunk enough to kiss because she hates pseudophilosophical bullshit more than I do. I turn my head towards her and she looks back at me.
"Danny." Her breath is the smoke coming out of Rad's cigarette, the smoldering logs in the back of my dad's truck. She breathes out and tightens her fingers between mine. They're cold and warm at the same time, like melting ice cream. She shudders closer to me and hums something softly. Those old moths fill my throat, but I stay still, just watching her.
You begin to think that these moments are enough to survive, that these conglomerations of memories and dreams beneath dying trees are fair enough to keep you sustained, but they're not. It's the skin touching skin beneath the starlit dreams, the hazy breath and the smell of 80-proof on someone's breath.
Mal looks like a witch's cat beneath the October sky. The kind that would bring me bad luck if she were to move across me, so I keep her still against me and we just breathe out the strain together.
Mal, she touches her chin to mine, aligning our noses just a tiny bit off-center so we'll fit together. Right here, we can be as close as possible without kisisng, without passing our breath. And Mal locks her gaze into my eyes and just watches for just long enough, and she says, "I want to die here right now."
I say nothing, I think nothing about it, and just remain lulled in her breath. It's a sleeping gas, a welcome toxin to the lungs.
"I want to die before our moments can fall apart." Her lips brush against mine. "Before I have a reason to die."
Mal looks like the curtains drawn in Rad's hospital room while the lights were out and the monitor cried with us in beat. She feels like the bedsheets covering my father's face last December, the bandages covering his body. And she smells like the peppermints on my therapist's desk.
I don't think you'd know Mal if you saw her, really, because you've not been given all the pieces.
___________________________________
the church
Mal slides her hand across the tiny shards of glass and licks at her bottom lip, pulling her fingers away sluggishly as tiny slits of red appear beneath her knuckles. She says that it’s just a reminder that she’s alive, that she’s breathing and well. She doesn’t look at me or Rad or anything but the shards of stained glass on the pew, but says that in distant lands, people have every last drop of blood drained from their veins for sacrifice. She says that it’s an honor, that they are sanctified in their pain.
I look up into the broken face of St. Peter and smile a bit, imagining myself lying back on an altar with my skin perforated, my arms burning like a million fire ants in my veins.
Rad sits on the floor and begins to piece together the puzzle of shards on the floor. That’s when Mal looks up at me and smiles and asks if I’ve ever tasted communion wine.
