I was never told how a century of insomnia would weigh upon the soul (I could not for a moment wish to stop, yet I'm not sure for how much longer this can go)
She should have heard it coming through the trees after the girl that she loved, the girl with the child and an awe for magic uncompromising. It should have rattled the house like a semi at midnight; should have tasted like glass shattered on her tongue. She should have felt him cross the veil into the world she had been designated to protect (it was the promise she had made, after all, in exchange for all of this that came after) it should have warped her vision or strummed the rhythm that rang inside her ears -- breaker two something has distracted the sentinel --or given her any way to course correct before it all began to shatter around her neck.
wall to wall and treetop tall; ten-four, death, the sentinel falls
A stack of silver dollars at the bottom of a well dug through slate and earth is more than an eternity of wealth for a girl grown old with static in her ears and morse code tangled in her hair.
There are days she won't leave the bed, Anastasia the girl with the girl inside her like nesting dolls, a myth wrapped inside an impossibility, a woman wrapped inside a goose down duvet. I leave the windows open and she watches stars through steam rising from cups of tea and tells me about the flowers her grandmother grew and dried like the herbs I hang in the rafters of my modest home. I tell her these are not flowers, these are magic, and she laughs and tells me flowers were the only magic she believed in.
She created a hole when she let herself in and dared him to follow (he should have been taught to keep his hands to himself; but had he learned we never would have been where we are now would we?)
She nailed him to the tree with her blade and the walls of the forest came down like curtains cut from the rod. It's hard to fault her but I should have seen it coming ten miles away.
When the sky is clear and the moon is high, the veil will part and women return to the forest to revel in nightgowns and camisoles and old t-shirts with names of bands they haven't listened to in years. It is the sentinel who ignites the lanterns and draws back the veil and leads them through the waltz they have done each year for all the years she can remember. She does not bring them there but when they return to their beds their only memory will be dreams hazy with starlight and thick with breathless laughter.
Lemon balm, for most things but especially for the way a cigarette makes you feel sick to your stomach, add peppermint for menstrual cramps but keep the cigarette. Mullein when that November cough comes back and thyme to keep off the flu or ward off December nightmares. Lavender will keep you calm and a rosemary tea will get you through until tomorrow. Two drops of a mushroom tincture will help to get to sleep. Honey will make most things sweet, but nothing will ease the gnawing in your gut that not a bit of this will be enough.
It started as a spark at the bottom of the well; a spot of sun concentrated on a bit of grass or a scrap of paper discarded with a wish. She called it the season, the sun, a wave of heat and by the time she called it a blaze the ash had settled a fine layer in her hair.
I have never had a daughter but I have had a pair of silver spoons nailed to the base of a tree. Sebastian once said a strongly worded command could grow just as well into something worth protecting but lately the weight of an old pocket watch and a soy candle burnt to the quick is not enough to keep my feet on the ground.
She protects the forest, she says with fingers crossed behind her back. She is the watcher, she knows but will not admit that she gave up hundreds of lives for a watch that will never end with bones in the ground but a spirit lost to the wind.
When she lays with her lover in the old four-poster bed it’s easy to feel young again. It’s easy to feel at the start of things and like the child may belong to her and the future a mere glimpse in the mirror.
Girls like me we’re sentenced; vanity is a dead giveaway for the wolf who hears the future on the airwaves. He weighs your debt between his teeth (he’ll never give you more than exactly what you deserve) and drops you in the well with a crystal or a coin and tells you wait but in the end I was not a girl like me but a young woman greedy for the things she already had.
Gender:
Points: 370
Reviews: 541