Re: Vendetta [S!2 Round 2 ~ So
01-15-2013, 03:19 AM
Originally posted on MSPA by XX.
Un ciervo se está muriendo.
A woman sits by his side and she is as beautiful as the sun.
She strokes his head, and her hands are cool, and they are wet with the blood of her child.
“Do you remember it all, my love?” says the deer. There is red on his black lips, and a burning hole where there should be his heart. His neck is ringed by golden lights. He glows like a god in her afterimage. “Slaughter. Slaughter. When they took you from me I thought I would die.”
She smiles.
“Those bastards will pay,” he says with a better man’s conviction, the same words he’s said for twenty years and will say until he joins her in her beautiful hell. They are a lullably, a litany, a holy hymn. They are as familiar to him as her name, and sometimes he thinks they are. “They’ll pay with everything they have and everything they’ve ever owned, and their hearts and their bones and all the agony I can bring them. I swear to you, I swear I will wrench apart the world. I will find them, for you. I will take it back.”
He does not weep, nor would he, but she is sick of misery, Misère. Lately it is all she knows. Her hands are narrow and cold, like her smile, like the knife that was buried in her. She cradles him. Her long, dark hair settles like a perfumed veil across his face.
He cannot see her now, for she is a shadow of a ghost he loved, but her face is tattooed on the surface of his mind. A flawless raging goddess who rises above a thousand men and a thousand ships, her perfect face cold with daunting misery as her hands pour rosewater and gunmetal. Absolution. Her cat’s grin, her blue eyes. Her perfume. In twenty years he has not forgotten that she has always smelled like honeysuckle.
“I believe you.”
The song of her voice fades through him. He nuzzles her, dabbing blood onto the dress she was buried in. Black was a sweet color for her. They had buried her child in white and her beside it, a goddess interred in an unworthy earth. He looks at her and sees the picture from his desk: a smiling beauty, her head turned this way, holding a lily in her slim hand. She’d hated that picture. She’d always said she looked too young.
“Misère,” he says. It is his favorite word.
She looks up at the sky, at the hot Southern sun as though she has forgotten it can blind. For an instant he lets himself believe that he is home, with her by his side on the field behind their house. It is summer, and the garden is blooming with honeysuckle and wildflowers and the gun they’d buried when they were 16, giggling over their shared secret. It will be there forever, he realizes. He never told Martin about that field. In a thousand years it will rust away, and there will be an empty space behind the ruins of a house and under a thousand years of honeysuckle they will still have kept their secret.
“You are not finished yet, chéri,” she says. He feels her move and he wants to scream at her through his bleeding lips, to tell her to tell their son about the field, to dig up all the metal and the flowers and to lay it on his grave, but he knows it is useless. The way she lays him down on the earth tells him she knows it as well. “You will walk again, and I will sleep in peace. We were made to bleed this world, chéri. No one can deny us that.”
He knows he is going to die. He knows she already has. And all he thinks of as she walks away is that somewhere, one million miles away in a long-dead town he would have never thought to visit, there is a deer that is dying in the sand.
Un ciervo se está muriendo.
A woman sits by his side and she is as beautiful as the sun.
She strokes his head, and her hands are cool, and they are wet with the blood of her child.
“Do you remember it all, my love?” says the deer. There is red on his black lips, and a burning hole where there should be his heart. His neck is ringed by golden lights. He glows like a god in her afterimage. “Slaughter. Slaughter. When they took you from me I thought I would die.”
She smiles.
“Those bastards will pay,” he says with a better man’s conviction, the same words he’s said for twenty years and will say until he joins her in her beautiful hell. They are a lullably, a litany, a holy hymn. They are as familiar to him as her name, and sometimes he thinks they are. “They’ll pay with everything they have and everything they’ve ever owned, and their hearts and their bones and all the agony I can bring them. I swear to you, I swear I will wrench apart the world. I will find them, for you. I will take it back.”
He does not weep, nor would he, but she is sick of misery, Misère. Lately it is all she knows. Her hands are narrow and cold, like her smile, like the knife that was buried in her. She cradles him. Her long, dark hair settles like a perfumed veil across his face.
He cannot see her now, for she is a shadow of a ghost he loved, but her face is tattooed on the surface of his mind. A flawless raging goddess who rises above a thousand men and a thousand ships, her perfect face cold with daunting misery as her hands pour rosewater and gunmetal. Absolution. Her cat’s grin, her blue eyes. Her perfume. In twenty years he has not forgotten that she has always smelled like honeysuckle.
“I believe you.”
The song of her voice fades through him. He nuzzles her, dabbing blood onto the dress she was buried in. Black was a sweet color for her. They had buried her child in white and her beside it, a goddess interred in an unworthy earth. He looks at her and sees the picture from his desk: a smiling beauty, her head turned this way, holding a lily in her slim hand. She’d hated that picture. She’d always said she looked too young.
“Misère,” he says. It is his favorite word.
She looks up at the sky, at the hot Southern sun as though she has forgotten it can blind. For an instant he lets himself believe that he is home, with her by his side on the field behind their house. It is summer, and the garden is blooming with honeysuckle and wildflowers and the gun they’d buried when they were 16, giggling over their shared secret. It will be there forever, he realizes. He never told Martin about that field. In a thousand years it will rust away, and there will be an empty space behind the ruins of a house and under a thousand years of honeysuckle they will still have kept their secret.
“You are not finished yet, chéri,” she says. He feels her move and he wants to scream at her through his bleeding lips, to tell her to tell their son about the field, to dig up all the metal and the flowers and to lay it on his grave, but he knows it is useless. The way she lays him down on the earth tells him she knows it as well. “You will walk again, and I will sleep in peace. We were made to bleed this world, chéri. No one can deny us that.”
He knows he is going to die. He knows she already has. And all he thinks of as she walks away is that somewhere, one million miles away in a long-dead town he would have never thought to visit, there is a deer that is dying in the sand.