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How to Kill a Crooked Ward

Though nothing can haunt a crooked ward, her neck often cracks and turns rapidly as if she fears something coming. As if eyes leech onto her rigid and bark-like back, and their hunger for her image alarms her, or the echoes left of her fallen mind. Nothing can hurt a corrupted spirit, but perhaps the past. She fears not a hunter, but a walking memory, pulling her back to her former self. How wicked a deed to dredge a dead woman's mind back to her rotting body, to convince her only to die.

If there is nothing worthwhile in me, how do I go forward from here? How do I live as a creature and not the woman I thought I was?

You would sit by and watch the world burn if you could sit comfortably while you did it. That is the curse of comfort. That our couches are stuffed with the same filling as those in coffins.

On friendship:

When I spend time with you all, I feel a ball of light pool in my weary palms.

The weight in my shoulders, the tightness in my jaw, releases like smoke out of my lungs.

I can breathe again, I can laugh again.

I take the light home with me, and it isn’t so dark there anymore.

When you wear masks like you take breaths, you don’t notice that the act is killing you. You don’t see the bags under your eyes, the redness invading your scleras. The undying tug on the corners of your thin pursed lips. You see only the delighted faces of those so pleased to see not your face, but the faces you adorn for them. Catered to them. For some, the mask you wear is a mirror, for they want nothing more than to see themselves in you. For others, black as night to obscure anything akin to their likeness. But you are so enraptured with their happiness, you neglect your own. For there is a worse fate than being unloved.

It is being loved as something you’re not.

I don’t feel anything anymore. I don’t know if I miss it or not. It can be nice being withdrawn from the world, until is isn’t.

You can run away from reality, and shield yourself from introspection, but in the corner of your eye your life is always happening.

Life is happening, life is happening all the time. I can’t seem to catch it in between my fingers, elusive as rays of light. I cannot keep it high in my lungs, it leaves me like a breath. I am a meager stone in a fast coursing river and I watch what erodes me away. Life is cold. Invigorating. I wish I could hold its hand and study its face before it escapes me again.

There is something so shameful in trying. In putting forth the effort out in the open where the onlookers look and dig their forks into my darlings. My creation dies in the end, regardless. Whether they relish every morsel or idly masticate while their eyes are drawn to the street walkers, just like all that came before her, my idea is eaten. And I am left alone to wonder if a piece of my soul had any flavor worth talking about.

Melodic, melismatic is she. Her song is her figure dancing in air, steam rising ever out of reach.

In twilight hours, when her day’s thoughts drift heavenly with the receding tide, and fears and doubts rescind, she thinks of her. Her head wet from the sea dampening her pant legs, resting in her lap as a black pearl. She runs her fingers through her short black hair and wonders how it rises underwater, if she could ever see it for herself without drowning. Salt and iron prick her nose. The siren opens her eyes and the moment she looks at her with a tenderness so palpable, her image disappears. Her lap lay empty. The sailor girl’s mind too shy to peer at even the idea of her so flagrantly. She hears the creaking of the floor boards, and inhales the lantern oil burning, and is brought back to dry reality. Skin itching for the sand in the ocean shallow.