When The Vine Burst Through Cooked Earth, And Curved To And Fro Toward The Sun, I Knew Growth Was Not

I would let her put rods in my fingers and tie thin golden ropes around my wrists if it meant she’d smile at me. I’d make a good puppet, a very good puppet. And I don’t mind forgoing being her daughter, she never liked me very much that way. I make a much better puppet.

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

Sirens often eat out of hatred, not love. So when the sailor girl asked the siren if she found her appetizing, she shook her head with a tight lipped grin. The human took it as rejection, her eyes falling to her hands and picking at the callouses she found unsightly, not understanding she had just shown her affection for her. That hiding one’s teeth was a gentle act of favor the merfolk used.

D. Alan Holmes, Enlightenment // Signet Amenti // @cryptonature // Alan Wilsom Watts // Evan M. Cohen, "Oceans" // Nikita Gill // @pauladoodles // Julian Gough, "Minecraft End Poem" // Sleeping At Last—Saturn

Fairies are a gentle sort, no bigger than pointer fingers. A little fire sprite burned the tip of mine once. She wasn’t sorry about it neither, she just snickered and gave me a thimble to wear over its ugly little boil. I sort of admired that unapologetic way she had about her. Her nature wasn’t wrong after all, she didn’t burn me out of hatred or malice. She burned because she was fire.

The Wolf

Most are familiar with the story of the wolf in sheep’s clothing: The sly predator posing as prey to descend on the flock and eat them as they are none the wiser. But the story is remembered all wrong, the wolf didn’t have to wear sheep’s clothes at all. He stood before them as a wolf, with claws pointed, canines jutted, and eyes round in their deep, black middles, and simply said, “You are wolves, too. Wolves are better than sheep. Stronger than sheep. You are not sheep.”

Foolishly, they agreed. “I am better than the others, so I must be a wolf,” they thought. And so the wolf ate the sheep, one by one. Where normally they herded together and protected each other, they stood idly, wrongfully unafraid. They had forgotten that what hurts one of them, hurts all of them. They preferred to be better, to think they were wolves, and wolves don’t eat other wolves—only the less than, only the sheep.

And what do you think happened, as the last sheep stood in the glade, and the wolf approached him with grin bloodied and eager? “My brother,” the sheep said smugly, a moment before he was eaten alive.

That is the curse of living, that we choose what is familiar and not what is good.

This isn’t me,

I don’t know who I’m pretending for.

Why do the ones I love keep being taken from me? What have I done to deserve shards of their memory pricking my fingertips like spindles every time I scroll on my phone and see a face that has stolen a piece of them? Their eyes on someone else’s head, their smile creasing someone else’s cheeks, their ginger hair curling around someone else’s ears that don’t fucking look right! I hate that I see you everywhere. I hate more that it’s never you.

One day I’ll be old, and teenagers will record me doing mundane tasks with my wife in public, and post it somewhere, on an app with a name I don’t know, appreciating #humans being humans. Appreciating how adorable old people are like we’re rabbits in a wooded glade or something, never thinking they’ll be me, holding the hand of their partner, helping her step from the street to the sidewalk with weary bones and wrinkled faces. One day I was them, and one day they will be me. Though I’ll never know their names or faces, they will have taken a moment of my life as their own as a relic of humanity, though for me, it is just a slice of my morning commute. I wonder if I’ll feel the camera on my back then. I wonder if I’ll wish I was the recorder and not the recorded. I wonder how many likes the essence of my self and my life would get, as a moment of my life is turned into an online commodity by a stranger.