Is Everyone On The Verge Of Completing And Utterly Losing It?

Why can’t you let me have anything? Why can’t you let me have anything? I ask the mirror.

The girl in it is too busy weeping to answer.

“You’re gentler than they said you would be,” the girl remarked.

The siren smiled graciously in return, and took another chunk out of her calf and thrust it down her throat without reprieve. The girl didn’t feel a thing, her saliva numbing her skin the moment it touched it.

“We’re only hungry beasts girl, not cruel. We leave that to the men,” she said frankly and wiped her mouth of blood the way a child would of jam.

These teeth of mine, that I press my tongue against, will outlast my soul. I taste death, how when I die, my crooked jaw will linger here on this earth without me. It haunts me to smile and see a glimpse of what will remain.

What is all this?

It’s bioluminescence. You never seen it before?

No, I haven’t.

It’s little tiny creatures, every time something moves through the water they light up like itty bitty stars.

Do you eat them?

Do I-? No! They’re beautiful!

You don’t eat beautiful things?

You’re still here aren’t you?

-conversations with a siren

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.

It is easy to be liked, far too easy. I have never been so liked as when I looked in the mirror and saw nothing.

I’ll figure it out, I always figure it out. Why not now? What’s wrong with me?

Nothing. Maybe this is a problem that can’t be solved. Not even by you.

My skin prickles with heat,

Dropping doves on laundry lines

My heart leaps hard against my ribs,

Shelving sonograms in my mind,

Oh dear. I am in love.

My cat didn’t like me much. I saved his life when he wasn’t more than two days old, but I never was his favorite person. He’d meow at me all angry like whenever I got near him, so I left him be. He’d let me pet him once in a blue moon and I treasured that. But he got sick. The sort of sick you don’t get better from. And even though he avoided me most of his life, and I respected his wishes, deep down he remembered what I did for him. His last days alive he came and sat with me. Maybe asking me again, save me. I know you can. You did it before. And with everything in me I wish I could have. I would have saved him a thousand times over even if it meant he stayed in rooms I wasn’t in, and preferred people other than me. I would give everything for him to dislike me a lifetime’s worth. But I only got four years.

My skin prickles hot; I asked the old man a question and he answers with a story so far unrelated I had to turn around and see just who in the hell he was talking to, because it certainly wasn’t me! Yes or no will do just fine, I kept hearing myself say in my mind, my voice gentle like a kitten’s fighting tooth and nail to drown out his gravely droning on about airplanes and the war. Outwardly I must’ve been screeching fake niceties and not pulling off my polite half assed head nods because his eyes were wide, and albeit dull as ever but he seemed perturbed. And that’s saying something because men like Robert don’t seem anything, they’re simply half dead elderly men roaming the earth to challenge God. Look how long I’m living! Keep knocking Jesus, I’m not opening the door! I can’t imagine being a gold digger and accidentally marrying a Robert. Undying so much as they are unriveting. Later I looked in a mirror and saw my face, still plastered up fake happy from our little conversation if you could call it that. I understood instantly why he seemed so off-put by me, I looked clinically insane. This fake it til you make it crap has got to work for somebody but it is undoubtedly not me. Unfortunately God put me here to be as authentic as possible—to punish me of course.