Lattice

Seven days.

Seven nights.

All he’ll choose to allow fate’s scoundrel-puppet of perdition.

In frankness (for she can’t afford anything else, palms creased by coulees bereft of gilded currency, unless they, too, were by choice), such an analogy scratched upon the gnarled woodwork always felt like an insult. A wad swished from trite-tonsiled theatrics, masks which, in time, forget their irony.

Were he the only performer to have taken his craft seriously, where would the bulge-eyed art of himself stand?

Upon which peculiar planes and strange shapes does her gaze lend merit?

The stars…

His sisters and brothers…

Would she wish them asylum from the prison of her flesh, a thing-taker who thinks tanking is the solution to all her cast-anchor problems?

Depths which, by design, he can no longer safely penetrate?

If anything, she’ll be assured that despite this world’s puzzling optics, the tricks it trades for truth, she’ll have left with nothing but an endless bout of questions.

The one stream of consciousness they can’t ever pry from hands which one night dreamt

of iron.

A smith he is, in turn, haggardly bent over his precious anvil of nightmares.

Dared, too, to consider his own captivity equine.

This Bird may as well be such. A parrot of papyrus as much as it is an empty preacher.

Which is to say, not at all.

The journey, much as hers often are, is hopefully silent. Gods, how such a state would give any member of the populace reason to breathe, to cast all their distinctions aside in ascetic ascension, where only the clouds will care to hide their secrets away.

He was never once a child. Or else, forever cursed to be so. The desert’s elements which coalesced his form into being made sure of that.

She never did forget, however, what it meant to escape.

A floating lobby, ransacked by robbers who’d only wished for Life. How easily he could’ve quashed their hopes, rendered it null under the righteousness of his rainbow of penance.

Rain there would still be, of course, albeit paid in sacrifices she’ll have at least found a bit more familiar.

Without a peep, he sifts softly through scattered fragments of broken glass which could only enable this act he forbids, a chanced peer upon an empty shell, suffused by more intermittent somersault-glances that’ll only leave him spinning, vertigo kindled in corners where he can’t look down.

The wavering telos of a tightrope, fashioned out of muscle-linked stardust.

Serpentine sacrament within the empyrean which simply settles for the approximate actual, celestial toothpick a bane to Its baleful bucket-list.

All the stage reeks of cape-coddling play-pretend.

Sons of bitches, every single one of them.

A Lady the first to singe the age-old tale to ash, regardless.

She grants herself the luxury to heckle where no one can hear, aligning shattered seams of her mirror to form a distinctly ophidian configuration, the rusted capstan Its new, eternal maypole.

A second tenant who may yet share in earthly spoils.

An effigy to a sibling now Lost, captured in crystalline compassion.

Had he chosen oblivion, perhaps there would’ve been threads of the fictile tapestry he’d do well to scorch in void-heart vengeance.

But she already knows she decided upon the meekest desire of all.

It’s the same one that tells him this unseen egg was worth germinating.

Sleep, nowadays, takes him easily. No longer does it give him a reason to be jostled from its eternal paradise, cure his blindness with yet another horrid vision.

So easy it ~~would’ve~~ ~~could’ve~~ ~~should’ve been.~~

For what?

For the proof of your worth?

For the proof of his?

To whom?

Upon whose altar could you ever spill the honeyed ichor of a goat?

Who would accept such a sacrifice?

Who around you would still listen to woven thread,

would offer themself willingly to the noiseless god

who asks for nothing more

but your devotion?

Wrong.

It’s all wrong.

Within the haze of slumber’s indeterminacy, she barely registers the succession of bare-soled tallies against her cosmic honour which echo throughout the chamber,

lift the other side of the duvet,

softly envelop her around the waist,

and plant a feathery kiss at the base of her nape.

Two failures, conjoined at the soothing brink of the slipstream.

‘…Tell me.’

Nora’s breath is like a knapsack, bearing the permeable, sweetened musk of mahi-mahi with every exhale. Her words tickle his neck like a memory he can’t, and surely wouldn’t dare, to name.

‘If there’s something on your chest…I want to hold it, too.’

‘And if you couldn’t get it off?’

The way her chest reels backwards gives her the satisfaction that this surely took her by surprise. Snails he can’t help but shuck, the dagger-chord of distance cooly pressed between thumb and forefinger.

The weight of the stone that keeps him steady.

She does not expect, however, for the seamstress to hold her tighter, collapse the sinkhole-divide.

‘Don’t need to. Don’t want to. I’ll give it room in my closet, like all the rest of my skeletons, the ones that remind me day after day that I’m nothing more than an accessory. A lamp who sits to make other people shine.

And you…’

Chin slinked over a shoulder, barbel lapping at the base of a temple.

‘…You were the first to come in a long time, to tell me I had every right to be a person, too.’

And he affirms it, all with a set of squeezes at her intertwined wrists, arms encasing his stomach.

‘…Like me?’

‘…Like you.’

A sniff.

‘Well, you’re too damn good at it.’

‘Of course I am, love.’

A yank at the covers, sending them both under a firmament of fog.

‘I take my inspiration from only the best.’

Seventy-one years.