a child, lost:
a precipice yawns between arya and the truth of her answer. a gulf of none of your business. secrets passed from one murmuring mouth into a pointed ear. secrets held between her fingers, in the webbing, in the callus and bruise and scar, in the dirt under her nails. he won’t leave me alone. he will, now. scared away for good, her voice a low, cold snarl in his ear. ( good girls don’t carry knives and know how to use them. good girls don’t push sawed-offs down the back of their loose-fitting jeans, bumping against their tailbones when they move. ) you even think about coming near her again, i will find you, and you won’t like me when i do.
a tense, febrile, wolfish anger is a dry spitting of residual heat in the empty, nauseous ache of arya’s belly.
‘ taylor said i could find her here. ’
she speaks ( accent studiously non-descript ; scots frostbite snap withheld behind her teeth ; a muted scrape that could be from anywhere or nowhere ) from the invisibly torn hole in her throat, the dagger-bite of existing. ( outside : whole girl, skinny and caved and brittle, too much and too little at the same time, but the scars are hidden under her clothes or under her skin, and no one ever sees the first wound. inside : the leagues of hurt that shadow around the edges of dark grey eyes, staring a challenge, or a question. an unspoken, tacitly shared language. )
‘ it’s fine. i’ll come back later. ’
aiyana chooses her sentence between the gap in her bottom teeth; wedged soft-hard-soft against the tip of her tongue and the gum. she didn’t have time for babysitting --- but, yet, something told her that she needed to cut the shit. a stereo booms loud, pounding her heart in the pit of her throat. she defined summer by how loud the music was. every day had been summer since she’d started working. dark eyes are swallowed into the depths, her mouth turning from a warm line to a pinched knot; a mother’s knot, her grandmother would say. there would grow crow’s feet around the edges of her eyes soon. ‘ taylor ---? ‘ a sweet name. she didn’t recognize it, save for what she could make up in her head. ‘ i don’t know her - or care to. she your mom? ‘ it seemed only polite to ask.
gym bag rolls curtly over the slope of her shoulder and digs itself into the flesh of her neck. ‘ she’s not trying to get you on, is she? this place is shit, but it’s mine. ‘ they were the girls of everywhere but nowhere at all; she’d clawed the half-moons of her nails in until they almost broke and fought for her earnings. it was a lion’s den, to say the least. she didn’t want any more bourbon spilt from the pout of a minor’s lips. ‘ you’re welcome to come look around. see if you can find her. ‘ beat, her shoulders shrug upward, making the needling of her gym bag press tighter, ‘ ---- but you need to come in with me. ‘
