salt and curses
She’s really fucked it up this time.
cw: depressive thoughts, violence
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Emma lingers in bed too long. She shuts her eyes tight against the light and that is a mistake.
Da is both dead and alive. He's always been like this -- a shade to whom you devote your life in hopes that maybe he'll find his.
Dead, rotten fingers wrap around your neck. He's dead and gone. You buried him alone because no one left in the world shares your blood. You buried him in the dead of night because the shame of it under the sun is too great. He's come for his revenge, to snuff out the life of the daughter who has done naught but shame him in his final moments. The fury takes her, then -- for he deserved it.
He deserved it.
The thought feels like poison ink, seeping down through her guts.
He deserved everything he got.
His lifeless eyes, dazed from drugs -- he swings and thickens your lip with the coarseness of his fist. You don't allow this. You are the trap, primed to spring. Hit you once, return it 1000 times.
You lash out, fist through his eye. He draws blood. You kill him.
It wasn't me. It wasn't me this time. He did it to himself. The drugs finally did it.
But it was you.
It was you. It was you, all along.
She sits up so fast in bed her world spins in place. Her chest constricts like she'd been sobbing in her sleep, but her cheeks are dry. The well in her has long dried up; she is proud of this fact. She is.
Ice lances through the back of her neck. She gasps for the pain of it.
That is not dead which can eternal lie, And with strange aeons even death may die.
Get out of bed, some part of her commands. Get up and move. This is not you. You are not a layabout. Get out of bed.
Move your ass, Emma Ibori.
Not dead. Eternal.
Even death may die.
He'll come back for you. You'll never be free. She pulls on an old shirt, still sweat-stained, and pushes out the door of her apartment until the salty air of the ocean hits her tongue. She storms down to the beach, a flurry of unkempt clothes and wild hair, and she walks until the cool spray soaks her knees. She stands there as the sun rises, beautiful and pink, and she wishes -- not for the first time -- that she was stone. But even stone erodes. Even death may die.
