#vc. all

[tidelure]

ON A NIGHT MUCH LIKE ANY OTHER IN THE MORS OF OCTOBER, AMID THE FOG AND THE RAIN, VEDIA'S DREAMS TALK HER TO THE EDGE OF THE WATER ╱ feat. WYMON VISSER

what is a ghost?

the academic might name it an anomaly, a breach from the understood and acceptable by something not yet peer-reviewed. the novelist, prone as they are to using one word while meaning another, may say a metaphor. the catholic, guilt. the child, who is closer than they know to the very truth, may simply point to the shadow in the corner and close their eyes.

if we are to accept each varying answer as baring a measure of truth, the only through line is this: something one cannot bare to look at head on. perhaps this is why, in the end, we have no definitive photographs of our spectral visitors. it is not that they refuse to be documented, but rather our inability to turn our head and aim the camera.

so when vedia sahin-van ness rises from the soft down of her bed and emerges from behind the locked door of her ancestral home, it is not with the intention to haunt. it is, of course, without any intention at all ⸺ she is, after all, asleep. and if she had time for scheme and design, even in this state of dreaming, she certainly would have had time for shoes and a coat. as it is, as she descends the great hill that leads to town, mud caking the high arches of her soft feet to the slim round of two ankles, it is without either. without even awareness. and yet ⸺ by the time she has circumvented the boardwalk, thick mass of dark hair pulled from the ribbon that once bound it, white peignoir stuck to her body by the cold tongue of the rain, drifting through the thunder with tender calm until she stands before one who once loved her on the docks of the cove ⸺ IS THIS GIRL NOT A GHOST?

she seems to be speaking. she seems to be saying something against the rain, that voice so like a length of silk lost under the coverlet of storm. the wind whips her gown until it loses its courage, tucking between her legs, slipping off her round marble shoulders. she's reaching for something outside of our understanding, one slender wrist extended out to the monsters of the deep. her feet balanced on the edge of wood, a ballerina. a tightrope walker. a child born on the sword of damocles.

can you bare to look at her, @scpsis ?

[tidelure]

BELIEVING THE DRAKE ESTATE AS EMPTY AS IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN, VEDIA TALKS TO IT IN THE LONELY HOURS OF THE NIGHT ╱ feat. GALEN DRAKE of @seacurse

in the cluttered aftermath of a dinner party, vedia slips out the back door of her home, no more noticeable than a loved one's shadow. her body is restless lately, even in dreams; the bouts of her sleepwalking growing more frequent. and so, increasingly, she finds herself walking in the waking hours. she is trying to outpace it in some way, to move her little body through and past this disquiet that seems to grip whatever sits beneath her bones. though there's no real intent to her stroll, vedia finds herself at the crest of something once familiar ⸺ a home that she had visited, once upon a time. her eyes turn to a window on the uppermost floor, a shuttered thing she had once imagined to belong to a boy she'd cared for dearly, with the zeal that only a child's heart can hold. thoughtfully, she leans herself against the cool stripped bark of a tree, her limpid eyes sparkling in the starlight.

"i used to dream about you, you know." she announces to the empty house, a soft confession that the breeze catches and carries lovingly in its palm. the air is frosty with november chill, but amid the swaddle of inherited fur and hoarded champagne, vedia feels warm. in that warmth her tongue unfurls naturally, like the petals of a pointsetta in a hothouse. "when i was a little girl, i thought you were like a prince. i was so mad when daddy said you and your family were gone," laughter blooms, sweet and distant, as her gaze shuffles to the ground to toe an inconsequential pattern into the dirt. after a beat, vedia looks up once more, into the sweetness of the past. "but i told myself one day you'd come back."

[tidelure]

UNSHEDDING WINTER LAYERS AT A COFFEE SHOP, ON BREAK FROM REHEARSAL ╱ feat. AUGUST LANDRY of @ycsterdays

"i can't believe you never told me you were cornelius hackl in new york," the movements of her hand, though avid, are delicate — fingers that had been trained to drink from fine china and play with porcelain since a very young age. even in her excitement vedia lends the impression of something delicate, her voice full of a certain breathlessness, as if the very idea had reached past her ribs and stolen the air there. "oh, it must have been simply gorgeous! i can't even begin to imagine it. what was it like — will you tell me everything?"