DATE: January 25th 11:45am LOCATION: Theo’s Sleeper Car STATUS: Closed for @whiterxbbits
Look at it, in all its glory! Glass shards and gouged out wooden panels that weep and sigh like open wounds. Broken furniture, smashed and fragmented like old bones, like ceramic tiles against her heel. The other security—all her lackeys, all just puppets and little toy soldiers—toss personal effects into the hallway and they fall at her feet like flowers before a bride. How else could the royal procession go? Imagine her humming, eyes sly, baton held behind her back. Imagine her, long, easy strides down the hallway—everything torn out and upturned as if to say: no one’s home, nothing permanent.
(That’s right: no one belongs to themselves, only to me, to me.)
What is more beautiful than the Chaos of your own hand? The judge and the executioner. It is sweeter than pleas of mercy, better than the tears of enemies and lovers alike, all the same under the morning’s honeyed-sky.
This is the scene from which Nadia emerges into Theo’s rooms—electronic locks disabled—as if it were her own. The room, the boy, what was the difference to her? A door without a lock, a boy without a spine—the quivering lips and slick film of tears over those big dark eyes, a perfect complement to the ruins beyond. A broken, shivering boy in a sanctuary of a space, safe until now from the reach of an angry god.
Or perhaps a queen on her throne the way Nadia lounges in the one chair of his room, kicking her feet up onto his trunk, dirt scattering across its surface.
“Look at that, they didn’t even bother to check your room,” eyes cast over the scene, threadbare, tools laid out, small television shadow empty and dark, “Why? Because you’re a good boy?” The words are venom in her mouth, twirled around her tongue before spit out. “So, you wouldn’t go against me would you, Theo? You’d tell me if you knew anything?” Laughter erupts out of her, all teeth and tongue, as if he weren’t already dead within her jaws. Such words could’ve been sweet, yet they are edged, sharp enough to promise real pain, the prick of blood against skin. With this she snaps her long fingers, hand held out for the glass of water her mouth doesn’t request, letting her baton clatter to the ground.
Now watch: look how high the dog jumps.
