walking on barbed wire

walking is a song, her footsteps the rhythm, her heart the beat that has echoed through each and every mile. she is quiet, almost melancholy; Before, it would’ve been cause for worry, a knuckle to her forehead to check for warmth - but After has found her tongue still in her mouth, heavy and arduous, a stalactite nestled between those ivory teeth. to move it is to acknowledge, even in the barest of terms, what she has long denied to herself: that she has been cut free, a loose strand in an intricate web, flapping wildly and without direction through tumultuous winds. any day now, she will be crushed by some absent-minded beast and left to rot below the earth, forever a Thing of the Past.

black claws sink into the flesh of her shoulder, drawing her from her brooding with a sharp chirp of protest.

“yes i know, Kass,” she hisses, voice rough with disuse. she shoots the bird a baleful glance, but it merely turns away, feigning innocence. she’d named the thing after her favourite brother, eighteen months her junior, who she’d been most bereft to leave behind. she could still picture his little face all twisted up in confusion as she’d been chased into the wilderness, the voices of their family rising in hysterical prayer -

she cut the thought off with a snap of her teeth, as though physically closing on the memory and wrenching it in two, rending bone from socket. it helped, sometimes, to think of the memory as something she could physically kill.

“enough of ghosts,”she tells Kass, though it’s really for herself. “we’re both too pretty to cry.”