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You live inside me, the same way I live inside you. A moebius strip, a snake always swallowing its own tail. Mutually assured destruction, maybe, or mutual deification. Mutual consumption. I will be the house that holds every part of you.
Mabel: Matryoshka, Becca De La Rosa & Mabel Martin
best read in smallest size hoefler text
Tom Riddle lit the pyre, and Amoret Banks was going to burn in it.
Lower Slaughter reeked of greened copper and canvas smoke, but the war dead had to be burned somewhere. Crematoriums were distant and overfull. Cemeteries were for the soldiers with families to go home to; the nameless ones would be dumped in the sticks. No burial service. No graves. On Good Friday they'd carry them to the burning pile and watch with scarves over their mouths as the flames went up.
Amoret was thirteen when she first felt it—that thing—sticky, cold, unclean; the bodies of better men made martyrs.
Reid left for the Ministry two years in. She might've forgotten by now what the dead felt like. Not like Amoret, raw-handed from washing, who stared from the rocks with purplish palms, posed for feast. Only the eagles never came, and the glory never followed. There was only the sense of being left to die.
When night fell, the burning slowed, the ash soared and the wind snuffed it out. Children lined up for the street pump while mourning song echoed from the church. All the voices hoarse. All the air thick with death. They sung for those they'd never see again, not for the strangers whose remains fell like snow over the thatches. The names of the young boys engraved on the nave walls; tallied one-through-fives; Robertson, Ford, Bailey. Amoret dragged her sister by the elbow from the window, their hob-nailed boots scraping along the cobblestone. Sybil was a ghost. Her feet dragged along the River Eye as she peered in the water to gape at little ducklings.
On better days, she stared out the window in her good Sunday dress, watching the glass fog with kitchen steam, tuning her violin, sometimes playing, collecting stones from the river. Never the ones hidden in tree trunks. Sybil tucked them under her pillow for good tidings. It was an empty superstition to tend. It existed only to keep her busy.
