SONGS OF OURSELVES

❦ platinum

if it's easy to bear it

i'll bear it

i'll try

but could i be

the one

that's on your mind?

cause i'll slide up there to see you

and maybe

that's love

❧ dijon, "magic loops"

BOOK XX:

✩THE SISTER ✩

written in the year xxxx

(a constellation of eyes camouflaged in night. it never occurred to you to be hungry.)

☾

Soldiers on white horses discovered you down in the cellar and now you are running, and I am not there.

Go, terror powers your legs, stitched together with ancient welts and burns, go!

Sunlight filters through your halo of hair. Your shoulders are boulders, corded with bullish muscle—the perfect build for a laundry maid. The most you were ever born to be, as you were told.

They also said you would never be loved, and they were wrong, so wrong.

You have stood sturdy as a tree for almost twenty years. Despite it all your skin still gleams like polished ceder. But even the mightiest oak will fall beneath an axe, a beast, an unnatural disaster.

The lead horseman shouts a command, and you know you will never see Leolal again.

She will run as far and fast as her little legs will carry her, her hunched back damp with sweat.

Not too long ago she was a baby on your back, safely tucked inside the cloth you were once swaddled in.

And to see Leolal today, feeding herself, speaking your language, wearing your eyes like precious jewels!

After they're done with you, they will run her down on their pure white horses to tie up any loose ends. No witnesses.

But not all is lost!

Maybe she will outwit them. Maybe she'll find a rabbit burrow to hide in. Maybe an errant god will intervene on her behalf.

Maybe she'll just get lucky.

As for you?

There is little else left for you, so long as Leolal makes it out alive.

Breath leaves you and your side begins to cramp.