The Complex Sorcery of Kicking Ass

NUMERUS I

01: of dwindling hopes and pretty boys

"She's mad, but she's magic. There's no lie in her fire."
― Charles Bukowski

✧ ゜✧ ゜✧゜

THE THING ABOUT the water is, it's relentless. It's cold and calm and yet there's something relentless about the way it just is. A relentless pursuit of cascading beauty, Noha's mother would say.

Her mother was a petite woman, from what she recalls, with big eyes and jutting cheekbones that were fit to kill a man. "I age like fine wine," she'd say, her six foot frame draped with robes and fingers donned in silken gloves. Noha would've liked to support that claim but she hasn't seen her mother in a long time. It wouldn't have made much difference now, anyways. Her eyes are useless now. Besides, all she has are vague, faded images of what she remembers. Willowy figments of beauty tucked away into her mind.

Her mother was strangely poetic when it came to discussing anything other than vengeance against her possibly dead father. To her mother, everything was a poem. Words existing only to be strung together into something that sounded like music. To her mother, 'water' was a 'relentless pursuit of cascading beauty'.

She shudders now, not willing to think of what atrocious metaphors her mother uses now.

Noha's not a very poetic person, her brash nature is the stone cold witness that she despises all things cliché but she loves the feeling of being enveloped by coursing water. Devours it, really. The moonlight shines
on her barely visible body and she feels the gentle heat seeping into her skin, flesh getting used to the mixture of coldness and warmth that surrounds it.

It's a forgotten memory to most, this lake, but it's her spot. It's one of the many places she likes visiting. This one's stuck by her side, though, through midnight crying sessions and early morning sulking. She's done a lot of self-reflection sitting on the nearby rock with the wind's music a background symphony. The air is humid, her breath is hot and she thinks how it's no wonder she keeps coming back here. Of course, if it wasn't a drug dealing hotspot by day she'd come here more often. She misses her mother. Her breaths are slow and exaggerated as she recalls the way she used to live, unapologetically happy and never yielding to fatigue. Every inch of her was exploding with energy.

Now, her body is a cold home to the ghost of what she once was. She's been reduced to someone defined by her loneliness and lassitude.

The wetness on her cheeks isn't from the lake, she's only shoulder-deep, she wipes her face, voice thick when she calls out for her friend. I'm such a child, she thinks to herself, the water suddenly a little too cold. She's not too fond of nostalgia.

"I'm coming!"

The response is a second too late, not instantaneous as always and for a second Noha panics, suddenly overcome with worry. She's greeted by the familiar voice of Fern and she exhales, her breath forming vapors in the air, the white mist dissipating into nothing within a few seconds.

"Don't do that. Don't do that." Noha breathes again, hands finding Fern's as she grasps onto them tightly. Her hair somehow finds its way around and latches itself onto Fern's wrists and the girl rolls her eyes.

"I was gone for approximately five minutes, Noha."

"It's dark out here, okay?"

Fern lets out a giggle and Noha stares at her friend blankly, picturing the slight twist of her lips and the sliver of a sparkle in her eyes. Fern was always much funnier on the spot than she was, and so her friend's laugh felt almost rewarding.

"Blind puns, I see."

"It was not intentional, you ableist fucker."

"Language! Okay, get your emo hair off of me."