BROWN SKIN | BOOK 1

|| C H A P T E R . 30 ||

Why are tornadoes swirling in my stomach to the point where I want to vomit in an uncontrollable form. I told you already, I don't have the right words to express how I feel. I just hope that doesn't mean I am emotionless or empty. I'm not. I sometimes feel more than necessary.

So let's talk about something that you don't fear because we both say things like "I won't be missed" or try to look on the brighter side like, "one less civilian to worry about." I mean like death. You said being dead doesn't scare you. So swallow these lucid dreams and spit up these illusions that play with our mind. Let the maggots chew away at my lashes and tear at the whites of my eye. May they rip my skin inside out to leave me raw and rot. Let the ashy gray rats creep into the skeletons of our eye sockets. Let the earthworms wriggle into our body tissue and meat to become dust and composition. Our souls will just be the remains of our existence just— Everywhere. Tell me.

Tell me my blood can't leak gold on top of a rightful King's head,

if so, make me bronze.

The kind no one cares about.

Smear it with bare hands where it can be deemed as remarkable and monumental. Make it memorable like Monet and Van Gogh. Let it be appreciated so the world can see what it had done to me. What you have done to me. Only then, there will come a day we will be famous when we weren't alive to witness it.

When people were too late to tell us we were loved after all.

—Ebonee

"Dad?"

Beau more so asked as if he was not his biological father, but a random pedestrian he met on the street for the first time. He expressed a question mark around his relative's name to make sure it was real and true. Beau's hand compressed a little too tightly in mine, which hurt, and replaced more a sense of fear instead of cutting off my circulation in my veins.

There were plenty of strangers that strolled in every angle, in every direction, going about their lives. None of them really answered back, Beau becoming the ugly duckling in the middle of the sidewalk. I searched for an older male with similar features to Beau, maybe the hair texture or height. My eyes darted left and right, shading them from the sun for the mysterious man Beau called his father outside.

Today was supposed to be another one of those days.

Beau and I were going to walk hand in hand to a place, somewhere nice or fancy but not too fancy unrealistically speaking, but where two teenagers could actually date and live a normal life like the rest of the books. Let's take one for the books they said.

With third degree burns and violence in our burning eyes, sometimes all we could see was rage and people expect us to magically heal. Replace that with red and they wonder what you could be so upset about when life is so great to and for them. The End.

But there wasn't a mere explanation for the way life robbed us of our innocent ways and souls. Maybe, life for everyone was not a masterpiece. And maybe there were different kinds of beauty at a valuable price people are willing to spend and see.
I don't think I wanted to be in a museum like the Louvre and just be admired and untouched. I think if I was beautiful, I want to be a thunderstorm and rigorous winds during rain on a summer day. More than art, more than exquisite and more than a masterpiece.