Ink And Echoes

• BUT I LOVED MY FATHER - FOUR •

IV

❁ F O U R ❁

• • •

° Laney °

For the first time, I felt as if all the colours from my mother's poems faded and my bottle of honey was left desiccated.

The police found bullets in Fluerie's room. It took me a moment to understand whether they were just bullets or a burning string that held an already broken flower vase together. And I knew, that Elijah knew poetry wasn't just words clustered together. Poetry was his family itself. If he were to fix his broken spectacle, he would not have done it without bleeding for everyone else first.

This house, a jar of honey or maybe firewood stinging with petroleum, was now a crime scene. But, the biggest crime scene was in Ruelle's cracked perfection. She was a mess, a melting bundle of strength and marriage. How foolish of me not to see the fault lines in her eyelids, everytime they were wet, with Elijah's ashes and Fluerie's smile.

But that was okay.
She was just the grey glass
that had held the marigold
honey that I crave for.

There were fingertips of Fluerie on the bullets and whenever she spoke, I would notice the rotten roses on her tongue; just like the ones on my mother's grave. But here's a tragedy, she wrote a book on a comet that was blue and black but still so much more; it probably sounds wrong but she set fire to my family everytime she wrote. And everytime I burned in that fire, I knew death had its own flavour. People taste it, letting a milk seep through their head which was not meant for them.

Sometimes, I think Ruelle talked to Elijah or maybe I was hallucinating like her. And Fluerie would watch her mumbling with a strange love that I could never mirror. I could feel Fluerie go blind with my trust, but wasn't that a mistake? What she didn't know was that I was not just a tsunami which was going to drown her house with a pure wave of satellites, but I was a hurricane. Did she have a moral to learn from?

Her father's library was like my mother's table, now a home to rusted poems and parasites to feed off his family (with a little bit of spilled honey too). When I entered that room, I could feel the burning flower petals settle inside me and I realised, I was falling in love with everyone but myself. I knew, I was caught up in this moment, pulling myself to the edge.

The police had surrounded Fluerie, as if attempting to clean her. But, they had darkest eyes I had ever seen and Fluerie had already cut her heart out of her chest and given it to me. I leaned on a bookshelf, watching the books trying to fight an untamed cancer with soldiers from a song on the radio. The floor was covered with roses and snakes, and the coffee table, with a broken plate full with Elijah's ink.

What he didn't know was, when he would leave, that ink would give birth to hawks with wings that Fluerie should have owned and they would claw at the Christmas days and Ruelle's mind. Maybe for Ruelle, darkness was necessary but she was dripping off it, shedding it everywhere. But everything looks good on paper. I don't understand who I am.

“Laney, did I kill papa?”

Will you dance with me darling?
What about my poems?

Fluerie asked me; her voice made my bones ache, as if she was pushing through a pain in them, painting them in. I did not say her anything and picked her up, in my arms, letting her breath plant a drug in the honey that my skin was made up of. Around her, I always felt like I'm drowning which my mother never allowed to happen. Her poems, now I realise, were so plastic, killing my family, not just burning them (while smiling so easy) unlike Elijah's poems which were all about a plate of pastries and coffee beans sewing this house back to life. The only fault was the needles he used.