She sleeps peacefully in my house, my house of death. The others here have given up their hearts, I have held them in my hands as the last beat rang out to an unresponsive body, and then they come here and I have met them, welcoming. This girl feigns my touch while my fingertips are unable to pass through the pulsing heat that radiates from her – the heat of a soul still attached to its carrier. I hover them over her casing, feeling the life that I never get called to feel. It is restless, aching, and earnest. It is intoxicating. Within the stench of death she is concealed from all but death herself: poor living corpse.
At the door of my house there is movement, but he that enters is not who I have invited tonight. He grips flowers: cut and killed in their prime, and he scatters them so they are almost returned to the ground, stopped only by my little pretender and her canopy of dust and stones. She cools at the touch of his sweet flower and I think perhaps she is strengthening her act. The man promises tears distilled by moans, but he is composed, and with a start is backed into the night, observing next to me as the boy enters.
I have seen him before, I have invited him thus. His hands have been stained the same colour as mine and yet he glows. Behind him another, and with a fourth living form, my appetite grows to an unbearable swelling pain; still, all I can do is watch. The fourth is commanded: live, and farewell, away, away from me. I let him go; it is not he that I have invited.
The boy accuses the tomb. It is a maw, my womb. It has not gorged, but waits to birth anew his dearest morsel of the earth. He pulls open the rotten jaws that have not eaten and promises to cram it with more food, real food. It is not the tomb that will consume, but me, the shadow behind his back.
The man pushes out past me, further towards the light, the boy, and pursues his vengeance. He wants the boy to die, and thus he calls my name. He must die, must indeed, because he has chosen me, but now I dance between them because it is the man who has called me. The boy – mad – begs in mercy: stay not, begone, live. He calls again. I dance across their swords and the arms that wield them, in the gaps of understanding and through their protruding clouds of grief. Spinning between all, both, I reach out and find flesh, break it, and break it further. The boy has slain, and I take the other. His fate perhaps was written in sour misfortune’s book, but it is the stars that I shall obey now.
His glow and her lantern together cast upon my house a feasting presence full of light; it is so bright that I lie by the dead man interred. I feel his dearth and shroud myself in it, waiting. The girl performs still as if I had sucked the honey of her breath, despite my pale flag having not advanced there. I keep her not, not as my paramour, nor in the dark at all. He is blinded by her light in the dim night and, unseeing, he lies too, but next to the tomb, sculpting himself into his everlasting rest.
To her he gives his last look, last embrace, melding her form into the formation of his statue. I guide the vessel of poison into his hands and he takes it willingly, pulling the stopper and thus affirming the stars and all their writing. He kisses his wife before the bottle. The toxins slip hurriedly down his throat and spread a coldness that seizes every joint and muscle, casting an organ at a time, making his body writhe outwardly and contort in protest, shuddering up and down with shaking limbs and a twitching head.
He is a boy, so young and shining, but the desire stretches guiltily, twistingly, and I reach out, taking his face in my fingers, letting the tears fall over them. She begins to slacken her act, the life radiating out of her, and so, at the last moment, I tilt the boy’s head upwards so that he may not see what I see. His heart aches to be held, crying out, but I refuse to let his face drop, and as he is consumed into me, she smiles.
In seeing his statue she breathes a life of plentiful years, forthcoming smiles and dances and touches, the sunset of tomorrow, the crisp scent of the next frost, birds announcing a new day. Then her eyes land on me. Her pupils enlarge so as to devour all in their wake, and through them I can see the world blurring to ash. She falls out of the tomb, my nest, crashing frantically down to where I rested the boy’s head, pulling him against her so that her pulse meets his lack. It beats for the both of them. She buries her screams, her tears, in his hair, and her future in me.
I have come for two, and I have received two; I could let her go. Another beckoner comes to take her away from me, but she has seen me now and she will stay. Fury is directed through her, travelling like blood into the fists which clamp together the fabric at his shoulders, into her tensing stomach and teeth that grind against themselves, biting into the loss of everything. I hold her gaze, but I keep my distance. She grasps for the poison, a cup closed in her true love’s hand, kissing the boy’s lips for some that might hang on them, but I’m no longer there.
It is she that closes the gap between us, taking from him a happy dagger as she comes. She holds it to my womb, but points at her own, calling it a sheath in which the dagger must rust. His mode of protection and valour will rust in whom he sought most to defend, will itself die in injuring its most loved. I let her push it deep within. Her screams of anguish pierce through my house and strike my shame, knocking both of us to our knees. To him, his empty breast, she returns. I follow. I help her as she wraps herself in his arms and pulls free the dagger, letting the blood soak into his clothes and cover his skin. It spills out, reaching for every part of him that it can find, warming his cooling body. Seeping, fading, she stills. Her eyes stay interlocked with mine until they gloss over, and then… and then I take them both together, him and her.
A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life, and I help them.
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