FIND BELOW AN EXCERPT FROM A FREE STORY (no strings attached)…
A cursed girl who cannot die finds a bruised boy under her roses every day.
I have always loved wounded things, although perhaps I am the most wounded of all.
Cursed. Undying.
Undyingly lonely.
Hardly anyone comes to my manor of echoes and neglect anymore (not that many people even dwell in this spellbound place).
Only the woman comes to the gate in the morning.
Only the murderer comes to kill me in the evening.
And the boy made of intensity and silence, injuries and scars, he… well.
Come in and I’ll tell you.
Content warnings: a young man is beaten; a woman is immoral; people are killed.
I am cursed.
Undying.
Undyingly lonely.
Yet, again, I die for the thirty-second time in the parlor.
Stabbed through the neck, I collapse in a brutal sort of beauty.
(Am I supposed to think things are beautiful while dying? I suppose the normal sorts of thoughts during death are humdrum and lackluster by now.)
As I sprawl, the plush carpet cushions my artlessly falling body. My gown goes tousled in voluminous crinkles around me, the fabric shaded into pinks and golds by shafts of light from a lamppost outside the window.
Starved in life, I starve in death, too, for wondrous things, for soft things.
The spikes of pain in my throat are not soft, nor are the long, blood-saturated strings of pale hair that twine around my neck pretty. The tresses slick across my skin like thick, wet ropes.
I’ve been killed by rope before, too, strangled, and the sounds a throat makes while trying to grab the breath required for life are grisly, appalling, like my budding scream now. Sliced off by steel, it gurgles in bubbles leaking from my severed trachea.
It’s almost tiresome how the blood straggles into my lungs until my breath drowns in shallow puddles and shallower gasps, my head too light, my lungs too sloshing with liquid.
Heavy. Yes. The world inside me is heavy as I suffocate.
Actually… it’s not so bad now. Like waves lapping gently at a shore: a sweet, soft invasion. I am a beach caressed by an ocean of scarlet ribbons. Fading breath, languid mind.
My killer looms deeper in the room, a shadow poised beyond the lamplight’s grasp, his—or her—silhouette cut out as if by the edge of a dagger.
Beneath my weighted lids, I disdain the death-bringer and watch, instead, an unruined bit of splendor beyond the windowpane: the moths winging around the lamppost.
In a choreography of wings and wind and flight, they strew streaks and sinews of shadow in their wake. Diaphanous and transient, they heed unheard melodies.
I almost catch a note, a lullaby?
No. Surely it’s only a figment wrought by the night’s caprice.
*
I wake alone—always alone, with the rest of my bloodline murdered months ago—no, years now (how odd time can be)—and only sunbeams remain deathless enough to embrace me.
Their glossy heat skips warmth across my cheeks and my chapped lips, which stick together like flypaper, creased with fissures of desiccated skin.
My eyelids disentangle, and the world welcomes me like an uncurtained stage.
The sun-wasted parlor greets me with a peeling plaster ceiling moldering into crumbling curlicues of vines and cherubs. Near my crumpled body, a stitched-together, maroon-and-ivory upholstered chair curves its back, a matriarch of furniture ready to berate. The fallow hearth beside her lies unstirred, its future fires yet unborn, with any once-remnants of heat long gone ash-cold.
And beneath me, as always, clotted blood mats the carpet.
In daylight, the gown that glimmers around my body is neither pink nor gold, as it appeared in lamplight, but as cerulean as the swaths of pearlescent sky outside—or it would be if that sky were adrift with old blood like rust-red snow.
I lever myself up on shaking elbows (dying renders my muscles into weaklings), and I probe the skin of my throat.
Hale, taut flesh, flawlessly knitted and unscarred, healed by the hand of enchantment.
The coating of blood is already flaking off (but the sensation of it never does).
*
Waking after being murdered always leaves me restless. Aimlessly I ramble through the labyrinthine halls of my palatial home.
It was built so long ago now that it is something of a fairytale construct. Its grand façade rises rife with turrets and towers, its spacious halls strewn within with lavish extravagance. But it is a musty place of many corners: cobwebs thread through dulled gold candelabra, and dust adorns the crystal chandeliers in spidery strings. Ages untold coat the mahogany tables, and time has rippled its fingers through the windows, distorting every glance outside as if through flowing water.
As I wander, gilded mirrors hung in the halls strive to entice me with my reflection.
I am not cajoled. I do not need to look to know that my lips have gone lurid ruby-red from my biting them. I do not need to look to see that my gray irises dart back and forth trying to catch the constant worry that flits around me. I do not wish to behold the bruises painting translucent purple crescents beneath my eyes, nor do I need a reminder of the silver-threaded hair framing my face, the hue more appropriate to someone many times my true age.
And as for the dried blood tracking down my throat—no, no thank you, I do not need to see that.
A faint sound—a scuffed footfall, a shifted chair?—yanks a traitorous leap from my heart.
But I tamp it down; no one is here.
Loneliness is a trickster like that; it beguiles me into believing the cricks and creaks of this place could be a person: a friend, a potential lover.
Every rustle, of course, yields nothing.
Nothing would thrive in this atmosphere of neglect, not even I, who merely exist. I set one foot into the next step, into the next room, into rooms and rooms filled with shelves of fanciful inventions and gadgets tinkered into reality. They speak of generations of brilliant minds.
My mind is lonely, tired, uninspired.
Hardly anyone comes here.
Only the woman in the morning.
The murderer in the evening.
And the boy made of intensity and silence, injuries and scars.
I would have added more story here, but I don’t want the whole of it to be scraped by bots training AI models. The whole story, however, is available for free to anyone on Amazon here, on other retailers here, or on prolificWorks here.
Sonya Lano 