You have chosen a tale that is gothic, romantic, and dark, with claws and fangs and roses and curses. If you come in, you cannot die and will wake every morning to the same beautiful boy injured beneath your roses…
I am 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.
In my ensorceled haven, I make jeweled birds that sing with the voices of the dead, I feed an enchantment, and I die every night.
Tonight, in the parlor, I die for the thirty-second time.
Stabbed through the neck, I collapse in a brutal sort of beauty.
(Am I supposed to find things beautiful while dying? Perhaps imagining myself lovely can alleviate the pain?)
(It doesn’t.)
As I starved in life, so I starve in death: for the wondrous things, the soft things. No poetry graces my artless fall, for no tragic boy is here to catch me.
Only shafts of light from the lamppost outside the window reach in to solace me, gilding my bloodied skin, and pinkening the crinkles in my tousled gown.
Fresh pain spikes through my throat, and pale hair twines around my neck, slick across my skin like long, wet ropes.
Why must I suffer this ugliness when I have never imposed it on another?
Why? I ask toward my killer, a shadow poised beyond the lamplight’s grasp, his—or her—silhouette cut out as if by the edge of a dagger.
Does he or she revel as the blood trickles into my lungs, as I drown in shallow puddles and shallower gasps?
My breath has been sliced off by steel, mere gurgles lost in bubbles leaking from my severed trachea.
The death-bringer has killed me by rope before, too, strangled me while I thrashed—and in my mad grasp for air, I almost touched him (or her), although in the end, I surrendered (as always)…
The sounds that time were grisly, appalling, all the throttled noises in my throat as I stretched vainly for screams.
Every day, the killer comes.
Every day, I succumb.
Do I hate him (or her)?
If I felt anything, perhaps.
I am only apathetic now.
Beneath my weighted lids, I at last relinquish observation of the killer and, instead, I watch the unruined splendor beyond the windowpane: moths winging around the lamppost.
This… yes, this is my poetry.
This choreography of wings and wind and flight, these creatures that strew streaks and sinews of shadow in their wake. Diaphanous and transient, like dust in the night, they whirl in unheard melodies.
I almost catch a note, a lullaby…
No. All the lullabies have ended; they’re only figments wrought by the night’s caprice.
If I succumb and go so soft every time I am killed, do I want to die?
*
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 rumpled 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 any other retailer but Amazon here, or on prolificWorks here.
