My Innocence Was Taken By Hands No Bigger Than My Own, Another Child Who’s Eyes Swam Blue With Cold

Even in its darkest hour, the world carries good people on it. And we must fight for them. Love is sustainable, a replenishing and revitalizing energy. Hatred ravages the wielder just as much as those it is wielded against. It can propel you, surely, but for how long? How long can you hold the fire before you, too, are turned to ash?

I want to live a thousand childhoods. I want to know how cold the water gets in the backyard rivers of country houses. I want to feel the texture of marble on kitchen counter tops and eat everything the private chef prepares. I want to run in grass miles and miles long with my sisters. I want to know how young feels in every skin there is.

That was when I met him. My undoing. He was like a father to me, but I was not like a daughter to him. He knew this. He knew what I saw when I looked into his eyes, and he did not look into mine, drawn into the gaps between my blouse’s buttons like black holes for morality. I was always to blame for his touches. I had always thought of myself as a girl, as a person, but really, I was a place. A place for innocence to die.

That is the curse of living, that we choose what is familiar and not what is good.

More hours in the day ought to do it. Just four or five more, and my dreams don’t seem so far away.

Polymaths are rarer than single subject experts; lofty does not begin to describe my future. But who ever aimed low and went high? Better to do the opposite I say, and maybe I’ll warm up to medium.

And when the night took his knee, and the sun grazed his face with her locks long and blonde as she stood, his eyes rested only on her.

The siren caressed the sailor girl’s cheek gently, like a receding tide brushing its long fingers on the sand reminiscently.

“You never wanted to hurt me, did you. Why? Won’t you starve? You’re thin as bone,” the sailor girl asked, letting her eyes roam over her wet skin as she bobbed out of the dark water.

The siren shuddered at the comparison, and whipped her hand back suddenly. Mermaids were competitive, the more meat on a girl the higher she rose in their ranks. To be thin as bone meant one was nothing but that, a carcass without value, without muscle, sinew, or flesh.

“I am more than bone, but you. You are thin and sick even though you rove the land where food grows on trees and you hunt for nothing, and yet, you come to me to die. I will leave you disappointed. If I have to suffer this life, so do you.”

Her short dark hair seemingly melted over her face, as the sunset turned to night and shadow enveloped her entirety.

“I, I meant no harm,” the sailor stuttered, unaware of her misstep.

“Your people never do, and look what that leaves us,” she spat, and turned her head, now a dark hungry pit, toward the docks where a siren hung by the neck.

“My people? Is that what I am to you? Some violent human eager to noose you,” the sailor girl’s eyes carried hurt, and she nursed her chest’s wound with a calloused thumb in circular motions.

“I wish you’d broken my heart with your teeth and not your words,” she said, and retreated from the shoreline with a flush cheek from where she touched her.

There is an understanding in burning high rises that only it’s occupants can gather—that the rapid footsteps and baited breath do little for longevity if the staircase is ash and the elevator an oven.

No, the hurried panic is not for survival of the body, but a hunt for another. A body heat almost indiscernible undulating between the flap like flames—like pop ups out of a picture book. You may think it madness to seek heat in a fire, but this is a heat of the soul, a desire to die in embrace. To know a heart beat’s breath against your own.

An understanding that if life must be unkind, you must never let it be alone.

I can’t have children, I’d have too much love for them. I’d bring them up scared of the world like I am. Scared of nothing and everything at the same time.

Is that why people write? Because no one will listen?