I washed. Mom dried.

“This world has only two true directions, towards and away.”

afterglow ~

when we were girls we were taught that if you just loved the beast enough, looked past the dripping fangs, the claws curled around a heart you were certain was good beneath it all - if you held a little more faith, stayed soft enough, malleable enough, resilient enough - that the spell he was under would be broken and you would live long enough to see the beast become the man you were promised; your reward for loving so blindly and wildly - and so i drank my poison like a good little miss every last d r o p we're feigning fables now, but not really. it's a tale as old as time. so we sit in our gilded cages and carriages of copper and wait. wait while the beast clips our wings, and the bars that once kept us safe, the bars we mistook for devotion, now hold us captive. until the clock strikes midnight and the carriage remembers it was always a pumpkin, while you're standing in a pool of your own blood, cutting your feet on the same glass slippers you were once all too willing to wear.

and you cannot be surprised when the fairy tale buries you in a shallow grave.

because he showed you who he was from the beginning.

the teeth were not a curse.

the claws were not a hex.