love is in the air || @decidentia : Royce
Mirrors are the root of vanity. She has been told so time and time again. Others are her judges, decide whether her dress fits her right or if her hair needs brushing. It makes her smaller, not knowing what she looks like except in passing glances. She is being kept secret from herself. But there is an alluring power in this, too. The very sight of her corrupts. She knows this to be true. Devil child, dressed in bridal white. It makes her magical and strange. Of course only angels and ghosts would court her. Of course she's started talking to the wallpaper.
There is no mirror in her room, though she imagines one. She imagines the silver screen as it haplessly reflects the slow circles of a lone dancer. She feebly embraces the air and when the moonlight slips in her arms she feels him briefly fade. It is in the shadows that he grows solid, solid enough for her leaking gnawing heart and the hands it drives. She buries her face in his flayed Letterman jacket and pretends that the scent of burned skin and tire rubber doesn't stick to the roof of her mouth. He is all body when she holds him, she swears it.
As she presses closer, his missing pieces weep against her chest. She can feel it, the way he's been torn apart, where his car dragged him and flayed him and ground him into the asphalt. In the half dark his face is a ruin of loose skin and glinting flesh. It frightens her to look closely. But it is a tender fear, that turns her stomach like the first shudder of arousal. She clings to him as if only the one who scares her has the power to console her. It is sweet to her, the way her little heart contracts in her chest. Miriam figures this is what it must feel like, in some dance hall, with his arms around her, sweating in the floodlights. Not in this bedroom that has never spelled safety. She pretends they are elsewhere, they are other people. She wants to be sweet and pure and in love with the baseball star. She wants to wear a red dress and let him pick her up in his car, watch him comb his hair back in the rearview mirror. The rush of first love, innocent and steadfast even in the face of morbidity.
On and on the radio blares its static, a rustling and whirring. It's dead air now that nobody is transmitting. Her father's sermon concluded hours ago, praying and praising his litanies. Now it's white noise, humming no melody but one endless tone. It's enough for Miriam who melts into Royce's absence of warmth, in the absence of music. He guides her gently, without much strategy besides the steady sway of their shapes. She imagines a beat for them to step to, shuffling across her floorboards like this.
When she looks up, she sees his shredded cheek, sanded down by the blacktop. He used to delight in her staring, her fearful speculation on the violence that his body endured. Now he's had his fill of her flinching. Now he praises her for holding still when he leans closer. How devastatingly handsome he must have been, fresh and ruddy with live blood. How devastatingly handsome he is now, dead in her arms.
She smiles to herself, made giddy by her unreason, by her defiance of instinct. Her mind scratches itself raw trying to fit the pieces together; her fear, of him and of whatever budding madness keeps her in his weightless, demolished grip, and the sugar high of being held, of having the scary thing in her closet step out and kiss her hand.
"As far as prom dances go... This is really nice."
