your persistence in partitioning his anatomy—sclera cocooning his sight, angel’s kisses languishing his nape, digital nerves branching his hands—martyred as weather-resistant: sketches of the parts you observed of him slid under shu’s door every by-noon while he played dormancy’s seeding bow with a deathly sobriety. the textures your choice in media expended—pencil for limbs, paint for veins and arteries, watercolour for the loose way you reimagined his capture of the world—perhaps explained why you would not speak, though he made ill effort to discern it. shu told you it was pointless, but still your witching subduings—curses that mark all unrequited and respired giftings—waxed and waned with an apple blossom’s seasonal phoenix in spring.
whatever your troublesome nature, shu made sure to crease the corners where his thumb gripped the paper before slipping it back for you—should you wish—to collect the return of his retinas’ half-hearted labours weighing upon it. sometimes you met his expectation of it, like a reaper with the recently-dead. at other times, you left it as he did for you until he inevitably—like a yellowed bellowing—would shove it into his nightstand before any of his brothers could seize your offerings. at such times, shu mused that even soul collectors must take vacation from such miserly business and made no mess of measuring the pattern in whether you would or wouldn’t take back your confections.
how many cones of colour does the human eye lack versus the slumbering creature of salt, shu wrote once on the back of the paper you slipped him yesterday’s noon after three weeks of you taking leave of his returns. curious was no word to describe his mood, nor irksome bore reiji remarked upon a few nights before with a recuse that sired the black sea. perhaps coquettish captured it thusly, but he preferred habit, if only for the mealy texture of it on his tongue. in any case, you collected this time and wrote back on your next sketch: more than three. shu tried at a laid-about rasp of laughter upon reading it—you were not wrong—but his lips stayed blunt: the lost shade of blue in your soaked dollops of his eyes was a lucky discovery for someone like you, working only from a tried wheel of colours. you most likely had no clue of it. he wrote back the number five—for the senses commonly known, leaving the rest to your imagination—before slipping it back under the door along with a violin score, the first he had written in centuries and taut, titled after you: rue.
when his knees—soft in the ignorance of polishing cold tile—still had room to sprout into something green, edgar told him his favourite fairy tale: jack and the magic beanstalk. his worn boots stomped the ground, an imitation of a giant’s insatiable rumouring, while his smile—though different in petal-plate—burst with a reminiscence akin to yours in today’s aching: a crisp fruit that one’s stomach, even a child’s, would sour upon if indulged without lingering. shu offered no protest to his lack of agency; playing the role of jack suited his bony limbs better regardless, though edgar always insisted a noble’s easy access to sugar ought to make climbing trees, in place of beanstalks, a manageable habit of adventure. but shu—a nocturnal animal wearing sun-rays for a chance to learn the plump grip of a friendly hand at sundown—instead pressed his mother’s bitter truffles into edgar’s palm during their brief, illicit incursions into the mansion’s furthest woods.
though he ought to have questioned why any boy would trade a cow for a handful of beans—after all, god was a tepid explanation for why high things like the sky age in tempo with gravity’s covalence—shu never did. not even when their irregular spats got the better of him, resulting in months of absence from their meeting stump where they had carved their initials into the meat of it with edgar’s pocket knife. magic, like him, was a stubborn imp with ludicrous promises for the pick and chew—even now, as shu holds your hand which carries edgar’s gaze in union of skeleton and diatomic illocution while guiding you to the rotted stump, rings peeled and cooled in the late summer’s breeze. he tells you to carve your initial, but your finger only draws into his palm: i have nothing to give in return. yes, that is true too, shu supposes. he peppers your neck with a waxy kiss before letting you settle instead upon the open stump.
one day when shu entered your room, he noticed how still you were.
he felt his heart collapse—or maybe it was his body—on the bed. he pulled you close and rocked you, as he had always done when nightmares frightened you enough to mouth his name like tautonym: one pursed syllable for shu, two stretched syllables for ririe. the latter, he found, took root in your features and osculations far better under candlelight’s diaphoric lushness.
your fingers—anchors ultimately too mortal to retire dead seas—would no longer yield sketches to slip under his door or words to paint into his palm. no word left him, nor sound. not even when he uncurled the crumbled note from the rictus of your hand: spread my ashes.
he waited for time to assuage you—now only flesh, bone, and hair—immortal as calcium, before making good on your request to feed your nitrates back into the mansion’s soils. all these decades and their sweet dews, he could never overcome his fear of the inferno’s appetite, not even to release what was left of you.
afterwards, he surrendered his violin to reiji and told him to do as he pleased with it before returning to his room. reiji considered smashing the frame to feed a bonfire on the roof, but instead he polished the wood, placing it on display within his laboratory. perhaps he could accept the absence of their stiff duets as children, though the audience no longer lived to be sated by them. perhaps not yet. for now, he decided: let the future make omen and dance of it.
the taste of whisky, husky and warm, drew caustic on shu’s breath—alighting pleasant mouthing of a hum in his matrix marrow. he smiled at the storming ceiling, cracks in the plaster stumbling over themselves like insects.
a stiff black suit sighed, though to shu he looked like an ink-blotted swarm:
“must you track the sofa with those shoes? a good-for-nothing is only useful in the way a dog is: bringing the outside soil into the foyer.”
shu’s words slipped, sodden with boyish strands and present tense:
“there is something… i need to confess….”
“oh? do tell.”
“every night when… when she thought i slept, she would speak… to me.”
“how droll. however, i have no desire to hear of your former indiscretions.”
“her… her voice was like… hah, i don’t remember. but she always asked the same thing: to… help her die. i pretended i didn’t hear her.”
“typical. you were slovenly then, and you are slovenly now. if you’re finished with this frankly tiresome rambling, would you mind vacating the sofa?”
perhaps it was the dry rye colouring reiji’s tone or the strawberry tint of the moon, but shu complied. he swayed upon rising, falling toward the hardwood—only for reiji to ensnare him in a sudden, rigid entombing of limbs:
“you thoughtless fool! hold still—”
“maybe… maybe i just wasn’t as desperate for her. but if… if you had seen the look on her face… when she mouthed my name, reiji, you would not be able to… judge me either way.”
“…if it will help cease your being overly familiar, it hardly matters what i think of it: she is dead.”
shu laughed, shifting in the fabric’s hold—wanting to pull away—but deciding it was too much energy to expend: better i just lie here. the suit breathed—a phantom bud tickling shu’s ear: a reminder that it was some time, some day, but he could not be bothered with the arithmetic of it.
“i’m going to sleep now. be a good pillow and stop yapping.”
silence painted shu’s eyes with dreams of you in winter’s fineries, carving your initial—at last—into the meat of the stump he shared with edgar.
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