stars and sea and cruelty

“You ate your heart.”

The stitches keep your chest together, whatever’s left of it, that is. They’re ugly, the thread doesn’t match the rest of your paper-white skin. It’s rose red.

Rose red. Can you believe it? So fucking pretentious.

What a joke. Everyone knows that’s just a nicer way to say piss pink. It’s the color of a fucking urinary tract infection. She puts her lovely, dark hand over your chest. Ghosts her fingers over the hollow, your heart’s been scooped out with a silver spoon, and the skin was still recomposing itself. Getting its shit back together. Veins and arteries elegantly cut away with a back alley doctor’s favorite scalpel. After the initial bloodbath, it was easier, honest! All guests needed a welcoming gift, and what kind of host would you be if you didn’t offer up this gorgeous demon a piece of you heart. That would be disrespectful. Very rude.

Incorrect, you correct. You told me to eat my heart.

She also took a bite of your pride, swallowed it down with blood wine. Yvonne was a creature of indulgence and immediacy, she licks her fingers and gives you a bright smile. None of it matches, her patchwork existence. Maybe it could’ve. Maybe before the deal with the devil, maybe before midsummer’s festival, with its brilliant bright baubles, its lovely lit lanterns, maybe before she stepped into this terrible, terrible world filled with magic and with liars, and with even prettier girls, god, the girls, maybe before she ever met you, the summer you with a killer grin and a terrible idea (let’s do something dangerous, tattooed hand outstretched and reaching, yearning, because god, you yearned for Yvonne Pent like the sun burns for the moon—), yes, maybe before she ever met you and ever found out what the meaning of love was, what love was to her, what love was to you, they never intersected quite as well, but that’s okay, because even before then, yours was a story that was scripted with a kiss goodbye.

Your heart is probably really nasty. Gross. Who’d want to try that shit out. Yvonne would! Of course she would. She would love the iron and the ink, she would sink her teeth and come out with black enamel and purple-blue lips. Your heart hasn’t worked for quite a long time now, so, for a demon-witch to eat it up, and tell you it was delicious, well, that wasn’t too bad. Your legs finally give in, knees buckle, and you hit the floor, elegant wood paneling that your mother said would come in handy one day. For what? When they needed to express order a funeral? Can someone cut you a little bit of slack? Even the beautiful leather living room seating set, made for eight, used by one and a half (sometimes two) people, it looks like the dingiest thing at the thrift store. The Mikael family ikea dream, it’s going to be your heaven. Or hell. Whatever the apocalypse decides your fate entails. The fireplace is still charming and quaint, electric. A mantle with an ugly crocheted doily that belongs in Grandmother Mikael’s taxidermy collection. It’s really hideous. Even the picture frames on top of it can’t save it from its gaudiness. The family photos look so out of place, an afterthought. Tacked on when Markus asked you why your parents hated him, and loved you.

They never loved you.

They couldn’t have. If your parents loved you, they would’ve never let you come back to California after you hauled ass, like a goddamn coward. They would’ve said, sweetie, it’s fine, stay back in Maine and reinvent yourself—don’t come back for Yvonne Pent.

“I’m not that kind of girl.” Yvonne speaks with the voice of Beelzebub, who, by all intents and purposes, is definitely not that kind of girl. You can’t really be a typical eighteen year old girl with stringy, tangled red hair and a dirty school uniform for a school she no longer attends, when you’re the Lord of the Flies. You sigh, and the runes on your skin, they’re almost done with their rush job. The stitches can finally be undone, as soon as the finishing touches are complete. You really don’t like this thread. It’s gross. This entire ordeal is gross. Your magic’s never been good at the healing process, but what’s a dead brother’s dying wish against the laws of time and space. He whispered the secret of the universe before you could tell him to shut up and let you die.

So. You ate your heart! You’re still alive! Most people would be overjoyed by this little detail. Not you, though. Everyone in the entire universe would be so excited about pulling a Daenerys Targaryen with their own goddamn heart and living to tell the tale. It would be an excellent icebreaker at dystopian cocktail parties. Hey. Remember that one time your girlfriend said you couldn’t eat your heart, and you totally did? Haha! What a “banger” as they say! Myrah, you’re fucking wild.

Yvonne leans in, real close, silver eyes like scrap metal pieces, boring into your skin. Your hands pin her down, blood stained fingers dig into her shoulders. She’s got more fat then she has bones. She’s squishy, it’s cute, really. She’s really cute. Crooked teeth, and hellfire, all of it. She’s on her tiptoes, and her hand’s finally out of the cavity in your chest, finally out of your person, because, god, would that be awkward if the magic finished weaving its spell and her hand was a permanent feature of the Myrah Mikael chest.

Disgusting.

“I forget, I forget. Sweetheart, you gotta be nicer, I think I’m about to puke.”

You try to keep your tone jovial but you honestly feel like something’s clawing out of your rib cage and tearing into your lungs, it’s getting harder to breathe properly. How annoying. A minor inconvenience. The Mikael living room feels so far away. It feels so cold. The only thing you know, the only thing you see, is this comet in quasi-human form. Stardust trails from every orifice, the sky would bend to her command, all she had to do was say--

“Please. You would’ve already done so if you had to. Que dramática. Te haces la víctima por todo.”

Well, yes. You think. Yeah. If only the compulsory ninth grade Spanish you knew could tip you off about what awful insult was leaving her lips. Just so you could agree wholeheartedly. You agreed with Yvonne on a lot of things like the location of your first date (the Coachella portapotties where you knocked a tooth out of your favorite back alley doctor, on accident, you still swear), what your first slow dance song was (some bastardization of a catchy EDM song, distorted by bad reception and the hotel room’s air conditioner filters), her assessment of your personality as a whole (flirtatious, empty-headed, stupid, stupid Myrah!). Yeah. Okay. Maybe there was a lot to be desired, but, it didn’t mean she had to go and ask you to eat your heart. Were you the only one totally upset about this? If you called someone else up, maybe they would agree.

To be honest, you’re sure they would probably just say:

You should’ve seen this coming.

It’s really, too bad.

“It’s not like you’re setting a good example, Myrah.” She huffs, and the world moves with her. Arms over her chest, god, weren’t you guys just napping outside in the sun, with your face buried in her boobs? That was last week, right? How the hell--oh, sorry, Yvonne’s mother probably wouldn’t be too fond of using her home as a curse. Your bad. You run your hand through your hair, dirty and matte, it was blonde at one point. The runes are done. Your tattoos aren’t all over your chest and your stomach anymore, they’ve come back home to the comfort of arm and wrist, swirling around pale skin like smoke. A good example? Are you seriously asking the right person for that? Your day job is ruining girls’ lives everywhere. Your night job is running support for a demon that wanted to usher in the apocalypse.

The hole is gone. Yvonne traces the scar, and cuts out the thread with a flick of her claw. She turns her head, and does not look back. Instead, she fixes her stare on the Mikael family bay window, something big and ostenatious, like the rest of their fuckshow of a family.

“Myrah.”

She sounds more like herself in that moment, than she has all night.

“Do you remember Resentment?”

The fucking turtle? Are you shitting me? Yeah, you remember the turtle.

“Do you think that it hated us for giving it a name like that?”

I really don’t care. Did we forget I fucking forced an organ down my throat?

“We are victims to our fate, Vonnie.”

Her words are machine gun bullets.

One, two, three—each one accusing of some complaint, or disgusted grievance. It takes a delicate ballet to avoid becoming a casualty. Pirouette over a minefield, arms outstretched and toes en pointe. Marigold is fuming in her white lab coat, a possession filched from an actual doctor. This back alley street rat, with her dirty Coachella shirt, and cut off shorts, rules the underground with a wicked grin and a syringe filled with Mystery Drug X. She was safe, she was kind, really. Julia thinks so--when she’s not threatening to wrap her decorated hands around her dark throat. The white fur coat covers most of Marigold’s favorite points of intersection. 

“You promised you wouldn’t get into another fight like that!” Marigold spits, hands on her hips. A creaky, kitchen table separates them, and Julia twists a piece of cropped, dyed hair between her index finger and thumb. Platinum blonde. The color of east coast snow. Los Angeles gets none of that. Her violet gaze flickers towards Marigold’s newest assistant, their resident tech whiz, the code witch. She’s fiddling with a cellphone in a corner of Marigold’s decrepit apartment, hunched in and over herself. Rumor has it she made miracles out of HTML and javascript. As lovely as that sounds, Julia hates magic of any shape or form, it’s never done her any good. She slips off her coat. Faint lines cross over her wrists, the color of ichor, the color of faith.

“Don’t address me like I am a child, Suarez.” Julia says pointedly. She uses Marigold’s last name as a bargaining chip. They have years of history. Her name drips off her tongue and it tastes like acid. It’s supposed to maim. 

“Then don’t act like one.”

Marigold scoffs and throws her long, dark hair into a high ponytail. Julia crosses her legs. She picks at her tights with manicured nails, and arches a perfect brow. A stand off? Fine, fine. So be it. 

The witch looks at them, gray eyes as wide as dinner plates, but expression otherwise, nondescript. She needs to get better at hiding her emotions, Julia almost wants to snap at her, too. For being too quiet, for being too detached, at least act a little more human. There were reasons people wouldn’t shut up about the unholy spawn of their district’s power couple. She was a complete disappointment. There wasn’t anything awful about her, and in this neighborhood, you needed that to protect yourself.

Julia daintily wipes the blood from her nose with an embroidered handkerchief. She has a headache, and her knuckles are purple-blue, only two shades darker than the rest of her hands. This gets the woman’s attention. Marigold clicks her tongue and runs over to a cupboard, takes out bandages and antiseptic wipes, whatever she could get her hands on during her last unauthorized visit to the hospital’s backroom.

“For someone who went to med school, you don’t look all that prepared to help people.”

A bottle of white little pills shatters. Marigold’s right hand is wine red. 

“Julia, I will incapacitate you.”

“For someone so celebrated in the circuits--”

There’s a comment from the peanut gallery. Julia and Marigold both turn to the red-haired witch. “Ian really fucked you up.”

Julia opens her mouth, and then closes it. Painted lips refuse to refute. Marigold snorts derisively. That’s what you get, is the rubbing alcohol sting.  Julia is silenced into submission and finally lets her favorite doctor work her brand of black magic. There’s an incantation in every prescription, a wish in every sanitized stitch. There is redemption, there is holiness--and that’s something she doesn’t want to be a part of.