@ THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE. FEATURING: @tintedswindows.
Like a moth to a flame, Aroma was drawn to abandoned, rotting things. Life was a fruit bowl and she was an apple that used to be perfectly ripe, so juicy you could still taste its fleshy mesocarp in the gaps between your teeth. Then her brother died and someone had tossed his carcass into the vessel, diseasing the entire ecosystem until fuzz grew over her like second skin. A putrescent fruit had no place among the healthy kind, not unless they were a bletting medlar or a persimmon, but it fermented a sweet spot for fruit flies, the only ones brave enough to sit with outcasts at the same table. A morbid kind of kinship, perhaps, was what had led them to the outskirts of the slaughterhouse, where the fencing kissed the soil of the woods. The disappearance of Zahara had weaved the hardened silk of a cocoon around the grounds of the town, festering sorrow in its pupa; the return of Zahara had disintegrated a hole into the swath, allowing the goop of despair to emerge transformed. Still, the air was tangy and damp, pulling Aroma closer in her sleep. Their upper half was draped over the fence, skin raised in goosebumps as it tried its hardest to fight back the biting wind of the night. She was wearing nothing but a shirt and boxers, bare feet littered in cuts and bruises that were soothed by the dew of the grass. It was eerily quiet yet loud all the same; they shivered to the beat of the aspen trees, shuffling from one foot to another with every gust of the breeze. By the look in their glossy eyes, nobody was home. “I’m thirsty,” they finally spoke aloud, feeling a lingering presence. Aroma sighed, out of character, and whistled into the darkness of the woods, as though they were attempting to coax a wolf out of its den. Then, her eyebrows furrowed, thick and bushy just like the caterpillars ballooning across the host trees, and she turned to face the approaching figure, rigid and ominous. “I said, I’m thirsty.”
