A SUMMER VIOLENCE

𝐀 𝐁𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐅 𝐇𝐈𝐒𝐓𝐎𝐑𝐘 𝐎𝐅 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐌𝐎𝐎𝐍.

lace used as a mask, the yowl of a unseen cat, a naked body beneath a black fur coat, the delicate legs of a spider as it spins silver, french erotica, a page ripped out of a book of fairytales, an overturned wine goblet, flowers blooming by moonlight, flesh turning blue under satin restraints, veils draped over marble statues, crystalline bubbles overflowing from a clawfoot bathtub, sobbing on a cool marble floor, the glint of a pastel wig under club lighting, the tremoring choreography of hands in an orchestra, lounging nude across an ornate loveseat, a gloved hand held over waiting eyes, a mirror covered in black silk.

—  SÉVERINE  MOON  /  fallacia  .

full application. ( tw: suicide ideation, drug use, disordered eating )

dynamics.

pinterest.

when séverine comes to the open door of hector’s room in the early afternoon, she is still wearing her nightgown. 

“my car has arrived,” she say simply, long slender fingers tucking elegantly into a strand of hair fixed into a foam roller. it’s a defiantly outdated method of curling, and well-suited to the platinum blonde wig affixed to her head, so light in colour it appears white. “we’re going driving.”

her heels click on the marble as she leaves once more, ivory hair like a smudge of fog leftover in the air.

the car, which she had found unexpectedly while strolling with saint last week, was a 1963 ferrari 250 gt caliornia spyder in a delicious green that one wanted to call olive for how well it would fit with a martini, but was probably closer to pine. she had inquired at the seaside café it sat next to whom the owner was, and learned it had been kept and faithfully upkept by the same greying man for forty years. it’s been with me nearly as long as my youngest child, he’d said fondly. not looking to sell, no.

séverine had only smiled. it had the same effect as pulling out a wallet.

it was a terrific waste of money given she would have to have it shipped home,  and particularly because she could have found a comparable car nearby. but there was a chance she would never leave this place anyway, given beautiful women often had habits of dying or disappearing when a ghost lingered nearby (in this case, forced removal from the life one is accustomed to is marked under Death), and so excessive expenditure really meant nothing at all — even less than it normally did. — and anyway, it wouldn’t have been the same to purchase the same model car if it had not been tended to all these years with love. one could just sense these things.

so now it’s séverine moon’s newest car, and that’s why when she and hector reach it’s deep green doors and the grey shadow stretching out beside it, she hands the keys to him. “you’re driving.”

lady’s car, lady’s rules.

she gives vague instructions as to where she intends them to go, and once thoroughly on their way, séverine closes her eyes and drops her head back against the leather seat. despite the wind caused by the fast pace of the ferrari down the coastline roads, she imagines she can smell the remnants of some other life in the car, cologne and cigar smoke and the faint give of the leather beneath her cranium, as if in the quick and unexpected change of hands it hadn’t had time to mourn and release its previous ownership, and was instead trying to adjust her into it. it makes her wonder what other life she and hector could have, if they were to have one. under which circumstances they might fall in love. she’s certain he has never felt that way about her, and most assuredly her leanings have never tilted that way for him. but they could have, if they’d so chosen. love is like that sometimes; a decision. certainly he’d adore her if she’d decided as much. she touches his arm briefly as she considers this, flexing her fingers, studying affectionately the momentary contrast of her skin on his. diamonds glitter in the sunlight, winking back the woman wearing them. it’s her exceptional sense of self that allows her to drift easily between the handling of these sudden ministrations of imaginary fondness and the sharp cargo of the conversation to come.

when they finally park, she waits with remarkable, casual stillness for her companion to route around the car and open her door. It has some resemblance to scaled predators who lay still on the riverbank, cloaked in mud and high water, before springing suddenly upon their pray. when an arm is extended for her to take, she rises gracefully to it.

“you’d call us dissimilar people, hector, i know that.” she starts, arm looped through his as they tread over sun-warmed stone. “of no shared likeness, for all that we’ve done and all that we have not. there are parts of me you do not wish to be associated with. by others or inwardly.” she rests her cheek against the globular curve of his shoulder, a precious stone set atop the gold band of his skin. her eyes pitch forward to trace the coastline, smiling absently as if finding something amusing. “but it’s not our formation or shape we need compare, darling. it’s the impact. our impact is indistinguishable. without us, there would be nothing. no world at all; only a shapeless land mass. it’s volcanoes and earthquakes that form continents. others might be frightened, but when i feel a rumble in the ground beneath me, i know it’s only you, stretching your handsome limbs out when first you wake up.

there’s a thinness to her memories of genèvieve, a shell of something structured by the very absence within. in all remembrances of their time together, every moment, there is only the silken sheath of gen’s resentment and the way it had allowed her to play liberally beneath it, a girl as free as any milkmaid among green mountains, unfettered as butterflies, in the void of her own apathy. how little any of it had mattered to her — none of it — in that dark void; hot and warm under the care of gen’s satiny-sheened resentment. how perfectly cocooned she’d been. how well fed, on all that nothing. content as a magician’s rabbit, bound to disappear at any moment.

and yet — for all that how disregard, for all the times she played errantly in the indifference — how delightful she found even the little notion that their names bore a letter with mismatched diacritics, the grave and the aigu perpetually leaned apart in perfect parallel, and yet if cut out and pasted next to one another, destined to intersect at the base. that was how it had been with gen, for her: attention never fully given, bored by her envy, yet she had stacked their very names on top of one another like vulgar lovers, counting out the places they overlapped. generally apathetic, pointedly obsessed.

séverine thinks about this, their names assembled on top of one another, when she seeks gen out in her respite.

she has a piece of bitter chocolate between her fingertips when she takes her place across from geneviève, unsweet and dark enough to be reminiscent of something charred. the edge of it is in her mouth when séverine crosses her legs, relishing the earthy sharpness of flavour as the sharp corner melts down into something subdued between her lips.

she draws on that bitterness again, swallows it down as their eyes meet. her white teeth crack open over the dark nib from behind her mouth, white as pearls. she smiles, reclined there on the dark velvet as she is, languorous and inexplicable.

she watches the sun break over the horizon, a great egg cracked and spilling yolk down onto the sea. the lines of the water trembles under the stress of it, perpetual undulating motion as if each wave is the weak shoulders of a mortal, the same way any body does when weighed down with tonnes of gold. séverine watches this reverse act of kintsugi - halcyon swallowing blue - from the edge of the rooftop, a soft and discordant sound eliciting from her hands, where she turns the underside of her drink against the thin glass of the bar’s barrier.

her hand reaches for hadrian’s arm inconsequentially, the same way a girl puts hers fingers on a comb already woven through with snags of her hair or a shell found under her shadow on the beach: because it’s merely there; because it’s there under the jurisdiction of her existence, and therefore hers, the way all else is. the labyrinthine nature of her mind is sea-swollen with substances parcelled off of saint, the edges of each thought bulging at the middle and brushing together with bloated tenderness. the evening is beautiful and full of the promise of wreckage, and she can’t help but tug at it, curl her fingers around the velvet rope hanging from the ceiling and pull.

➣     𝐇𝐎𝐋𝐃 𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐎 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐁𝐎𝐗 & 𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐂𝐎𝐍𝐓𝐄𝐍𝐓𝐒 𝐈𝐍𝐒𝐈𝐃𝐄

anne boleyn had six fingers.

think of bluebeard’s castle: a girl can have all the easy riches, if only she promises not to seek the room that holds the bones.

SÉVERINE MOON as BLUEBEARD’S BRIDE.

thierry mugler fw1999 bridal gown and veil, dior ss06 bleeding pearl choker, alexander mcqueen savage beauty robe, vivienne westwood fw20 belted dagger, custom handheld full-face mask.

the helicopters that arrive on the grounds of the de cervantes estate are numerous, each bringing with them archived pieces from juggernauts of the fashion industry: mugler, dior, mcqueen, westwood. a look assembled by séverine itself and procured with little more than an assistant’s phone call.