#jaller

Smother it, says the voice of gold within your throat, within your crystal brain wrapped in its leaves, smother it. You hands were made to kill it if you so desire and I so desire; smother it. Fear not the burn that cannot reach you. I so desire: smother it.

Smother it.

There is a heat.

Sweet and feeble, cherry-sweet, too sweet, too bitter, too burnt and sour, sour like a medicine that can't cure you, bitter like a lie - oh how you hate it, how you hate it. How it tries to peel its way to you, to appeal to you, after all of it, how you hate it, hate it. You can't stand it, you can't bear it.

There is a heat.

Cherry-sweet and burnt, left simmering too long, encrusted around the flame, rough and cracked, how you hate it, hate it - and yet how you cannot hate it enough to undo its gentle reach, to pull yourself away from it as it worms into the gold, as it sinks into it, rough against soft, warm against cool, a flesh too tender to fight back.

The gold peels.

It stretches too much, frays, a hole with messy edges at last opens on the fabric-soft gleam, tears the skin without ichor or pierce or cut to rend it apart: beyond it you can look away, beyond the glow, into a world you don't recognize, look at an absence that is a presence, at a heat feeble and dark and bittersweet, at a voice.

Smother it, says the voice of gold within your throat, smother it, smother it, I so desire: smother it, before it melts you down, before it melts the golden leaves around your crystal brain; your hands were made to kill it if you so desire and I so desire - smother it, fear not the burn that cannot hurt you, that can kill you, smother it, crush it, choke it to death in your hands that were made to kill it if you so desire and I so desire.

Are these your hands?

These things you've never seen before, scalding hot, rotten cherry burnt to black, moving in a way you cannot fathom to understand: pushing feebly against the gold, towards the heat, burning worse than the warmth they ache to reach and yet unable to pierce through the tender metal skin, the gleaming flesh, retreating when it clings to them, when it coats them in its sheen. They grow hotter to dispel it, yet still they cannot melt it; and again they push, weak and desperate, towards the heat, towards the world outside, towards the absence that is a presence, towards the voice.

Are these your hands?

You cannot recognize them. It cannot be you moving them. You haven't had hands in so long, let alone hands to move on your own. You've never had hands at all.

There is a heat.

Your hands reach towards it, desperate, towards the holes it burns in the tender gold.

Smother it.

Your hands were made to kill it if you so desire, and I so desire: smother it.

Are these your hands?

Is this your voice?

Cawing from disuse, calling weakly, struggling through the gold in your throat, calling beyond, through the holes, through the air, clean air, for an absence that is a presence.

The gold peels.

The gold melts, the gold crumbles, the gold drips and folds and curls on itself under the cherry-sweet and bitter heat's push, reveals a world you don't recognize, a world the hands that are yours reach for, a world the voice that is yours calls out to, a world where an absence that is a presence calls out to you, a voice.

Smother it!

The voice of gold in your throat screams, Smother it! Smother it! Kill it! Fear not the burn that cannot reach you, that can kill you, smother it! Smother it!

The gold peels.

Are these your hands?

Is this your voice?

There is a heat.

Tender and mellow and piercing through the curtains of metal flesh it singes apart, reaching for you, an absence that is a presence, a voice, a hand, an eye that sees beyond the gold and the mask and the memory and the guilt, a noun you hate and yet cannot hate enough to hate forever, a voice that calls the name you had forgotten through the cascading molten flesh at last peeling, dripping away from you, from your hands, from your voice.

Is this your breath?

Heaving and shallow and fast, like you haven't breathed in a millennium.

Is this your body?

Crumpled and cradled and tense, still reeling, so tired, so heavy, so tightly held.

Is this your mind?

There is a heat, gentle, cherry-sweet and sour and bitter and burnt - an absence that is a presence, a voice wrapped around you, calling your name: it's passed, it's passed, you're here, I'm here.

I'm here.

The gold peels.

Smother it.