#of orange

The first in The Praetorium

and the second during All saints wake

She was unnaturally beautiful, but this was only to be expected because she was not human.

He had known this from the moment he first laid eyes on her: this slender being with an eldritch paleness torching the pretty orange blossoms tumbling in her hair, the bare feet. The small mouth and stoic eyes were as smooth as stone. She was not be moved by diamonds or money or exotic gifts from China, but when he had, in despair, cut out his heart and presented it to her with trembling fingers, she had taken it from him and tucked it primly in her bosom. And so she was his.

He took her home and presented his bride to his unsettled parents, who were charmed and yet scared of this pale woman who did not speak and only stared at them with the graveness of a river. What is her name? They asked.

“She is of Orange,” he said, and he would disclose nothing more.

Of Orange, they puzzled. Was it a country from a far-off place? But he would say nothing, only smile and smile and take his wife away to their room. He dismissed the attendants and closed the door. When he turned to look at her, their eyes met and she blinked as if she understood. She unfastened her belt and slipped out of her shimmery robe, revealing taunt breasts. Its nipples were impossibly red against her white skin, and her limbs were delicate branches. When he kissed her, her lips were soft but dry, chapped like bark. Her eyes retained their smoothness but she wrapped her slender arms around his neck and he carried her to the bed.

“Do you love me?” he asked in the midst of their pleasure, and she would say nothing but her mouth would curve into a smile, sharp like a cut in a rock.

Afterwards she turned from him, thin shoulder blades moving up and down as she breathed under the thin white sheets and clutched his heart to her chest. He fell asleep and dreamed of impossibly tall trees and green-skinned dryads that smiled and led him between the bark, cool fingers grasping his skin and playing with his hair. They touched him with their hands and then their mouths. Their girlish chattering, thin as rustling leaves, turned into guttural, androgynous cries; and their pleasurable mouths transformed into sharp teeth that bit and ripped at his skin, gulping his innards until he was stripped to a shivering calcium frame and all that was left was the sunken hollow where his heart had been. Then they screamed, eyes curdling yellow as they groped him, trying to find the most delicious morsel of his being. I’ve given it to her, he would have said, if he had a mouth, a tongue, a voice box. In fury, they gnawed even his bones, tearing them apart one by one so that in the end he was nothing, only a dim consciousness floating in limbo that did not even recognise itself. Only a dim pulsing, not light because he couldn’t see but it was a colour that was not really a colour, some sort of extrasensory sensation that he reached out to with his invisible arms. It was orange, reflecting a million shards of spectrum light, beautiful and pulsing but no matter how much he tried to reach it he couldn’t grasp it. Come to me, he cried, be mine. And though it had no eyes or nose or mouth, he could have sworn it smiled at him.