Coming Home
His eyes are alive in every way that he is not. She hates his eyes. The veins around them look too much like roots. She wants to kill him all over again. She wants to tell him. She does not say a word. Seymour moves silently next to her, his footsteps lighter than the air itself, his robes not making a whisper, while her clunky combat boots stumble over themselves and her hair beads clack together.
She grips his clawlike hand tighter as he leads her--somewhere. She wants to stop the circulation that doesn’t exist. She wants to crush his roots under her feet as she dances for him. She doesn’t want to kill him, because that’s exactly what he wants her to do. That has always been what he wanted from her, and what he will always want from her. Oh, how he longs for it, the power that his death would give him. He desires that more than he has ever desired her.
“How will I dance for you?” she asks. She could make her skirt flare out so her ankles would be exposed. She could toss her head back, heave her chest as he burst through her, exposing her ribs and her still beating heart to the dead grass of the Calm Land.
How long would her heart continue to beat before he tore it from her? Would he claw it, raw and bloody, from the empty cavern of her body? Would he shove it down his throat in one piece? Or would he cradle it in the palm of his hand, slicing it and eating it slowly, piece by piece?
Would he even touch it at all?
She would rather swallow glass before allowing him to swallow her heart whole.
