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BEFORE US THE BODY IS PILING ITSELF UPON ITSELF SECRET BY SECRET
I
ROT IS ALSO A HEART
The story goes: the green-eyed monster will mock the meat it feeds on, but no man ever thinks to consider himself meat. No man expects the monster to bleat and bray and eat him from the inside out, eat him until he is nothing, until he is a shell, until the monster has licked its way to the very sin that led him here, and swallowed it from out of his chest, raw and glowing.
Shock will roll off Mithrun’s back from then on, with nothing to cling to; fear will go the same way, as will lust and greed and pride and the rest. No footholds in a husk for the follies of men, except—
A morsel remains, unidentified. When they find him, they’ll name it vengeance, and decide it will string him up like a marionette and puppeteer him, the last scrap of his humanity winding around his tongue like a vice.
An eye for an eye turns the whole world blind; an eye for a wish—any number of wishes—turns one man hollow. Weigh up those scales, Lady Justice, and speak. What’s left to see with except—
His remaining eye, silver oxidised into obsidian; a mirror shattered to reveal a door to Hell.
So he’s not blind, not entirely but—What can be done with broken mirror shards?
Well, Captain, a voice says to him as a hand spoons slop into his mouth to keep his body functioning. This is what living is for him now. Someone else’s hand feeding him. Someone else’s voice, melodious like birdsong, singing to him through the bars of his gilded cage: Every sharp edge can be made a weapon.
II
ROT IS ALSO CHILDHOOD
The story goes: a kingdom rests on the shoulders of its king and the king leans on the shoulders of a child. Music is not so different from magic, really. It’s all in the hands and the voice and the way the air bends around these strings. A performer doesn’t reject a request. He makes a song out of protection and bears the weight of a nation. His clever fingers turn to thorns and a prick plunges the kingdom into a waking nightmare for a thousand years.
The Lion makes its home in the space between a duty and a desire. The child’s hands remain busy with his spells and it grows silent in this new world, after a while, but death does not touch them there, so the king is no longer afraid. The king is no longer much of anything—the king is missing, but Thistle made a promise. He’d give a thousand more years if that’s what it takes to fulfil it.
He wanders the paintings, sometimes, to see him again. There is still music in the paintings. And the people don’t run from him the way they do now. He can walk, and play, and laugh, and no one runs from him. They look at him, in these snapshots of the past, and they are glad to see him, and he misses it. Back when the sun felt warm, and the sky wasn’t an eggshell waiting to be broken.
He had only wanted to protect them. That’s what they had asked of him. He keeps their paintings for company now, because they won’t come. He hangs them side by side on the walls of his house, arranges dolls around the table to eat with, and he pretends it’s enough for a life.
When the Lion comes to feed, the child’s voice dies in his throat, and his tricky, talented hands go cold and still. The paintings are the last things he sees: silent and empty and lifeless, like the people he swore eternity to.
And he thinks that it has been so long since anyone has asked him to play a song for them. It has been so long since he has released a melody into the air. He does not know if he still remembers how.
III
ROT IS ALSO WHAT LOVE IS
The story goes: a mother tells her daughter, You run faster than everyone else. Her daughter spends her entire life trying to slow herself down or speed the rest of the world up. She locks herself in rooms lined with dusty tomes, in halls where the promise of knowledge hangs as thick and heavy as the dust that lines the highest shelves. There’s an answer somewhere, pressed between the pages of a book—she just needs to keep reading, keep learning, keep trying, and trying, and—
Life moves on around her and she keeps outrunning everyone else, and she is no closer to closing her teeth around her dream, her heart’s only wish. She learns to control power, this nectar of the gods, stolen from a world that exists elsewhere. She fashions herself a channel for it, a vessel, a funnel from her to them: a staff for the hope to flow through, to drip into their mouths. She calls it immortality, grips it between her hands, and prays that a name is enough to make a reality.
But reality doesn’t exist in the margins, and you can’t build a ladder to the sky with stacks upon stacks of essays and theorems. When power rises to meet her in the form of an impossible beast, she listens to it, and it dresses her up in courage and whispers secrets to her.
The library in her dreams feels awfully small now. The pages in her hands feel fragile, insubstantial. She tries to keep up with the world, to use what she knows to fill the darkest of voids but she can’t build a life with these words. She can’t change a life with them. She can’t live a life if she doesn’t—
Look up, new voices say to her. New voices, new voices—but they aren’t—new, that is—they’re familiar. There is no cool silver sophistry in them, not like the magic she has tucked behind her eyes now—no, they’re urgent and harsh and sharp, yes, trying to reach her in a place where she can’t be found, but they’re also warm. Warm, she thinks, and it reminds her of a meal shared. Of many meals shared, and a journey taken together.
(Come back, Marcille.)
And aren’t people just as insightful as books? Don’t they have spines, too? Don’t they have stories, ones they can tell themselves?
(What is it you really want?)
Marcille looks up and reaches out, and they pull her back into herself. She escapes the beast with every part of herself, all still her own.
(Not this.)
I
I have been breaking mirrors
In vain
Searching for one
That would reflect
No more; a mirror
That would break me.
AISHA ARNA’OUT, UNTITLED
II
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
DONALD JUSTICE, "THERE IS A GOLD LIGHT IN CERTAIN OLD PAINTINGS"
III
[...] There’s still time.
Soon she’ll close the bloody book,
slink past the lit carrels, through
the library’s heavy door to the world.
GAIL MAZUR, "GIRL IN A LIBRARY"