Senses
Sight
Ivan had always seemed far too knowledgeable for the mere three minute advantage he’d obtained over Sua at birth. Even in the tattered recesses of her infant memory, Sua could read clearly the strangeness with which her brother moved and spoke, as if laced with poisoned peculiarity since young. She could recall, faintly but not foggily, the way in which he would stand and stare at nothing at all, eyes as blank and horrified as those in the portraits of soldiers they would study in the years following. After Ivan had long since learned to mask the tenebrous graveyard that seemed to swallow and damn light within his gaze, the mark of his sinful enlightenment. The trauma. And his body–still. So preternaturally still, fists half-curled and breathing irregular but even, shoulders heavy and square, as if frozen by the weight of his knowledge. A man haunted at the tender age of four.
Perhaps that made them similar, the haunting. Perhaps that is what allowed Ivan behind the frosted bars of her eternal prison. Perhaps that is what made them twins; two children bedeviled by sins so heavy they weighed upon both body and mind like seven tonne weights, their movements sluggish in place of the eloquence they’d been robbed of by damnation. Ivan had voiced similar, years ago, with that same haunted look, before Sua had even become cognisant of the indifference which caged her. That was the first day she’d realised that her brother truly did know far too much. Yet, for all that he was encumbered, he seemed still capable of living amongst the humans, interlocking their fingers and dancing despite the stones attached to his shoulders, his arms, his ankles. Not in any way that mattered, not really - Sua had seen the hollow, half-empty shape of his gaze, as if missing a piece in an otherwise simple puzzle. Sua thought she might be the only one who could. Sua knew she was the only one who understood. Because they were the same, at least in that respect. Twins. Bonded.
That warmth only halfway touched Ivan mattered not to a younger Sua, though, for she was only interested in feeling it at all. So she had asked him, and was all the worse for it since.
“You’re just aloof,” Ivan had said, glancing at her through the mirror as he adjusted the green hoodie underneath his school jacket. It was hideous, Sua could recall even after a year, but it had, for some inexplicable reason, been his favourite outfit for almost the entirety of their first year in high school. Though, she couldn’t bring herself to continue reminding him of that fact after seeing his panicked, almost frenzied eyes when he’d thought it had been stolen. As if anyone would want a hoodie that so strongly resembled Shrek’s hide, but that thought was between Sua and whichever god or spirit who had heard. She could count on one hand the amount of things important enough to render her brother so frightened, including their family. So if Ivan, for some odd, odd reason, loved that unsightly, swampy thing to such an extent, Sua supposed she did not have to voice every opinion. Even if it was correct, and he really should have just thrown it out the moment he outgrew the thing.
“Very insightful. Wonderful elder brother you are.”
At that, Ivan had huffed what could’ve only been a laugh, low and derisive, almost unbelieving. “Elder brother, huh?” he’d mumbled, casting his gaze downward to inspect his palms. For what reason, Sua had never known. Ivan’s palms were flawless, soft as a baby’s skin and without even the scars of childhood, perhaps owing to his lack of playtime with the other children. It was less even than Sua’s, who had at least attempted hopscotch with their next door neighbour. That particular arrangement had only lasted a grand total of twenty minutes, but that mattered not. “Alright! Then as your elder brother, I suppose it’s my spiritually ordained obligation to advise you, baby sister!” he suddenly exclaimed, twirling around to ruffle Sua’s hair, as if in an attempt to block her sight of how the mirth didn’t reach his eyes. Vaguely, she remembered thinking that Ivan would be very easy to kill, with his exposed neck and strangely soft nature. He might even let her, if she asked. Ivan was just like that. “Aren’t I so kind? I dare you to find a brother as kind as me, as magnanimous, so willing to help his downt-”
She’d long forgotten with what she had belted him with, only the wonderful peace that followed. “Get to the point.”
“Ahh you really haven’t changed at all.”
“What?” Perhaps here she had raised whatever object she had used to bludgeon him not moments before, for Ivan had flinched and quickly shielded his head with those uncalloused hands.
“Anyway, why don’t you just…reach for them?” (Here, Ivan has consistently insisted that she had hatefully glared at him with the intensity of a thousand burning suns. But who would trust Ivan? Who could?) “If you’re so concerned about not being popular-”
“I didn’t say that.”
“-shouldn’t you try talking to them?” Ivan continued, undeterred. “It’s not like they hate you, I always see someone trying to talk to you. It’s you who doesn’t respond. Actually, I’m quite surprised they still like you, iciness and dismissiveness considered. Not to mention the earphones and your famous ‘I have homework’ — wow, baby sister, you’re starting to look like the problem.”
“They will never find your body.”
At that, Ivan had smiled. Sua can still remember because it’s the one she hates most, even more so than that fake, hollow smile Ivan seemed to think everyone liked better than the private ones he wore at home. When he didn’t even realise he’d made an error, misarranged his facial muscles. Sua never told him, afraid he’d stop. That the distance between them, too, would grow a light year for every millimeter. She’d warned their parents, too, if only halfway. They needed not to know her fears, and she wanted not to be sent to a psychiatrist the same way Ivan had been years ago. So Ivan didn’t know, and Sua never told him, and Sua never told anyone anything.
“I’m serious, Sua,” Ivan said, bed dipping gently as he shuffled onto the bed, carefully fixing her now dishevelled hair. “Just try.”
She huffed, “Fine.”
And so she did, and so she discovered the punishment for insouciance.
🌙💭
The first greeting of the day came before Sua had even entered the building. Two girls were sat by the front steps of the school, giggling and glancing impishly between each other, the students around them and the tablet between them. As Sua approached, one girl looked up and waved. Absentmindedly, she reciprocated, offering a small nod to the girl’s partner.
The second came on the stairway to the second floor. “Morning, Sua!” a boy who might’ve been in her class — perhaps math? — called out as he sped past, face lit by dark sunlight streaming through the stained glass window. A rainbow in greyscale. She waved.
The third came in the form of the muted cacophony of her classroom. “Morning”s and “hi”s and “where’s Ivan”s were flung haphazardly toward her before dissolving with a pop audible to only her, their melted remains dripping over her lustrous leather shoes in much the manner that minced meat did in the summer. She reciprocated all the same, even as she saw her words fly through one ear and out the other, with no effect save for a quick, worthless smile as evidence that she’d ever spoken at all. Such was the fate of the indifferent. She supposed she should be grateful her frigid prison had allowed her to even view the light and its human dancers at all, even as the world, the trees and the skies and the people under it, took on a yellowed grey tint. Even as colour abandoned its underpaid post and light grew heavy with darkness and warmth drained from heat signatures. Even as warmth and light could not be seen any longer.
Briefly, she wondered if she could see at all.
🌙💭
The first time it happened, she could see the light in such vivid detail she’d felt like she could touch it.
Blades of lush green grass slashed harmlessly at her feet, softer even than the wisps of wind which blew gently through her hair and clothes, white sundress lifting like a dandelion on a breeze. Verdant hills stretched before her, almost glowing under the rapturous light beaming down from the curved rutilance of the sky. The sun, as radiating as the human eye could see. As Sua had ever seen.
Yet both seemed almost stygian compared to the lambent blur of a girl whirling around her, teasing powder pink tendrils billowing as she danced in and out of Sua’s sight. Brighter than the grass beneath their feet, Sua marvelled, brighter even than the shining sun. Brighter than anything she’d ever seen, in life and in this idyllic place. Warmer than the fire proscribed to her. So bright, so warm, Sua almost thought she could feel it, if only through the touch of her sight. She supposed that would have to be enough, even in her dreams.
How long she’d spent standing dazed in the embrace of the girl’s pinken light, frozen in her almost tangible warmth, Sua couldn’t know. But she suspected it had been longer than it truly felt, eyes tracking the pink signature of her hair hundreds of times in only five atemporal seconds. Five eternities.
Still, once they ended, Sua found that five seconds short had suddenly become five seconds too long, for they had been a buffer to the glittering ambers which Sua, in her heart, her soul, suddenly knew should have been there since the beginning. A gaze that should have met hers, been fixed on her , for all the seventeen years the sun had not been. For all the time humanity’s heavenly jury had punished her amethyst placidity with crepuscular sight, greying obscurity even on the most vibrant of days. It would only be right. She would only be whole. Loved. Loving. Warm.
Sua almost felt she should mourn her wasted years of cluelessness, as if it were her fault.
“Why,” Sua breathed, more a plea than a question. “Why weren’t you there.” Why weren’t you here. Why weren’t you anywhere?
The girl shook her head in a nearly excessive manner, pale skin reddening where flashes of pink whipped her smiling cheeks, in the way only the ethereal skin of a dream could. Then, perhaps upon seeing the crestfallen curve of her frown, or perhaps the furrow of her brows, or the question in her eyes—she never had been able to effectively school her expression as her brother could so effortlessly since childhood. Perhaps it was those haunting three minutes that had taught him—the girl pointed to her throat, then her mouth, and shook her head again. Not as profusely this time, yet somehow wilder. Her hair emerged from the ordeal with what looked like several crinkled, pink spiders.
“You can’t talk?” A nod, for some reason much gentler than how she had shaken her poor head. Maybe she had injured it nodding once, or maybe she liked the feeling of hair on her face. It was probably pleasant; tepid. Heated, even. “Oh. Okay. Well, then.” Internally, Sua wondered if death was viable in a dream. She felt as if she’d die if separated from that shining amber, and yet she was saying goodbye, turning, walking away. Leaving. Abandoning her.
When a hand reached out to halt her, the star found that it could not touch her. Could not reach her. Still, seeing the ephemeral hand jutting out from her forearm, Sua turned and smiled, eyes as heated as they had ever been, could ever be, trapped in ice. “Sure, I’ll stay by your side,” she said, though she had wanted to say she would be back.
Well, they were the same, weren’t they?
Smiling, the girl promptly dropped to the ground and began making snow angels in the glossy green grass. When Sua didn't join her, she peered up with curious eyes, head tilting in question. There’s an amputated blade of grass in her hair. Then it was in Sua’s, then the air as she chased after the glowing girl through the hills and into the tall grass, the star’s face lit with a laughing brightness Sua thought had long been proscribed to her vision.
And so, Sua’s heart learns to see.
Taste
The second time it happened, Sua had been on death’s door, brother’s carcass in hand.
“They say love is food for the living heart, you know,” Ivan said, bed dipping slightly as he sat at the edge and pressed a warm bowl against her cold forehead, glistening with sweat. She glared at him. He smiled at her. “Eat the porridge, sister dearest.”
“How do- How does that even correlate?” Sua replied, stuttering as she coughed. A few days ago - three, to be exact, number courtesy of the healthy idiot sitting before her - she’d suddenly fallen sick following a spontaneous humid storm, lukewarm rain sticking to her like their mother’s sickly, cloying perfume. The only heat that seemed able to so much as breach her icy barrier. She’d always been more prone to falling ill at the turn of Spring, and, despite having miraculously avoided a single fever, cold and even cough last year, the recent storms left no room for such hope. Conversely, her brother had taken sick exactly thrice in the seventeen years they’d spent together. Distantly, she recalled a young Sua interrogating an equally young Ivan over his supposed thievery of all her healthy genes in the womb. She’d cornered him in a dark room during a particularly bad fever, armed with frustrated tears and a damp towel. What she’d said, his reply and even her reaction had since been lost to the flowing passage of time, but she could recall in vivid detail still his expression, if only for its odd nature. A smile, equal parts mischievous and serene with a hint of something she couldn’t quite discern, even as now-seventeen year old Sua. “Answer.”
“It doesn’t. That’s the beauty of language; words can mean whatever I want them to. Now eat.” If possible, her brother’s smile widened further. Nuisance, he was. Haunted, pitiable nuisance. Vaguely, she wondered if she would miss him should he die. Surely she would. She loved him enough. Didn’t she?
It wasn’t as if she had never questioned it - a painting with but a thin sheen of dust could, at any time, be scavenged from the dilapidated back archives of her mind. One which displayed with shameful pride a picture of Sua, fresh from her rejection of the warm ambrosia her brother had advised her to seek, seated across the kitchen counter from her mother. The first and last time she had sought confidence in any but her brother. Golden sunlight streamed in through the back window, illuminating her mother like a tender saint. Or perhaps a pragmatic, condescending god, from whom she’d inherited her unfeeling self from, the sin passed between guardian and ward like a debt. Or maybe that was the villainous urge to shirk the blame speaking, the product of that angry cavity in her chest, devoid of warmth. She didn’t know. The light notably did not curl around her the way it did her schoolmates, her mother’s shadow instead engulfing her in its comforting disdain.
“What is love? ” The words hung heavy in the air, etched into Sua’s side of the painting’s wooden frame.
“ Dear, be specific. You know better than this.” Conversely, her mother’s response was carved into her own side of the frame, somehow more elegant than Sua’s had been. As if she’d spoken her words with more care, despite the cold, metallic feel of them in Sua’s memory. Or perhaps it was that she simply could not feel even the touch of her own mother’s love, guarded as she was in that permafrost.
“How..How can I know if I..if you..How will I know if I love someone? I don’t even know if I love Ivan.” For some inexplicable reason, the woodcarver of her memories had captured her every stutter, yet failed to record both her mother’s chastising ‘stuttering is unsightly, my dear’ and Sua’s own hesitance at her confession. Omitted it. None would know how the implied ‘or you’ had hung in the air, pregnant with dreadful uncertainty.
“If you know them well. Every inch of them, from the inside and out—to desire such. You know your brother well, don’t you? Yes, yes. That’s it, dear. Do you feel a bit better? Now, will you fix your bangs? ” There, the frame had run out of space, filled to the brim with a lesson Sua had never once forgotten. Was now repeating to herself like a mantra, applying with the precision of an underdog aiming for the top in a prestigious exam and the dogged faith of a cultist.
Knowing someone came before loving them, in the way that a sample came before the heated bliss of a box of pastries. That names and secrets and laughter came before relationships. Requirements. Materials with which one built bridges and ships and cities from searing abstraction. Materials that Sua scarcely had, holding a lukewarm bowl and damp, dripping towel in a land so barren and cold the rivers and streams and lakes had all but ceased to exist, frozen by her lack of social knowledge. Yet, still, she held them, that bowl and that towel, simultaneously freezing and burning at the touch, heavy with a hidden encyclopedia of recorded facts and habits of her brother’s, growing with each passing year, month, minute. And yet, still she wished it was larger, if only for one page detailing his true, unfiltered expressions, an illustration of his face unmasked, unadorned. So, she knew her brother, and knew him well, and wanted still to know more. Thus, she loved him, and as such would miss him if he died. She would, Sua reasoned to herself. Because she knew him, because she would mourn the fluctuating weight of that deformed, invisible encyclopedia, and the fading materials that it was tucked into.
And so, she reasoned again, repeating this fact for the umpteenth time since that first rejection, it stands to reason that she does not, cannot, will not miss her classmates and peers and neighbours upon death. Because she does not know them, nor the warmth of their skin. And nor will she ever. She shelved the thought.
“If you don’t respond in five seconds I’m calling the hospital.” Suddenly, Ivan’s clear, deep voice cut through her stitched barrier of introspection, worry and threat evident. Sua blinked owlishly, shaking her head as if doused with cold water. A bit of porridge spilled onto her cheek, but she paid it no mind, cool as it now was. Instead, it was Ivan who tutted, rubbing her cheek clean with his jacket sleeve in what could be interpreted as both an act of brotherly care and rebellion against their mother, asleep in the room over. Both, usually. None, on days where his black red eyes had taken on a more tormented expression, beleaguered by some unspeakable sin. Sua had wished she could ask. But Ivan would never tell her anyway, slipping back into that infuriating mask like a seal on oil.
“Go to school,” Sua said, banishing that thought from mind, “Your friends are waiting for you out- cough outside. You’ll make them- cough late.”
At that, Ivan’s face hardened, if only a fraction, and Sua’s groggy mind wondered if she had guessed wrong. Maybe they were here to mug him. Anything was possible with her brother.
“They’re not my friends.”
She replied, suddenly too tired to bicker, “So they aren’t. Mother- cough will still throw a fit if her son is late, while her daughter is sick in bed. Go.”
Sighing, he placed the now cold bowl of porridge on her bedside table with a loud clack. He was annoyed, then. Why, she couldn’t know, but suddenly found she didn’t quite care to, feeling the enticing lull of sleep tug again at her arm. “You haven’t eaten a bit of porridge,” Ivan grumbled.
“I’m not hungry.”
“You never are,” Ivan shot back with more anger, words heavy with a meaning that felt beyond her. “But you need to, rather than laying here and being tended to hand and foot, you know. Regain your strength. You don’t even eat anyone else’s cooking when you’re like this, and now you won’t eat at all? Haven’t you thought about the people you’re going to leave behind?”
She fixed him with a confused, half-asleep glare, “What.”
And with that, he whirled out of her room, wordlessly slamming the door as much as his princely hands would allow with his sister sick and crestfallen in bed, and his mother sound asleep only a room away. That is to say, not at all.
Strange, she thought as she gave into the tantalising lull of sleep, Weirdo.
🌙💭
There was a plate of plain white buns waiting for her this time, scentless and pretty, if not for the dent in the side indicating the pile had been dropped at some point. She smiled all the same.
“Hi.” The pink haired girl—her own god, her star, Sua had taken to thinking, bright and full as she was in this idyllic new prison—grinned, prancing around Sua giddily, plate in hand. Sua was half-certain this might’ve been how the buns had gained their dents in the first place, though she was less sure of who the girl would’ve been dancing around the first time. For some inexplicable reason, a quiet ache throbbed in her chest at the thought of the girl in others’ dreams. Listening to others’ speech. Being others’ god.
So excitedly she almost dropped the plate in her hand, the girl pointed down at a place by the creek, jogging a few steps before turning around, as if urging Sua to come, to follow. And if Sua trailed behind like a wizened dog, having been struck dumb by the girl’s expression as she shouted noiselessly, so beautiful in her effulgent apricity, no one had to know.
As they approached, a red and white chequered blanket came into view, covered in plates and bowls and jars of food. None of which Sua had ever eaten in her life, but in that moment found herself craving. “You want me to try all this,” Sua guessed, gesturing at the food as they sat in the only empty space on the blanket, mouth watering in a way even Ivan’s food couldn’t bring out. Her chest throbbed, surveying the feast before her. Cherry tarts, apple pie, cream puffs. All food she had seen but never eaten, refusing offers at every turn for her strange fear that her attempts to learn others through taste would yield blandness the way touch had yielded algidity.
The girl nodded in reply, shoving a white bun into her hands before holding up her own, head tilted as if to suggest eating together. Against all reason and experience, Sua giggled, biting into the bun. Plain. Bland, yet comfortingly so—as if she were biting into a memory; tasteless, flavoured by the forgotten. She wolfed it down.
Then, the plate of cream puffs slid toward her, beaming up at her with an inviting promise of knowledge. An opportunity to learn about the star next to her, who was savouring her own cream puff with the happy face of a girl familiar with the taste. Partial to it. So Sua, gaze unfalteringly fixed on her, slid the creampuff past her own lips, only partly registering the almost overpowering sweetness. She wondered if she had eaten this before, if perhaps they had shared it in a past life. If only the universe were so kind.
“I feel like I’ve eaten this before,” Sua said, staring down at the cream puffs, “But I haven’t.” The girl simply nodded, picking up a cherry tart and offering it to Sua. You, too. How come I know you when I know that I don’t? Sua didn’t say. It hung in the air anyway.
Their picnic went on in this fashion, exchanging food and laughter and comfort, falling back into an almost familiar routine. Almost, if only because the food, at times, tasted only half like a memory and half an experience, like something she’d wanted and could only share now. Perhaps they had known each other in a past life. Or perhaps Sua felt so because she could finally know someone other than her brother. Learn their taste, know their habits, miss their presence.
“Mizi,” she muttered to herself, as if recording it into an oral archive. “That’s your name,” she continued, possessed by the knowledge proffered by the feast. How that was possible, Sua couldn’t know, and wondered if she even wanted to. If it were even of any importance. This time, the girl smiled, somehow brighter even than herself, more blinding than the antarctic sun. Nodded, gentler than Sua had ever seen, like she could not allow Sua to misunderstand the answer. Sua smiled—grinned, even. “I’ll see you next time, Mizi,” she said, clutching the girl’s name, now a singular page, to her chest. The beginnings of a second encyclopedia. The trappings of a desire to learn more, taste more.
So the second time in her life, Sua found herself able to miss someone in death. And then, to her surprise, she found she wasn’t averse to a third, or a fourth, or even a hundredth. She hoped that her stomach could digest it all, that her feeble arms could carry the unprecedented weight of so many encyclopedias.
🌙💭
RRR. RRR. RRR.
Several heads swivelled to look at Sua, brows raised in question. She merely sighed, fishing her phone out from her bag, quietly cursing her lack of pockets. In the past, their absence had not bothered her, barely registering for the fact that her phone had remained mostly untouched throughout the day. Some days, she needed not to even charge the thing, unused as it was. Now, though, with the screen lighting up every other second, her refusal to have a pocket stitched into her skirt at the start of the year loomed over her like a great big “I told you so” which sounded suspiciously like her brother.
‘Ivan’ Sua resisted the urge to roll her eyes upon reading the contact name, declining the call and pressing on their messages, noting the red battery icon in the top corner of her screen.
Ivan
(11:03) What is this I’m hearing about u participating in the eating contest
(11:03) ?
(11:03) Who are u and what have u done with my sister?
(11:08) Did someone put you up to this? Do you need me to come into your class?
(11:12) I’ll ask mother and father to talk to the school. Say hello to your new classmate.
Sua
(11:15) Stop jumping to conclusions. Dewey invited me and I want to
Ivan
(11:15) Dewey?
(11:15) Why aren’t you answering your phone?
(11:15) Who is this?
(11:15) Why do you have her phone? Give it back.
Sua
(11:16) Why do you have literally zero faith in me?
(11:16) [Picture]
(11:16) See, me. Now leave me alone.
Ivan
(11:16) ?
(11:17) ????
(11:17) Why
(11:18) I’m not gonna stop until u tell me why. Remember that we live together
Sua
(11:18) God forbid a girl try to get to know her classmates
(11:22) BTW I need your charger
Ivan
(11:22) WHO TAUGHT YOU THAT
Smell
Scent carried memories in the way that it carried fondness and comfort, wherein the lack of such recognition spoke to a sense of foreign peculiarity rather than the quotidian succour of an old friend, as remembered scents were. By that token, the inability to distinguish another’s scent without cognisance or context, or to remember it at all after leaving its embrace, revealed a cold and empty chasm within which the olfactics of love had been strangled to death by odourless indifference. Without a scent, one was but an unremembered malaise at best, and stained nothingness at worst. And so, it reasoned that a relationship unscented was a relationship unfostered. Nonexistent.
Sua had been seven when she learned this fact, having heard it recited to her by the ghost of her older sister’s voice as she stood, silent and destroyed, in her mother’s empty room. Most who knew the estate would not mistake the room for any other, could not, given the aroma it emanated, so strong one could physically feel it lave over skin and hair and bone once inside. Courtesy of the thick, cloying fumes that her mother so favoured. They clung to every inch of the room, redolent scars clawed across the pristine white walls from years of love exchanged between room and inhabitant. Even her older sister, for all she resembled their dear mother, could hardly stand the stench of its history some days. Regardless of her attempts to replicate it, to paint her own room with sickly flavour. There had always been something missing, weaker. Muted. As if there were not enough rapport between her sister and the material world of her room.
Yet, somehow, Sua could smell her scent in every object which had so much as grazed her skin, could even pick it apart from a cacophony of odours bombarding her in a room far too crowded for the miniscule population who had bore witness to her sister’s life. Could identify exactly the coffin in which her corpse laid, pallid and drenched in a flowery aroma which did not belong to her. Faint, some would call the one which did. Nonexistent, most would say instead, disguised as it was under the perfume selected by her mother, insistent that her dear eldest child had used this bottle to death in life, had drowned in it like a drunken man’s sins in alcohol. As if her sister were a sin to be drowned. At least Sua had committed her true self to memory, a version of her sister unconsumed by scents that weren’t hers dancing between the unperfumed archives of her mind. Recognisable, more so than she was in her final bed.
The same could be said for Ivan, subtle as his was. Like it was hiding, afraid to face the world unmasked. Still, the faint smell of old parchment and rain was unmistakable to Sua, perforating her nose with every step deeper into its wraithlike embrace. Unlike her mother and sister, Ivan’s scent was unsweetened, absent of the artificial sickliness which spoke of a love only for the material and a desire to be shackled by pretension. Instead, the falsities it presented were that of the unscented, the unadorned, the unloved. Concealed, yet still somehow pleasant. Comforting. Like a heart both loving and afraid. Perhaps related, Sua felt the pressure of her icy prison alleviated most when sitting in his room, singing quietly while Ivan studied. As if the care cultivated within his room had taken the form of a helpful wind sprite which lifted her gelid transgression from her slumped shoulders and spirited it away, for it was unwelcome in her brother’s quiet lair. That, perhaps, might have been the reason he had been allowed to grow ever so close.
Her mother, however, left behind no discernable trace once the woman herself had left the vicinity. At least, to Sua’s senses. Her father, on the other hand, along with his bevy of associates who smelled simultaneously like an office and nothing at all, spoke often of how their hands would carry her scent for hours after holding something she’d touched. But her father’s scent, too, stayed not in her mind once he had strayed from her body, so she had thought perhaps that adults were merely of a different stock entirely than children. Though, hearing the words of her sister, wizened by the five year chasm of experience between them, Sua was struck suddenly with the possibility that it was not their scent that was nonexistent, but rather her own relationships.
“No,” she had whispered, then. “That’s not why I..I knew this was Mother’s room. I did.”
Yet, not even Sua herself believed that.
🌙💭
The girl squirmed as she recalled that memory from the forgotten recesses of her mind. From the darkest corner of her library, so shunned by the light that its tiny, unkempt shelf had been frozen over by aphotic shadows. A shelf she would have rather forgotten, yet time and time again thawed at the faintest presence of warmth, even as her own glacial prison stood solid and inviolate in the face of the sun’s passion.
“Don’t do that, dear. People will think there’s something amiss,” her mother chastised gently. But not kindly, her thoughts whispered, unfilial and unhelpful. Her stomach twisted. “And do do something about your hair before we leave. It’s unsightly, your sister would detest that so.” At that, her mother shot her a pointed look from her place on the other side of the room, where she had stood fixing her hair and clothes since their arrival at the cinerarium. Their father hadn’t even deigned to come. A business meeting, he’d said. “You know that, don’t you? Come, let me fix your hair before you offend her further. Come away from her picture, now, she can see you.”
Sua wondered if she would finally remember the smell of her mother, if she just allowed her to fix the unkempt locks of Sua’s hair, tousled by her impulsive decision to rest her head against the shelf. If it would finally feel like a hug, even if just once. Before she could struggle further between the decision to rebel or obey, though, the light, familiar scent of rain and old parchment washed over her with all the gentle force of a Spring drizzle. “I’ll do it, Mother,” Ivan said as he fixed her hair, tone blank and bordering on bored. Any onlooker could easily tell it was all a nicety, rather than out of any sort of affection. So their mother smiled at him, eyes raging with all the maternal disdain that her perfect face could not show.
“My, how lucky I am to have such a caring and considerate son. The other ladies will be so envious when I inform them at our next luncheon.” Then, after a beat, “Are you two done, yet? My legs are growing tired. I’m sure you both know how she would feel about this, too. Oh, how caring she was, she would tell me ‘Mother, do rest, I shall take care of this for you’ at even the slightest limp.”
“Mother,” Sua started slowly, eyes set forward at her sister’s photo, blood thrumming in her ears at the imitation of her voice. It just sounded so wrong . “We’ve only been here for ten minutes.”
Then, before she could argue and inevitably take them home before they even had time to miss their sister before her ashes, Ivan interjected. He smiled that perfect, princely smile that made Sua want to claw at his face for his lies. “Why don’t you have the driver take you home, and return for us? This must be hard on you, dear Mother, though us children have alot to talk about. You know how it is, don’t you?” Here, he cast his eyes down to the floor, shoulders shrinking as he fidgeted with his interlocked fingers. “We just miss her so much.”
A beat. Sua swore she could hear a sniffle from behind the door. Then, “Alright, dear. But do tell me if it ever gets too much for your heavy little shoulders. I would hate for you to suffer in my stead. Ah, your hair.” And with one last flick of Ivan’s fringe, she was gone, and so was her perfume.
For a while, they stood in silence, staring into the almost empty compartment. Their sister’s final resting place, decorated only by an urn and a singular photo extricated from their last family photo before her death. As usual, her face wore a polite smile, nice even, pearls glinting in her flowing silken locks, pulled back into a half-up bun. Her makeup was subtle but effective nonetheless, emphasising her features so she glowed even a decade after her own light had been extinguished. Yet, the photo was somehow darker than her corpse had been, distant and unreal. Not the sister they’d known, Sua had known. Had sought comfort in castigation from. Their mother had selected the photo as a compromise for Sua’s request to leave the compartment bare and free of the perfumes their mother insisted repeatedly were her favourites. Some hadn’t even been sold until years after her death. Sua sniffed. Sandalwood, rose, lavender. She hadn’t made good on her promise.
“Remove it if it bothers you,” Ivan said, breaking the silence and handing her a bag of baby wipes. Wordlessly, she accepted the pack and began wiping, all the while avoiding his gaze. She had an inkling of the expression they bore, plagued as they had been in every visit for the past decade, and knew not whether she was strong enough to face those anguished coals yet again. Whether she had the strength to lift from his shoulders a sin he had not committed as he had her. Perhaps she was just born weak.
Weak, so weak she could not even handle a foreign scent at her sister’s resting place. Possessed by the fear that they would disguise hers, and then she would no longer recognise it, and then there would be no comfort between them, too. And then she’d be forced further into that icy prison of hers. All alone, unloved and scentless save for the occasional aroma of rain and old parchment wafting in through an old, battered string telephone smuggled in from the outside.
“Do you miss her?” Ivan asked after a while.
“I’m done,” Sua replied, inhaling softly. “Still smells like her.”
🌙💭
A scent so strong it sent Sua wide-eyed and flying into the bright green grass, which looked more and more artificial with every visit, assaulted her immediately upon arrival. It invaded her mind, flooding her with a barrage of dusty photos and frames, filling her head with noisy silence. As if she were not yet privy to their sound, unworthy of them.
Because she forgot. She couldn’t hear them, because she forgot.
A splitting pain overtook her brain. She isn’t sure if she screamed, but quickly enough Mizi arrived, and a sweet, gentle aroma began to soothe her head. Under the new scent’s influence, the pictures flowed slower, transforming from a raging flood into a quaint trickle. It was then that Sua could finally process the contents, and realised with a rapid blink of her eyes that they were all filled with Mizi, Mizi, Mizi. Every single one of them. Childhood, puberty and a short adulthood. All were marked by that shock of dusty pink hair. That enraptured smile. That warmth. Sua wondered when that had transpired within the rigid confines of her cold life.
Then came Ivan, somehow both more and less haunted than usual. Different. Possessed by a different devil, prisoner to a different sin, unpunished yet. Sua wondered if his damnation had been in his birth as the brother of someone like she, cold and unloving.
Then came their sister, eerily gentle and pulchritudinous in the way only broken dolls were. Eyes wide and terrified, her scar shaking under the force of her care, lips parted softly, like she had been singing a cautionary tale. All four sides of the frame were lacerated beyond comprehension. Sua wondered where such a familiar picture of her sister had been found, when she herself could barely recall her features.
And then came her mother, and Sua froze, body rigidising.
“I don’t even want to know why my mother is an insect. Or something like that,” Sua muttered once the river of Mizi photos had returned. She glanced over at Mizi laying down next to her, a crown of red clematises clutched tightly in her hand. Ah. The sweet aroma. “How did you do that? Actually, more importantly, what was that?”
Mizi merely giggled in reply, soundless as usual. Yet, when her breath fanned against Sua’s face, it brought with it something new all the same. The sweet scent of dried clematises, a hint of cotton candy, tender as a falling lotus and intense as the burning sun. And suddenly Sua was filled with a familiar comfort; old laughter and a ghost of warmth that was once as known to her as the stars were to the sky. A memory which she had never known, yet felt like home all the same.
Vaguely, she wondered if it truly was.
🌙💭
“Um, Sua? I thought we were going to visit your sister,” the boy whisper-shouted, glancing around nervously. “This is a cemetery .” So in sync Sua could almost suspect it had been rehearsed, the other two girls accompanying them (because threes were unlucky, in accordance with online mythology) nodded in agreement, casting her crestfallen and pleading looks. She merely shook her head, stepping through the door and over to her sister’s compartment.
“Meet my sister. Ah, Dewey, do you have the flowers? Thank you…Why do you look so shocked?”
Hearing
Her friendships had been threatened. Sua felt it obvious that she acted to secure the perimeter to prevent the impending pilferage. Or, at the very least, postpone it. For eternity. For-ever. In her mind, that seemed almost excessively reasonable—correct, even. Moral, if you considered how she was protecting her angels from falling into the corrosive, corrupting influence which would cast only a cold darkness over their hearts and futures. Yes, moral—Sua had been cold, was still cold, untouched by the sun and trapped still inside that prison of hers. But it had a window now, and she would be damned twice over if she lost it to corrupting hands. It was hers, now. She was going to keep it. So this was all very understandable to her. What she could not understand, however, was why her brother had hidden her phone and prohibited her from setting foot outside the house. Obstructed, even, with the way he had hidden her house keys, too.
“Ivan,” she drawled, glaring daggers at him as he scrolled blithely through his own phone just five feet away from where she had been pacing. A testament to their upbringing—or perhaps it was whatever offence from the womb that had haunted him so since birth, who could know?—his back was pin straight despite his demeanour; left cheek was cradled by his hand, eyes at half mast. Lazy. Bored. Mocking her. At least, she told herself so, feigning blindness to the indecipherable glint in his eye. Fear, sadness, hatred, even—she did not know, and did not dwell upon long enough to conjure a hypothesis. She couldn’t. “At least tell me why you’ve locked me up in here like some danger to society. Give me that much.”
Through his eyelashes, she caught a glimpse again of that scared, sad hatred. Suddenly, her eyes had found themselves cast awkwardly toward the marble floor, as if castigated. She might as well have been. “You’re sick,” Ivan said simply, after what sounded suspiciously like a suppressed sigh. “And I’m familiar with the illness which afflicts you.”
A beat. Two beats. Sua waited for him to continue. He didn’t, opting instead to return to his phone, the faint sounds emitted by the videos the only indicator that she no longer had his attention. Briefly, she weighed the consequences of simply killing him. Ah, she realised, eyes wide as saucers as she stared at him thoughtfully, But then I’d go to jail, and they’ll be taken and then they won’t want to keep me anymore. Not an option . So, instead, she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, serenity settling over her features as she exhaled. In, out. In, out. Relax the muscles. A technique passed from her mother, though it had been her sister who taught it to her, always eager to lessen their mother’s burdens. Always where their mother should have been, ever the considerate daughter. Perfect, as their mother was.
Finally, once she was sure she had composed herself enough, her eyes fluttered open again, this time meeting her brother’s immediately. He grinned cluelessly, as if he hadn’t the whisper of an idea of the situation, or what she was about to say. Strange thing, Ivan. So strange.
“Rather than speaking like a forlorn matriarch in a badly written period piece, would you explain to me what the hell you’re talking about, oh dearest brother of mine?” She felt her stomach churn, just a tiny, almost lilliputian bit, at how her voice then had taken on the lilt of their mother, its cloying sweetness. Why, she did not know, and decided that she did not want to. Then, returning to her own, unimpressed and irritated tone, “I’m going to be late to school.” And gods know what could happen in that time, she didn’t say. It hung in the air anyway, expressed through the ghostly curve of her faux placid expression.
Her brother merely stared at her, smile dropping into a thin line. “You look exactly like her.”
She balked, feeling for a transient second as if she had entered the world of the atemporal, where even the dust particles weighed down by their mother’s favourite perfume of the week came to a freezing lull. And then Ivan blinked, inexplicably alarmed—or perhaps he just seemed so because he had been frozen a mere moment prior—and the hand of time again descended upon her. She knew not the expression she made then, only that her face had slackened, and her brother’s had been painted with the beginnings of anguish, unable to ignore it any longer.
“Which one, mother or sister?”
When no answer came, Sua merely demanded, “Give me the keys.”
Once again, her brother’s eyes steeled, resolve hardening. “You don’t want me to.”
She raised her brow, “What.”
At that, her brother stood and stepped forward, breathing loud but level. “Do you think people will laud you?” His tone was even, his hands were steady. As if he’d said this a thousand times before; as if even all the emotion of his words could not shake him even on one leg, because he had been here before. Because he had suffered before. “Do you want that—to be some tragic heroine, a noble victim of your own story? Nothing will change, except the hurt you wreak upon those that care, those that are left behind to mend and to bear witness to the destruction you brought on your own life. Because you were selfish.” Rehearsed, it sounded so rehearsed and yet so raw, like this was the sin which haunted him from genesis, and the house a confessional. “And yet you forge forward anyway. You never change, only thinking of yourself until the end.” And Sua almost wished, then, that he too could not touch her, that his words could not reach her. So then they would hurt less, if at all.
Without a word, the girl turned, marching swiftly toward the door, not knowing what she’d do once she reached it. Maybe she’d break it down. Probably, she’d turn and ascend the staircase situated by it instead.
“The toilet seat,” Ivan called out, halting her just two feet away from the door. “They’re under the toilet seat. But when it gets too hot, don’t cry to me about your cracks.”
Literally what the fuck was he talking about, Sua thought, but instead spat, “You sound like you are a matriarch in a badly written period piece.”
🌙💭
Five baleful hours into the school day, Sua found that it perhaps may have been in the best interest of her sanity to have let Ivan continue on with the ‘illness’ charade. For she found that corruption had already sunk its teeth ever so slightly into the soft hearts around her, had already tied boulders to their wings and dragged them down inch by inch into its blackened realm.
“You’re really hanging out with her?” she’d heard from the hallway, only two feet from stepping inside the classroom. “ Seriously? ”
“What’s the problem?” came the voice of one of her new friends.
“Well…” Another voice. “It’s not a problem, per se, just- Ah.” And then they’d discovered her on their way out of the classroom, and Sua was forced to pretend she’d heard none of it at all, earphones in. Nevermind that the jack was hanging out from her scarf.
Thieving brats, all of them. Trying to take away the only ray of light which could peer through the miniscule gaps of her prison, make a window of it. Trying, stealing, destroying when she already had so less. When she had already been pillaged, when she had already lost the comfort of an angel before. How cruel. Vile, even.
And that was only the beginning of their misdeeds, their amorality, always gossiping about others, the terrible things they said and did. And her friends were forced to bear it all as their light and almost tangible warmth grew further tainted by a frigid murkiness. As the finite stores of their warmth was stolen by those who would never marvel at it like she would, never appreciate it like she did. And yet they gave it anyway. How annoying. Aggravating, even.
“Sua, are you sure you’re okay? You’re spacing out alot today.”
She blinked. Right. It was lunch. “I’m fine,” she responded flatly, looking out the window. Partially out of the desire to watch the cherry blossoms falling, swathes of bright pink swaying gently on zephyrs, almost dream-like. Mostly out of annoyance.
Doubt clouded collectively over her three friends’ faces as they exchanged looks, seemingly communicating with their eyes. Sua wouldn’t know. She had never been privy to such codes; even Ivan’s expressions could only be read via their disparate, yet shared, misery and diligent studying of that encyclopedia.
After a heated debate between the three, Dewey turned to her, starting slowly, nervously, “Is this about this morning?” He coughed, and instinctually Sua knew he had been elbowed under the table, perhaps kicked, too. “If it is, we’re sorry. We’ll make it up to you, okay? So don’t sulk.”
“I’m not sulking.”
“You literally haven’t looked at us all day. Come on, Sua, it’s not like that. You know that, right? Mi- Ow !” Dewey shrieked, glaring daggers at the other girl, who only rolled her eyes, reaching forward over the table to clasp Sua’s hand in hers. Eyes kind and gentle, mouth set in a soft, benign curve. Warm.
Yet, the only thought which had flooded Sua’s mind, then, was that she was cold, so cold, and all the warmth of the sun could do nothing in the face of her erosive ice. Die, it would die, and they would be as cold as she. And she cursed herself for how inviting that possibility seemed, wondering whether it was before or after a thousand prostrations that she could even begin to truly repent for such a sin.
So, with all the swiftness of an injured dog’s assailing jaw, she snatched her hand back, eyes wide and shining with a sheen of wetness that she refused to acknowledge. Her friend blinked owlishly, slowly retracting her hand, mouth hardening into a thin line.
And Sua knew then that the tryst was over.
🌙💭
The idyllic greenery of the dream seemed almost violent now in its vibrance, burning her indestructible skin with its mocking juxtaposition to the horror of her reality. Vaguely, Sua wondered if her struggles could reach her still if she stayed here with Mizi, if she allowed her dreams to consume her whole, if only for comfort.
But then she’d leave her brother behind, and all his words about her selfishness would ring true. That couldn’t happen. His sins would swallow him whole, drown him, and there would be no one to help, because there would no longer be anyone who could understand the weight of his sins hovering over his shoulders, laughing in his obsidian eyes.
Though, perhaps that was what he wanted. Deserved.
“Sua!” came a voice, cutting through the thick fog of Sua’s anger. Somehow, she recognised it, though she had never heard it before in all her life.
“Mizi,” she rasped, turning to find the girl barreling toward her. “Mizi, I can hear your voice again.” Though she had never heard it to begin with.
The girl seemed almost to be running in slow motion, though Sua could tell not if that was simply her desire to see her again clouding her vision. She supposed it didn’t matter, for with Mizi they had until Sua left to awake for the next day. With Mizi, she could stay until the effulgent sun whittled itself down to its last, weak embers, until the soft grass beneath their bare feet had hardened in their withered state, until the hand of time itself pushed Sua to leave. They had until Sua left. Until she wanted to. And then they could do it again and again and again, cheating the logics of time and space until they were no more, cast into the background. Until they were sick of each other. And Sua could never, she realised with an almost excited jolt, ever, become sick of Mizi, and Mizi her.
Mizi, sweet, innocent Mizi, who was unreachable and intangible and therefore incorruptible, perdurable in her saintly love, her familiar unfamiliarity. Mizi, who could see neither the horrors in Sua’s life nor Sua’s mind, and thus loved her with a blind heart. Mizi, who would not leave her. Mizi.
Sua smiled. “You can talk now,” she said as Mizi came to a stop just a foot away from her, so close they were almost touching, yet so far they could not do so even with a ten foot pole. Sua wondered what that would have felt like; she and Mizi, flush, skin to skin and hand in hand and smiling, laughing, like everyone did. Could do. As swiftly as it came, the girl shelved the thought, remembering how Mizi’s translucent hand had slipped through hers that very first time. But she did not banish it.
“I can! I finally can!” Mizi affirmed, frantically nodding her head and throwing her arms carefreely into the air. “There’s so much to talk about, you don’t even know! Sit, sit! We’re gonna be a long while.” So they talked and talked and talked, dragging on like alien friends who had not seen one another since their crash into Earth, into this life. By the end of it, Sua couldn’t even remember what they had led with, only that she had never talked as much as she did then, and that Mizi was happy, and that the sun apparently did not set in her dreams. Instead, it beamed down from its place high in the sky, seeming almost artificial now after so long spent under its unchanging glare. But that matter paled in comparison to hearing Mizi speak for the very first time, though it felt as if Sua had thousands of first times before.
So familiar, so old and yet new, that she recalled then the hundreds of thousands of films she’d seen on her last visit, the river of unlived memories she’d all but drowned in. And suddenly, that inexplicable belief that they had known each other once before rose again from her chest to fill her head with thoughts so bright and hopeful, they almost made her warm, too.
Then, was staying here truly so selfish? When it granted her the closest thing to warmth, when it welcomed her in ways that reality had not, could not?
“Sua, are you sure you don’t need to get back now? It’s getting late.” Ah.
Sua shook her head, smiling gently. “Let’s just talk a little longer. It’s been so long, after all.” Since they’d descended. Since they’d separated.
If possible, the other girl’s already large green eyes widened further, looking now like two Bahia emeralds rather than the small, glinting ones Sua was so accustomed to. “It’s too early.”
Sua blinked. “What?”
“It’s too early, you can’t- no. You can’t, you have to go,” she continued with a tone poisoned by anxiety. As if the worst was upon them. As if staying with Sua was the worst that was upon them.
For the first time, Sua felt cold in this dream. Felt the icy horror of her reality bleed in through the seams. Felt the biting Winter beast of her Spring oasis roar to life, jaws snapping with a sickening crunch only she could hear.
For the first time, Sua bore witness to an angel truly falling as she watched Mizi tear at her pinkened face, glowing scraps of flesh falling to the ground in clear, bloodless heaps. Dazzling white light shone from where she’d clawed, almost drowning out her muttered “nos” and “you can’ts.” And Sua watched it all, terrified. Awestruck. In love.
But then Mizi screamed, and Sua realised, perhaps belatedly, that she was in pain. “Stop,” she cried, rushing to grab her shaking wrist, only to permeate her wraith-like body. She cursed, turning her head to meet Mizi’s eyes. They were blown wide, shocked and panicked and lost. Like something had happened, like she didn’t know what to do. Sua wanted to scream. In fright, or frustration, or just for the fact of it, she didn’t know. Didn’t have time to dwell on it before Mizi had met her gaze, arms falling limp by her side, and the space around them fell into a tenebrous nothingness. She didn’t dare to blink. Didn’t want to, so sure then that all she needed was this, to be frozen here and consumed in Mizi’s gaze, and Mizi hers.
“You have to go,” Mizi said again, breathing heavy and uneven, somehow more imperfect and human and alive than anyone she’d ever seen in the real world. “Please, Sua. It’s too early.”
“Why?” Sua didn’t think it was too early. Nothing could be too early in a dream, where the sun shone identically across all hours and time didn’t exist, only excuses. “I thought you liked me.” She’d thought her friends liked her, too. “I like you.” She really did. Had.
The other girl shook her head in vehement denial, flinging specks of burning white light from the gaping holes in her face. “It’s not that simple.”
“Why can’t it be?”
“Please, Sua. Please don’t stay.”
Somehow, the icy excuse for blood running through Sua’s veins froze further at that statement. “Why do you all do this.” She didn’t know what expression she made, then, staring at Mizi’s tattered, tear streaked face. Only prayed that it was not an unsightly one—perhaps Mizi would allow her to stand beside her if only she were presentable in all situations. “Why pretend you like me and make me want you and then tell me you don’t? Isn’t that too cruel?” she breathed, more a whispered cry than a question. “And is it really that selfish for me to want this—Can’t I feel warm too? I’m so cold, Mizi.”
“Sua, it’s not like that—”
“Then what is it like? Tell me, what do I have to do so that you’ll be kept , so I can protect you all?”
Again, Mizi shook her head, softer this time. Gentler. As if she were approaching a child. As if Sua did not understand anything. “You can’t keep a person, Sua. That’s not how it works, and it’s not how love works either. They’ll still love you from outside, and they’ll still love you when they’re not blind,” she said. It sounded as rehearsed as Ivan’s words at the staircase had. Sua almost cried then and there. But one look at Mizi’s eyes, glowing with concern, and the wells which played warden to her tears dried, storm clouds clearing. She couldn’t hurt Mizi. She couldn’t. So instead, she was silent, even as her body shook like a leaf in a hurricane.
Finally, she whispered, so quiet she wasn’t sure even the wind could parse the words without reading her lips, “I just wanted to protect the things I had.”
“I know.”
“I just want to be warm.”
“You will.”
“They hate me now.”
“They don’t.”
Her fist curled and uncurled, breaths short and eyes burning. “How do you know? You weren’t there.”
Here, Mizi grinned, and she looked so much like she had before reality had tainted her that it hurt. “Call it a hunch. Or call it me knowing you just don’t understand.”
“What,” Sua breathed, for the nth time that day.
Mizi then pointed at her heart, and then Sua’s. “You don’t know how they feel, Sua. And you’ll never know, truly, until you understand that they really do love you. That they’re not going away, ever.”
“But they will,” Sua argued.
“And how do you know that? Have you even asked them?” When Sua didn’t answer, Mizi sighed, crossing her two index fingers, brows furrowed. If her face were any less destroyed, it would’ve been funny. At least she was still beautiful. “Assumptions, no! You can’t understand their love if you only assume and never listen, Sua,” she said, gesturing pointedly at her ears with one hand, and Sua’s with the other. “Relationships aren’t entered alone. You have to speak, and then you have to listen. So you can know.”
Sua opened her mouth to refute, only to find an absence of arguments, and the few excuses which rose to her lips fleeing at the sight of Mizi’s stern expression.
“Now go home and listen.”
🌙💭
“I’m sorry! I think you thought we were talking shit about you, but we just- It’s just- Agh! Yunhee, help me out here!” the girl exclaimed, shooting her friend a pleading look before bowing for the nth time in five minutes.
The other girl—Yunhee—seemed more old fashioned, in that she immediately dropped to her knees and assumed a prayer position. “Wejustthinkyou’resosupercoolandwantedtobeyourfriendstoo!” Sua wondered if she had ever considered going into rapping. “Please forgive us!”
The first girl nodded. “Double please!”
Sua blinked, crestfallen. They’d barged their way over to her desk the moment they’d arrived in the classroom, presumably dragged there by Dewey. Then they’d started a cacophony of profuse apologies, half of which Sua couldn’t even hope to parse out. But apparently, they hadn’t meant anything immoral. Apparently.
She glanced curiously over at Dewey, who only looked unimpressed with his friends. “They really are telling the truth, Sua. You don’t seriously think we’d just let people talk shit about you, right? We’re friends, aren’t we?” Then, after a minute of silence, “Sua?”
“I apologise for what happened yesterday.”
Dewey grinned, “Aha! I knew you were sulking! Hey, hey, put that glare away if you’re apologising! Sua? Wait, are you crying ?”
“No,” she sniffled, lying through her teeth. “I just have allergies.” That, and friends to listen to. To understand.
Touch
Love was carried and passed on through contact; the sense of touch. Whether free or conservative, to touch was to feel, to care for, to love. Mothers kissed the heads of their newborns, siblings held the hands of the youngest, and lovers kissed the mouth of their treasured. Touch was thus the physical transfer of love; the evidence that love was warm, and that love was there. The contract within which human warmth and trust and intimacy domiciled, binding together all of humanity under this shared understanding. To touch was to love, to give it and to receive it. To allow it to dance upon one’s skin like the playful rays of the morning sun as it peeked out from beyond the horizon.
Sua had seen evidence of this statement in the bright, easy smiles which lit her friends' faces every time they brushed shoulders, or huddled together, or even struck one another. And it had come to them so easily, as if it were the simplest of things rather than possession of the sun’s warmth itself, Prometheus’ gift to humanity reborn. As if it were common. Expected, even. Normal.
Yet Sua, trapped as she was in the icebox which had taken her prisoner at birth, had touched another only once and felt in it all the warmth of a lake heralding Winter. And she was all the worse for it. So, it reasoned that Sua refused to touch another again, afraid of that biting cold, the confirmation of their indifference. And, she thought quietly, her own.
But Mizi had told Sua to listen, to understand. To try to. And Sua hadn’t seen Mizi in weeks, had not caught even a glimpse of that refulgent sun nor the pinken light of her saviour, instead engulfed by a gaping, whispering darkness whenever she’d fallen unconscious in the last two weeks. Something which had not gone uninterrupted for so long in over a month now, and something Sua wasn’t sure she could return to. Knew she could not. So Sua listened, so Sua understood. Tried to.
“Why don’t you let us touch you?” her friend asked as they studied together after school. The one whom she had snatched her hand away from. When she had thought they’d been stolen, when she had thought the inevitable was upon her, and that their friendship’s Armageddon had come. “I’m not, like, mad or anything. Just curious, is all. Is it a personal thing? We can help, if you want. Or not, if you don’t.”
Was it a personal thing? Sua didn’t know, and perhaps didn’t want to. Regardless, she lied.
“I’m fine with it. It’s just a little surprising, is all, since I’ve never had many friends.” If any at all, no one said, but all four understood it to be there anyway.
Her friends exchanged looks, speaking again in that wordless language which she could not learn, yet had come so naturally to others. Almost as if all humans were biologically inclined, to the exclusion of the frozen. Perhaps the ice encasing them had permeated the skull and altered them so that they may only understand that which was spoken, and may never read a face. Or perhaps Sua simply wasn’t human. Not entirely. Some days she felt so, looking at the warm light illuminating her friends’ faces, before frowning down at her own dim person.
The one who had attempted to touch her weeks ago was the first to speak. “So if I were to sling my arm around your shoulder, like, right now, then..”
“I would be fine.” Liar. She wondered if they could tell, if they could see the filiform needles poisoned by fear pricking her skin, fierce and burning cold metal.
Another exchange in that strange language, then a concerted, determined nod. A gesture Sua could, to her great dismay, understand, grimacing as she steeled herself for the inevitable.
She could do it. It was only an arm, only a whisper of a touch. An attempt to transfer the jubilant ambrosia so commonplace for them. Just one. Just once. Only once. It would be fine. No, warm. It would be warm, Sua decided as she stared ahead, back pin straight and hands sweaty and clasped in her lap, refusing to meet her friend’s eyes. Not daring to. For she wanted not to know whether there was an abundance or notable lack of warmth in her eyes; whether there was light or darkness reflected in her own.
Because she had only touched another once before, and had been met with nothing but an arctic void. Five fingers cold with Winter rain, a smile which did not meet the eyes, and light which did not dance, but reflect, refract. A void in her own which she could only see then through the mirror of another. A cold indifference, a sunless interaction. She hadn’t spoken to that classmate since.
How, then, could she handle it if such transpired with her own friend?
“Sua—? Shit, she’s crying!”
“What happened?”
She shook her head, willing the tears back into her eyes. Perhaps if she were more human they would listen.
“Should- Should we get Ivan?”
Another shake of the head, fat tears threatening to spill over her cracked porcelain cheeks. “I’m sorry. Let’s just go back to studying, we have a quiz tomorrow.”
And so, Sua left that library untouched.
🌙💭
The very last time Sua saw Mizi and Mizi saw Sua, the god-like wraith had been consumed in a strange, cherubic grief, sparkling tears falling from her now crystalline eyes. Her skin had taken on an incandescent quality, soft and glowing, almost tragic in its effulgence. Young, too. New. Like she’d only just recovered the unbleeding flesh torn from her poor face before vicissitude had again left her with this sorrowful, dolorous countenance.
“...Mizi?” Sua murmured, teary eyes wide with shock. Well, at least we’re on the same page, Sua thought with morbid delight, Almost like we’re one.
A gentle smile painted itself into Mizi’s face as she met Sua’s gaze with an intensity Sua had never seen, yet somehow knew. A devotion, almost reverent. “Sua. My god, my universe, my Sua.” Slowly, she hobbled forward, unsteady, arms reached out as if she believed she could touch her. “Hold me.”
And though she knew in her mind that it was futile, her arms shook with the urge to comply anyway, as if it were only natural to hold the burning calidity of the sun in her arms. As if she wouldn’t destroy it with her algid plague. She stilled her arm with the other, pressing crescents into her cold skin. “I can’t.”
Mizi paused, then, and something like heartbreak flashed over her features, and something like self-loathing bloomed in Sua’s chest. “Is this,” Mizi started slowly as she restarted her ten foot trek to Sua, “Because of last time? Because of what I did? I’m sorry.” Here, she tripped and fell to the ground with a soft, hollow thud, and if she did not look so pitiful then, Sua would have wondered if this world were artificial, and then if it were real in any sense of the word. If anything at all was. But Mizi was gazing up at her with pleading, tearful eyes, shimmering emeralds, and so the world fell into the background anyway. “I’m sorry, please forgive me. This is our last chance,” she begged, struggling to her feet and limping over yet again.
“What do you mean?”
“Do you trust me?” Mizi asked in place of a reply, hand outstretched in the foot long space between them. It was only then that Sua noticed the calluses decorating her glowing hands. The light shone brighter where they were concentrated, like cracks in porcelain. “Sua?” With a sharp inhale, Sua nodded. Mizi beamed, fresh tears streaking down the curves of her face. She raised her arms higher, wider, poised to embrace. “So hold me, and trust I will be there.”
And so, shaking, Sua embraced her. And so Sua felt warmth blooming all over her body, so intense she felt like screaming, only muffled by the obverse kindness of Mizi’s love. And so Sua, at age seventeen, received the gift of touch.
Yet, before she could bask in the warmth of her own first gift, she felt it fading, her skin cooling to a fraction of its former frigidity. Her fists clenched, teeth gnashing, arms tightening around the fading star, as if she could prolong their time together simply by holding her tighter. Mizi, conversely, only kissed the top of her head, burning into Sua an invisible brand, as if to prove she had seen Sua at all.
“You’re leaving,” Sua said, something empty in her chest cracking with the realisation. “You’re going to leave me again.” As if she could remember the first time she had had her.
“Sua, Sua, my Sua,” Mizi repeated, reverential.
Sua shook her head. “No. No. Is it because it’s too early? Mizi, I don’t know anything. I don’t, so—,” she hiccuped, voice cracking as she stared into Mizi’s gleaming eyes, only a few inches away now and yet further than the moon and stars. “So don’t leave me. Please, please Mizi. Promise me.”
“I’m sorry I made you cry,” she said instead. Sua hadn’t even realised she was.
“You can’t.”
“We can only alter fate so far, and there’s been a heavy price to pay,” Mizi said, as if that made anything better. More tears welled in Sua’s eyes, distorting the girl standing before her. She quickly wiped them away, desperately trying to commit her fading image to memory. “Please love well, my Sua.”
And then there was nothing left of her dream but the artificial world and an aching desiderium.