3 June 2003
BtVS
Spoilers for Chosen.




She's in Costa Rica again. She didn't like Latin America until the end of the 20th century, but now it feels right. Liquid melting worlds of blood and flesh and jungle flowers insects crawling all over her nails. She remembers Grandmother in her arms in this same inn. The two of them curled together and kissing for hours and hours with heavy curtains blocking out the day. Grandmother's luscent skin like kitten's milk, sweet and licked up and spinning out into the will of tiny hunters. The innkeeper's blood in both of them.

Two men, three demons, one shrill vengeance spirit with curling snakes of hair since Grandmother left her. Five hundred nights since Grandmother's death.

Sweet tea on her lips, warmer than the blood she licked off the girl-doll broken in the corner of this space. They keep the inn open just for her, to feed her whenever she circles back here.

She walked all night. Mummy told her once that idle minds should move. Round and round the drawing room, circles and steps that led to Daddy and Grandmother and Spike...

The birds sing that you don't give up your love so easily. A girl takes her pleasures where she can, but her knight comes only once. White milk-fed face in London smoke opening under her tongue, crying for her.

The sun-birds crackle above ground. They fly all day between worlds and words, carrying messages for the witches of these raining forests. She heard them singing hours ago of blood and fire and earth pouring in on itself.

Not until dark do they fold themselves in and quiet. She crawls out of the cellar and catches one. Strips its pretty wings into coloured ribbons, wraps her hair around them, and asks it, "What did you see?"

It's only animal blood, but the bird flew far today, and farther in the last weeks, and it knew. All the birds are singing of it.

She misses lancets and doctors whose surgeries she could lick clean like hidden candy.

Her love is gone, burned out like fire from within.

She licks out the bird's heart. Twists its feathers into her skin.

Hours and weeks later, she will think of his wings.


jane
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