And this is the part where you take her fine-boned hand and dance. This is the part where you fall in love again, where you look at bare stained bones and think you could spend eternity like this until you're both ground down to dust and sparkling love. This is the part. And so you are dancing with the love of your two lives, and there’s sweet music rippling from the lake where you dragged the bodies out, and the sky is a single, sweet plum that tears apart sometimes to reveal pink and yellow vulnerability, flesh. From his podium, the strange, wicked little man laughs. You are in love and you are dancing as gracefully as you can. It's not very, but it’s what you can do. Underneath the podium, you know, is a puppet, and he is made of a wooden husk and string, and his insides are all gunpowder, bitter and angry and ready to kill, ready to die. Maybe it’s none of your business, but you know he’s there. You wonder if he dances. You are in love, by the lake, beneath the cool shade of an increasingly low hanging fruit, while the puppet and the misshapen creature that’s taken the place of his father watch through holes in the aging wood and on top of it. Her bones are cold. There’s a bird’s nest that’s taken residence in her ribcage, and maybe you’re a little jealous of it; it’s wormed itself into a place that even you’ve never been able to touch. The birds twitter and take little stabs at the plum-sky, which drips drops of pulp and nectar onto the four of you. No one knows - no, the father-thing might, actually - how much that sky can take before it falls, skin torn and gone and bleeding and spilling over and onto the body-less lake and the lake-less bones and the faerie and his puppet in his matchstick home
under
no stars.
And you. In love and swaying to the humming of so many sleepy souls with your shirt in tatters and your eyes intact and full of some wonders that you saw at the end of the river right before the townsfolk all drowned.
And you
have a secret privy only to everybody except her lovely bones, growing lighter and hollower and more and more fragile the more you dance; you kissed the puppet boy, once, on smooth, sanded, not-yet-varnished face, through the bars of the lion cage. You think it might have been sealed there, when they painted the beginnings of a face on.