The revenant emerges from the study in the absence of God, padding on unshod feet to the display of weapons in the room adjacent. She stands before them for a time marked by the ticking of a distant, mistimed clock, her unbound hair falling across her face, all that moves of her the tiny lift and plunge of her chest with unwelcome breath.
She does not touch the rapier, or the net that hangs above it. She leaves them to the snake and the butterfly, whose voices she does not hear, and she goes walking through the halls of the last house in the world she ever would have chosen to haunt.
(But of course, she has a choice. There is always a choice. That is the most terrible thing.)
When she comes across another unquiet body, she stands in a doorway, or at the threshold of a hall, or frames herself, somehow, at odds with the house around her, a pallid parasitic orchid intruder from some other place, and she will not be the first to speak as she observes them with bruised rose-petal eyes flecked through with clotted green.
a butterfly beaten in a summer rainfall | open to gaze house residents
She does not touch the rapier, or the net that hangs above it. She leaves them to the snake and the butterfly, whose voices she does not hear, and she goes walking through the halls of the last house in the world she ever would have chosen to haunt.
(But of course, she has a choice. There is always a choice. That is the most terrible thing.)
When she comes across another unquiet body, she stands in a doorway, or at the threshold of a hall, or frames herself, somehow, at odds with the house around her, a pallid parasitic orchid intruder from some other place, and she will not be the first to speak as she observes them with bruised rose-petal eyes flecked through with clotted green.