Topic: Full Circle

CardofTemperance

Date: 2009-04-30 01:08 EST
She was still the same, essentially, and she supposed with some dull regret that she felt that way. Had it been a death, really, was she altogether gone, was there no September left' There was, there was.

For what mythology had bestown her on dreary, rainy nights back home by a Nanny or Father, none of it had been true and September was bitterly disappointed. She was no fantasy. She was a wretched entity. She had not withered, she had suffered instead some peculiar strain, and while certainly not alive in that lovely, wholesome sense, with beating heart and warmed flesh, she was very certainly far from deceased. Still she roamed the night and days, paler and with a darkness haunting the edges of her eyes, and the turn of a sleeve as delicate fingers brushed to a scar, which would be opened come dusk, and she would feed upon herself.

September was stirred, but distantly from before, in that she was less sullen and confused within her situation, and while not entirely forgiving, she at least now could bear it.

Watching the sun rise was still a favourite past time, and as it crept over the clouds she imagined her first love by her side, and then Gaul, Gaul instead of all she had known before, and ever with icy breaths at the base of her neck, underneath her hair. Her body was a strange map of decay, of truths swallowed up in consequence. Temperance had been shuffled forth and foremost. She disguised her brittle mind beneath it, smiling, waving at those she interacted with daily, but brooding when her eyes averted the day and she took to the narrow streets that promised oblivion, in many kinds.

CardofTemperance

Date: 2011-08-22 03:39 EST
The back gate had been lashing against its post for an hour and September could not bring herself any closer to shutting it. At the distance she held to it, curled on her sofa, victrola murmuring and enjoying another grim cigarette, its muted beat sounded like a heart.

When yours no longer beats you will find the strangest things will do in its place. She abhored imagining her own in the sounds of others, whether it be Tom, the lusty farmer she spent the evenings from Salisbury Curve, or a victim, her mouth open and angry, her ear to their chests. When had she become such a desperate, pathetic thing"

Long enough ago that she did not care.

It had been months and months since sight of her sire, the long-hipped, sullen eyed coachman, the one who had taken everything from her in one fell swoop. Click of the fingers. Bat of the eye. Gone. Whammo. Kapish! Gaul had taken it all, and left her nothing but scraps. Desperation will make a mockery of you, her Father's own words. Words she had left on. Words she had died by, in the coachman's arms. Surely he laughed at her now.

Contrition was all she sought, to spite him, to spite what she had become. The church on Abercrombie let her through its doors, though the candles always shrunk at her proximity. She liked to pretend the Jesus up there was Gaul, bled and bleeding, thorn-ridden and in agony. It consoled her.

On her knees, at midday, she prayed, she did not know to whom or really why, because she knew she was beyond any help. But just the action, some old ritual, it softened the mood, carved out her bitterness and tossed it to the wind. One day she would not feel so aghast.

As she closed the gate behind her that night, she paused to stare at the street, the passerby, the flickering lantern glow. What for her now"

What indeed.

September laughed, shook her head and strolled down the long, cobbled, weed-enamored path to her front door. She knocked, though she knew no one was home, let herself in and sang a hello, though no one would answer, except the silent stir of a cobweb, the dim sound of water dripping into the sink.