Work Text:
Before there was the world, there were things.
that doesn't make sense, but let's pretend it does. We usually do.
Before the world was the world, there were people.
It's hard to call them people, but they were there.
The skyscraper of metal and dates that was always grasping for something akin to the hands-on clock-face.
The bird of melodies that traveled like poets traverse words and that word crumbled like shattered metal binders.
The caught mountain that rumbled with sweets under heel and tongue and the ash on hands that fit atlas in them like brothers.
Then there were the ones who were different, the world had hands like caked on mud on knees, bruises on tender shins- snapped bones in the ribcage. It hurt to breathe, but the world kept wheezing. they would make it better. they would make it well. they would make it good.
milk and honey soap cannot make this place holy again, it is too much and too little and the stars are not real. this is not a world, this is a place in a bend that does not exist.
"The race of a thousand ants, the race-" He cries, he cries.
How tender bruised shins are, how tender a broken bone, the fractured skull.
that doesn't make sense, but let's pretend it does.
The baby boy with the hands small but blood caught under nails, too many eyes but never the ones keen enough to recognize when they should run, limbs too frail to flee.
The woman of silver and linen and quiet melodies played like keys of a music box that always seemed out of tune, uninflated balloons that hang from her fingertips in patterns of color that she does not see. She does not have his eyes.
The man of blacks and whites and a cap he can't remember getting, eyes like the father- the son? the sun. there is not red under his nails, but his eyes take the hue in stride. he moves like shadows trace ribs and the lines of emptiness on the skin. he has claws running down like tears, but he has only ever been able to cry teeth.
Before the world was the world, the sun shone in a way that was not light. it was a lightbulb that was not golden-tinged, only white. the ground was discolored like bruises of worn skin, purples and browns and blacks mashing in a way like how one chews through the gummy silver meat that gleams in a way it shouldn't, pale as death. Gnawing at itself. the voices are not voices, the skies are sometimes lavender, magenta the color of a highlighter spilled on paper, sometimes a sickly heated yellow. The baby does not like this, but he hunts for the Mondays all the same.
the world is cold, then, cold enough to drown in like salt dissolved in water, ice that never drowned. The baby shivers, the father leaves, the mother cries. her tears could fill the world. they do not, she drowns in herself instead. the baby shakes, shakes, shakes. heaving chest never full enough, the world wheezes with smoke and cigarette ash.
he wails for a day he knows is coming but it never becomes any easier as drawings roll to life with slender hands and pale button faces and crossed-out eyes. the bathtub is stained red, scribbled crimson gore, but there was no water? it doesn't matter. Do I have to remind you of the baby's least favorite toy?
the world tastes tart. the sky has turned to the color of mulberry. the baby hides in the woman's arms, and she hides from the feathered and the toothed, the too-many-scaled and the too-many-eyed and the too-little time, she hides.
today is never yesterday, yesterday is never the same.
It's time to go to bed.