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Aklaustos ἄκλαυστος - adj. - unmourned, unlamented, unwept
A sickness in the air and it smelled of seawater, wet, layered, folded through with bristling rot, sodden decomposition. There was no body to decay, yet the stench remained; the spider's catch, it hung, pendulous, throat cracked on a red-woven strand, the twisting sway. It tasted of a tooth, bacterial-sweet, gripping the back-most gums in gnarled roots, then clicked loose by a wandering tongue. How deep familial roots grow. What a desperation to carve them free. What a wretched exigence.
The day was bright and the people streamed by, cheery. Satsuki Kiryuin walked down the crowded city street and people parted before her, the dark waving of her skirts and subtly woven, the paces of her feet, sandal-bound. She had a step like purpose and an air like dominion. It was her mother who'd smote and slew yet Satsuki roamed now, a feeling akin to shame riding her narrow shoulders, hems heavy as though with matricidal gore.
She paused and the crowd created a wide berth. To her left, midway down the street reared up a shop displaying a large pair of cartoon scissors. They looked nothing at all like the blades Ryuko had wielded once upon a time. Almost idly she ran her fingers through the long hair that fanned to her waist. She had not made the final cut – her mother would not demure to fall at a lesser mortal's hand – but she felt bloodied all the same, raw and breathing, a swift dripping inhalation this brutal extispicy. She could not make the final cut, but something else of hers could use an alteration.
A bell chimed when she entered the shop, heralding her appearance.
A plain-looking girl behind the counter with a smile as bright as the weather, "Can I help you?"
"Is there an opening right now?" Satsuki asked, grip tightening on the straps of her bag.
"You're in luck. Right this way."
Ushered to a low-backed chair she sat, placing the bag at her feet while the attendant fetched the barber. Footsteps behind her. She tensed. Her eyes flicked to the mirror. It was only the barber approaching. He greeted her with a kindly expression.
"What can I do for you today?" he asked, reaching out to weigh the long wave of her hair in his hands.
She opened her mouth. She meant to say, "Just a trim," but instead what came out was, "All of it."
He blinked down at her, "Are you sure? It seems such a shame."
Her brows furrowed, eyes hardening, and the barber fended off her glare with raised arms, "Alright. If you insist."
She said nothing in reply but internally she wrestled. It had grown too long in any case. Just as she had – grown too fain to slay her mother. How toxic to harbour so desperate a wish for so long, the wish to carve a path from sternum to navel, entrails splashing to the floor, the blade trembling in her hands. Nothing had ever felt so right as when she had cut off her mother's head. The rush of triumph had flooded her. Just the memory now made her want to be sick.
The barber wrapped a black cloth around her, fastened tight at her throat. She swallowed past the obstruction, a laver's swathing cloth, wrapping the dead – a net, a trammel, an entangling robe. She was the weapon of some strangling thief, full of exult in the heat of villainy – she felt short of breath. She gripped the arms of the chair, knuckles flashing silver and pink. She felt the balk shuddering just beneath her skin, as stags the hounds. Blood-staint, blood-guilt, and the very air she breathed tinged metallic.
With a resigned sigh the barber took up his scissors and brought them down on fistfuls of her hair. It fell like a downy tide, strange sparrows with their songs dark and foreign. Hands in her lap. Severed hair fluttered like cloth between her fingers, two locks clenched in closed palms. Her breaths quickened.
Hands curling in warm bathwater. Her mother's mouth upon hers and it always tasted wine-dark, libations black and bitter. Dead. At last she's dead. Then why the memories hounding her still? The dead should lie prone. Satsuki would rest easier having seen her corpse, over which to scatter fuel – spark and tinder and clean woodsmoke – and drown her bones in the wicked sea.
Here she sat and here she struck and here her work was done. She never killed her, but her hands were still stained with the dull lathe of blood. Blood for blood, avenging sister and father – Ryuko would forever in some part of her mind remain a child enwound and slain in merciless nets. She'd kill her mother for kin, but most of all for herself. And if she'd poured libations down her body, what wine could match her words? It was right and more than right. Even in memory her mother flooded the vessel of their proud house in misery, the vintage of the curse, and now she drank the dregs.
She sat in the barber's chair, and each expert snip of scissors was a furious chthonic whisper, hissed in her ear until the sound was the roar of the distant shore.
"There," the barber brushed away any last loose strands, "What do you think?"
Satsuki's head shot up and her reflection stared back at her. She looked more like her mother than ever, hair running a sharp line parallel to her jaw, gaze flinty, mouth down-turned. Her reflection stared back – beware, child, a parent's dying curse. She blinked, breath caught somewhere deep in her chest. She'd as good as killed her mother and there was no doe-eyed goddess to absolve her. Just herself. And she was just a girl with a cheap haircut.
Tearing at the too-tight robe around her neck, Satsuki cast the cape away, "It's fine," she exhaled once it was free, "It's fine."
She leaned down and picked up her bag and when she rose to her feet amidst the ruinous pools of her colubrine hair, she felt cleaner than she had in years.
FIN.