Work Text:
I can see the end in the beginning of everything
And in it, you don't want me
But I still play pretend like I don't watch you leaving
-Janie, Ethel Cain
-✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧-
The cursor flickered before Sable’s eyes. The document was empty: an English assignment she was excited about two days ago, but had suddenly lost interest in. Her favourite candle had been burning for a while now; an artificial pumpkin that was running on fumes. The album she’d put on to focus was nearly over, the music crashing and falling through her earbuds: an instrumental track that just made her miserable.
She was stuck. Not out of academic exhaustion or indignance toward the project itself– no, it wasn’t anything like that.
She’d become apathetic; toward what, she wasn’t sure– because it felt like she’d become this way about everything.
Morning cups of coffee didn’t cheer her. The moon never seemed to want to reveal herself to Sable anymore through the windows. Those creepy forums she liked to dive into for hours seemed bland, listless. She was upset with others for their creativity– how come they had so much of it? Overnight, it seemed a switch had been flipped, the panel ripped off and sealed back up with nothing but unbreakable concrete.
Simply put, nothing was making any sense anymore.
What she thought she knew had been flipped on its head: who she was, what it all meant.
It seemed like everything was unravelling, and she was limited to the role of a passive spectre; hands extended, but with limp fingers. She did not have the energy to bring herself to fix it.
Sable shut her laptop and snuffed out the flame, smoky plumes of black marring her fingertips. She put her head down onto the cluttered desk and hid there in the dark for a little while, her head swollen and aching but with no agonizing thoughts to even fill it. The one thing circulating throughout it was small whispers of desires she’d never dare tell anyone about, even though they simply were soft, gentle things. Snippets of a life she wished she could live.
Of things she could never have.
The center of most of them was someone she likened to an angel sent from Heaven; someone she knew well but not as well as she’d like to. She’d felt the distance stretching out between them, and it made her feel like the world was going to end. Like it was all bound to come crashing down any minute. But in her head, in these sweet, cinnamon-sugar-coated dreams of hers, everything was as she believed it should be.
Mikaela, with her hair curly and untamed and a thick-knit sweater pulled over her constellated skin, held Sable close to her warm, pillowy chest.
‘I won’t let you fall apart,’ she’d whisper, softly, and her lips would kiss hers even softer. She’d say it over and over again, until Sable herself believed it. She’d look at her and everything would click into place, like the dredges of a mystery all working together to snare the perpetrator.
But that would never happen, Sable mourned, staring at the polaroid wedged between her mirror’s wooden frame and the glass; the vivid depiction of the whole universe personified, smiling next to a living corpse. The only one who… understood her– Who could bear to be around her and listen to her prattle on about things that nobody else would dare hear out. But Mikaela had friends— Other friends who could help her and treat her better than Sable could manage to. She would always turn to these friends instead, and had been, now more than ever.
Mikaela’s father passed away three weeks ago.
She hadn’t been at school until earlier today, and there, seeing her sit across the keyed-up cafeteria, dejected, Sable found she couldn’t move. She didn’t know what to say— she had no comforting, wise words of advice or consolation to give— and thought that anything would just make her worse. She was beautiful in her despair, a wilting muse, and Sable wanted so terribly to hold her and tell her it’d be alright– but she didn’t because she thought it’d drive her farther away.
So she watched her eat and waited patiently for those crystalline eyes, shadowed by a carrion red-violet, to flicker over to where she sat. She felt her heart pound when she stood up and walked around to the other side of the table, but felt her stomach twist in helpless agony when she realized it was just to throw out her sandwich wrapper. Mikaela was not going to talk to her today. Sable accepted it sorrowfully.
Yet still, she watched. She caught a glimpse of her hair, bright as a robin’s belly, flouncing down the hall around the end of lunch; she was on the way to English, the one class they had together that semester. Holding onto her books for dear life, hiding in the dark curtain of her hair, Sable resigned herself to a slow, even pace and began to follow her there from a small distance away.
Sable’s books felt like cinderblocks in her arms, her heart lunched in her throat, and her lungs began to contract as she wallowed up the stairs after her and caught a saccharine wave of Mikaela’s perfume in the cramped, empty stairwell that was heavy with the smell of the school’s heating system. It was as if the walls were closing in on her, the woodsy scent of vanilla mingling with the suffocating, all-encompassing warmth; she almost gasped. Mikaela didn’t look behind her.
A little farther down the hall, catching her breath and regaining her composure, Sable noticed a cluster of people outside the English classroom.
Mikaela’s gait had changed from sombre to slightly uplifted as her eyes rose from the floor to meet them, all waving her down and offering compassionate smiles. Suddenly, the air around Mikaela had shifted. She drew closer to the group, allowing them into her bubble of personal space, although she had not even allowed Sable to linger there. They patted her arms, offered her gentle embraces, and she softened with each one. Sable could only watch.
A strange mix of contempt, self-hatred, and longing issued forth from her stomach as they drew her away from the classroom and far, far away from her, down the next stairwell, into the next world over. The bell rang, then.
Sable walked into the classroom and took her seat next to the window, nauseous all the time she watched Mikaela’s figure flutter alongside the autumn leaves from behind the raindrop-dotted panes. She and her amorphous crowd flickered for a moment along the dreary, beige parking lot below before they turned a corner down the street and vanished from Sable’s sight; Doubtlessly headed for the smoker’s pit, or the convenience store, or the baseball diamond.
She felt as if they were worlds apart, suspended in air. Everything the teacher said went in one ear and out the other as she chewed on the insides of her cheeks and scrawled hasty, illegible words onto her notebook’s last page:
Mikael I want you to come and take me with you wherever you go
Bound ceaselessly into the past present future life death anywhere anywhere
Where I can hide behind the curtain of that red flowing river of fire you’ve got pouring from your head
Into candles and wool and cotton and sweat and lack of responsibility and that perfume
You’ll do it you will I know you will in my head it all makes sense
It all makes sense that you’ll help me keep me
Disorganized and fluttery by your side,
Just a second away from certain death,
Waiting for you to tell me that the storm has passed,
And hold me to your breast in the moonlight and the hum of words in your throat,
And keep me safe there forever.
All I want to do is be your thing.
She didn’t remember when she started writing poetry about Mikaela– or, rather, flowery prose about her– but she knew that it felt right to do so at that moment. She had no other outlet; Nobody to talk to who wouldn’t gawk at her, or belittle her, or tell her she was being painfully insensitive. She wrote until the nauseous feeling faded listlessly, and unceremoniously away, her thoughts settling not into quiet, but into a temporary state of apathy. So long as she convinced herself she didn’t care, and so long as she tucked it all away, she’d get through the period.
As soon as she got home, though, it all came rushing back.
Her eyes, their shadows. The crowd, the heat, her perfume. The painful abandonment she felt in the lunchroom. It all came sputtering out of her in pillow-muffled sobs, her fists clawing helplessly at her blankets and her forehead desperately nuzzling the fur of a plush tarantula that, of course, Mikaela had got for her one dreary winter day for no reason at all. She wondered, frantically, if she’d ever get little things like that back.
She felt all of her insecurities and faults come crashing down on her all at once, keeping a mental tally mark for each one she remembered: She was too brash, too obsessive, too apathetic, too selfish, too eager, and not eager enough. She never had the money to buy Mikaela anything nice, she didn’t take the same level math course as her and could never help Mikaela with her work, she never had anything good to say whenever Mikaela was upset, and one time she didn’t answer her calls for a whole day because she was mad at the world, and for whatever reason, Sable had decided that included her.
Every tick made Sable curl further into herself. It made sense. Perfect sense. She almost wanted Mikaela to just get it over with and confirm all of her worst nightmares so she wouldn’t have to writhe like this. She wanted her to kick her onto the floor and scream at her until her ears bled, because at least she could understand why she’d want to. This, she thought, was crueller.
Of course, though, the tempest had died down into a mild drizzle. Sable settled at her desk, tried to get something done, and gave up. The killing thoughts picked away at her brain once more, a sickening whisper of I can’t do anything right stuck on an endless loop in her mind as she packed her notes back into her bag.
Aimlessly, she looked around her bedroom; clothes strewn about, posters and tapestries tacked over uneven strokes of black paint she’d had to do herself two years prior, because her parents wouldn’t help. Mikaela was somehow in every corner and yet nowhere to be found: in her bedsheets, tangled up in memories of sleepovers past. On her corkboard, tacked on and perpetually smiling in some pretty sunset. In the margins of her homework, the backs of her notebooks, the tips of her pens, the jewelry around her neck. Everywhere and nowhere. Everything and nothing.
Sable threw herself back onto her bed, head angled up at the window. Two trees were dancing a delicate, branchless ditsy against the purple-grey sky of evening, and Sable longed wantonly to take their shape. To be free to simply sway, at the mercy of the wind, and to feel nothing except its kiss against her oaken skin. In her head, words padded in strained bursts against her skull:
So that I may watch and listen to the sounds of their branches and the cars on the road
And the longer I stare, the more I wish I were like those two
Free, high up, whereas I am so below
And it comes to me softly, this idea,
It falls on me like a gentle snow
That if only I were with you, I could be that way the wind would be all I know
Sable could feel herself perpetually sinking, lower and lower into a kind of darkness, as the sun quickly fell behind the clouds and drew her room into a streetlamp-lit black.
She wrapped her arms around herself and held the stuffed tarantula close, listening intently as the wind started to pick up outside. The trees, once so sweetly swaying, began to knock into one another with a noisy fervour. The branches cracked, like twigs under her boot, incessantly, and the sound all fell down on her like a weighted blanket. She sank, further and further, into her bedsheets, and a kind of drowsy tranquillity hugged her dearly. Her eyes closed, pictures began to develop just behind them, of barren trees and powerlines and thick sweaters and coffee breath and a dark car’s dashboard lit by a green speedometer in the night.
The car was humming along some forgotten road, headlights guiding their way to nowhere in particular and caressing the surrounding woods. Sable was drearily sitting in the passenger seat, on the verge of falling asleep. Something gentle was playing from the radio, a melancholy and romantic ballad of sorts, and Mikaela was in the next seat over, one hand on the wheel with her other in Sable’s. She felt so in love. Like there was nowhere she wanted to be but there, even through her lucidity. The moon and stars smiled down on them from the windshield, twinkling against the deep black sky, and Mikaela turned down some lonely road, the turn signal chiming softly.
She parked the car, Sable rising slightly from her doze. Blue eyes met green in the near-darkness of the cabin, and they both smiled. Sable could see Mikaela’s curls, haloed by the headlights outside… an angel.
Mikaela stepped out of the car, boots crunching against the fallen leaves, and opened Sable’s door. She helped her climb out, and the two were alone in the coldness of the night. They stepped over roots embedded deep within the forest ground, mitten-covered hands holding onto another tightly. They walked farther and farther into the long, silent woods, Mikaela illuminating the path ahead with a bobbing flashlight beam. Sable understood that Mikaela knew where she was headed. Sable trusted her so fully it made her ache. Her heart thudded from beneath her coat, and a warm blush billowed up past where her scarf touched her cheeks.
Mikaela stopped, and Sable stumbled forward and hit her pillowy chest, a gentle puff echoing into the din. Mikaela caught her with steady hands and laughed with a sound like chiming bells, holding Sable within her warm line of sight for a moment, eyes gazing down on her with adoration unlike any she’s ever known. They were the only people on the planet in the concentrated beam of the flashlight. Completely alone, save each other.
A thought passed Sable’s mind errantly: I hope I die before you.
But before Sable could finally press her fluttery lips to those parted beautifully before her, frosted with the Autumn air, Mikaela took a few steps back into the receding darkness.
Sable stood, unmoving, as Mikaela wedged the flashlight between the roots of a craggy tree.
The utter silence of the woods crept up on her; an unnerving kind of silence that she felt would be interrupted at any minute. The only sounds she could decipher were the rustling of Mikaela’s jacket, her own breathing, and the light sound of the barren trees blowing against one another in quickening succession. But even Mikaela stopped moving; she stared at her from behind obscured glasses, shadows encompassing nearly every dimension of her. Only her silhouette stood out against the white-lit tree, the moon hiding pensively behind deep grey clouds.
In her silence, Sable found comfort. In her darkness, familiarity. Like all the lights went out all across the galaxy, the whole world finally slowing its pace. So she walked, tentatively forward, with both her arms out, toward the shadowy figure of the girl before her.
She held her still form gently, both arms tucked so sweetly under Mikaela’s stationary arms and folded across her back. She pressed her nose against her neck, eyes closed in the dulcet absorption of her soft, warm skin.
Time became an abstract concept, Sable standing there for what felt like an eternity– a sweet, blessed eternity– but Mikaela never moved. There was blood thrumming beneath her skin, and the steady roll of her chest against Sable’s as she breathed, but nothing beyond that. Sable began to mutter pleas against her neck, muffled in the folds of her scarf, deep and mournful:
“Please, I know you wanted to show me something…”
“Mikaela, Mikaela, please.. Please hold me… please..”
“Please.. Please say something…”
“I thought you wanted me,”
At her final plea, the light went out.
Silence.
Shuffling.
Silence.
Shuffling.
A plume of hot breath brushed against Sable’s cheek.
A sound like something growing, intermittent cracks and pops, and the breath grew nearer.
Choking, the sound of someone choking in her right ear. Sable stiffened.
“Mikaela..?” She whispered as something began to snake around her neck, as hard and rough as a tree branch.
Tighter, then. Hotter, then.
“I lo--ve y--ou,” Mikaela’s voice breathed, strained, like there was a lump in her throat– A grotesque noise issued forth from it, from the very back, and Sable stood, transfixed.
On her lips slept an unspoken response she found she couldn’t verbalize.
Mikaela painfully pressed on.
“I lo--o--ve you,” She spoke roughly. “I lo--ove y--y--ou. I love you. I love yo–-ou.”
The branches held them there, together, without an inch between them.
“I lo--ve yo--u, l--o–ve.. Yo--u.. love…”
Sable felt her body begin to writhe, her veins beginning to thrum with searing pain. It started with her fingers, the bones cracking and her nails extending and…
“I love you,” she screamed, feeling it. “I love you! I love you!”
“Lo--ove.. You…” Came Mikaela’s sweet, broken call.
“I love you.”
“I..”
Until neither of them could say it anymore.
“Sable!” Someone called, distantly. “Sable!” They called again. But the haze was so thick that she couldn’t hear them. Her head was full of photos of clouds, of trees, and of vanilla perfume. Of happiness. Togetherness.
But it didn’t last.
Sable groggily woke to the familiar sound of the trees hitting each other outside her window against the dusk– and her mother’s incessant, terrible calling.
-✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧-
Dinner passed in the usual, uncomfortable succession; Sable picking idly at her plate, having lost her appetite. Her mother, badgering her about her day and somehow managing to get into some meaningless argument with her over nothing at all. It made Sable sick, the way her father would just stare– idly nod along to the cruel epithets falling from her mother’s mouth like the swirls of spaghetti she shoved into it– no intention whatsoever to intervene or have any original thought of his own.
“How’s Mikaela doing?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? What, you haven’t been there for her? Sable–”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“...”
“Her dad died, like, not even three weeks ago. I don’t think she’s alright.”
“I was just asking a question, Sable. You don’t need to get so… so defensive.”
“Thanks for dinner.”
After twenty-five minutes of gritting and bearing it, Sable found herself back in the safe, yet somewhat suffocating confines of her dark bedroom. The walls held her gently, if not a little painfully, and she once more curled up on her bed, holding the stuffed tarantula in her schoolclothes. She realized she hadn’t even changed yet.
She closed her eyes and tried to return to the forest.
In the silence of her bedroom, she imagined the cold nip of the wind, the crunching of leaves under two pairs of boots; mittened hands, intertwined.
But all she was met with was the near-blackness of her eyelids.
She clutched her stomach, feeling all her woe turn to nausea–
It wasn’t fair.
She didn’t get to pick to feel this way.
She didn’t get a choice.
She didn’t want to want her, her knotted curls, her crystalline eyes; the perfect, moonlike softness of her skin when her shirt lifts up just a bit as she reaches over to grab something– a coffee from the cafe downtown, an eyelash curler, or a creased book; the way it makes Sable’s stomach turn and her heart race. She didn’t want to be burdened with imagining the way the curves of her skin would feel under her fingertips, shaky with love-letter jitters. How her hands, gloved and sheathed in purple dye, massaged Sable’s scalp the first time she ever coloured it.
All of these things, she didn’t want to notice anymore. She wanted to shut them out, to shut these feelings out and just be okay with being alone– with the fact that they would never have a place to go. She prayed it wouldn’t be forever.
But she wanted forever to involve her.
There was no world, no universe, no plane of existence where Sable would ever want to be without her. In every single one, should she lose her, she had an inkling of a feeling that she would find a way to follow.
She knew she’d stay with her, even if some day they should be just two matching missing posters tacked up on some forgotten pole. On the edge of town, decaying from exposure to the ceaseless elements.
Just dots of blood on the ground and shell casings on the floor.
Locks of hair tucked away in some evidence lock-up.
Footsteps on a muddy trail.
Everywhere. Anywhere–
But the concept of her love being suffocating and too much to bear waded through her consciousness as if a plague.
She understood at once that it could smother.
Injure. Hurt. Mar. Kill.
It frightened her that the prospect of forever might not be as appealing to her as it would be to her love–
It rattled her body with nerves; the anxiety of a doe being hunted for sport, right in the sniper’s eyeline.
Sable touched the fading brunette locks and frowned. It had turned to a miserable gray.
She lurched out of bed, her veins thrumming with the need to do something– she got up and leafed through the stacks of CDs cluttered on top of her desk, on her bookcase, looking for that one. She reached up toward the battery pack dangling from a thumbtack on the wall, switching on her fairy lights and watching everything come to sparkling, amber light. If she was going to be miserable, she was going to find a way to do it sweetly. To package it up into a digestible little ball, a pretty pill to swallow. She wanted to wrap her arms around her sadness as if it were a dying copy of herself, bleeding out slowly on the ground. To soothe it, but not eliminate it.
She wanted to writhe. It was better than feeling nothing at all; better than coasting through life as a passive spectre. A zombie.
She popped open the jewel case: Sable’s Gloomy Mix.
On the inside, buried between clippings of printed out images of pentagrams and moons and her favourite musicians, written in a curling black pen: Love, Mikaela.
-✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧⋆˖⁺‧₊☽◯☾₊‧⁺˖⋆ ✩₊˚.⋆☾⋆⁺₊✧-
The crunch of wheels against the driveway cut through the bleating music. Sable rolled over to face the window, and the dim glow of her room was subsequently filled with light, reflecting a luminous square of headlights onto her wall.
Her phone had been buzzing for a while on her desk. She hadn’t checked it.
The red numbers of her alarm clock read 9:32– definitely too late for any of her parents’ friends to be visiting. Sable rolled over again and pulled the blankets over her head, trying to ignore the jingling of keys and the thick sound of a car door closing. The knock on the door.
She shut her eyes tight. Maybe they’ll go away.
A few seconds ticked by. The knock sounded again, and her phone buzzed in succession. She wished it’d just fall off the table.
Stubbornly, she threw the blanket off her head and sat on the edge of the bed, tarantula in her lap, waiting to see if it’d sound again.
Instead, her ringer went off.
The ringer. Hers. Wind chimes.
Sable hovered at the windowsill. Out there, in the black of night, under the orange glow of the old streetlight, was a beat-up old blue truck.
“Sable, could you get the door, please?” her mother called from down the hall, knitting in bed while watching the televangelists preach over cable television. Their haughty, loud voices echoed throughout the carpeted stairwell, vibrating the photos hanging from the peeling floral wallpaper.
And love, well, his love has the power to save the world.
And it did. He has. From eternal damnation. Because of him…
“Sable,”
…we will be saved from the permanence of death. From burning in the pitiful fires of hell, if we just choose to believe in him and his doctrine of love.
“Sable!”
Because isn’t that what we all want? To be loved? Christ loves us. God loves each and every one of you.
The voices all faded into errant murmurs when she descended the stairs. A different voice sounded out this time. Beyond the partition. A voice so sweet. So gentle. Wracked with something like concern.
“Sable?”
She fumbled to unlock the door, throwing it open hesitantly, her heart beating beating beating in her chest–
There she stood, her hair blowing in the uneven, vindictive wind. An angel in the porch light, denim jacket, knitted scarf, circle glasses, black leggings. Black boots on the beige straw mat.
Mikaela looked at her, relief rendering her features softer than silk.
They didn’t talk– Sable couldn’t move. All she could see were her constellational freckles, and all she could feel was the world slowing down, the televangelist's murmurs from above repeating over and over:
Isn’t that what we all want? To be loved?
“Who is it?” Her mother called.
Sable stepped onto the porch and closed the door behind her.
“Hi,” Sable mouthed, barely audible. She felt vulnerable.
Mikaela stuffed her hands into her pockets, nervous. “Hey.”
A few seconds of silence slipped past them before Mikaela tentatively brushed the apple of Sable’s cheek and frowned. “Your mascara’s all smudged.”
“W–why are you here?” Sable whispered, subconsciously leaning in to the touch. “I mean, you ignore me all day and then leave during class and–” Sable bit the inside of her cheeks to quell her anger. Her heart was screaming. ‘Of course it’s smudged. You did it to me. You did it you did it why are you doing this to me–’
“I didn’t want to… I didn’t want to burden you with...”
“You can burden me with anything!” Sable suddenly cried, despite herself. “Anything! Just please don’t leave me,” Her plea turned soft, her whole body trembling with the weight of her honesty. With the weight of her presence. “Please don’t leave me…”
Sable’s body tensed, her hands protectively covering her chest, like Mikaela might see too far into it, might harvest the gooey feelings at the center and laugh at their intensity– the sheer weight of them. But she just stood there, immobile. A hurt kind of compassion fell across her parted lips. An angel in the porch light.
“I don’t want to lay all of this on you,” She looked heavily at the ground, her eyes turning pink and gummy and welling up with tears that she hastily began to suck in. “I just want to say I’m sorry. And that I wanted to see you. But I can’t explain–” Her voice turned stringent, her eyes flicked up piercingly, and she drew in a deep, cold breath. “God, Sable, I can’t even explain.”
They stood, only a hair’s breadth away from one another– and yet to cross that threshold, that small, yet enormous threshold– would be to put something into the world and into their lives that they weren’t sure they’d be able to keep alive.
But Sable wanted it, even if it only breathed and blossomed for a second. Some things are ephemeral, but in Mikaela’s eyes, she saw eternity stretching out before her like the curving, star-speckled roadways and suffocating branches from her dreams.
They would suffer, but they would suffer together.
Sable might hurt her. They might even learn to hate each other.
But she wanted so badly to try, to give one, feeble attempt at forever.
So she fell, headfirst, into Mikaela’s arms, and was surprised to find those same arms holding her tenderly, gently, with no reserve.
“Let’s go somewhere,” Mikaela spoke, her lips moving sweetly against the ruffles of Sable’s hair. “Not my house. But just… somewhere. For now.”
Everywhere, anywhere.
“Anywhere,” Sable gasped. “Please.”
Muddy trails missing posters shell casings evidence locker
Mikaela took her trembling hand and, nodding, offered a misty smile.
“Anywhere.”
Sable’s mother called from the porch as they drove on into the night, tucked away safely in the cabin of Mikaela’s truck. But it was of no use.
Love had clogged the ears of reason;
It had eclipsed the ache of reality.
And they were going to regret this forever.