& words

That I may or may not finish??? probably not let’s be honest here.
The premise I had was this:

Rose goes to sleep! And then a dead older Rose from a dreambubble hijacks it and begins talking to her about the memory that killed her!

And that whole set-up would’ve been lead into, obviously, because it is not meant to be initially clear at all. :I I spoiled it. It was me. Don’t care!!!

Whatever you’re thinking right now, stop. Instead, picture:

The sun, the real sun, sticking hot and high up in the sky like an ornament on your birthday cake. This real ornamental sun shines weakly through the cluttered treetops of the woods behind your house like a yawn, scattering light across the forest floor lazily and it’s so pretty even you stop to admire it, sometimes. Of course, only when you’re out there — which is not often, let’s not botch this fantasy of ours with dishonesty, hmmm? — surrounded by trees and dirt and moss, each gnarled trunk dark as dead blood in the shade of its canopy and not quite shooting up from the ground, but creeping, because trees as old and grand as this are gradual, deliberate. The air is just warm enough to stick to your skin, fill up all the cracks and scars (some of these you remember from a game you played when you were younger, some of these you don’t remember from the drollness of your life after you’d won — but no matter) that write your history with the summer-sweet smell of crisp leaves, damp soil, and something a little heavier, something animal.

Imagine you are there now. More than that, pretend she is there, too. Like this:

It’s the highest point of the day. Through the splintered gaps of the trees you can see the sun crested above the mountains that seem now so far away, a country kept from you to preserve who you might have become in another, simpler life. The forest is quiet as a corpse, no birdsong because the birds fled when she plucked on noiselessly, effortlessly from a branch and split into it — the snap had choked a noise out of it. It had been a quiet noise, like the faintest whisper of a song into the radio static you sometimes don’t realize you’ve got on you’re so preoccupied, but it had been enough to grant you both silence.

You’d watched, quiet and with your legs folded neatly beneath you and your hands wrapped up in your mother’s old scarf so that they could not shake, as she peeled its feathers with practiced hands and pressed her dark mouth to it, drawing out what she needed, discarding what she did not as carelessly as she had stolen it. Your eyes had been closed — not for squeamishness (you have known the eldritch purr of each bestial and alien god from your sleep) but for respect to her privacy (your own curiosity sated long ago, near the beginning of what you’ve got now, and you do not need to see to know) - and, now, with your eyes open, you find her sweeping a stain from her lip with her thumb and she is beautiful in the way only monsters are.

Breathe. Quiet. You do not remember this yet, but you will.

She stares back at you with wide and wild jade stained eyes hooded beneath lashes she paints to grant them length and you imagine that if she still had a heartbeat locked beneath the strange bones of her chest it would be stuttering in tandem with your own. Then, she turns her gaze, her mouth twisting unpleasantly in something that you might call embarrassment if you did not know her the way that you do, and she opens her mouth, chokes before she realizes she has nothing to say.