you're too young & eager to love

4 shorts. Some are shorter than others. I present: Maharet, the hydra, Reese, and a violent Addison and Mischa’s maker scene.

And pictures, because I can.  
Fly my pretties, fly!








She was more forest than woman. Her eyes, tonight, were blue (though where she found the replacements here, in the heart of the Peruvian jungle, was a deep and secret thing). Maharet smelled of the earth, of the rich, worm soils and the sweetness of ancient flowers. Her hair bound half-back, coiling like rope down her shoulders. She was still tall even beside such vast trees, and she would have roamed with the hunting beasts of the night.
She was nowhere and then immediately beside him, ushered forward by invisible air. Her Nordic.
“How do you do that?” Mael’s anger stirred the air, a thickness as palpable as the amazon’s humidity. He hated this climate, this world of heat and treasures. It was too impenetrable for his need.
He had been searching for months, sending a plea that was the syllables of her archaic name.
Maharet’s smile was full of knowing and touched by a wretchedness she never fully felt entitled to. But her voice was forever unchanged – the tone of a young woman composed of shadows and sand. “How do you walk? A series of simple gestures.” She teased him, in her own way.
The anger again, a fury that, if possible, would have bruised her heart. He was a stoic, yet fearful creature, at once in love and at odds with the marble queen beside him.





The world split.
Something deep within the earth roared and became unleashed. Talons clawing the earth and a beast of a million necks, the rustling of scales and timeless venom. She emerged, the rage of eons and uncomfortable in the light.

By the time she reached the water, she was nearly human. The whisper of a serpentine tail, slashing through the murky bottom depths, was the last to fade. Her unearthly skin and questioning eyes, the scars, peppering across her shoulders, and like brands upon her, now, singular throat – long and a column of strength. She felt contained, more than she had before, below, in the darkness. Her mind hurt already, snapping jaws struggling to break forth.







He is muscular, lean. Unbuttoning his shirt in the soggy gloom of an Alabama night. The crickets are being drowned out by something more consistent and less stringy; it takes him a moment to realize that it’s his heart, thundering inside his chest. Elie knows - she can hear it from inside the truck ten feet back, in her drawn and stretched position (boots sticking out of the window, skirt riding indecently high) and despite the heavy way she’s pulling on a cigarette. He would think she was sulking, but the mist in her bright eyes confuses him.
Reese doesn’t want to think. He shrugs out of the shirt, folds it neatly and puts it on the ground before working the clasp of his belt. Thick leather. Leather that could bind wrists or ankles. Sort of slides out of his pants like they’re a second skin. Folds them too.
By the time Elie finishes her cigarette, the smoke making her eyes hurt, he’s already gone. Swift as rain, pushing through the trees and ears back flat, running from something that heart of his can’t quite escape.





She knew. Not human. Knew before she had to open her eyes, knew before the terror engulfed her insides, turned them to ice. Funny how cold she could feel and it still didn’t match the temperature of the hand grabbing her neck. Addison didn’t scream though the noise rose up, just couldn’t get past her lips because of the blood in her mouth.
Scent like oranges and cream and sunlight. The sort of things he never cared for, not even when he was human.
He breaks three of her fingers in the first ten seconds. Her fault, the blind way she snatched at his face, going for the eyes like that could possibly matter. Shattered the tiny bones of her left wrist as though they were hollow, made for flight. She screamed then, a guttural choking sound. He makes sure to silence that though – a clean tear of his teeth in her neck. Not gentle, not that burning type of intimacy she associates with Mischa. Mischa who was dishonest, who said you didn’t feel much as you died. She was feeling everything in thundering, electric drumming beats that shook her.
Ripe and vital. That’s how he thinks of her. Splitting open her core to look at her glistening, vulnerable insides. He says she’s a fool - a fragile, frail thing. Insignificant and quick to join the dust. Because look how easily she could be destroyed. How easily her security could be proven unreliable. He is not Mischa; she is not deserving.
Addison couldn’t remember the grave, because she never experienced it. He had. He had that coffin savageness now, drinking her in mouthfuls.