you're too young & eager to love

I have brought a character back from the dead!

Or, well, I've started to. Random bits with Olivia follow under the cut, along with a picture because I couldn't resist. Calliope is mentioned as well as a nameless potential relationship-guy. Who is gradually dying. Whaaat? Yeah, my mind always goes to angst.

P.S. The only reason I stopped working on these is because I made the mistake of looking up size zero models and grossed myself out. I'm hoping to continue later.

P.S.S. (so I don't forget): Things I plan on writing soon - Tombstone, Clementine, Addison, something sci-fi, Emere.





They are twin scarecrows, the insides of their arms littered with battle scars from syringes. The boy is slighter, but Olivia is taller with bony elbows and hands like claws, strong and brash to match her laugh. Her fingers seem to taper into nothingness, like her waist. There used to be a time when he, deliriously sick and realizing his impending death, wondered if he could slit his wrist on her hipbones.

Beside him on the hospital bed, her hair is the color of tea-with-honey and brittle. Strands of it keep coming out whenever she shifts, her legs entangling his, her eyes on the sterile ceiling fan. “This place could make a corpse out of anyone, you know? I feel hollow.” And he knows this is what she loves best, the empty, weightless salvation of her starving insides.

The teeth-scrape scars on her white knuckles are testaments of her will.

-

They met in the hospital, after Olivia’s weight dipped down into the lower eighties and she looked worse than a Holocaust victim. Except she smiled more, dancing around the pristine corridors to the music blaring from her headphones, dragging an IV bag on wheels with her and using it as an impromptu microphone. Mid-twirl, her ankle buckled under her minute weight, and she fell – caught herself on the metal bars of the nearest patient’s bed. His. He remembers how red the inside crook of her elbow had been then, how angry, after she’d refused the IV by tearing it out four separate times.

He told her she looked like an underfed alley cat, and she said his head looked like an eggshell.

He has something incurable, something destroying him slowly, and they switch his medication so often that he starts charting the days by the colors of pills. The doctors need the lining of his stomach to heal, so he drinks too much milk and survives on a liquid diet, but the pink capsules make him hungry for steaks cooked rare and fried chicken. The blue ones, he tells her, are hunger suppressants. All the pills – it’s just a balancing act.

She pops them into her mouth before leaving, her first meal of the day.

-

Olivia used to tell Calliope that she was a calorie-free banquet. Calliope never laughed.

She gets out of the hospital, entertains the concept of therapy, and does a gram of coke as celebration. So thin, but an inch from being unhealthy, and she finds solace on the plush carpets of Calliope’s rich floors. She even eats a piece of homemade pie - scrapes the filling away and only nibbles on the crust.

The brunette has a new bruise, shining and large, on her waist. Olivia spends twenty minutes in the upstairs guest bathroom and Calliope can hear her gargling mouthwash afterwards. They speak in silences; they speak around themselves.

-


She hasn’t had a period in years. Her organs have started protesting, but she’s a pretty package at five foot ten and a size zero, wrapped in haute couture. Prominent cheekbones and a square jaw, her sloe-eyed stare peering up at her from the covers of magazines.

-

He’s done with the hospital, for now. He has enough prescriptions to kill a Clydesdale in his medicine cabinet and enough blankets to ward off any chill in his bones. Olivia visits with throw pillows and plush decorations, wearing so many French silk scarves that he can’t see her neck or the bones protruding from her collar. She brings groceries too, even though he never sees her eat, and he no longer has much taste for food. He isn’t like her – he eats to live everything seems to taste chalky. He thinks that’s the oxycodone.

She comes around enough that he’s starting to learn a few things, like the way Olivia keeps lists religiously and never shares them with anyone and sometimes looks at him just a touch too long. The way she slouches in her seats like a bored schoolgirl but carries herself like a soldier, the way she drinks coffee like water and looks particularly striking in red and has a habit of spinning pens through her long fingers without seeming to notice it.

Even though the last time they saw each other was months ago (she’s been in China for an editorial), she’s still striking. Still attentive and dedicated and wearing things that flatter her in ridiculous ways. It’s quite an accomplishment really, because there are no curves to her tall body, just brutal angles and cutting lines. He’s still a man, so sometimes he thinks about what it would be like to fuck a girl like her, to push her against his antique-style desk until she is half-absorbed by the wood. He wonders if it would feel like anything, lifting her and twisting her and how easily she might snap. If her hair would come off in his hands like he imagines a cancer patient’s would.

Olivia, he realizes, keeps most of her true sentiments close. She changes her body, accent, and affiliations depending on photo-shoot circumstances and motivation and necessity. The things she can’t change, those are what she locks away the most fiercely.