you're too young & eager to love

I'm back! Now that school and the pressure of the end of the semester is over.

I'm bringing a gift. Obsessed!Frollo and Esmerelda. Not much of it though, alas. Based on that oh so famous Disney scene. (Yet my mental image is a combination of just about every interpretation ever made.)

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Oh Notre Dame, how I beseech you.

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He dreams of her.

The dusk color of her thighs, the length of her neck and the fit of a rope around it. How the coarse thickness of her hair is turned silken by the touch of his fingers. The gypsy-woman, dancing before flames, and twisting riddles that sound like fate.

With her mouth against his ear, she speaks of sanctuaries.

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He knows her. He has seen her face on every harlot, her colored skirts against the walls of his sacred city. She spins and spins and yet does not topple. The gold tossed to her feet reminds him of Judas, and he spends the cold hours of morning with the rosary between his fingers.

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He would confine her, if he could.

Sanction her to stone walls and incense air.

The fire licks at her fingers, and she laughs, brazen and defiant. He is burned when he tries to touch her. She tells him that freedom is something earned and not by prayer. That salvation is found in the heart and not in servitude. But what he notices is the shape of her mouth, the space between her lips where the smoke slips from.