you're too young & eager to love

Back-posting here because I forgot to post two weeks ago somehow.

I’m trying to be creative after weeks of waking up at 4:45 AM, teaching three blocks in a row, and adjusting to learning three (THREE) new digital platforms for the school year, as well as an entirely new block schedule. Exhausted? You do not know the meaning of the word!

I’m trying to chug through! Like that little persistent engine.

The prompt is a carry-over from the last session, which was just “future,” but we wanted Linemell, and I like quotes, so you’re getting one.

But honestly this is a big pile of crap and a waste of both Hadassa and a good quote. It doesn’t even get to the future aspect.


“When love is sharp it outlives the body
[…] I could cut your throat with my love."
-Yelena Moskovich



After the exsanguination, you retreat from the city.
You used to love its broken, wretched landscape. The factories churn such smog that even the daytime could feel dark while the damp alleys—festering like open wounds with the destitute, the unlucky, the forgotten—would call to the eternal snake inside of you, the beast with its hungry stomach and sharp teeth. Stalking the cobblestone streets had thrilled you, left you bloody-mouthed and wonder-struck with the lure of the hunt; the city’s throats were a fount to be pulled, and you were rarely satiated. To some, you had been beautiful in your viciousness, your ruthlessness. Yours was a name alone that could ward off potential threats, and so maybe you had overstayed your welcome, had become too comfortable in Linemell. Maybe withdrawing from the city was unavoidable, in the end, because nobody was meant to find comfort for too long within its grim, stony walls. Even Ravenstone with its angelic bells chiming each evening is not enough to cleanse the city of its filth, although the church tries.
The church tries, but you cannot.
You are not used to being unable.
You had only known that the city changed for you, much like the house itself, and the sudden awareness had settled over you like the dirt of graves or a ghost’s caul. The Victorian with its aged wood and elegant columns, its wide sprawling gardens and large wrap-around terrace, stood mute and dull for all its grandeur once the Vannier House had its vengeance. Justice? Retribution? You do not know what to call it, the blemish that is your fledgling’s betrayal or the sacrifice that had been done for your sake or the bloody reckoning that had followed.
Baron had cried, of course. His wrinkled hands had clutched at you, and he’d sobbed with the frank indignity of the elderly. It had been Kostya that had pulled him away, worried that you might hurt the old caretaker when you arguably needed him most, but you hadn’t. You had let him kiss your hands, his mouth paper-thin and wet against your palms, your smooth knuckles. He’d even grabbed at your skirts, the elegantly stitched fabric looking vulgar when held so tightly in his wrinkled, liver-spotted fingers. You told him that the house was still to be cared for in your absence, but you think a part of him had known that you were abandoning the city. He would not see you again, not in his lifetime, but he would be like Argos, old and very tired, waiting with painful hope for your return.
You don’t pity him.






You wear your grief like a shroud.
For a while, it is permissible.
It is enough.






You cannot say their names, his or hers.
It’s unfair to the girl, but your pettiness and anger will not let your mouth shape the sound of her name. It is the anger that feeds you when the sorrow has passed, and you are angry at her too—her child’s face, her cherubic eyelashes, her rosebud mouth, and then her precociousness, her willfulness, her meek human heart that had beat a rhythm he had been unable to ignore.
What had she had, you wonder, when you want to torture yourself. What is it that made her so much more desirable than you? A wisp of a child, untouched by eternity. What was worth the betrayal?
And such a betrayal it was.
The core of you, the small black heart inside the creature you feed, the part that has been with you since Sindan, this is the part that cannot conceive of forgiveness. He had deserved his death, and maybe the girl had deserved hers, but you had deserved none of it. Even during the private moments where you have only your own company to lie to, you cannot seem to trick yourself into delusion. You want the fault to be yours, only you cannot find where the trouble began. You sift through your memories like a miner sifting for gold, and each time you are empty-handed at the end. You knew him for the selfish, hungry, charming, pitiless creature he was—he had mirrored you in many ways, this you can admit, but he had done such a grievous wrong, such a sleight that you could not comprehend.
It is the burden of motherhood, you think, the hidden fear of losing that which you hold most dear, the weight of a disappointment so crushing that it feels inevitable.






Some of your children become mothers, become fathers, become parent-siblings bound by the legacy of blood-work. You’re happy for them, but the happiness is a pallid, perfunctory thing, a feeling on the edges of your soul. Distantly, you can tell how ill-fitting motherhood is to Vida. She brings her typical aloofness to the role, and you seem to comprehend that she’s setting up franchises rather than forming a home, which is why she stays with you. Or maybe that too could be apathy. Maybe she’s happy to be kept in the fold. You can’t say. You don’t ask.
You become a quiet thing. Laith, still adoring, still enraptured, does not mind. He continues to wrap you in fabrics you do not wear. His talented fingers stitch together wonderment and dreams, dresses like stars, but they hang in your closet, unable to be admired by anyone. They hang like skin, like skeletons on the noose.
Kostya visits. You haven’t given him a gift in some time. He asks about the house, about the current caretaker, about whether or not you want to stay in this new city with its gray buildings and gray people. It is enough, it is fine, you reassure him. He looks at you like he misses something about you, but he doesn’t press. It’s not his nature.
“Have you heard?” he asks. “Gideon is stirring up the muck in Linemell.”
You think of your mercenary, your warrior, and a hint of a smile plays across your face. “He is holding the city, I trust.”
“He can do that much.”
“What is this muck then? Vida says he’s living in squalor, one of those condemned row-houses from the turn of the century. It’s to spite me, of course.”
“He’s hunting one of Ravenstone’s.”
This amuses you, but you don’t say that. Instead, you lift your eyebrows and glance out the window as though you expect to see Gideon there, rage-filled and resentful. “How do you know this?”
“You like me to keep an eye on him, so I do. Not often, of course, because he wants to prove himself capable in some way that might matter, but I check from time to time.”
“For me?”
He nods. It’s a simple truth, not sentimental.
“I doubt he will follow through with whatever scheme he has brewing. He’s always wanted attention, that’s what this is. But then … maybe it would do him well, siring another.”
“He is violent. It will not be easy.”
You want to tell him that nothing ever is, no matter how long you live. Eternity brings few rewards in this aspect. Instead, you shrug. Gideon is as he is, and you appreciate that consistency. Even his hatred reeks of love.