you're too young & eager to love

I started writing this about a month ago, tinkered with it a bit, and then never picked it back up. I'm posting it before I forget to.

New characters/new scenario. .... Even though none of that is established here. Ha.

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This man half drunk on her invincible scents.

*

Canary was born rich, and she was still rich at 25. But like her mother before her and her mother’s mother, she had only ever known gilded cages and the scarlet rush of rosebushes from behind the safety of glass windows. Hers was a home shrouded in decadent decay, like most of the older estates. The ivy twisted over the stonework until nature herself had reclaimed the exterior walls while the dust thickened over the furniture inside the many unused rooms.

She felt it thicken on her eyelashes. She felt it under her nails.

As a child, her footsteps had echoed down the corridors, reverberating off the stone, mirroring her loneliness. Sometimes, she would close her eyes and wait, thinking those ghostly steps were not pale shadows of her own making but the patter of pretend playmates. If she waited long enough, she thought she could hear other children, only muffled, as though they were stuck in the walls.

St. Croix was still considered territory of the United States (or what remained of the nation) but it had, nearly four centuries ago, lost its island allure. There were no more elaborate holiday festivities. There was no triumph, no shared camaraderie, in surviving the yearly hurricanes. No one thought of Christopher Columbus anymore or the native Carib. There was only the familiar sense of tragedy and the scattering of rose petals. The heady scent of funerals and dampness.

Canary watched her parents’ burial from her bedroom window. The coffins, she knew, were empty. The procession was symbolic, but Canary thought it was a hollow gesture all the same.

*

Now she holds up her mouth and clear eyes.

*