For Saints Have Hands :: [Beretta + Word // Someith, Day 5]

[L△LIA]

for saints have hands
that pilgrims' hands do touch
and palm to palm
is holy palmers' kiss

The sun slits the horizon's throat as the winged messenger of Death takes flight from the hands of one monster to search for another. It does not know what to fear most. The sky cracks as if electric with blood, bursting at the seams with red and pink and hellfire flames that threaten something more than foreshadowing. The small word is not scared of this sky, sighing with strange relief to be cloaked in burning clouds. Comfort has been redefined after its time spent captive to a girl with a god complex so extreme she has begun doing away with the lines between creatures and men, the living and the dead.

She smelled like girl, like banshee, like sheepish, like blood and rot and corpses. Confusion spun the bird's senses in circles until it puked from dizziness, laughter thrumming in Beretta's throat as she tied a weighted bag to its leg. Tears welled in its eyes, rolling down feathers to pool at its feet. The bird didn't know it could cry. This must be what drowning from the inside out feels like.

Tears still fall as it flies, unremarkable to the children whose heads they land upon. More rain? One of them might sigh, but not the one the bird seeks out. He has familiar eyes. The pupils may not be slashed apart by his horrible soul like hers are, but looking at him feels like fluttering on the cusp of death and the word does a double-take over its shoulder to make certain the Queen of blood and banshees isn't silently cackling from behind. Someith's touch as the boy unravels the... it isn't thread, oh no oh no oh no, whatever ties this terrible gift the the bird's leg isn't thread —

The bird screams. It did not know it could make this sound. Soaring away, it forgets what silence is, crying out to the clouds to hold it, to hide it, to save it from the hell that has made a home within these children of damnation. The gift is left behind. Palm to palm, Leticia's lifelines have been skinned from her hands and stitched together. Freed from her body, they still hold her bones, the ivory of her wrists appallingly, exquisitely carved into a pair of chess pieces. A king. A queen. The violent red mark of Beretta's lips has been kissed to one of those palms as a signature, despite knowing that a present such as this speaks for itself.

The bird is gone, but the screaming will never end.

[Beretta sends Someith a word carrying a small bag stitched together from the skin of Leticia's palms, marked with a lipstick print, containing two chess pieces (one king, one queen) carved from Leticia's wrist bones]

[permission to send a word pre-Feast from Kayak]