not about angels { isla/meri }

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

i s l a s w a n

WE KNOW FULL WELL THERE'S JUST TIME

HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, Death. Cheers to the day you carried Ellie away, a tiny blonde angel in your arms, sleeping softly. (Where did she awaken?) I was there, sitting on the bed, next to her, wondering what blissful dream she had slipped into. I was there, when cancer squeezed the last breath out of her lungs. I was there, when the rosy glow of life receded from her skin. I was there, when you lifted her in your arms, like a black cradle, and took her away. I wanted to run after you, to pull on your inky cloak and implore you to bring her back. But I was frozen. My body was rigid with agony.

And then the tears came. My eyes became storm clouds and released a downpour of despair and anguish and grief. Sobs stole the steady breathing from my lungs and racked my body, an onslaught of deadly waves during a squall. Pain engulfed me, a black, icy sea of suffering. And I was--I am--fully submerged. I do not, cannot, will not, resurface. I am constantly holding my breath, suppressing tears and swallowing back misery.

One year. One year ago, Ellie died and the pain has not numbed.

(Yeah. I would drink to that.)

It is the third time I am sitting in this graveyard, before her tombstone. Engraved on the smooth front of the tombstone is:

ELLERY ISOBEL SWAN
Born February 3, 62nd
Died June 18, 67th
If I ruled the world, everyone would be
happy, and no one would ever die
or feel pain or get sick, ever.

(Would it not be lovely if that was a future achievable? It is an impossible utopia. But of course, only a child could dream up something like that, a world so far out of mankind's reach.)

Ellery would not want me to be in this desolate state, sobbing over her gravestone, wishing that she was still here--a call that would never be answered. But Ellery does not get a say, if she can't say anything at all. The dead can't speak. And Ellery is dead. Ellery is . . . dead.

She's

d

e

a

d.

And nothing will ever change that.

But just because it is set in stone does not mean it will ever be alright. Maybe my misery is set in stone, too. (Ellie will never stop haunting me.)

There is no resolve to my agony. (If only there was a cure for grief.) There is no amount of morphine or alcohol or any type of drug that will heal me. Time may be the best remedy, but I do not believe in "time heals all wounds." If it was a true saying, I would not be here, would I?

I lay a bouquet of pink roses, Ellie's favorite, at the foot of the gravestone. If only she could have picked them with me, if only she could see them. (It is too much to ask.) I remain sitting before her grave, staring at her name carved into the stone. She would have been seven years old now. I can imagine her, snipping a pink rose from the garden, her fair ringlets of hair golden in the summer sunlight. I can see her smile, showing off her missing front teeth. I can see her looking up at me with her brilliant blue eyes that match the perfect clear sky.

(It is a fantasy too good to be true.)

A tear rolls down my cheek, but I wipe it away with the back of my hand. And after it falls, another follows in its wake. I do not wipe this one away. With my traveling thoughts I have opened a gateway of tears.

So I let them pour out.

They do not recede.

"Why were you cursed with cancer of all diseases! We're in District Six! We live in a place where the greatest doctors of Panem live. They could've . . . they could've cured anything. Anything but not stage four cancer," I sob. "It's not fair."

"Why couldn't it have been me? She was so young, five years old!" I ask to a cloudy sky. "Ripred, why her?"

My hands are tangled in my locks of blonde hair, and my eyes continue to drip more tears, falling onto the rose petals like rain. My lips tremble as I speak to a nonexistent little girl, whose vacant body is trapped in a casket several feet under me.

When my bout of tears subsides, I rise to my feet and turn away from Ellery's grave, beginning the short journey back home. Before I close the elegant black gate of the cemetery, I say softly, "Happy anniversary, angel."

I allow my hair to fall around my face in a blonde veil as I walk, my eyes fixated on my feet as I walk through the streets, trying to hide the river of tears that pours down my cheeks. I feel the build up of a sob form in my chest, but I gulp it down as it rises in my throat. Hold it in, Isla, I tell myself.

Hold it in.

W O R D S : 8 2 5

template by Chelsey

[Raseri]

{ M E R I } WYNNS

I looked all over the house in her usual hideouts—the backyard, the basement, under the kitchen table, under the coffee table, the corner of the living room where we keep her blanket—but Penny was nowhere to be found.

It’s not like her to run away like this. She’s a border collie, aren’t they supposed to stay and protect their families? Isn’t that their thing? My mom used to tell me stories about when I was just starting to run all the time, when Penny would guard the perimeter of the yard to make sure I didn’t go too far. One baby step off the edge of the grass and she’d cut me off, her black body shoving me firmly back into my parents’ line of sight. She was a puppy then, and definitely thinner (too many handouts under the dinner table had changed this), but she was a horse compared to me.

She loved us, right? I am convinced that dogs can love. Maybe even more than people since they can’t think badly of you, right? Different cultural standards. She loves us, present tense.

So why would you run away?

I better start looking for her before the panic sets in. Although who am I kidding, isn’t it setting in already? I can already feel my throat narrowing, my breath struggling to take hold in my lungs. It’s that animal part deep down inside of me that I can never seem to control when things start to go wrong. Like when I’m watching the Games, and one of the cannons goes off. A little voice that says, ”It’s one of ours.” Penny is missing. Someone stole her. She’s lost. A Peacekeeper got her.

She’s dead.

No! I scream in my head with such imaginary force that tears burn at my eyes. I refuse to believe the worst case scenario. Penny is a good dog, and a smart one, and even though she’s too fat to run as fast as she used to, no one’s going to try to catch her anyway. Everyone likes dogs. No one would hurt her.

Maybe she’s just taking a walk. I slip on my shoes and set off at a fast walk down the road, my feet clogging a one-man army cadence against the sidewalk. I try my best to imagine myself as an experienced detective, or a bounty hunter. A solo search party, since Mom, Dad, and my brother are at work. Just the three of us: me, myself, and I. I crane my neck to get a better view of the backyards of the houses lining the road—maybe she’s looking for other dogs there?

”Penny! PEH-NEEEEE!” I push two fingers against my tongue and send out my best whistle. It probably isn’t loud enough—my dog is just about deaf at this point.

After trying for like fifteen minutes without any luck I see the cemetery up ahead. Its black fence is taller than me and pointy on the tips of the bars—are they trying to keep live people out, or dead people in? I shiver at the thought. I hate these places. Sure, the black bars of the fence are probably far enough apart for a dog to slip through, but would Penny really want to go in there? I’m not sure that she would, but the more I think about it the more I’m sure that if that is the one place I don’t check, that’s the one place she’ll be. That’s how these things work, right?

I suck in my fear with a breath of humid air and push the gate open.

I can’t count the headstones. There are too many. So many people dead, some old and some young, way too young. Are there more dead people than living people? I guess it would be optimistic to think that at least they’re better off dying here than dying in the Games, but that doesn’t make me feel better. This place gives me the creeps. I hope Penny isn’t in here. This would give here the creeps, too.

I guess I believe in ghosts in the way that most people believe in them—only in cases when they want to. Some people want ghosts to be real so they can talk to their dead grandmother, or say goodbye to someone they lost. Me, I don’t want to believe in them right now. I want them to go either up, or down, or nowhere. Just as long as they’re not here. But so far, there’s not a soul—living or dead—to be seen.

Hang on. There’s one.

There’s a girl, sitting in front of a tombstone. Suddenly I feel intrusive, like I’ve walked in on someone when they’re naked, vulnerable. She rises to her feet and I take a step back, not wanting to be seen. Even though technically I have every right to be here, graveyards belong to the mourners. I’m just a searcher.

What if she’s seen Penny?

Acting mechanically on this glimmer of hope, my feet set off in her direction. She leaves through the gate and one moment later, I open and close it behind me. I could have yelled for her to stop but it feels like something about the cemetery has shut me up, rendered me mute. So I resort to following her out of a graveyard into the streets, like some creep.

”Hey um, eh-excuse me?” I stutter nervously. ”I was wondering, have you seen a black and white dog about this high?’

I flatten my palm to demonstrate a height about as tall as my knee, but then I see the tears on her face. Shit. ”Oh, uh. Sorry. I’ll just, uh--” I stuck a thumb over my shoulder in a get-out-of-here motion, but my feet were frozen to the pavement. ”Sorry. Um, are you all right?" I’ve cried a lot in my life but never about people in the cemetery; I wasn’t sure how she felt but I could guess it wasn’t 'all right'. But what else could I say? Regardless, I found myself standing in the same spot, hoping desperately that there was some way I could help her—or some way she could help me.

[я𝑜𝓈𝑒]

i s l a s w a n

SO IS IT WRONG TO DANCE THIS LINE

AN UNFAMILIAR voice, one of a boy, a teen, perhaps around my age, reaches my ears. It came not too far behind me. The muscles in my body tense with unease—and not because they are a stranger, who I do not fear—but because my face is soaked in tears and pink from sobbing, my eyes are puffy and rimmed with red. And my hair, which was smooth and soft as silk when I left home, is now a disheveled blonde mess from knotting my fingers in my hair.

"Hey, um, eh-excuse me?" he stutters, calling after me. I smooth down my hair in a feeble attempt to fix the misplaced hairs and wipe away my tears—but I cannot wipe away the redness, the imprint the tears left on my eyes—and face him, keeping my eyes fixed on the ground in hopes that my face would remain concealed, or at least the tears. "Have you seen a black and white dog about this high?" He gestures with his hand, demonstrating that the dog is about at knee height. And then his expression changes when he looks—really looks—at my face.

As if my face was not hot enough with scarlet, the color darkens in embarrassment. When he realizes his mistake, he quickly tries to gloss over it with an apology. "Oh, uh. Sorry. I'll just, uh—" He makes a hand motion, holding his hand up, his thumb facing the winding street behind him. And yet, he does not move, as if there are rocks tied to his ankles, impeding his escape. "Sorry. um, are you all right?"

I recalled the past few hours. Rivers, entire seas of tears. A salty tinge in my mouth from the rivulets that leaked from my eyes and trailed down to my lips. Eyes dry like the cracked ground during a drought, all of the water squeezed out by despair. Gravestones with loving epitaphs, adorned with flowers. Soft ground, beneath it, hundreds of bodies locked in caskets.

I remember everything as a blur of anguish, the tears and the steady throb of my heart and the graves, the searing memory of Ellie. But I do not remember or dog. The dog could have lingered in the cemetery, and I would not have noticed. I was consumed in haunting memories, a deadly sea ghosts whirling in my head.

"I, uh, yeah. Yeah, I'm fine," I reply too quickly. There is a moment of silence where I am just standing there, with my untidy hair and tear-stricken eyes, trying find the words that are lost somewhere in my throat. When I do find them, I discover they are not the greatest words. "I . . ." my voice cracks. "I haven't seen a dog, sorry."

I am about to turn and walk back home with humiliation weighing down my shoulders as I bite my lip, feeling like an idiot. But I had an opportunity to do a kind deed—something I feel I owe the world. And if I distracted myself with searching for a lost dog who I could see this boy loved dearly—I know how it feels to lose something you love—perhaps Ellie could slip out of my mind. Even if it was for a moment, a short couple of seconds, I would treasure them. There are no moments without the excruciating reminder that Ellie is gone. She is in every room of the house, in the empty rocking chair that she would sit in, in her empty bed, the kitchen where she would be stealing a cookie while our mother wasn't paying attention. She is in the streets, where she should be dragging me to a candy shop or begging me to play a game with her. (And I wish I had played more of those childish games that most girls my age deem pointless.)

I would give anything to hear her giggle at me each time I tripped on my own feet as we walked on the streets. I would give anything to groan when I see the empty cookie jar one more time, and look at her, the thief, accusingly. And she would grin at me mischievously, knowing that I would not snitch on her. (If only necromancy was a reality.) If I could, I would free her from her deathly prison in the ground, if it meant she could walk the earth with me once more. But there is no such thing as a second chance, and I am forced to drown in my grief and try to pull myself out of it, but my body is too heavy with regret.

If I fail to at least distract myself, wouldn't I be returning something lost to a kind soul? I do not wish my fate upon anyone, whether it is losing a dog or a sibling or a parent or a friend. Only a certain dark type of person deserves that kind of pain, and this boy is not among them. (And I am not, either, but the world is cruel.)

So I do not turn my back on the boy and mutter a half-hearted goodbye and sulk down the streets back to my home, where I would only sit in solitude and let the memories take over, sending me through a hurricane of more regret and pointless wishing but no hoping and despair and a g o n y. I know in both my heart and my brain that allowing myself to be put through that is pointless, stupid, even, but it is inevitable. I tried drinking but intoxication frightens me too much for that to become my outlet, my panacea for all of my pain.

I look up at the boy, no longer shielding my face.

"But I could help you look, if you want."

W O R D S : 9 5 3

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