it was years ago, when scar tissue still lined her tongue and pearly skin fishtailed down her sides. she was a winter girl resisting the early spring with its swallow songs and habit of pegging doorknobs with lilies. fluorescent solstices had thawed her crystal mantle, but snowstorms still billowed in her core.
egyptian obituaries speckled her forearms where bits of coral sand had once been ground deep beneath her elbow creases. she could not remove the blemishes, no matter how long she mined at her flesh with crooked nails and frantic nerves. throughout the trembles, she comforted her sea salt worries with the misbelief that blue-eyed boys are attracted to disaster.
if he ever watched her chafe pencil wrists, he never considered her intention. his azure vision could never decipher her rapid tongue- understand that what spurred her backwards was a malicious backbone: a fascination with car crashes that leave bodies crackling with deformities. it was all nervous energy, kinetic jitters working friction until she freckled pink.
with satellite hopes, he aspired to rewind robins and revolutionise the new year in the middle of march. bricks were trapped in grout and stamped even so that she may never trip; roses were plucked of their thorns so that she may never bleed. but that was before she ground the earth from its maddening spin and inertia moved him miles.