Shiki; eri; neku- the other me inside myself; and you; and the kitchen floor when I see us in reflection.

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v.

Her lips split to swallow her teeth in a smile of sorts, but it never feels natural and stings ever-so-slightly at her fingertips, tingling with explosive blood like scarlet rose dynamites on the aching empty space between the seconds of the countdown.

Bamboo neon like Sheep Heavenly scarves woven from the tangled threads of her heartstrings.

Shiki has always worn her heart on her sleeves, but in Eri's sparse clothing, there is such a thing as being too open; and shut again.

iv.

Shiki knows many things, but the only thing she can bring herself to remember as she falls and falls and vanishes into emptied nirvana is the gospel of swallowing what you cannot bring yourself to say.

But as the light simmers to elegant arcs across her broken back; like it's a stretch of snapped thread dangling in cascades between Eri's nimble fingers, eased through the eye of the needle that is the bone of Shiki's spine with the cracks between her vertebrae; the driver stumbles out and drawls in the kind of tranquil hysteria that only the most drunken men can muster, she jumped out in front of him.

Her brunette bangs are so much plainer against the concrete when Eri stumbles, and Eri sees bright and high and Easter dye.

iii.

Graves are only so deep when you dig them yourself; Shiki knows this because hers is so far into the soil and earth and worms and maggots writhing against the pine she cannot appreciate the men who dug it, and the lives of those men, and the wives of those men, and the children of those men, and the happiness those men revel in when they come to know that simple truths are what provide the most profound kinds of celebration.

These are lives she will never know, so far down that her lips are blue with stillness and the wood is binding her arms to her body in stiff sophistication like she never needed that satin bodice Eri stitched for her.

The princess is asleep; and there she will stay, until a kiss from her prince jerks her awake in one-two-three motion.

ii.

Eri does not look away at the funeral. She never shirked away from the body; at least, not after the initial vomit clambering up her throat, but she swallows what she fears to say.

But one day, everything flickers back a moment and a minute and a day and a week and a fortnight; and she adds it all together to spell the days where Shiki was never there, then she opens the door and there is the glimmer of glasses perched on a girl's nose and mud-brown-black hair and plaintive tea leave mint robes;

And she thinks she is crazy.

Eri hides behind the shocks and locks of bubblegum electric-pink hair like Shiki never did in her body; and Shiki knows there is never a reason for Eri to hide in a beautiful form; and casts her fearful gaze to Neku, the boy she does not recognize beside Shiki, but she discerns well the peculiar glance he is measuring her with.

You are alive, it says, we are alive. This is Shiki beside me and you know it. You are-

i.

Shiki feels dust gather inbetween the cracks of all their spines, and they speak in irregular tandem like a carousel swinging unicorn's horns and fairy filth; and on the bathroom floor their reflections shift in circles, and between conversations jarred like pebbles into the tender break of Shiki's cold skin, there is only a boy and a girl and trainwrecks of things long left behind.

Eri clicks the heel of her boot against the porcelain; and Neku is cold and cold and burning Shiki up in his arctic blue flames;

Then in the silence between techno blaring through the amethyst mesh of his headphones, Neku's auburn spikes tremble when he casts his gaze to the floor and says to Eri, I think I love you, and it's because Shiki is plain and dull and unfashionable and uninteresting, and then he flips the volume up so loud it drowns her sobs in a sea of drumbeats and guitar slips and;

And that's okay.

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