Written 2012 - June - 17.
Edited 2013 - April - 06.
My name is Oruha and I have a clover tattooed onto the flesh of my chest, trapped between my breasts like any plant caught in a heavy book of the variety that no one really reads, just flips through. An atlas, or a history of some kind, a record for the sake of recording, the sort of thing that no one cares for much, because if you want to learn, there are so many ways that are so much better.
It was a one-leaf clover when They gave it to me, the faceless They, the heartless They, the outsider They that never cared to know me. When They let me slip away (since They didn't care to keep me), I added to the image. It was too much of an opportunity to really resist, and in any case, I wasn't trying that hard.
You can pass off a four-leaf clover as a vanity, as superstition, a charm to keep Them away but Him close, or Him away and Them near. You can say it's whim or whimsy or some dry old tradition, and they'll nod and go on, because everyone wants to be a four-leaf.
No one wants to be a one-leaf.
No one wants to be a powerless witness to the horror that is this life and to know, in your gut, in your blood, in your bones, that you can never do anything to change the world.
No one wants a one-leaf.
The one who made my markings (not the ones They ordered, but the ones I chose) was a woman who was proclaimed a man at birth and spent most of her life pretending that the first twenty years of her being never happened. For her, they didn't. She was reborn with her name as I was with the ink in the needles that sank under my skin to make me full and ripe and desirable once more, at least in the eyes of the world.
I saw her when I sang, in flesh and in memory, so many times, standing at the back of every smoky room with the corners of her mouth tilting up to the sky and a triumph spelled out in her shoulders that I shared, every time. She had wings scarred onto the skin of her back, from a cruel knife turned to kindness for one beautiful moment, one blinding-hot second when the world rearranged itself to her will, and when she showed them to me on the soft sheets of her bed, my woman-made modifications pressed to hers, she was smiling. She told me that no one could cut them and no one could take them away from her. That she had one untouchable way still to fly.
I found the clover on the smooth of the back of her neck later, hidden by the rough of her indigo-dyed hair and when I kissed her in the childish hope that it would make everything just a little bit better, my veins were humming with the kind of freedom that can never be clipped.
I found out a while later that she was burned to death, as if at stake, was consumed by flames as she went to Heaven or Hell or whoever would take her at that point, and I liked to think that the wings on her back rose from the ashes as if she had been a Phoenix, and I still like to think that we are all reborn from our ashes, though I've never been able to convince myself of that.
The night I heard of her death was the night I kissed Kazuhiko for the first time. For a second time, I was reborn, wings formed from the handprints he left on my back, and when we were breathing heavy outside of the club, my legs still wrapped around his waist and my stockings dirtied like only stockings can be, he inspected my clover, knew nothing more or less about me, and that was okay for then. I never told him about it. It would never have ended well.
No one wants a one-leaf.
No one loves a one-leaf.
No one will weep when a one-leaf dies.