'Pan, who and what art thou?' [Hook] cried huskily.
'I'm youth, I'm joy,' Peter answered at a venture, 'I'm a little bird that has broken out of the egg.'
-Peter Pan
Wendy waits in her lonely nursery, John and Michael missing from their cradles, Mr. Darling watching the game downstairs.
She's busy, she's hastily telling her stories to no one. "Is Mr. Heathcliff a man?" she sighs, the question emanating from the growing hole in her breastbone, reading Wuthering Heights to John and Michael, who aren't there. "If so, is he mad? And if not, is he a devil?"
She's grown to live on the no one listening in, grown to live on the dangers of Captain Hook and his other personalities. She eats it, devours it with the fangs that don't exist in her mouth, sucks it in like cigarette smoke, lets the black clouds envelop her esophagus. She smothers it in her heart and feeds it with her life, her heartbeat, her blood, her stomach acid, the folds of her gray brain.
She waits for Peter to venture in. "I sha'n't tell my reasons for making this inquiry," she mutters, looking at the rain stuck hopelessly on the glass, the dreary greenness of growing nature and the clouds muffling the moon.
Her voice is low, a whisper. A dainty plea and a seduction. "But," she runs her lily hands through her greasy hair, looking at herself in the nursery mirror, "I beseech you," she pleads and she hates her reflection, the pulse of life subtly jumping from the prominent arteries of her neck, "to explain, if you can…"
It's as if she can see her body traveling to the future, can see herself with dragged down eyes and skin like paper and a body like a bag of water, and it scares the existence out of her, out of poor, poor Wendy…
"…What I have married."
Wendy sits and waits for the moon to peer out of the clouds. Peter Pan will come through her window and suck her blood, and she will never have to grow up.
AN: I've been reading Angela Carter, and if you're familiar with her stuff , you might understand what on earth possessed me to write this weirdo here.
And hasn't anyone else noticed the parallels between Twilight and Peter Pan? Anyone? (Sorry if throwing Wuthering Heights into the mix made it yet more confusing; I needed something that Bella/Wendy would be reading, and the quote worked)
Disclaimer: Wuthering Heights was written by Emily Bronte. Peter Pan was written by JM Barrie. And Twilight was written by Stephenie Meyer. I am not any of these people.