Swallow
Ugly comes in waves you can't
choke down.
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Kairi likes pretty things – sunsets and making fiddly little necklaces out of shells while sweaty boys tread sand-circles around the island, their island, swaggers in their steps (but Kairi never pretends she's anybody save for the girl who pulls her skirt up a little higher).
Nightmares, black and white, are pushed back into a metaphorical closet in some metaphorical corner of her brain hung with cobwebs and sprinkled with dust like strawberry sauce where wandering hands of innocent girls can't pick at them (with nails painted banana-yellow and plastic smiles fixed to anxious faces as the storm grows worse and worse outside the windows).
Of monsters with golden yellow eyes and black claws that tear flesh into red ribbons like pieces of stained glass; beautiful but tragic, (as they pin you down and smash your pretty face in).
Of fingers that close around yielding flesh and slowly choke the life out of beautiful princesses until they become nay more than malleable toys – if I put my finger in this gap and tilt upwards see how many limbs I break and strings I can pull – and other such nightmares that make her pull the covers over her head (but doing that won't save you now).
And once upon a time many years after the boys that don't exist and the cave full of secrets that all fell in Selphie turns to her, bright green eyes inquisitive, and she goes: "Kairi, how do you live with yourself when you're so shallow?"
Kairi turns to Selphie, eyes wide, incredulous, and merely answers back; "How else do you live in a world that's so ugly?"
Without her boys and her home what else is there to love that's more beautiful than herself?
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"But princess…" black fingers close around pale-pink throat,
"It's ugly to be so engrossed with the pretty.
Got it memorised?"
"Just because you wish I was obsessed with you."
- - - - - - - ---fin;,--- - - - - - - -
a/n: barely kaixel for ana's contest :3 I slipped my prompt in there.