Tattoo Heart
We, women.
Beasts of Nature, and beauty
Phoenixes of fire and
lore
Holy in our unrighteousness
We are as fragile as the suckling branches broken in the harshest snaps of Winter
Possessors of little more than human breast and bone
Let no one put us out
I thought I was going to have to drag her all the way out. Through the eyes fastened to her, gazes shifting sourly in her wake. Left behind like the slimy trails of slugs, to inherit the vacant air around the beasts curled, motionless in their own salt. But I don't have to do that. She walks ahead of me instead, her head held high, her eyes shining like tokens in the grimy, slender light.
And when I finally push through the labyrinth of people, their stares blistering the back of my neck and sides of my face, she is crouching on the curb. Sitting against the wall in the shadows, looking larger than life there. Almost too large to fit into this moment, and I have to remind myself of what has transpired. I have to wonder if she has been sniffing around in Alice's breadbox selecting cakes and foodstuffs in bright colors with childish abandon. She ate the wrong one and now she will grow out of her skin, she will grow taller than the building, a colossal angel of anger in the night.
She's wearing someone else's coat and I can't remember if she waded into the place in that, or if she lifted it from someone sometime during the night. It ceases to matter, now. The coat is outrageously large and the cuffs are pulled down over her hands to cover the big knuckles. What looks to be raspberry icing, is drying on the coat sleeves, but I know better.
She won't look me directly in the eye. Even though I am close enough to smell the night's last thirsty round on her breath. Sickly pungent and sweet. Even though I tuck a tuft of her lilac hair behind her ear and smooth it over. Sparks of it stick up all over her head and she looks like a little lion. If it wasn't for those eyes you might mistake her for a wild-er beast. A meat eater that could swallow you whole should you frolick too closely to those shining jaws. But there is something tender in those eyes, something as soft as the satin insides of a pillbox that cannot, that must not be seen. And so that is why she looks away.
Her mascara on spring-less legs took off down her cheeks, leaving trails of a moon-less night black, the tears she will not cry. The skin around her eyes is beginning to change color. She is awfully young, but everybody looked away when he punched her. She keeps wiping her ruddy nose on her sleeve, but the blood doesn't stop coming. Someone will take this story and pad it with ace bandages of words so that it is cool enough to put on the tongue and dissolve acceptably. But I…but she…if she was my child I would not want her here, sitting on a stoop with a broken face in a beaten in jacket. Making wishes on stars that will sink down to float in a belly warm with rum at 3:20 in the morning.
All that I can see of her is a heavily pierced ear and a tousled head of hair, when she has her face turned like that. I smooth down the hairs, electrified into bunches at the crest of her regal mane until she snaps at me, and shoves my hand away, her fingers flapping through the air like the wings of a crazed bird. "Don't bother with it, its no use."
And so the subdued hair pops up again, it's fingers reaching to the sky , hungry for nourishment. She lights a cigarette and smokes. Marble mouthed, and stony eyed she makes a peculiar figure in the darkness. A muse hungry painter's dream. She cuts a portrait of many colors. The black clouds running down her cheeks, the indigo rocks lying coolly beneath her eyes, the purple leaves pointing up out of her head, and the red river coming out of her nose, pooling into tributaries along her chin and the soft, fleshy crevices above her lip. She is her own planet, her own Earth. How could anyone, any man want to destroy that?
"Anko." I say, thinking of the look in his eyes, the dull thunk when his fist connected. "You didn't have to do--"
"Oh,shut-up Kurenai!" she says at me, so fiercely it feels as if I've been shot in the throat. My voice leaks out through the bullet pierced layers of my esophagus and I can only stare dumb founded as she raves at me, an angry pelican her wings outstretched her above her tiny head.
"He was a jerk. He was going to take you home and bang your brains out, then he'd have nothing to do with you. Men are vultures and he figured someone else would come along and pick up the scraps he left behind eventually. I had to do everything that I did." she says to me. She smokes angrily, the embers of the cigarette lighting under her face, casting a grave, grey shadow.
"Anko." I say. But I can feel the air change.
The minions of Fate stirring at it with their twisted spoons. She's quiet now, she starts to rock. Her arms are folded around her and somehow it got colder when I was not awake to notice. The wind blows through and breathes rudely on the back of my neck. She's looking at me, now. And I can see the edges of rabbit holes in her eyes. And I feel that if I step into them I will fall into a different place entirely. A place with walls that magically get tighter and tighter around you, even when you are lying perfectly still, your arms at your sides, eyes closed, just waiting for it to be over. I can see in those eyes that her mouth is open, but nobody hears her screaming.
She rocks and leans her head back on the brick wall behind her. Her chin is tilted, leaving the vulnerable meat of her neck exposed. A juicy vein rests just beneath the surface. In the shadows it looks gunmetal black. It pops out, the trigger tense when she swallows. It aims perfectly at me, right between the eyes when she talks. There is a low humming noise in the air. Coming from her throat, from that violent vein. Suddenly, I'm afraid. I wonder where she has traveled to in her head, if I could reach into those abysmal eyes and pull her back, and shake her and beg her not to burn out. When she speaks her voice is low , cool, gentle, the sweeping of water over land in a small, clear brook. But her eyes are seeing fires, flames that shake foundations and burn towers to ashes. She is looking at me, but right through me, enchanted.
"He put his hands down my pants. He kissed my throat. He told me he had love for me that was so bright, so pure it could out-burn a thousand suns. So that nothing else mattered." she said.
"Who?"
"My father."
She lifts her arm and it slides out of her coat. She holds the skinny little thing out for me to see and taps the white flesh. "Here. He is…here. Because I love him." she says, tapping the arm. And I can see it. Etched into her skin, the white, body of the snake. Long, and lithe with muscle. With eyes of putrid amber and fangs soaked with venom.
I cannot begin to understand. I close my eyes. Can still hear the music coming from inside the bar. The terrible thumping seems right next to my heart. Pounding, pounding, pounding. But I am not sure if the monster is trying desperately to get out or in. And I don't know which one's worse.
Tonight I will lock all of the windows in my house and bolt all of the doors. But I will not be able to stop the snakes. White as alabaster, pure as snow they will crawl into my bed, coiling their relentless bodies around my arms and leg. They will hold my head back, exposing my vulnerabilities to the night and drip their venom down my throat, drop by succulent drop.
When I open my eyes, Anko is gone. Has slipped off into the darkness to be amongst the shadows. She must have been small enough to fit into the crooks of his body then. I imagine her the way she was tonight. Bigger than the building. Bigger than the sky as if she could bound effortlessly up beyond me, and higher still into the pristine air. I would have tried to grab her ankles, and hold her down, but her skin would have slipped through my fingers like water, like silk. And I would not have been able to keep her. No one would.