Written for the Music to Words contest at Caesar's Palace.
Song: Arabesque No. 1 by Debussy
"Cato! Cato!"
That's how she dies.
…
In truth, she thinks of nothing. She doesn't remember anything before she loses consciousness, just like how she had wanted it to be. Nothing flashes before her eyes in her dying moments, and her last thought is not pretty or romantic. Her minds screams, "fuck!" and then it's gone.
But when her body is burned and put in a box and buried underground , some people like to imagine that they were in there. That she was thinking of them. They cry for themselves.
The ceremony is relatively short, because nobody has anything to say, but there is one girl whose thoughts are too loud.
And to her, Clove's last thoughts are as such:
There are two girls sitting on the water. One of them is sitting on her hands while kicking water as far as she can, and the other is trying to stay dry by lying on her stomach to stare at the waves of sunshine bouncing off the ripples.
Clove puts her hand in the water, and it feels like how she would imagine sticking a hand into a toilet after pissing in it would feel like.
"It's warm enough to swim," the other girl says, taking one hand out from beneath her thighs to put on Clove's neck.
Clove's lips turn up into what easily be mistaken as a smile. "I don't have my suit on."
"Even better."
Clove sees a curtain of golden hair in front of her when she realizes what's happening, but by that time, she's rolling into a lake, swallowing water filled with microbes because she can't keep herself from grinning.
...
"Wait, wait, Clove, I thought of something really cute."
"Yeah?"
They're stretched out on the floor of Clove's bedroom, legs touching every so often. Clove wants to swing her leg over Aven's hips and burrow into her neck, but she settles for twitching.
Aven puts on a sophisticated air and holds a piece of paper above her head to read from. "Feeling phantom pain is when I make the bed, and your side is smooth."
Clove twitches again.
….
This time, they're climbing a mountain, on a vacation that they were unauthorized to take, but Aven needed a break, so it happened.
"Should we turn back?" Aven grabs Clove's arm.
"You're the one who wanted to get to the top," Clove snorted.
The trees are attempting backbends now, and the sky looks like an abomination to everything that sunsets stand for.
Clove pulls her arm free and roars back at the wind. "I'm afraid of being fucking scared!"
Then they continue.
….
"You know," Clove starts hurriedly, angrily. "I've felt this way since I was twelve. When we met, we were twelve."
She doesn't say I love you to strangers, and she does not know anyone well enough to call them close. Because to her, close means at a place where she could sand her skin and muscle and bone to dust and there they would be, beating in time with her heart.
But one day when she is lying on her side, her eyes drooping, and when it has been hours since either of them has said a word, when she watches her drool drip onto the pillowcase, she swears that in that moment, she thought it.
And she wished she had always lived like that.
…
Aven takes a deep breath and smooths the paper in front of her. She had crumpled it many times over when she was sitting in her seat.
"Clove was a loving girl who never opened up herself to anybody, but she was caring and kind and a good person. I remember when we…"
It's far from the truth, but Aven believes it.
"She's in a better place now."