Hand in Glove
Bound up in buttoned gloves, corsets, and high collars, hardly anyone suspects how pearl-white Victoria is inside, how sharp the contours of her collarbones are, how the soft skin stretched taut across her ribs is streaked with angry red stripes like burns from hot coffin nails or whip lashes. But Emily knows.
Emily remembers being ladylike, being kept under thirteen layers of starched petticoats, laced in, hemmed up, and veiled by houses. Emily knows what it feels like to scream inside: I want to claw open these bodices! I want my heart to swell with sensation until it splits me apart!
Emily still grasps at a passion that drifts out of reach and fades away like the ghosts of autumn leaves. She still screams, though she has learned to tear her white silk wedding dress to ribbons. Even though her hairpins have all been cast aside, the latticed lacework of her gloves is but cobweb now, and the pearls from her bridal finery are nearly dust, Emily is a spirit just like the girl she was. Emily is still constrained, powerless to shed or show her hate and love.
Hardly anyone suspects how fiercely Victoria burns within, infected by the strange idea that she and Emily are not so unlike. Victoria watches Emily through her barred bedroom window. She breathes on the glass and traces the lines of Emily's wind-whipped, shredded skirts. Only the skintight mesh of Victoria's gloves and the cold glass of the window separates Victoria from Emily. Victoria thinks about amorousness and wrath, realizing the two are one and the same.
When all is said and done, Victoria ignores the heavy knolling of church bells at her back. She pulls Emily into an embrace tighter than the binding of a bodice, far nearer than propriety could ever understand.
Urgently, she crushes her warm mouth against Emily's cold blue lips. Without words, Victoria tells Emily, now is the time for your freedom and mine! This is our absolution and deliverance, stronger than any wedding vows; here is the passion we have always deserved!
Emily's mouth smarts like a sting and resounds like the heavy echo of a heartbeat, burning from Victoria's kiss of life. She clasps Victoria's hands to hers and unbuttons her gloves gently and deliberately, revealing Victoria's milky, sun-starved fingers.
Emily slips as darkness and velvet through Victoria's naked hands and bursts more brilliantly than any sunrise, resplendent like hundreds of unpinned butterflies breaking their glass shrouds.
Victoria holds the hot flowering fireworks of light like a lover. Her body sings.