Title: Saturnine Singing Blues
Number of Prompt: 334
Fandom if not HP: Wouldn't say it was a fandom, it's more like, a one-shot influenced by Marya Hornbacher's Madness.
How many: 1/50
Feburary 12, 2013
Cowards die many times before their deaths; the valiant never taste of death but once drunken by greedy mouths. Salim knew not what bravery implored or of its brethren that bedevil the malevolent but he conspired with the lily-livered men and the eyes of timorous perfidy.
He sought out enlightenment and returned in pusillanimous rags, a milksop drunkenly consuming the vows made in wine. He thought himself to be astute but his avidity was checked by his anxiety, and he appeared rather like a mouse than the aficionado he perceived. A coward, a liar, and yet he continued to drink willingly from the envenomed flute; besotted by the fallacious valor discerned as his own making.
A fool thinks himself to be wise, but a wise man knows himself to be a fool. Salim stared at the ring once as silver as his wife's eyes, the argentate plating reflecting the corroding conduit pipes found on the ceiling of his rig office and her copper tresses. A silhouette of his wife remained, neglected and lamenting beneath the early gibbous moon; ichor shoes and rubicund cheeks mocking the saturnine singing blues of the Lusciana. The achromatic fragments of her skin fluctuated, moths threading through her silken flesh in zealous obsession, mercury tears dripping from chrome wings.
Liquid silver together with molten copper spilled from agape dianthus lips, sable elytra beetles outlining her rosary bead eyes. Salim could essentially smell her lemon perfume, tart but piquant, just as she did the forenoon of their wedding and every other day. A cad, a coward, a dastardly saccharine husband and her. She whose Sandman tucks her in with a bitter lullaby at the cry of vespers, and she who loves with red-blooded potency.
Her silhouette evanesced into the Stygian morning and Salim was left glaring at the lavender crescent jewel enclosed within corroded silver. Salim knew there no greater lost sheep than love, a misery imbrued into his skin but a benison kissed upon acerbic lips. He had met Lollie on a Tuesday in her garden when she was not-quite thirty, and he was not quite able to drink the vermouth that brimmed the barrels of wine.
Lollie was not pulchritudinous, with bleached blemishes illustrated across her rosy-pale skin and a rigidly austere expression; instead, she appeared rather morose than approachable. It had been an atramentous, benumbing night and she had sat alone on her ocherous green and iridescent blue garden well. An alabaster white moth rested at her fingertips, the ambient pinewoods animated with ochre wings and Salim's flashlight.
The topiaries boughs were laden with rosin, myriads of pine needles meandering across melanoid empyrean, the crunch of dried bracken underfoot. She fixed her mercury stare at him, and he froze underneath the wilted chrysanthemums strung across the pines trees. Lollie did not scream, Lollie did not look afraid, and somehow that frightened him more than her melancholy reflection casted in the well's water.
"Excuse me, lady?" The moth at her fingertips was gone. Salim finally felt truly alone next to her. "Could - could you help me, perhaps?"