Glass

There were days when she felt she could hold him in her hands and feel him, fragile and shimmering as glass. He put up a front of strength, as they always did, but she'd seen beneath the skin, she'd lived within those veins for a brief flash in time and she knew the truth.

He was a glass castle, just waiting for the first stone. He flashed his grin and tipped his hat and never once betrayed that he was hollow inside, never once implied that when he stood against the sun just right, the light slanted through him and it was like he wasn't there at all. There were sharp-edged catacombs of dispair within him, covered in hot blown filigree and hidden from the eyes that never looked too close, never wanted to see the imperfect bubbles in smooth and solid walls.

She wanted to come to him and help him rebuild, transmute the glass to steel with her own special alchemy, chip away the cheap paint to find the man she knew must be buried beneath.

Even when he was not near her--especially when he was not near her--she was aware of his frailty, aware of how hard the wind of a real world could blow. He had spent his time in the tempest, shaped and hollowed out and smoothed over, and now she was afraid if she did not take him in from the storm he would be lost forever.

Most of all, it made her angry. Angry to her core at the travesties, the horrors that made the kiln that tempered him, furious at the barbary of men in back-alley New Orleans on too much alcohol and not enough morality. It was incomprehensible, how they could take a wild-eyed babe and collar him like a dog, how they could use a boy--a little /boy/ dirty from the dank of the street--and use him hard, for their own pleasure without a
mind to the way he choked on his own sobs, the way the blood dribbled out the side of his mouth from where sharp, baby's teeth had split the flesh.

It made her burn, made her turn her face from him, and she was sure in her heart of hearts that he always thought--always assumed--that the shame that touched her face was all his fault. She wanted to go back in time, rip a hole through the continuity and fabric of reality with her own two fists and tear into the men until there was nothing left but a smear and an afterthought and a stunned but grateful--but unharmed--child in the
corner.

She wanted to break away the glass.