Left is safe and right is unsafe.
She's staring at her hands like they're foreign entities. Her fingers are curled around the glass of the containers, curled tight and she remembers a long conversation with one of her cousins when she was younger. He had told her about being in school and having pencils thrown at him. She had told him that she was homeschooled so she wouldn't know, but she'd have broken the pencils and thrown them right back.
He had laughed and told her that he had friends who did that. All boys. He'd teased her about being secretly a boy, and she told him she wished.
It could all have been so easy, had she been simply one thing or another: girl or boy, anything would have been less of a struggle than the simple, aching truth that was the fact that she was neither.
Left unsafe and right unsafe because in a world of extremes, there is no such thing as solace.
The glass is unbreakable, she knows, because even though she shouldn't break it, even though that would be suicide, right now she doesn't feel like destruction would be too much of a let-down. But the glass is unbreakable, at least to the muscle of her hands, and that is a disappointment.
She's gone numb, retreated into her head as if she wasn't already there, always, and she's thinking about how she doesn't live anymore, how you can't rape the willing and can't murder the dead and right now she's a lot closer to a corpse than she is the person who she had been around Lenka.
She wishes, not for the first time, that the car had just killed her, except that she has the creeping suspicion that it did. There are reasons why she hadn't hesitated for as much as a moment when Kenspeckle had made the job offer, and though she doesn't hear them now, there have always been rumors floating around. Nye isn't the only doctor trying to raise the dead, and everyone knows Nye and Grouse are in competition.
Two wrongs don't make a right but three lefts do so perhaps she should drink three sips of the left liquid.
She wonders what would have happened if it had been the Nye that had offered her a living, had found her on the street that day. She bets she wouldn't be dressed the way she is, accoutered the way she is, holding poison in her bleeding palm the way she is. The Nye, for all its faults, would have understood her, she thinks. Would have understood about the gender and the aloneness and the brutality of being isolate in a world of friends.
Perhaps she could have shed the pronouns, shrugged them off like a weight, and perhaps she would have been able to fly with her shoulders set free. Perhaps she could have achieved something with her life, something more than what she has now. Perhaps.
What she does have, though, is an aching kind of thirst that has overtaken her mental processes and stripped her to a single raw nerve ending that is ready to scream, so she stops thinking, like that could ever help. Like anything could ever help her in this world where she had always thought she was destined to be alone.
Right is safe and left is unsafe, and she has stopped caring which way is left and which is right because it doesn't matter and she doesn't even know if she wants the poison or the purity at this moment, so uncaring, she drinks.
A/N: I'm not really sure what to say here.
~Mademise Morte, December 19, 2012.