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TO THE BONE ✷ VOL. I, AFTERSHOCK
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AMELIE'S DEATH IS not for nothing. Before the Red Room, before nights spent begging to be clean, Iseult had been tender like the soft underbelly; the overly ripe fruit, long forgotten in some carved-out corner, blistering under the sun. But she quickly learns that tenderness does not stand a chance against the truth. The truth, as she comes to learn, is crushing. And so, Isa learns to be crushing too. She no longer begs for what she wants; she takes it. She stops pulling teeth and starts carving them out. She kills the softness, smothers the desire, becomes less reticent, more teeth, more hunger.
Grief has stripped her bare and there are no more wildflowers or braided hair or secrets whispered beneath covers—no more softness of sisterhood, no more swimming in lakes, no sticky candy and no more baby teeth. And though Iseult had stood with the legs of a newborn deer and barely crawled her way through the threshold of the Red Room, she had not made it out alive. She knows this much because she never really left that house. When she dreams, she is there, stuck beneath the floorboards, buried in the lining of its skin, still in the belly of the beast with Amelie and her crown of thorns and weeping wound.
And when they said that all who entered the house up on the hill would die, they were right. No one ever left, just stayed stuck in amber, reliving the worst moments of their lives—the moments that would erode at them—when they were monstrous, when they were loved, the moment of their death, the moments where they wished they had died. And if they were still here, wouldn't that just eat at them?
So, for the past few months Iseult has been half-dead, half-bleary eyed nonbeliever. She hasn't worked since August, and Amelie's mother still forces her to go to church every Sunday and gets a little too heavy-handed in the evenings when she's had too much to drink, and no one is there to protect Isa so she learns to make herself small. She chips away at herself, molds herself into something that can be stomached. It's survival. And as unflinching as she becomes, she never quite unlearns how to disappear.
Still, even after months of wasting away, Amelie's mother doesn't make her move out—her one kindness—but really, Isa knows that it is inherently selfish. Amelie's mother is mourning, not in the way that you would a loved one, but in the way you would when you lose something that you thought would always be yours. Even Amelie's mother, as unsparing as she is, knows the truth.
