Ink And Echoes

• BUT I LOVED MY FATHER - TWO •

II

❁ T W O ❁

• • •

° Laney °

My mother was whispering a prayer or crying, I couldn't make out. Or maybe it was just me who was crying. I watched her coffin, a shade of her ink that she had painted the kitchen walls with. Everyone was watching me, not her; not mourning but talking about her burned diaries drowning in a river and her crushed eyelids. They all had painted the ground with a colour of honey, sick and a lost yellow.

Shall I call this a funeral? Or just another stanza from her poem? I walked away from there, looking for atleast one nightmare that had turned into a memory. I sat in silence, falling out of love every passing second. My dress was stuck around me like a vine, almost like the touch of my mother who was always rooted to a window never opened.

When I went to her room, all I could see were black papers drenched in her white blood. The sunlight that fell on her table looked like a pool of despair that I wanted to get closer to but was my mother ever mine to love? The sound that her anklet made whenever she took a few steps towards her death, I would just listen; never stopping her.

She said me before jumping that -
❛ A Black sea,
filled with my tears -
rotten to lava;
awaits me.
But you, my beloved -
you'll pour milk to
my poems and then
burn them off on your
skin because, baby -
Your Black sea awaits you too. ❜

~•°•°•~

The house that I had to go meet my client was dripping with the same sick honey that I saw yesterday. It was as if my mother was using this house as a firewood to melt away the milk that had stained her poems. When I went inside, I wanted to cry. I could see the fault lines on everything in that house. That young girl - sweet, orange; holding a scissor in her hand to cut my bleeding fingers. But actually, she looked at me as if I was a mirror; a shattered, drugged mirror.

                                            Look at yourself.
That girl dripping of a
marigold honey,
with a milky smile;
she is you.
She is yours to hunt.
Baby do it. Claw at her.

My mother whispered, her flavours alone consuming my unwritten poems. I wanted a supernova not honey. Fluerie's skin was stitched with fear and dusty blood that her mother had sucked on. Ruelle looked like she was always drowning in a Black sea of milk, with the bullets buried on her husband's chest. Her engagement ring looked like it was burning in a fire; a colourless fire of her daughter's innocence.

“Laney, you look a poem Elijah wrote.” Ruelle said, looking at me as if I was a myth of needles and dreams.

Her daughter smiled at me. I could see a red honey seeping through her veins and the darkest milk drenching her ribs. Her mouth was full of blood and her orange hair was crafted carefully with library books. They all say, she killed Elijah but what they don't know is - poetry kills. Not drugs, not honey, not milk, not us.

“Laney, did you love your mother?” Fluerie asked me with a gun in her hand.