Devils and Angels

xxxii. a diamond that glitters

T R I G G E R   W A R N I N G ; 

implicit mentions of harm

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d i a p h a n o u s

light, translucent and delicate

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THE FROSTED MORNING GLOW THREW diamonds across the polished flooring; prismatic fragments in the shape of the lustrous gem that incoronated Diana's ring finger.

The Winter sun shining in her eyes brought out the idyllic blue that my father used to tell stories about falling in love with at first sight; the turbulent cerulean of a tsunami crashing to shore. Bit by bit, he'd loved every part of her, from the dimples in her cheeks to the golden tan to her skin, even in the ice-rushed months. But the crackling flames in the blaze of her anger had been his favourite: sharp smiles and smouldering laughs, surging stubbornness, and a violent streak that only she could keep contained.

Or so Dylan told me.

I did not inherit her eyes, nor her hair, nor her soft sunset tan. Instead, I had her knife-carved dimples, the rose to her cheeks, her razor smiles, and her obstinacy. Her smouldering laughs were mine, her fiery temperament mine, and every part of her violence embedded into my blood.

That was why we were volatile, prone to burning at any moment; blazing pyres, filling the sky with plumes of ash-grey smoke that crushed corrupted lungs in their suffocating hold. We were eruptive, inflammatory, with cinder-hearts pumping boiling blood; not allowed to get to close lest we exploded and decimated everything around us that mattered.

It was that anger that coursed through me now, in hot, pulsating floods. My body quivered—my hands grasping for stability in two crutches that could barely keep me upright—but it wasn't anger that had my heart ripping through my chest.

In anger's place was betrayal, and it sunk a stone of coalescent dread where my heart should have been.

Tears pricked my eyes, and I hopped back into the shadows, where my mother and her fiance couldn't see me. I pressed my fingers to my lips to stifle my sobs, shoulders shaking, and my vision blurring with a layer of glass that swam in my eyes, distorting my two parents who were lost in their own world.

A world of darkness, obsidian and all-consuming—the heavy air black with the smokiness of forgotten memories; the acrid tang of blood churning in the air and swirling across my skin, behind the fear rendering my world colourless.

I blinked, and the tears splashed hotly on my cold-pinched cheeks, a reminder that I was alive to see the day that the woman who birthed me had sealed a fate without me; that my biological parents did not care about me at all. I'd known it all along, but the sight of the ring had brought a fresh wave of nausea; a tidal wave coming crashing to shore in my chest.

I had to sit back and watch my own parents accept a life that they'd cut me out of; our dysfunctional family portrait with a gaping hole in the middle.

The sight of the two of them together ripped my life right out of my hands, and without knowing what happened that night, it would forever elude me; dangling just out of reach.

I couldn't bear to watch them—the image imprinted itself in my mind, making my organs collapse in on themselves again, and again, and again; a torturous cycle.

Scrubbing the visual of them out of my mind with quivering fingers, I hastily whipped around, near-leaping out the door as if being too near to them burned me. In a way, it did, their bond dancing up my skin and searing my flesh with hissing flames that leapt to the stars in tongues of crimson and gold.