LITTLE GRIM

07 CRAVING, KILLING

ACT TWELVE DESCEND TO HELL ( THE GARDENS OF MAGIC AND MOSS )

Four of them wander. Three stump ahead, and the last, the girl whom has eyes that hold chandeliers glimmering as the sole virtue, has baskets of fresh strawberries and wine (tinted, sweet as blood red jam) in her little hands, walking clumsily like a baby deer. They walk toward the gardens, where the angels have gone, where the devils have sunk their fangs deep into the earths and gone to rest; where the Princes forefathers take deserved rest from years of feasting on blood of the poor and on the costly constructions they build out of their bones.

Pearl walks with everlasting wonder - she swears solemnly that it seems like the angels have glued their wings together and have sculpted the skies in something that resembles a sweet, sweet painting; it has a certain warmth to it, and it makes it look as though the angels are kissed by the silky slivers of light of the sun, soft like rose petals in water.  Mornings of this kind form history on the patterns of her fingertips. It is a scene of serenity but still, the girl with the cheeks of plotches of rose finds it so vivid, that things pass by so rapidly whilst time goes on so slowly. Call it naïveté, call it ambedo; but she is hopelessly engrossed by the minuscule details of the earths her time in the palace has offered her thus far - like the delicate orchids that bloom and other plants that bathe in the sensory rays of the sun. She has always been like this. As a child, she enjoyed most of all velvet silken lined cocoons and melancholic raindrops against colored windows, sticky saccharine fingers and flower crowns messily coiled around soft necks.

The long grass around the manmade fence glitters with sparkles of gold from the sun like blazing fire as they walk, and it kisses their skin ever so gently: leaving honeysuckle nectar in its wake, the sunlight drips down their flesh like salty seawater tears. Pearl feels tempted to pluck one of the saccharine pink flowers that bloom amidst the grass, but she holds herself back. The Prince would not appreciate a short stop for such foolish thing. Pearl takes note of the small path that is restricted by little stones and amidst them bloom soft roses the color of the last girls cheeks - the trees and bushes are only slightly darker than the hue of green the Prince dons - a blouse with buttons atop a terra cotta pair of trousers.

"It's a beautiful morning, is it not?" Prince Helios speaks to his wife but he peers at Pearl, and she at the hardback novel in his hands - covered in stains of green tea, costly cherry liquor and strawberry paint, and its spine safe and sound under the touch of his blunt, uncut nails. 

The prince is correct and incorrect: Pearl does not much enjoy the heavy rays of the sun that entice Helios' blonde locks to glimmer. The sun - and its slivers of petroleum light - is far from featherlight in its assault on the individuals bones and veins and flesh. It was delirious and moonstruck, and Pearl had not been prepared for it. Her hair, in which lived michelangelo's baby blue cupid with skin like fine china, is disheveled a little and had began to grow a little wet where it frames her gentle features like a halo, and admittedly. She's certain that much more time exposed to it would make her either faint or mewl like a little kitten - and too, that already looked almost lewd in the way she baptized in the sun - with swollen lips, red tinted cheeks and tips of the ears, eyes dreary.

A while later, the four individuals sit in a circle and languidly profiting of the strawberries Pearl has plucked - Pearl, whose gown is covered by filth and grime as the result of an unfortunate fall. She had always been clumsy, after all.

"You should have been prepared - you should have dressed on the occasion, too. Such gowns are no suitable attire to attend picnics as a maid - now, it is all filthy and your skin's sullied," Evangeline says with a challenging grin on her lips as if her words have been jutted down in a book of law, ink-stained and possessing all truths in correlation to the finest ladies of all but in one of petty remarks fueled by jealousy, "A true woman should always be two things, at last: delicate, and refined. You are neither, you've proven."