LITTLE GRIM

12 DIONYSUS

ACT TWENTY ONE     BLUEBIRD

Below the melancholy clouds there is a library where angels lay their heads when the honey-rose sunset dawns; where laughter resounds from the lips of a wicked woman; where we lay our scene. A gift of pure beauty that once bloomed from nothingness, wove a rich mosaic in the clouds; now a bitter reminder of an unsaid secret appearing a blood-thirsty light in the sky that fragments the ballet of the river looming behind the castle.

Pearl, the one with an impossibly endearing beauty to see, but a deadly nightshade on her angel mouth that remains a terrific memory, remembers the lies, of course - they'd left a massacre in their wake, sickening and sweet, overwhelmed and overheated. The milk-soft hands of time heal slowly but surely the wounds, and yet they are a different kind of delicacy than the honey-rose china the Queen sips her tea from; the sort that lingers in the turquoise sea breeze little Pearl so badly wants to feel brush against her bare skin one day; or the one that holds the dreamlike quality of the library of the castle, that Pearl spends some of her days in.

Pretty lies, pretty lips, they are nothing but menagerie of pain between her ribs, that grant armor for her barely thumping heart. The way they move is like serpents, blackened beings wrapping around her bones, melting on her flesh. She swallows the flames that were cast upon her - that have grown from the fiery locks of Adam - and she speaks to the snake in her dreams that attempts to taint her caramel-colored flesh by a honey-rose sunset, but withdraws its tongue with caution because when good girls like her snarl even the Gods falter.

The cherub's father in his mellifluous melancholy once told her that her mother's mother was the blue pool. The ocean. Her papa told Pearl - when she was but a mere babe - that perhaps she had missed her daughter so much that she stole her back from the unforgiving grounds of earth. Told her that her mother's mother - like all the women - moved heaven and earth and that she had turned cobblestone and lethal larkspur into pomegranate sands and turquoise oceans. He'd told her sweet lies. (But men always do.) The memory impels soft laughter to resound into the silence of the night, her eyes glimmering in such colorful flashes they plummet her back into her childhood. She can still see her father braiding her coil hair; her strawberry lips parting with mellifluous, mischievous chuckles as he told her pretty tales strung so sophisticatedly only a crook could have made them.

That her mother had been a lady, too, had been a lie. Pearl knows this. She knows, now, that her mama was never a woman of an unearthly virtue - ghostlike gowns on her lithe figure, deadly nightshade on the lips beneath a honeyed glow of the sun. She was a lowly thief who sewed coats from the gloves and the wallets she took when the opportunity served itself on a golden-rimmed platter - but she was the prettiest like that, it was common knowledge: born from the gutters with a face like milk, by night, too pure, too unsullied, and made to be spoiled, but blooming and budding when the sun shone. In that sense perhaps she is more like the one she rose from than she admits - wild honey and a bitter tinge of the lavender fields her mother gazed upon from the colored glass that shielded her bedroom (and gloomy, for she knew that never once would a dashing knight come for her to sing his blues from beneath the windowsill).

Upon days like these, when waves of boredom and ominous melancholy are a constant knock at the gates of the castle that is built out of wavering wood and the unfaltering smell of soil, blood - of men and of grapes - and unsaid secrets of dark velvet, she believes more than ever that she does not belong on the Earth. The angels as they watch her, lips like plump rosebuds, doll's eye, agree - they spin a silken paradise where she belongs; where she would never have to cut her molasses hair because the stars like it the way it is and where the individuals are breathtaking but faceless - their beauty only ever in the lilacs inside of their veins and roses blooming beautifully between their ribs.