The sick, thick sound of the King licking his lips. It was the same sound that Sadie’s uncle made when he looked at her. He called her Chicken Wing. She thought that if he could, he would devour her down to her bones. He was the reason she was vegetarian. He always cooked red meat for dinner when her mother went out of town for work and left her alone with him. She’d swallow a few quick bites of something and then mash the rest of her meal to a pulp, moving the mush around her plate, while he tried to toe her underneath the table. She shuddered, unsure of whether it was from the cold of the cement beneath her bare feet or the uncanny likeness of their histories.
The other girl glowed with a phosphorescence reminiscent of the enchanted pools of water she’d always imagined existed somewhere else, while reading fairy-tales as a child of younger years. Sadie watched her from across the room, drawing her knees up to her chin and rocking to keep the cold from biting her on the behind. Her breath caught in the air in front of her face, warm wisps of life cutting through the obscene chill. Midori moved with the grace of a ballet dancer, her white lace dress, though ragged and ripped as Sadie’s jeans, following her as if it breathed a life of its own. Midori had gathered some wood from a dark corner, struck a match, and lit a fire in the ancient iron furnace. Sadie sat picking the black polish from her toenails and looked up as the light from the fire filled the damp, cement room, allowing her to finally see the details of their confines. She was sitting on a small cot, covered with a dusty handmade quilt and she could see now, across the room, a little blue painted wooden desk, dull and chipped with age, its ornate brass handles speckled with verdigris, nearly falling off the drawers. In another corner, there was a stack of old suitcases with garments made of lace and ribbon spilling out their edges. The only light, other than the fire, was the lantern that Midori had used to direct the two girls through the passageways beneath the city that had led them to this room. It now sat on the desk, leaning crookedly to the left, casting an eery shadow across the room. Sadie imagined she was in another world now.
“Do you live here?” she asked.
“I do now.”
“Where are you from?”
“Somewhere else.”
Midori sat down next to Sadie, pressing her palm onto Sadie’s knee with an unspoken urgency. Sadie thought that Midori’s touch would have been warm, but it was icy on her skin that was exposed by the rips in the knees of her jeans. Midori could tell that it scared Sadie a bit to be touched and she wanted to comfort her, but she had been alone for so long that she didn’t know how. She knew that Sadie had questions and that it was her turn to finish telling her story.
—
This king is an awful king. His palace extends into the depths beneath the earth. Unknown tunnels and chambers run beneath the city that he rules in the world that I come from. No one knows what an awful king he is. Except for the lost girls. He says that his girls are tainted and that no one could ever love those girls, but that he loves them, and that is why he lets them live. He says that if he were to send those girls off into the dark forest, where he says they came from, that what lives in there would eat them alive, would devour those girls down to the bones. He says the chains are to keep those girls from hurting themselves by running away. The truth is that he knows what he does is wrong. He knows his people would revolt against him if they knew the truth of what he does. But it is only one of the deep, dark secrets of his majesty. The truth is this king is more terrifying than any dark forest, or the sad, strange creatures that hold its secrets.
This king would sit alone at his grand table and make those girls serve him an army’s feast and he would eat it all himself. He would lick his lips and tease them with the bones to lure them closer; or worse, would drag those girls, wrists and ankles embraced with chains, across the room and pin them each down on the table, one by one.
That sick sound.
—
“I can hear it in the night when I try to fall asleep. I’d close my eyes and breath, imaging that I’d escaped into that dark forest, trying to ignore his greasy, fat hands and wet, fat mouth all over my body and his whispers of sweet peach dessert.”
Midori shuddered under the weight of her words and her dress slipped from her shoulder, exposing the luminous skin beneath. Sadie reached over to smooth the lace back over Midori’s shoulder, but stopped when Midori tugged the dress back down further. That was when Sadie saw it. A dark, soft spot that didn’t glow the way the rest of Midori’s skin glowed. She leaned closer behind the other girl, gently letting her hand glide across Midori’s back, guiding the drapes of her dress down to her waist. Midori stiffened and sat up, tilting her head so that her long dark waves of hair would fall forward. Sadie’s hands both caressed Midori’s cool, glowing back. Her skin was blue: the colour of water when the moon shines on a lake, traced with shadows from the leaves of distant trees that weren’t there. Sadie’s fingertips traced those patterns on Midori’s back, and flinched when they played upon the dark, soft spots, of which she now noticed there were two. Two macled holes equidistance from each other and the edges of Midori’s shoulders. She touched them and Midori moaned with the loss of a thousand unspoken sorrows, a guttural sound that echoed around the room and through time itself. They were soft wounds that felt fresh, but the broken skin closed around Sadie’s fingers, breathing and pulsating like gills of a fish, or a baby’s lips suckling at her fingertips. They wanted something that was not there and so they opened, releasing Sadie from their grasp. She pulled back her hands to examine them in the dancing light and saw that her fingers were decorated with blue blood. She drew a heart on Midori’s back with the blood, tracing over it lightly, and then turned the shaken un-girl to face her. She nodded slowly to reassure Midori that it was okay, brushing Midori’s hair away from her face. Sadie gripped the bottom of her Ziggy Stardust t-shirt, pulling it over her head, exposing herself too. She turned away from Midori, showing her back to the other she now considered kindred. Sadie’s back was covered with the bright pink-fresh dew-kissed stripes of scratches that should be reserved for older girls.
“I’m tainted too,” she said.
