An exhale. Her eyelashes fell like tail feathers from green and gold-speckled peacock eyes. The night breeze flew through the window as the sheer white curtains billowed towards her resting place, like two pale arms extending a ghostly embrace that would wrap her in the silver of winter.
The moonlight, dulled by the red of tail-lights and multi-colored neon signs of the city that surrounded her, reflected weakly off her vanity mirror that saw no beauty, warranted no playful smiles or flirtatious eyes in hopeful trial, and illuminated her snowy skin, which was dotted here and there with miniature goose-bump settlements that crawled through the peaks and valleys of her body's landscape. A shiver. Another exhale, this time clouded in the cool air that somehow made her loneliness seem more real. Hot blood circulated through a fragile heart, only to cool again within fingers searching for what could not be grasped in the ethereal blue darkness of night, of mothers tucking children safely in bed, of addicts slumped over in stoops, too strung out on their poisons to be able to recognize if they were coming or leaving consciousness. Curious fingernails traced a white path across skin so numb that it could only perceive the heavy pressure that surrounded it, only hesitated when they encountered lines that previous battles with the reflection of the mirror had left her with. Eyes closed and her eyelashes resed gently on the high apples of her cheeks; she would fight no longer. But she would not die this night. She was too good---or too scared---for that sort of thing.
The moonlight, dulled by the red of tail-lights and multi-colored neon signs of the city that surrounded her, reflected weakly off her vanity mirror that saw no beauty, warranted no playful smiles or flirtatious eyes in hopeful trial, and illuminated her snowy skin, which was dotted here and there with miniature goose-bump settlements that crawled through the peaks and valleys of her body's landscape. A shiver. Another exhale, this time clouded in the cool air that somehow made her loneliness seem more real. Hot blood circulated through a fragile heart, only to cool again within fingers searching for what could not be grasped in the ethereal blue darkness of night, of mothers tucking children safely in bed, of addicts slumped over in stoops, too strung out on their poisons to be able to recognize if they were coming or leaving consciousness. Curious fingernails traced a white path across skin so numb that it could only perceive the heavy pressure that surrounded it, only hesitated when they encountered lines that previous battles with the reflection of the mirror had left her with. Eyes closed and her eyelashes resed gently on the high apples of her cheeks; she would fight no longer. But she would not die this night. She was too good---or too scared---for that sort of thing.
Instead, she peeled her snowy skin from the temporary nest of cotton sheets and pillows where she lay. She approached the mirror, reluctantly took a seat in front of it and began brushing her orange hair without thinking, without pausing to contemplate the origins of cracks in her reflection brought on by nights when "things had gotten a little rough". No, instead she focused on the bristles passing across her scalp, overcoming the knots in her hair like water pushes through debris to make a stream that eventually empties in the blue ocean of her eyes. She would have given anything to leave this place, escape this duty, but this dream was further from reach than the images that fluttered behind her eyelids in the dead of night.
Instead, she painted her lips like blood, her battle prize that would command the respect of her enemies and force them to invite her into their camp so that she could make her clandestine counter-strike against this world's dumb and blind concept of morality. She sharpened her charcoal spear, traced her black mask of war beneath her eyes. Warm breath seeped through her crimson lips and condensed in the winter's air with each heavy sigh of preparation. She slipped into the armor of her sex-appeal that she detested so and stepped outside onto the urban battleground, soaked with the blood that impossible innocent dreams may bleed.
****END. Just something I slapped together in a hurry =) I'm kind of on a family-visiting hiatus at the moment. There's no internet connection at my boyfriend's house. Stay nerdy everyone!
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