Short Story Excerpt #4
It takes them a while to accept that their mother isn't going to come back for them.
Roze struggles the most. She spends her days inside of the cabin, buried underneath her sheets, her small wings frozen in statuesque stasis against her back. The snow globe their mother trapped them in displays one scene in the realm of reality: a snowy winter in a vast eternal storm, an old wooden building pressed firmly into the center of the plot. It is far too small, with one bedroom and a queen-sized stone-hard mattress that takes up most of the space. They have to share it when they sleep.
There is no night here--it is eternally day. It's funny; they don't get cold, but they do get tired. They're still figuring out how the dimension works. Outside of the globe they have the ability to shift between dimensions, to create pocket dimensions of their own and traps of their own and mischief of their own, but they are powerless within the globe. The magic binding them to it is stronger than anything a faerie can comprehend. The lack of hope grows inside of Roze like a gaping bone-baring wound, turns Viridia into an even hungrier thing. For a while, Roze is fucking delusional.
She foams at the mouth like a bad dog bitten rabid. Viridia holds her still by the shoulders, her mint skin folding over Roze's light pink dimensionflesh.
"You have to know she's not coming back for you," she breathes, her face so close to her sister's. Viridia watches her own face reflected back at her in bright gradients of coral, tears flooding from white eyes. "You have to understand, Roze. You have to know she did this on purpose."
Roze's voice scratches, diamond-against-diamond. "She couldn't," she says-her voice is naturally at a shrill-high pitch, and the combination grates against Viridia's mind in a way that only salts through the ache.
"She would never do this to us. It has to be a mistake."
Roze pulls her in, wets Viridia's sheer top. As Viridia strokes her back: "Come on, let's go to sleep," she whispers. "It's night somewhere out there."
They hold each other at night, Roze's back to Viridia's chest and stomach, curled up in the shelter of her sister. It doesn't happen often in their kind-some kind of genetic fuckery with twins-but Viridia's hair has streaks of salmon, and Roze's hair is littered with streaks of mint.
It is as if they were merged together in the womb and separated by miracle. It is as if they were destined to be conjoined. It is as if specks of their soul are scattered throughout each other. So: of course they are going to hold one another at night. The world is big and huge and scary when they are apart even when their world is confined solely to one plot with mid-sized acreage.
It doesn't even have to do with the fact that they have nowhere else to sleep--they could sleep facing away from one another, fetal position cold, but that would only leave them empty. They have to be together. They have to be together. There is nowhere else left for them to go. They wouldn't want to go anywhere else.