Member-only story
You Fool
The night lifts her
“You…fool,” she whispered, palm against the moon through the window pane, casting the whole room into darkness.
Outside, wind tears through this city of ice. And so she spins. Madly. Wildly. Just kicking off gently from the floor to be captured in the magic of the night that lifts her body away from gravity. Whirling. Into the air, towards the ceiling. Heart thrusting through the waves of delight. Still spinning, spinning.
Not dizzied by the spell, she laughs. She has become a card trying to see its other side, but only winds up twisting on a corner. “You fool” stays in her mind as an inner tattoo. A drumbeat. A rhythm she can’t shake.
Around her room, the little shards of her lives are stored, collected. Some heaped like dust under the bed. Some stacked like pyres against the corners, just waiting for a match to be lit. Some hanging on the walls, not quite pretty pictures but not coming down either. Others, she knew, were still buried deep in the closet, locked away by the force of desperation. One day she will have to sort through them.
Some were so light they could hardly be seen against the yellow hardwood. They would disappear if she tried too hard to see them.
She passed through the ceiling, through the attic and raw old rafters, through the curling shingles on…
