velvet evening
a graphic novel in the making
i. born in tears
the day she was born rain fell delicately on translucent windows, with a weight heavier and more devastating than mountains falling to earth. her mother noticed that the patterns traced by tiny droplets upon a frosty window surface were the same patterns her water traced as salt slid down her cheeks, the same patterns as the bloody tears shed from the womb that held her unborn child. they painted spiderwebs on soft surfaces, strings woven in circles around each other. a masterpiece of infinite connections, emanating from a central point. her womb. the makings of the universe, now the makings of a mother's death. a child, birthed from the dead in a film of her mother's tears and a cord of connection still sliding between bodies.
that evening the sky never stopped crying. there was silence. not even the gentle whimper of newborn curiosity.
iii. a raven
she was followed by death her whole life. grim reaper lurking in the shadows of each tip-toe on earth. crows would fly her way to nest their tired wings within the strands of hair growing from skull's flesh. crows would linger so long in her loveliness that they melted into her being until her hair became a feathered blackness, reaching past her vulnerable limbs, for her limbs would always reach out to feel beyond herself.
if you wandered into her madness and lost yourself in glistening hair for just a moment, you could feel the thousand raven eyes staring through your soul. they always remember faces. some could wade through the dark ocean of raven wings to find a pair of green eyes awaiting the arrival of warm-blooded body.
her mother was but a corpse and a seemingly ancient fairytale. and her father, circulating with the blood of thick blackness, was unable to care for a child in his hateful existence. a black magic wielder, some would say. he carried the same penetrating green eyes as raven, but her heart pumped a mother's blood. it was sweet and nourishing, blue as the ocean. her blood could quench the thirst of any seeker searching for secret of life.
birds in flight would gift their dying bodies to her grateful hands. a procession of feathery death and old bird songs would lie in the wake of where she danced (her stride was so elegant that she seemed to dance her way through life). over the years her backyard grew into a graveyard of body parts. tombstones of wings embracing grey rocks. skulls hanging from tree branches by strings of strong sinew. they gently clashed in the wind as it passed by, creating a song of shuddering leaves and bone-clicking sounds of sweet decay. it was the ancestors speaking.