She Dreams of Dead Lions
She wakes up to a phone call,
she hadn’t realizedshe was asleep.
There was an accident they tell her
And she walks in, past all the mangled bodies,
not bothering to swat the flies away
Just hoping they were wrong
That her family was safe in the country.
She wanted to look away,
but oh god it was them.
Her older brother looking peaceful,
her little brother a mess.
And now she was so angry.
“They’re in a better place” Everyone tells her,
‘Yes,’ she wants to scream, ‘but that’s not the problem.
The problem is they went there without me!’
But instead she smiles sadly, and nods,
Develops a routine.
Wakes up, puts on lipstick and nylons.
You can build things in lipstick and nylons she learns,
But only if you aren't afraid to get a few runs in them.
She learned there was no shame in being pretty,
because being pretty was her only power left.
She decides then
that a god so cruel as to punish her by making her walk through the
hall full of stinking corpses
for growing up without him
was not one she wanted to forgive her.
They told her she still had time to repent.
To ask for forgiveness, for her disbelief and lipstick.
And she, ever the graceful queen in her heart,
yelled back that she would not.
That their god should come crawling at her feet,
that he should ask her forgiveness.
The smell of death isn’t one she was like to forget or forgive.
She cries for hours on the day she laughs for the first time.
And she always buys detective novels,
though there is no little brother to read them anymore.
she screams into the night that she is too young,
too young to have so many ghosts.
but when morning comes
she is a mask of lipstick andwaterproof mascara.
She still feels a hole in her heart,
gaping and big and dark,
an emptiness where her brothers and sister had lived,
a hollow place where her parents had lived too.
And she grows older like this,
grows older with her heart screaming
everytime she saw things they’d never have.
She dreams of wearing a lion’s pelt.
And revenge.
She dreams of a lion pouncing on her family,
all the while making her watch.
By then she thinks she has earned her death,
oh but she hopes he chokes on her.
She dreams of a dead god,
dreams he lies with her dagger in his heart,
and the words he was about to say dying on his lips,
‘i forgive you child’
he almost says, in the dream,
and she twists her dagger in his heart,
and whispers to the god of her sister,
“look at all your forgiveness is worth,
maybe you should have sought mine instead.”
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