it feels like sinking in (shirley 2020 | rose/shirley)

[fiachairecht]

it feels like sinking in. shirley (2020), rose/shirley. the year after, and a little more. 600w, rated m. for aphrodite_mine in summerofhorrorexchange 2022.

spring.

In her back garden Rose can lie down, stretch her arms out and not touch the fence. She can dig her fingers into the rich black earth, let the cloudless blue sky sear itself into her eyes, and smell the new world around her bursting to life.

Mushrooms push up through her fingers, their caps unfurling over her neat manicured nails. Ivy drips down from the oak tree to twine around her neck and into her mouth like Shirley's fingers used to. Bunchberry blooms across her stomach, girl indistinguishable from ground.

She thinks: Shirley would look so lovely like this.

*

summer.

She starts sleeping naked, the heat heavy enough to be another body in their bed. It should feel like freedom, but it doesn't.

Shirley is in bed with them too. She sits between Rose and the nightstand and presses her ink-stained fingers into Rose's chest. Splays her hand across Rose's heart and just watches it beat on, and on, and on.

Sometimes Rose sits up as Fred sleeps on. Reaches out to where Shirley is and feels ... something.

There is, always, something inside her.

She thinks: maybe this isn't a dream.

She thinks: maybe I don't want it to be.

*

autumn.

Someone wants to die.

The earth feels it, under its carpet of rotting leaves, and it whispers its longing to Rose as she lies back in the garden.

It's hungry. She's been hungry, too, ever since she left Shirley, and she feels it now on the wind brushing against her open mouth, in her stomach turning at even simple meals, in her cunt throbbing against her three fingers in pale imitation of what Shirley used to pull from her. 

Someone needs to die.

She thinks: not me, not while I'm mad.

She thinks: but I could help someone else along.

*

winter.

Conversation around the dinner table is stilted, the weak sun that spent all its light across the snow outside doing little to illuminate the room. For the first time, Rose sits there as a guest - this isn't a party, but it is keeping them from being tethered to the men for a night.

"Are you writing?" Shirley asks, her ankle twining around Rose's. "Are you living?" Her fingers are curling around her knife's handle, knuckles white.

Rose grabs the blade. It bites, sharp - not as sharp as Shirley's teeth.

"No," she says. "Yes. I want-"

Shirley laughs.

Rose stops thinking.

*

spring.

"Good girl."

Shirley's breath is warm on the back of her neck, cooler than the breeze across her cheeks. The crimson not dried on their hands is dripping into the riot of wildflowers below, turning the bloodroot clinging to their ankles into something finally worthy of the name.

So this is what Shirley's approval feels like, unfurling in her chest like morning glories reaching for the first rays of sunlight. Already her fingers ache for the knife again, her tongue for the slick heat of Shirley's mouth. 

She leans back, meets the rough linen of Shirley's blouse, the wispy nicotine-scented strands of hair. Alive, they're alive, everything in the garden is redolent with life - except.

Shirley's right hand tightens on her waist and Rose inhales damp soil and rotting meat and sweet iris perfume. Shirley's left hand closes over Rose's own, slips slick hard berries into her palm and Rose kneels without a word.

Lift the eyelids. Place the white baneberry buds in their rightful place, tiny purple doll's eyes staring sightless at the sky. Shirley's hands are tight on her shoulders and Rose cannot turn around. 

She thinks: look at me, Shirley.

She thinks: I'm just like you, now.