Elusive Creature

Stones slipped just beneath the skin, smooth surfaces pressing against dermis, soaking up subcutaneous warmth; opals and moonstones and quartz, agate and topaz and jade all shining in the body’s light, chunky beads filling skin with texture beneath your touch.

Once you asked why she went to so much effort, all those tiny cuts and carefully treated scars, all those beautiful things hidden away for no one to see. She always healed so quickly, but she still felt pain, and it always seemed like one or another of her gems was infected.

Apparition & Mabon

The city is full of ruins, though few last long—waves of construction, of revitalization, flow through it like water, like the flexing of some unseen beast. The city’s blood flows in cranes and trucks and trains, in the brutality of gentrification and the decay that follows.

Trash dolls and harpies run before the wave, and feral angels slide through the cracks; but witches always find a way to protect their places, all those strangely preserved houses scattered through the hills, those otherworldly relics. Even after their deaths, they remain.

A Flower in the Silence

Someone has left a flower in the silence between moments, that secret place where you long ago learned to go to hide from the world. A place which you had always thought only you could access.

Because, well. It’s inside your mind. Right?

The flower is pale, almost immaterial. It looks like a pencil sketch.

You gingerly pick it up and sniff.

It doesn’t smell like anything. Which does make sense—smells have always been the hardest things to imagine with any sort of accuracy—but it’s still a bit disappointing.

Possession & Bruises

Once, long before, you wondered why the witch–your witch, now–was always covered in bruises, why her skin was forever a tapestry of slowly fading marks, all those purples and yellows hiding the warmth of her skin.

Once, you wondered why.

But then you died.

When you were alive, you had assumed the obvious. She had never cared to cover them, to conceal them, and you couldn’t conceive of her as a being that anyone could hurt without her willing consent; so you assumed it was simply a kink that she didn’t care to keep secret.