It is a personalized process, one developed over self-experimentation and trials conducted throughout my life– the source of my vitality, a behavioural sibling of randomness. There are no familiar semantics of my magical girl activities, no rhyme to the ritual, only a sparkler's wisp does the silence complete where the most calming chrysanthemums are stripped of their petals. In magical mechanical motion, there is but a handful of loose criteria:
The scholarly magical girl strives for knowledge, studies in the magic academics of the arts of magic. They chase, take hold of physical immortality. They see the true intention– evil is always looking for someone to blame, in search of quarrels, squabbles, and abuse. They are always proving something to someone, something to be someone. They are always in conflict. They are at the mercy of the commons, a half light shone down a road of deception. Such is the natural way.
My journey bloomed in ornamental palaces; upon gentle pleasure had I discovered fairies on the eve of my springtime. In a garden of sorrows, I stood amidst the concrete jungles of my city. Midnight had passed, the cold morning glow due her approach in an hour's time. I happened upon the carcass of a frog, his scalp torn and scattered, exposing the entrance to his gullet. The frog sprouted a pair of feathered wings. So heavenly had he laid, his back seated against the grass. It was enticing, my fervor for his flesh soon over capacitated. I took it as my responsibility to leave his majesty not to waste, carrying what remained of him in my arms.
I caressed his skin, the mucus lining between the surface of his body and my fingertips. The sensation was that of a contentful touch, the solidity of what was beneath created a sharp, dazzling reflection– it was whole, lifeless, the periodic muscle spasm interrupting a peaceful rest with a mocking projection. His juices flushed and dripped between my fingers in a careful arrangement leaving the platform two drops of blood at a time. He reeked, his decaying corpse emitting the smell of spoiled fish. I could see the cicada appearance of his guts spilling out from his body; it tried to escape, it tried its very best, but I pushed it back in.
The sun had risen by the time I returned to my apartment. A visible trail was left in the wake of my travels by both the stains of blood and scent of prey. My actions resonated their stench and masked itself in absurdity, the connection too strange to be scrutinized. I found myself disgusted at my kitchen's affairs. The beast sat dormant on my cutting board, his flippers muddying the floor of my knife. I knew not the delicate anatomy of the creature's natural forms, and chose the path of least resistance, fitting the whole of the frog inside of my mouth, head and all. My bites were violent, my chomping uncontrollably sporadic, each instance of contact between my teeth and his skin spraying sweet juices towards the roof of my mouth. It was a delightful meal, albeit one that came with rigid uncertainty.
It became habit; the same process was repeated over with any magic cretins I discovered on my outings. I became skillful, more sophisticated, more careful; not long after I first began, my neighbours started to report a distinct, rotten smell in our apartment complex. My activities were nearly paralyzed, had it not been for my purchasing of odour eliminators during a spark of foresight that occurred to me during a previous shopping trip. Much of my harvests bore small animals, most a size twice as that of my hands, of which I consumed indiscriminately and regularly in tandem with a steady dose of antibiotics.
After a week's investigation, it became suspect to my apartment's residents that there must've been something amidst the ventilation itself. It was thought to be chronic, the caustic pollution having grown none but stronger and unacceptably potent. Notably, the sweet, elderly woman next door had caved to an illness partially due to my doings causing an unnatural streak of mild insomnia. It certainly wasn't the best, but to say I felt guilty about the situation was a stretch; the rent had dipped considerably low on account of the new vacancies, while the landlord burnt whatever budget he had set aside for the issue on prayers and shamans.
What had once been a quiet neighbourhood turned unruly, dirty, the soot of apathetic handling coating the walls in rust. My apartment floor became abandoned entirely, leaving myself the only resident. New tenants came and left in the coming months; the lowered cost of rent perpetuated a cycle of poor, often unkempt tenants, many of which dipping in and out of payments. The landlord thought me a saint for having stuck around, and had adjusted my rent in hand. It wasn't an expected byproduct, but one welcome nonetheless.
The new residents were mostly uninteresting, but my attention was caught by a Rose who moved next door. I had scheduled my outings in line with my neighbours' sleeping times, but Rose had only recently moved in, and worked a graveyard shift part time at a convenience store. I was cradling the carcass of a cat when she opened her door. It was a moment of panic, and I had been prepared to quickly excuse the cat as a product of my charity work, a rescuee of my veterinarian escapades. Yet she saw the cat as nothing more than a pet of mine, with no mention of the stench that reeked through the air, the reason of which I would soon discover why.
Rose and I spoke not too often, of vapid topics and small conversation. She introduced herself as a chemistry student attending a local college. She struck me as an individual with little baggage, the youthful complexion and blanketed expressions like a still frame depiction of happiness, someone living a reality with little responsibility. She had little cosmetic sense, her cloudy glasses and cheap ribbons first in view before I could even see her, yet the sloven aesthetic shone a loose shade of handsomeness– I would've mistaken her for a boy had she not worn her hair in braids and spoken in such a gentle tone of voice.
I wasn't unfamiliar with roses. In fact, my coworkers referred to me as the ‘Rose Queen Maria', partly due to a prescribed thorniness in my speech, but also due to my preferential tendering of roses. My boss reprimanded me, touting the idea that a proper florist applied her love to the beauty of the whole, rather than individual buds, but I cared little for what she had to say. The rose had a simple, rich elegance that little others could hope to match. Her prickles added a literary depth, the berry-like stature seductively inviting a casual embrace. It was a guilty plant, born from intention, and one that I adored.
But my experience was moot. Rose was unlike any rose. She was more rosary than rose. She was smoothly abrasive, the flaws in the surface character cutely constructed along inoffensive mannerisms. She was softly opinionated, and that which I thought a careful front revealed itself as little more than a homogenous profile of undeveloped texturing. Conversations with her were fairly enjoyable; despite the lack of depth in her character, she was a fantastic listener, and spoke in a manner that made you feel like talking about yourself. I didn't have much to share, nay, I hadn't dared to share the specifics about me; it was too much too early, her world much too young.
But talking to her grew tiring. I could only parrot so much before my thoughts had been parched, and the brittle schedules of our conversations showed itself inconvenient. I had rather preferred the old widow and her incessant ramblings of youth than the demon that stood before me and engaged in conversation, only to grow awkwardly silent and be on her way when I closed my mouth. I thought it intentional, some esoteric insult, but it became quickly clear that the burden of reason had been on me.
Rose had some peculiar features. Her aura was strangely prepubescent, but I saw her for the angel she was. My aperture was locked to her halo, the encompassing grace of her wings obscuring my vision. My view was unclear, unfocused under the fluttering of feathers. Were it not for her having been a head taller than I, I would've thought her a child. Most strangely, she had what could only be described as semantic olfactory agnosia. Her sense of smell had been missing for many years now, yet she retained a proper sense of taste. It was clear why she hadn't minded the smell of rotting flesh that permeated throughout the apartment floor.
I hadn't thought much of the possibility that somebody else could've been as magical as me, perhaps even more so than I was. It came as a shock, but it was not out of expectations. Many grown adults shed traces of magicality, and I had only ever made the differentiation on a static measurement relative to myself. To assume myself unique was foolish, the realization came as a scabbed reparation to my securities– it was not out of the question that I existed, nor had I been a vicarious image.
It was then, a cold November afternoon, that I was walking home, when I chanced upon Rose's jaunt along the perfume aisle at a fancy boutique. She held a solemn expression, making reactionary snuffles to no avail as she held product after product to her nose, wafting to the best of her ability. It looked rather pathetic, a grown woman sniffing rows of perfumes in a perfect rhythm. I thought it tragic, my initial judgement that she was desperately clawing to regain a sense of smell. My worries were unfounded, however, as I approached her in curiosity and discovered that she had merely wished to purchase something to cover herself. Her manager informed her that she stunk the store to high hell, and that she had better worn a layer of perfume the next time she clocked in. She had never exhibited odours before, and had not the experience of purchasing such products. I lent my assistance to her. It was only natural, her current circumstance being substantiated by my doings. I wasn't of help, however, as I too had become agnostic to our shared curse. We resorted to asking the clerk who promptly told her to take a shower.
It was only then had I discovered the absence of bathing in Rose's habitual cycles, the room she occupied lacking a working shower. I had suspected something similar in the wake of the old lady's scent, but I had waived it off thinking it was merely my exaggerated perception of old person smell. In its place, Rose had conducted wipe downs using alcohol wipes in place of water and shampoo every few days. Though its sanitary effectiveness is something I can neither confirm nor deny, a closer inspection of her scent led me to stern conclusions of her methods. On our return, I suggested to Rose that she use my bath in place of her own. She nodded with hesitance, uncomfortability in unfamiliarity clouding her decision.
She came to my room after returning to her own, her childish pajamas and towel in hand, entering the bath I had heated for her. I pictured how her feathers would look when dripping with water, how her halo would glow, bouncing off the steam– my curiosity was too strong, my control too weak, and so I announced myself with cheerful glee and marched into the bath before she could give her authorization. My findings were disappointing. Her angely parts interacted not with the physical world; I could've concluded as much by reaching my hand to touch, though the consequence of revealing myself to another would not have been grand.
Rose minded the intrusion not. She saw the bath as having belonged to me, and as such the territory mine to pass as I wished. A convenient mentality, but oddly insulting; it's as if I had been delegated to a position lower, her majesty's weakest moment the strongest of mine. I was oddly uncomfortable after that, my plan to delegate the mild shame to my teasing now in ruin, my unnecessary awareness impounding the embarrassment. The bathtub felt unexpectedly cramped, her legs nearly intertwining with mine, though it was oddly comforting, this hellish landscape of heat emanating from one body to the next. I would've clawed the porcelain off to escape, had it not been for a crude discovery: Rose smelled good. Appetizingly good. Good enough for me to have wondered why I had settled for wildlife and roadkill when I had a prize like this strolling around a number plate down. It must've been masked by the deathly pollution, for it would've been strange otherwise for me not to have noticed.
My instinctual hunger for mana was not to be misjudged; I had thought Rose a witch, but she was not anatomically different from any other magical being, a creature biologically sane yet mentally imperfect, their projections of angelic features the product of my mental associations. The aforementioned imperfection substantiated magic, the greater the perceived flaw the greater the magical power. It only made sense that a human being would be the most flawed of all, their minds the most complex, their ambitions the most egotistical; to lack such nuance, to see themselves for what they are is an impossibility, something only magically granted. It drove me mad, but the cattle was but a promise, and her flesh a gift; I had no guarantee when I would find such a pure specimen again, if ever at all. My information was imperfect, her entity one of a kind, but still on a limit of time– until she would lose her innocence, when she would become unmagical, until that time was what I had to make my move.
I had little to do but to do my best to guide her along a sightless journey to her natural end. It was best from then that we met at irregular timings, at irregular frequencies by my own handiwork. She could spare but a few hours between her job and study, at the start of the night and the end of noon, of which I occupied alone. But as well as that may be, the weight of action rested not on my shoulders. Rose was not as eventually talkative as I had understood her, the road to our companionship stunted by her reclusive nature and innate introversion. I was infuriated by her behaviour. It was clear that further measures needed to be taken, pushed by repetition– I had to force her schedule in tandem with mine. But I had nothing. We worked separate jobs, and lived in separate worlds, my perfect rosary meters out of reach, avoiding me. The best I could hope for was a ‘coincidental' routine meeting at times when our lives aligned, with my sleeping times as close to hers as I could.
Though sparse, our encounters grew many times in number. She was surprisingly difficult to track down, her indulgence in casual detours my ultimate bane. I had worked to catch her at the end of her shifts, but she often left the store an hour in advance before her usual time, leaving the store unmanned. She proceeded by wandering off in random directions, often dining at the first restaurant she saw, before walking home. When it came time for her regular schedule, I would pretend to have caught her on my way home and engage with her in a conversation, lasting a rough twenty minutes before we had reached our homes.
My attempts at further invitations were rejected; she seemed not to fancy a morning tea, often ripe with exhaustive tiredness setting foot in her apartment. It was only once a week, on Sunday morning, when I would invite her to bathe together that she would glance at my room. She smelled terrible; despite the recent isolation of my magical girl activities to the on-site locations, Rose's agnosia meant that she often could not notice her own odours. It would not be so much of an issue if it had not been for Rose's habit of touring ridiculously heavy restaurants, the grease and oil that permeated throughout sticking on her braids and her clothing. I was ecstatic at the prospect of her baths, the idol rising from ashes of muddy sand– I could drool at the thought; as long as I had this memory, I'll probably be able to keep on living.
Rose was rather averse to speaking, but was not a wholly silent person. She shared small passions, homescale gardening and a mild fascination with retrograde consoles; I made careful to never mention old video games or anything that could be related to SEGA around her, but to tip around the topic was inevitable if I had wished to seduce her friendship, though I had none little but the surface essentials about the topic. Our meetings became gradually easier, our talks shrinking in sparsity– though I felt less as if she had been a companion, her hermitry naturally taking advantage of my conversational generosity. By her silence she had murdered me, though I felt a certain satisfaction when I could see her nod her head in tandem with my rhythm, at all the right times.
I had been again mistaken in my assumption that she had been no less starved than me. Rather, she was starved for companionship– her uncommon schedule and social withdrawal had deprived her of her social needs, a famine of condensated denial, of genetic anchoring. My stalking had then proved itself redundant. The cassette would often play in reverse. I would wake to her morning greetings in the cloudy afternoons, where she and I would share roasted brew before I left to work. In the mornings, I would meet with her at her workplace and join her in her dining, before heading home. Our outings became ever more frequent, though our dialogue changed not; I was the spearhead, the sustaining pillar talking to a mass of faceless, approving moles. But to see her joyful, tangy smile, I could not ask for more.
Floristry was but a passing interest. Flowers lived by arrangement, their etchings negligible, differing by environment. There is no magic in flowers, the flaws mere conditional defects. But to see the pillars run coarse was comforting. There occurred little in which I could forget about my blessing, where I could choose to be blind to the vacuum that lay when I looked into another person's eyes. I could see only artistry in a flower. It was physical, real, a profoundness that spoke without needing abstraction, without human approximations. And yet by human intervention, it became possible, likely even, to strip the inhuman of humanity and implanted with shallow memories– floristry was an art of easy platitudes and baleful fraud, the deception visible to none but the painting itself. I found it delightfully hilarious in concept, but I've grown tired of the joke. It's not funny anymore. I wish for nothing more than the silence and slaughter of every florist who claims to know more than the flowers whose buds they snip.
I had always found gardening a more soothing passion. It wasn't one in which I wallowed but it rode superficially proximate in light of floristry, a more truthful interest devoid of sin. My opinions were secondhand, I had never met a home gardener more enthusiastic than the worth of a month's tomatoes. That was until I met Rose. Her garden had proclaimed itself botanical, yet had a vested interest in sucrose as opposed to her flowery namesake. I found all sorts of strange fruits with sugary contents; cherimoya, mangosteen, soursop, durian– fruits that carried repulsive flavours that I forced myself to swallow. It wasn't that I had hated the fruits she chose in particular, but something about her fruits tasted off, inappropriately wild, undomesticated.
Many say I spoke in uncomfortable static, incomprehensible relativity spewed all over. It was unlike the deluded nonsense echoed by an old lady's dementia laden ideas and came to me without irony or insanity– I spoke a different, familiar language, where the words that I relayed matched patterns already ingrained, yet never fully, never complete. Rose, however, shared different sentiments. Her understanding of me was so natural I thought her fraudulent. I wouldn't doubt if it was so– her responses at most were but polite nods and hints of interest, though the few reflections of insight redeemed her credibility.
Rose would often speak of loosely tangential information of whatever sorrowful crop she held between her fingertips and proceed to ramble, unremittingly regurgitating every bit of information that she knew. It was awfully cute, to see her ditzy prance straddle through the narrow concaves of a conversational rhythm. It couldn't have been anything but healthy for a normally quiet person to speak at such great lengths, even if her words were vapid. Her gardening left me to a glowing sigh of relief; she was not disinterested in being around me, nor was she hesitant to display the inner workings of herself if the atmosphere had called for it.
My time became increasingly consumed by Rose at her and my apartments. I could no longer make time for much else other than work, being forced to have abandoned my circle of friends and break up with my boyfriend of two years. I endured an arrogant ordeal, one that could've easily been mistaken as such that I had offered myself as apology for a cult, but I was of perfect mind. Time is a capital and one that I cannot afford to lay, and to that, I see my sacrifice as the natural way. It is a matter of duty to my personal interests and I will act until I see it until it's paid. As with the highest floristry, the bouquet shines relative, and so the florist must act to widen the gap.
But a cult was not of terrible discrepance, indeed had I been the congregant and Rose my goddess, our meetings were sermon, my cryings a confession, her passions dictum, you could not describe it as any less than a cult. My love needed devotion to frame an illusion of longevity. It was not enough that we were just friends. Her and my memories must be all that we know, our trust absolute, for that is true friendship– to understand all that I can, to be understood to the best of my will. Though it was questionable whether or not she and I had shared the same values. For all of our peculiarities, she was on a realm possibly greater than I; normalcy seemed but a distant murmur, the pollen spreading not to her stamens for her bud was abnormal, animalistically constructed. Rather, she was content with little but my current presence, perhaps even so at a different time and different day. She spoke to the wall behind me more than I; a distraught, but not one that I minded much.
It was on the earliest moon that the firecrackers rang. We had none to visit, the subject of family oddly silent, and so we had spent the dinner's feast at my apartment. Rose seemed not to know of the traditions of old; she had none to teach her and shared a yearly confusion at springtime's dawn. It seemed improper to shed contaminatory information to an innocent maiden, and so I nodded along as if I were in much the same boat. My heart's door could never be as truly red as a Rose– it would be almost improper to fake the part. We ate a plain meal behind the curtain of noise, the music of cheerful reunions and celebrations from floors below. We shared a glass of soda behind the aroma of alcohol. We did the normal things that we had always done, in the backdrop of a happy riot. Her feathers shone a sheltered purple under the fireworks.
I never enjoyed the winter's end. The preceding days are always hopeful, but at the New Year's glamorous arrival, the invisible men at the bottom floor become blazingly difficult to ignore, nigh distracting, and it pains me to think that they and I are cut from a cloth so large and impossible to escape. When I look at Rose, her eyes so blindingly red, her face such a happy expression to be nowhere but here, I find myself on the verge of tears. It's an unstomachable jealousy. To be so innately disconnected. To be so innately magical. To be so innately alone. I cried into her arms that night, downing a jar of fermented rice. Rose did little but stroke my head and pat my back. She ran her fingers down the surface of my spinal cord, like a clumsy mother imitating the actions that she saw in a television tutorial, but the sentiment was sweet enough that I didn't care. The warmth of her body was intoxicating, my expression like that of a stalker that finally caught her prey; I was hugging an oversized sheep that gnawed at the grass on my head, my behaviour that of a mental exhibitionist. I could look up from her lap and close my eyes in a room with the light turned off, only to be woken by the glare of her halo. The moratorium of my rationale led to dangerous places, but this may be but the natural order. True bonding, where you would be idle not at their time of weakness.
My sober appraisal the morning after was all but draught, my pronunciation awkwardly unfitting and my meanings unclear. Was I the current or sketch, I could differentiate not. I fell asleep on my couch to find myself awoken in bed at the sound of my alarm, the stem that I curled myself around nowhere to be found. She woke hours before me, as her circadian rhythm had dictated such. I showered for my midnight shift and donned a pair of heels and a casual dress. Post-Rose, that's all I am. Just another florist working for little more than minimum wage. What a life for Maria.
It was an addiction, the symptoms of my Rose withdrawal systematically unmotivating me to do anything else. I felt like a machine when talking to my long term coworkers, my speech mechanically constructed only to receive an understandably solemn response– it would not be a mistake to think of me as having changed for the worse, the so-called mask subject to difficult differentiation. I was honest to a promised fraud. But my coworkers treated me much the same; it was a job, and our connections served little but small talk.
The timely festivities led our workplace to deliveries; it was the flower shop's role to supply the larger displays for midnight parties at a restaurant request, our services extending to smaller ceremonies than hotels or weddings. This time of year was the busiest. Cities of people with money in their pockets to splurge for momentary displays. The chairman's faces smeared with smoke, feeling up an exchange a hundred times a day. It was I who pedaled the products, the pots and pans of dirtless grass to rest in a backroom supply to wither against the dry and blinding light atop a lazy susan's sterilized mezzanine. I scoffed at the thought, the value of the bouquets left much to waste, handled in a background display. But such is the economy of the industry. To think of the store's handiwork as fine art is disingenuous; most cannot even comprehend the position to more than a cutesy nameplate. That isn't to say that I held such discontent with the way things were; I couldn't care less. But it was a bountiful shame.
I'm thankful to hold this job, but to whom I wouldn't be able to tell you. The hours were flexible; we were glorified delivery workers, after all, just waiters who made the salad in front of your table for legitamacy's sake. To have been able to match Rose's life was all that I needed; it was enough for me to keep food on the table and have my rent paid. Nobody had expectations of me anymore. I didn't dream of much more than this.
I wonder if Rose would say the same. She was a student, likely on a scholarship. I knew little of her field, but she majored in food chemistry, her papers and notes that sprawled across her desk and laptop pointing to such. It wasn't difficult to imagine that she would have a more lucrative career than I in a couple years time, my position similarly dead end as it had been now. Our relationship was a corruptible selfishness, my handiwork directly consequential to her development; a bloomer late enough to hide her pedals in the tomato's image. But it would be nicer that way. For her not to be so busy as to not be seen, for her life not to be so full as for me to fill it– it was the natural way, the fate carved by me, by my superficiality and erupting hunger. Not of the regular or magical kind, mind you; what bloomed in the sepal's place was love. My love. And no others.
I woke for a second time to the Rose's scent, so feverish and unaware and impervious to the outside world. I would smell her hair as we greeted each other in a warm hug at the morning's wake, so covered in smoke and sweat and air conditioner condensate from a night's work. I would silently interlace my fingers with hers when she walked by my side, the tender touch eclipsing my hand in the umbral cover to the settled sun. I would lick her face after our dinner and she would blush in embarrassment and cover her face and push me away with her arms and she would taste like cotton candy, the kind that you could buy in an underground subway. We would get home and she would pop her head out of her room after changing out of her work clothes and I would drag her to my room by her wrists and swing my arm around her braids, her hair's natural shine tangling itself with mine. Her gentle breath a lullaby to my heart, her pulse keeping my tempo positioned, her words steadily louder as I brought my lips to hers. Our moments were bliss. Shunned had I been from such aseptic joy, my previous partners superficial, unequivocally fond to the representatives of the world's evil. There was no greater quarrel than the empty gesture, no greater blame than the virtuous judge– synthesis was the root of sin, the prevention of such by natural agreement the only structurally sound solution.
I don't mean to say our relationship was flavourless, but it was a spice that bloomed of grinded peppers, black and stout. Rose was an absurd existence, abrasively spoken yet overly timid, evasively strung yet overly attached, I thought her impossible, her petals a different shade of chlorophyll the moment my eyes wandered inches from her face. She was overdesigned, her traits so devoid of proper meaning and in such poor cohesion I wondered if her existence itself were a defect. What histories did her angelics carry, what future would her copy write, Rose was someone so innate in interest that I was compelled to look, beyond her magicality, beyond her emergencies. To her, I felt senseful fear. To her, I felt purpose beyond. That was my everyday, a wonderful court of insulated happiness, my permanent recollections extending no further than the five hours after work and the periodic texts I sent during my day. A wonderful life for Maria, my wonderful everyday.
The Rose I saw that morning held my hand in a bed of thorns. Her spikes were poison, her skin serrating my fingertips. She was more beautiful than I had thought her to be, so much more beautiful than I wanted her to be. I found it hard to even approach her, like I had woken up to see my lover a different person, like our bond was a procedural mistake. It was a pure and tempered pain. I sang breaths of paint, my voice held as silently as I could as we walked along the street to her campus, our palms poisoning my arm and paralyzing my thoughts. I couldn't hear a single word she spoke, yet I couldn't bring myself to let go.
This was but the natural way, and it was I who had been the oddity in an unnatural state. Though I had thought, the difference found I could not; it only felt different, and I could conjure not simple distinctions beyond my sight. There was no meaningful change in my behaviour, no meaningful shift in my thoughts. It was rather the clarity of it all that had come to light in the absence of magicality. In other words, I would probably not have been mistaken to say that my body had been feeding my brain a chronic stimulant, one that became an obstruction to my psyche. What a relief, to know that my insanity had not been a product of artificiality, to know that I was truly my own self. But the consequence of it is not unknowable, the results were floating but a days or weeks or months away; to act indifferent was a mistake, to know that I had changed to external forces the mental torment of a questionable pureness of my essence. I saw myself blossomed, but only superficially so. It was rather the unforeseen that I feared; how I would come to develop because of my death, how my actions would differ had I not been in this predicament. It was a test. A test of the me that I thought myself to be.
My wishes stayed true for a comforting minute, but as the morning came, I saw her again. The Rose showed a darkened red, a crimson angst that had been invisible to me behind heaven's curtain. Her skin was imperfect, wrinkles and folds laid bare, flat upon a face without a trace of makeup or care. Her posture croaked, the slouched back she held that I had once excused by the weight of her wings now sat a grail of nothing in particular, but a display of tiredness. Her quiet demeanor strayed close, and yet the tinge of social uncomfortability I thought no longer so cute, my feelings instead bridged by distant unease.
We were visited by Rose's mother the day after. She looked young enough for me to have mistaken Rose as her sister, and Rose enough for me to have mistaken her for another, even more vividly hallucinated Rose. But despite their similar appearances, Rose's mother was quite talkative, and not in the same way her daughter had been; her sociability was high, and she came off as a kind but busy woman. It was then that I came to learn that Rose was raised by a single mother, a businesswomen in her forties. They were not as poor as I thought them to be; Rose's shift at the convenience store was no more than practice, the wages accumulated a bonus to her savings. This apartment, too, was chosen for convenience sake, the proximity of it to her university her main concern.
Her mother was surprised to learn that Rose had made a friend in such a short time, let alone a girlfriend. Rose had a history of solitude, her social withdrawals springing a largely dormant lifestyle in her younger days, her recent progressions likely due to my intervention. Her mother laughed at the end of her exposition, reminiscing about Rose's development. It was all but clear that Rose's social anxiety was the symptom of a pathological and chronic apathy– a person all too late to catch on to the cycle of growth and left behind in the wake of the world's frontiers. Her magicality, not pureness, but infancy; there is none more innocent than the untainted lily, and none as meaningful as the painting void of authorial interpretation. It was my blindness that let me thought her history unimportant. Indeed, there was very much a Rose before I held her stem, one carved and grown by the soils of a miserable existence. An astronomical coincidence it must've been, that the world had led the two of us together, so incompatible with the outer world.
But it was not the epiphany I made it seem. It was a perceptive flaw; the once so angelic Rose now pitiable, the essence of her happiness itself in my hands; I knew now that there was no grander picture for Rose, no second act but this. It was none but the cosmic flow that penned our love, the victim of conceptual randomness. Underneath the gallery of magic and stars was a normal florist and a chemistry student. It was little more than that, the silent cries of my keen desperation, a fraudulent theatre of shadow puppets. I had but the last resort but to make myself magical again.
I thought my resurrection simple, that I had simply needed the performance I practiced in sustenance so many times before, but my perception had not been the same as it did before. I could see no wings, no angels, and there was no method but blind guessing and my dull intuitions; I had no choice but guess, in blind hopes of their carcesses carrying the mana I needed, the same process repeated over until I could more selectively make their magicalities clear. But the problems numbered many. My weakness necessitated scale. The odour of my hunts would grow even more severe than it had been, and the bacterial dangers of my consumption would fester in my physical body, faster than my recovery could match. The solution's veil curtained itself thin, and yet I would tremble at the thought, the precious life I sought, all would tumble and fall for naught. I could hollow my feelings on a diskette the size of a hand before I could forget. For all, eternal, would my data lay, blasted in a furnace that saw its clay. In between my aperture, frozen in space, the photographic existence was what I thought myself to know; magicality is but the middle judgement, and it was I who penned the ellipse.
I packed my suitcase in three sets of clothes and a pair of shears. Our train clocked to the morning's dew, their tracks still freshly cold, my hands trembling from much the same weather. We sat next to each other on the seats, ahead of us a raving old couple having their spat. Rose slept through it all; her giddy excitement must've exhausted her, for her to have passed out cold on my shoulder.
Rose woke in a groggy mood, her sleep interrupted in an aching position as the train arrived. We stepped into the station under a cast of moonlight, the other passengers pulling their luggage in a daze. The town was quiet, the residents dim, the streetlights illuminating a dusk that crept through the window crevice of the wireframe buildings. It was a scenery different than our hometown, but not one that I thought unfamiliar. Rose could not say the same; the mystique of the countryside seemed exhilarating, her enthusiasm far surpassing my expectations. Was it really this interesting, this fishing village in the middle of nowhere? I couldn't say. But whatever idea had sunk into her mind was none but delusion. There was nothing magical about the countryside, their glamorous imitation of the real world, a sad betrayal of honest virtues.
Our stay was coupled to the second floor of an old inn, the most we could reasonably afford. The walls were painted white, chips of stone flung across the floors. The light of the table lamp lit the whole of the room, par the dim residuals that punctured the wooden window. We shared an old canopy bed, its curtains having long since drawn, the remaining frame splintering between its edges. I wouldn't have thought the room stayed in years had the bed not smelled of the corner store. Rose didn't seem to mind. Her opacity stayed true, having been bewildered by the novelty of it all, a life apart from her feathered bedding and polished floors. I would've thought her the mocking kind had I not known more, such childish curiosity uncomfortably sincere. I saw myself disconnected from her prancing, like a mother watching their daughter. How pleasant it was to see her in such bliss, so wholly unaware, so imaginative about even the littlest of things.
We took a stroll at midnight along the town's shoreline. It was Rose's first time seeing the ocean. She opened her arms to the salty breeze, her consciousness skimming the edge of the water's face. She skipped around on the wobbly terrace, free as the mind could be. She reached her hands to further beach, her feet and ears covered in muddy sand. An ugly, open display. I felt the weight of tissues overhead, beneath a sad collage of green. If only she and I could see the same sea, only then could I justify it.
The morning came to us on a caravan of boats, lined in synchronous lines of burning incense. They mourned for a person I never knew, but etiquette dictated our attendance in a village this small. Coming forth on our calm vacation was a silent and sudden deliverance, the currents floating lanterns of men, held against the coastline by a chain of string tugging the boat from one end to the next. For each person their torments crossed, the casket held their memory in thought for a minute still until the ring of the circled drum, and so they would pass the urn down the line of men to the end of the line– a traditional and ritual for all to be held, to signify a death to the world that couldn't care less. At the end of the line their family lay, their tears having dried and a smile on their face to greet the dead. Except, only for them would they see their urn turned wet, by a stranger's tears no less.
How atmospherically poetic, our evening dance by the beach, to the song of the crashing waves, a cacophonous tone of noise. There, did I push Rose to the ground, her silkend dress all white, floundering under the beds of helico grains, every piece so unique. She could see it with every glance, know it with every touch, the afterimage so clear against the conceptual everything I thought to know. And she sang it back to me. Every note, a somber melody, every second passing did my head grow thin as she looked back to me with those empty eyes that told nothing. And for a transient dream, I stole her lips and made it my own, and bit her tongue by accident. It was but too personal that I saw it be, her surrounding backdrop lit by a source of light that came from none other than me. The shadows cast between her strands of hair that blocked her face and puffed her head, cut short by the sharpened worry of a day's gone by and a pair of dull scissors. Her head rested, grounded, stranded to the muddled webs and cast aflame by none but me.
The tricoloured day ended not with the beach, and on our second clock, beyond the tripping step, was lycoris, trampling under my feet. Rose laid still behind the entrance. I tugged her arm beside, her teetering balance worsened by an onset of nausea and dandling fatigue, but I saw no other time than this. I stepped on the threshold and pulled her over. Her eyes were unfocused, and they planted onto the ground. How fitting, I thought, the lilied rose patting herself of dust kneeled in a temple floor. Had she not been so tired, so flawed, it wouldn't have been quite as charming. Above lay the corrigendum, the open ceiling to a wooden-laid tiling. It poured, the skies crying gray by none but its own authority. The raindrops splattered across the floorboards.
How sad, for the only thing that's ever made me feel a sense of this intoxicating joy to disappear so quickly, to loosen so soon. But this was all but the natural way, the only reasonable, rational, plausible step. Rose and I were all but human, humans who would live to grow old and fight and argue and die. Would her blood spill, my Rose would become immortal in me. There is no star that dies old, no rose that buds old, no angel that grows old, and so would I force her hand by my will. Easy and steady, I ran my fingertips against Rose's neck and wrapped her in my arms. She was happy, the brace of contact met by a still and quiet return. I wonder if she could feel the me I was now. I wonder if she could hear my heart, pounding against the walls of my chest. I wonder if she wondered why I brought her here, in the middle of nowhere, in a rotting garden that split my blame. I wonder if she knew, if she could smell the same lycoris that I so much despised.
It was a personalized process, one developed over countless experimentation and the culmination of my life's efforts. To become magical for the illmagical was a matter of constant, relentless, and eternal deception, to lie with such sincerity that the lie becomes true. There was no room for familiarity, no margin for self, only by the perfect fraud does my subterfuge complete where the most honest men are laid to breathe. In pathological condition do I take her for myself, to become a moon that paints itself red. How evil I was, to long for her immortality.
It was my knees on the hallowed ground, and my head on the cotton pedestals, that I had steeled my will to kill her. I was going to kill her. I was going to take my shear and stab her by the throat and eat her. In time, there was not going to be raindrops splattering but blood. Rose's blood, gushing from her vein, her hands on mine, tearing my fingers one by one. She would turn to look at me in disbelief, her hands coming to her neck only to withdraw at the first sensation of red. And she would wail and faint and fall to the floor, and I would swallow her.
From my back pocket, I drew the pair of shears and stabbed her in the chest. It was a single, swift motion, one as uneventful as I could make it be. There was no scraping, no entry, no blood. She looked at the shears, then turned my eyes to me and smiled. The bleak shade of gray took my eyes to see through those blurry glasses and frothed display. She took to me in a dead reply. She took to me without intent to cry.
When I reached those shears to the edge of where my hands could go, I saw them stabbed in nothing at all. They were floating right in front of me, both my hands fully out and motioned forward to nowhere in particular. How silly, I must've looked, to have made such a fatal mistake, my execution so mismanaged I doubted the validity. A shame, I thought, this perfect happening, this song devouring my every memory.
Those lilies bloomed a less vibrant red, fluttering with my blood, and woke the next day to a plate of rose pudding.