The Madame and her museum.

Throughout my short-lived existence, I have only ever been aware of the moment I woke up in war and the days that came after it.

Unlike the tattered souls of the unfortunate, I thrived in chaos, I think. I flourished in it, because it was not my shoulders that the burden of it rested upon. Because I was everywhere, felt as though I would last forever.

I know I have not been made to be cherished and nurtured in one’s arms. I have a bitter core, stricken by the bloodshed that marked the first chapter of my being. No one welcomes my purpose, but eventually, everyone submits to it; For the sting of a thorn outlives the beauty of the rose. All pretty things wither, and it is us who remain, harsh but untainted.

I remember when the fallen looked at me. Their faces crumpled like paper as they cried, weak-kneed and broken-hearted, but they refused to let go. They held on to me and my unbidden form, until the battles ended, and the world’s ragged edges became easier to ignore. Still, I lingered. They found me in the splinters of their children’s broken cribs, amidst the ashes of burnt down villages. With a mere glimpse, they all began to turn away, as though I had never even existed.

It confused me; and I stayed confused for quite some time, unprepared for the realization that eventually settled upon me. It was painless, that sudden understanding, but it rattled my balance with a violence I thought I had grown accustomed to.

Maybe, I realized, Maybe I was never meant to belong with them in the first place.

I was but a fleeting moment, passing by, impersonal to everyone but the soul whose fate ended with my beginning. And while I have always known that I lacked all the things that made one human, that I lived some other form of strange life, I was afraid. Afraid to be faced with proof that I could never truly exist unless I was claimed.

But as I’ve said, I grew in shambles, and, for humans, it is easier to discard fear than try to tower over it. In their eyes, there might just be no difference between the two. Perhaps this is the reason why I accepted the Madame’s offer.

She found me seated in my home of ruins, her tall form distorted with mist. Come, child, she said, reaching for me with a single scrawny hand, you do not deserve to be forgotten.

It was then that I found I hated the sound of that word, despite my ignorance of its meaning. Now I feel foolish, because I know, and the thought repeats in my head every night within the cage of a place she’s trapped me in. We are all forgotten. The word echoes.

Forgotten, forgotten, forgotten.

The Madame is fond of summer rainstorms.

She likes the gloomy sort of August, when the skies are heavy with lightning and our voices are drowned out by the distant rumble of thunder. We grow restless during rainstorms, our hopes misled by the open doors of her museum. I used to thump on the glass too. I used to shout for the passerby to look this way, to just please listen. Our wailing once sounded like a cacophony of terrors. Now it simply completes a routine.

Our prison expands. What is usually emptiness draped in shadow comes alive as something beautiful and worth admiring; with blooming wisteria growing out of stone floors and artificial sunlight shining through the display windows of our chambers. I can never examine the paintings that grace the walls for too long; too many colors and a sea of faces that I have no interest in observing. The Madame’s hourglass still rests untouched on her desk, specks of dust floating all around it. I am overcome by how upsetting it is that a thing this fragile remains unscathed.

With its darkness contracted like this, the museum looks more like the inside of a hand-carved antique, a curio meant to serve as a home to creatures unbound; And we are anything but.

I try to even out my breathing as soon as I sense the rough burn of anger. Another symptom of rainstorm restlessness.

Sometimes I feel guilty for my disdain. Even a prison can be shelter, and you can only appreciate freedom if you have come to know confinement. Besides, I remind myself, this is temporary. Like all pretty things, like my very self, the Madame’s hold on us is impermanent. And gloomy August days are meant to be our way out of it.

Still, I fail to understand her. Not because of the riddles she speaks in or the fact that she never properly addresses the visitors that she claims to adore, but because she can be genuinely kind to us. She brings us ribbons and tales of the world, extravagant in the way they are worded. She has gifted us each with a mirror, so we can look at the new faces she bestows upon us every day.

She, of course, remains unidentifiable.

It is mere slivers of her that I usually see; a clawed hand reaching out of the shadows, to me. A blank canvas of a face. The hem of her purple velvet dress, dragging against stone. To see her means to be content with the idea of never truly knowing her. She seems to like it that way. Despite her love for mortals, looking like them would undermine her capability to feed off their instincts.

I let her tailor human features on me this morning, heard her call me beautiful. And, in moments like this, I feel like I truly am. I look at my reflection and its boyish cheekbones, the delicate slope of its neck and the grey eyes that stare back. I see blonde hair and a freckled nose, narrow shoulders, and bruised knees. Like with the paintings on the walls, the longer I look, the more I notice, and I am overwhelmed into turning away entirely.

In this skin that I cannot remove, my importance lays on the vestiges of humanity that have been wasted on me. I am molded in their image and therefore, I am beautiful. It pains me to think about, so I always tuck my mirror into a dark corner until she returns.

And I always keep looking back.

Her clever, convincing forgeries are the strongest of fuels for my hatred and I know I will never let her be my savior.

How much more relentless must the rain be to send the ceiling crushing down on me? How much longer must I wait for the floor to cave in under my feet, until I fall, down to an emptiness I’m less aware about?

The museum shifts with each of its steady breaths beneath, around and above my body; Sleep won’t come. I feel quite self-destructive, as I always do in moments when we are deprived of a much-needed silence. That damned song still plays on the phonograph, its words all-consuming and irrevocably familiar in my ears.

My heart and mind are things of metal.

They keep me geared to you, in sleep and torment,

with a love stitched between your shoulder blades,

and breaths synced up with every blessed word you spare.

The song speaks of mortal fascination, of endless, self-sacrificing devotion, wonders that bloom amongst the ruins in furious, determined twists, only to fade again with time. I’ve always known of their existence, came to understand just how monstrous I must look in comparison to them, and yet I always wonder; If love is strong enough to survive even the most violent of my kind but weak enough to flicker out when it stands still, was it ever meant to exist? Does its worth only lay in the fact that it is missed when it shatters? And what if it does survive? How can it ever be reclaimed?

My questions do not fit in a room this small. I am slowly suffocated, haunted by solitude and uncertainty, as the song of pointless human feelings plays over and over and over.

The guests arrive when the storm is at its strongest.

Crowds are an inconvenience; they rise to a panic far too easily – so the Madame says – and because of that, the visitors are let in one at a time.

They leave their coats and umbrellas by the front doors, and they all tend to stare in wonder for quite a few minutes before moving forward, to us. Most flinch when they see me. They pass me by in a hurry. If I pretend to share their disinterest and revulsion, the reaction hurts me less.

I like looking at them, though. I like the way they fidget with the cuffs of their sleeves, the way they tentatively reach to caress the wisteria blooms that hang over their heads. And they are easy to read. I notice the same wisp of silent excitement in them the second they first lay eyes on the Madame, awestruck and still as the marble statues that stand by our isolated rooms.

Most are silent throughout the entirety of their visit. Some murmur to themselves, trying to keep their excitement under control, and after one clumsy attempt at a conversation, foolish me learned that no sane mortal would actually talk to exhibitions.

Gods, it feels like this place could swallow you whole, the person said.

It could. It will. See, the museum has teeth of its own and you, I said, you are being chewed on.

There was a scream, one so loud that it could rival the panic of an entire crowd, but whether I meant my answer as a warning or a joke, I still don’t know.

My peers are patient with our guests. They allow themselves to be quietly inspected, subtle in their eagerness for the warmth of a soul. Those beautiful enough to hope stare back from behind the glass walls, the human features melting off their faces as the truth unveils itself.

And the mortal visitors are bewitched.

I watch as they drop to their knees, eyes alight, mouths agape in what could have otherwise been an expression of terror if it weren’t for the overwhelming joy that always settles upon their shoulders. Like pilgrims facing their all-knowing and omnipresent god, they stay kneeling, palms pressed against the unsteady floors of the museum.

Then comes the part I like best.

It’s like the cage becomes a mirror; two figures, standing on opposite sides, shattering into what I can only describe as recognition of all things lost. The ground shifts, the glass window rattles at its hinges. My peers fall back into the harmony of their wailing; mournful for what they held in their withering hands just seconds before the beguilement. Beauty can only get you so far, it seems.

I always try to memorize the visitors’ expressions as the museum claims them. To pinpoint the exact moment of understanding on their faces is a tricky task, but I manage every time. Their horror soothes my aching. As their limbs turn into marble and their eyes roll back into their skulls like useless, fragile beads, I know beauty’s biggest weakness is that it is distracting. It keeps you bound when you expect it to free you.

The wailing heightens. The pilgrims solidify. And suddenly there is only more statues to adorn the halls of the museum. More beauty for lingering eyes to behold.

I turn towards the light that lays upon the Madame’s desk. Her hourglass still rests there, unmoving, the sand having fallen from one glass bulb to the other, the time having ran out, from one second to the next.

I relish in the silence of loss, and disappointment reaches me faster than guilt. This reoccurring martyrdom of mortality brings the shadow of doubt upon me. We have been lied to. Possibly. The Madame has only given us one rule; earn your reign upon a human soul, earn your freedom. But they must want us to reign over them. We are not violent things. Even in our ferocity, we cannot force our way in.

I scorch my consciousness wondering; what more could they possibly want? What option does the defeat of beauty leave for us? Us, the dreadful ones, the lives born out of misery. I have no answers to give. Instead, I try to welcome the quiet, distressing solitude.

At least, I tell myself, half comforted by the tortured lullaby of my treacherous form, loneliness is less painful when there is no room for hope.

I am awoken by the scent of bluebells, the soft melody of a song -a different sort of song- being carried to me by the dusty air.

Such is her intention. She enters like spring trapped in winter, with change and potential sewed under the buttons of her dress; lightning strikes in the distance with each steady click of her low-heeled shoes and I cannot help but search for her, desperate, eager for a glimpse, for a few seconds spent bared under her gaze.

I always sense her before I even see her, and I’ve tried to hate her for it. Gods, my hatred is blistering, and I grow weak from it every day. But I know she is no villain. She’s just a girl. There are no complexities in the way she exists. She never speaks, not even to greet the Madame. As though she thinks herself a phantom.

I do not remember how or when or why I became attached to her. All I know is that I am. I feel upset when she departs, joyful when every summer she returns. My relief is immense now that I’m looking at her. Now that she’s here and still unchanged. She has the same auburn hair, wild and unkempt under her hat. Pale and solemn, her face is the one I am the most content to recognize since I don’t have one that I can truly call my own. She brings a sense of familiarity that I fail to understand, and it is only after she leaves that the emotions she brings upon me melt away.

In her absence, there is clarity; I know that the reason why my feelings are short-lasting is because they were never meant to be substantial, never fated for me. I am an unfinished puzzle with a million scattered pieces, a forgery that will never be whole. I am a homeless creature with a borrowed face and a soul sustained only by strange, impersonal sentiment. And though it smothers me to bear another’s curse of love, one can still own a stolen treasure. I will take what I can get because fairness is a ploy that I detest, and I am tired of uncertainty. If my role is to replicate human cruelty, a convincing deception is what I will learn to exist as.

The girl now makes her way from one display window to the next, a dim sunset amongst stone corpses, and I become keenly aware of a silent question in my head; Did she scream when they mutilated her?

I press closer to the glass wall of my chamber, studying the details of her maimed flesh. The ring finger of her left hand, just like the index of her right, has been cut clean off, both severed at the second joint. A punishment for theft, I speculate. Or theft itself.

The air is stifling, standing still for her. Time is eager to forfeit and to betray, much like it did with everyone who has stood in her place.

She lingers. She watches closely, her breath fogging up the glass, and there is a certain animosity in the way her grip tightens on the window frame. In the pattern of her steps, in her precision, I notice it. The glimmer of interest as she gravitates towards the unknown. I see it so clearly that I soon realize; the girl must be searching for something. Something that does not dwell in beauty. The poison that has sealed the fate of so many others, she might just be immune to it. But if it is dread that she seeks, dread aflame, I reckon I could be quite as venomous.

And yet, my conscience speaks. And yet.

Salvation of oneself demands of you to know exactly what it is you’re willing to save. I retreat into the darkness of my gilded cage.

The girl, though fragile and withered, does not stumble, does not break. Her tattered skirts drag across the dusty floor and the phonograph sings on, syncs up with the screams that ripple through the air, the mourning for another glimpse of freedom fading.

I, too, am on the verge of screaming, for something within me rattles with a violence that has me dreading the moment -and such a moment will inevitably come- when I shatter. Such is the cost of her presence.

The girl never visits the same window twice.

Both cunning viper and greedy child, she is slow in her choosing but ready to strike, however picky or contemplating. And though we have a myriad of different ways to hide from the mortal eye, it seems that we will always be prone to hope.

And allow us to hope, she does. She seeks us out, purposeful, then lets us implode. The way she hurts you, I’ve heard the others whisper, one could never be as kind.

To be hurt by her in a summer that is thunderous and dark must be what mortals would undoubtedly set their hearts on; they would call it bliss and, quite stupidly, they would also set themselves ablaze for it.

Curiosity for said bliss is something I need to learn how to battle against, I realize, but then I catch another glimpse of her before me. She’s near, closer than she’s ever been, and suddenly I’m trembling. I’m a dead autumn leaf against the fury of harsh winds, incapable of judgement or defense, uncertain and unorthodox.

And terrified.

I clutch the Madame’s ribbons in my hands, the many shades of heavenly blue and hellish red getting tangled up around my fingers. I wish for the museum’s viciousness, for its teeth to grind against my very essence until I’m ash. War is my home; she cannot become my peace. She cannot have me, I have no devotion to give.

And, like my face, the bond that connects me to her was meant to replicate something else, someone else’s right to it.

A stolen treasure. I can still own it. I can still demand it of her.

But do I want to?

Do I want it, or her, or any of this?

She walks past my window.

My treacherous words reach out to her before I even have the chance hide away.

“They stole your fingers.”

The girl suddenly turns, wide eyed, her face flushed. I must have interrupted her very thorough search for answers.

She slowly stands upright, wipes her hands on the faded fabric of her skirt. And then she answers me, her voice as sweet as birdsong.

“Used their ashes as fertilizer for the gardens,” she explains, nodding. Her lips curl into a small smile that fades quickly. “My ring, too, they stole. It helped dull the pain; knowing that two pieces of bone could buy the end of an unwanted engagement. It is a fair price, wouldn’t you say so?”

“Have you known it then?”

“Known what?”

“Fairness. Have you come to understand it intimately?” I fiddle with the ribbons, wrap them tighter around my knuckles, and picture them cutting my own fingers off. No pain follows. Not even the imaginary sort. “You will find none of it here. You won’t even be able to tell when you’re being fooled into thinking otherwise.”

“I am no fool.”

“And yet you’re speaking to me.”

“With you. You engage in conversation well enough.”

That, she says, and yet I am rendered speechless.

For a moment, I feel like she might walk away. I pray she does, but she stands still, a smeared halo of faded light and specks of dust around her head.

“Will I be terribly wronged then?” she asks, relentless, and slowly reaches towards the glass of my window. “Is that a task you’d take upon yourself to accomplish?”

“Perhaps. If I am permitted to.”

“Do you need permission for most things?”

I suppose it is only fair that she pays my curiosity back with questions of her own. Questions that I keep haunting myself with, that I have grown tired of answering, even in silence.

Permission for most things, indeed. Even ruination.

She takes another step forward. Now both of her palms are pressed against the glass, and even her nose almost brushes against it. I don’t know what kind of reaction it is that she expects, but when she speaks again, her tone is almost accusatory.

“You’re crying.” Her eyes narrow in suspicion as they stare up at my own, and it is only after I feel the azure tears running down my face that I respond, half panicked.

“Oh. No, no, it’s only- it’s only the color draining from my eyes. Temporary. Blue is quick to fade, you see.”

“One will come up with the strangest of excuses if it means hiding the emotion of their becoming.”

“I’m being quite serious.”

“Yes. But hardly as true.”

An exasperated breath slips out of me with surprising force. “Do I owe you my honesty, now?”

The girl seems to think about it for a moment, but the only answer she gives is a nonchalant shrug. She’s still fidgeting; with the threadbare hems of her sleeves, the frizzy strands of hair that she quickly tucks under her hat. I realize I wouldn’t want her to turn into a statue. Time shouldn’t denounce her so. Not when she’s clearly meant to set the world in motion along with her. And I would hate to see her standing still.

She stares at me, and I have to keep myself from flinching against the judgement in her gaze.

“Would you stop?” I mumble.

“If it is an unfinished painting that you wish to spend your days as, you might as well get used to being closely inspected.”

My carefully molded fingers come undone, deformed and twisted like melting beeswax under the pressure of the ribbons. Still no pain. I never stopped searching for it, it seems, and I didn’t even realize.

“Fine.”

I give in, infuriated to be vanquished by a maimed girl dressed in rags and speaking nonsense. I know she has the advantage; the thought should ease my irritation, but it only makes me feel all the more cornered.

“Fine,” I repeat, the word a defeated softness against my mouth, “have at it.”

Her smile returns when she leans forward, fingers tracing along my window. I can pinpoint the exact moments when her interest peaks, the small pauses in the way her gaze trails over my face -this slowly fading, strange and borrowed thing- and I feel like I’m compiled by an abundance of ancient runes that only she can decipher.

I feel ruined, unlawfully awake. And though I have never known dreams, I’m certain that she weaves the kind of magic that is found in them alone. She is an anticipated illusion, an omen not yet bound with emotion. I wish I could choose whether to despise or love her. I wish either of these battles could be my own entirely.

This otherness inside me screams each time our eyes meet. Hers are dark and beautiful, filled with an anticipation so unlike the empty black void of my own manufactured stare. Her eyes are proof that she’s alive, a promise that she will remain so, even in stone and silence.

I stay indifferent to the relief that blooms within me.

“This is hardly fair,” she mutters, her precision faltering, and presses her forehead against the glass wall that separates us.

“You really cannot take a warning, can you?”

“Fool me then,” she says, her words a whisper, like she’s standing right at the edge and getting ready to throw herself over. “Fool me. You said that it would happen. That I would hardly notice.”

My temptation is primal, obscene, but this foreign part of me wishes to protect her, still. It is with a strong will that I fight against that wish, and hope to forcefully destroy it.

“You wish to be deceived for my own sake?” I ask, and, this time, it is me who steps closer.

“I wish to be deceived,” she starts, emphasizing each word, and her reserve solidifies once she finally looks back at me. Her voice is tense, no longer birdsong, when she says; “Because I have grown sick of searching for truths that were never meant to be found.”

She waits, and the museum is quieter than I have ever known it to be.

“My,” I breathe, positively and entirely overcome by the irony with which she presents herself at my window. “It is only easy to be this fearless when one is also ignorant.”

“So be it. Let me know. Let me see.”

She expects to find feigned truths in my deception, for closure, clarity, but what she is unprepared for is the fact that it is through one’s truth that deception can flourish.

I remember our one rule, its steadiness, its transparency.

Earn your reign upon a human soul.

The museum is holding its breath, perfectly and unusually still. I am frightened. My anticipation is suffocating me so very sweetly.

Earn your freedom.

The girl is here, ashen flesh and cindered bone, giving herself up, and suddenly there are more options, more space for me to act. For once there is no screaming, as if all my peers have accepted my victory before it has even been completed. A door is opened before me, and all I need to do is walk through.

The very air contracts.

There is a slight ticking sound in the distance.

The Madame stands in the shadows, watching, her bare fingerbones clicking against the upper bulb of her hourglass. The sand rushes downwards, signifying a summer evening’s inevitable end. She waits, as she always does. If anything, she is forever patient; it stains your very soul. She makes you sense her tolerance.

Click, click, click.

Reveal yourself, child.

Reveal yourself.

“Please.”

The clicking stops.

In my anguished, shattered breaths, there is nothing but the misery I’ve felt from the moment I came alive knowing that what sustains me is as monstrous as a bullet to the heart. It is the sort of misery that sears and destroys, but even with it gone, I will continue to be a creature unworthy of salvation.

Fairness. I’m starting to believe that it has never even existed.

But if it does, I reckon I could, for once in my life, offer it to someone who needs it just as much.

And so, “No,” is what I say back to the girl.

“Go,” I tell her, “There is no time to spare, and your persistence will only make it run shorter, go.”

I am unprepared for what she does next.

“I will not leave,” she says, tears in her dark eyes, and then her hand reaches through the glass, to me. Like a portal made of running water, the window splits open at her touch, no longer prison.

As always, she persists, her grip strong with fury when she grabs me. I rush to squeeze her hand with both of my own, suddenly incapable of thought or breath, and I tremble; I cannot tell it is expectation or shock that fuels me.

“I will not go,” she sobs, clawing at the ribbons around my wrist, “but you can make me regret it. Scare me away. Erase the ignorance in me. If I can have my pick of something concrete to keep me grounded… let it be fear.”

Realization strikes me, strong as lightning, and as my skin peels away, I press my mouth against her fingers and speak a word of almost foreign meaning.

“Lover.”

It sounds uncertain, like a too carefully formed question, but it seems to destroy her nonetheless.

“Friend,” she corrects, “He… was my friend.”

I suddenly wish to savor that answer, to lock it away so no one else can hear it or know its weight. And like every other intrusive thought with such paralyzing intensity, this one quickly fades into nothingness, and I am once again left numb.

Mortals always valued insubstantial things. It is their curse, I suppose, to carry the burden of mere notions based on impulse, like love, like friendship, and to break because of it. My questions as to why are still unanswered, and I have come to know the ache of a heart only when it came to me as a hallucination. A steady one, but still nothing beyond inauthentic.

I see it when the girl breaks.

She does so beautifully, like a flower trapped in frost. Her soul is scattered and unguarded, as if she trusts me not to violate it; or like there is nothing left to protect at all. She has given herself up in my embrace, my chamber’s window a flowing river over her shoulders, welcoming her with a gentle forgiveness in its melody. Every part of her has been surrendered, passed on to me, but it is the absence of weakness that helps me make up my mind.

In war, true courage lays in one’s acceptance of defeat, not in their desire for victory, however savage or unburned.

I hate to win like this, I really do. For I am clearly not the strong one in this battle.

In each passing summer, I have worn many masks. I was once used to the way the Madame reinvented me, the way she turned me into a different kind of alive to keep herself entertained and her museum easy on the eye. Some days I was adorned with a young boy’s furrowed brow, then a noblewoman’s slender fingers, a merchant’s jaw, a fortune teller’s playful, icy gaze. My borrowed faces were a contrast to each other and beautiful on their own, but there was not one that looked like more than just a stranger in the mirror. They were all but a reflection, distant and utterly silent. I sometimes tried to bestow stories upon them, but no desperate tale seemed to fit right. There was no well-established reason for the boy to frown, no curious stranger for the fortune teller to mischievously stare at.

So I ripped them all to shreds. I treated them as what they were, a mere disguise, a million failed identities that I could never exist within. I donned a veil of shadow over me, quit trying, quit hoping, and never let another see what hides beneath. But truth still holds me trapped. I am so, so tired.

To be looked upon and truly recognized, even as someone unnamed and unknown, is a risk I do not regret to be taking.

It is for the first time in my long, unchanging reality, that I am not filled with doubt. And I reveal myself.

I show the girl all that I am.

I show her the twisted, scorching torment and the rhythm of its breaths, the seared lungs and the blood-soaked skin, the grunting mouths, the splintered teeth, the fear that sees and conquers, the haunting echoes, the void, the sky, the one name that reigns above it all. Oh, I speak that name with such hatred that she forfeits her own tears, her soul empty of love, empty of friendship, because I want all that she knows to be struck by what she has never truly seen.

In this moment I am constant, ravaging, and she is ruined. She has been from the moment Death claimed her as one of his remnants. A tragic end, to be forever connected to a brutality as permanent as this, but it is also a fate that we share.

Her life ended where mine began; in war.

This girl has seen the truth of me, and yet she doesn’t look away.

“You are,” she breathes, voice shaking, like she is taken aback by her own thoughts, “horrid.”

“Yes,” I say back to her, “It is your kind that made me so.”

She has no answer to give, and I can hardly judge her for it. I know how shameful it is to be part of a failed race.

Silence falls upon us, suffocating and ragged at its edges. It seems to last for hours, days; Impossible, I think to myself, there is only so much sand in the hourglass. She lays unmoving in my grasp, more unbidden tears running down her pale face. She doesn’t seem to acknowledge them. Her head tilts back, and I have to lean forward and support her so that she doesn’t fall.

“I welcome you, torment,” she whispers, her laughs interwoven with her sobs. Her hold finally loosens, and she drops her arms like a lifeless doll, a conquered girl, a phantom once more. Her mouth moves in silent, grateful prayer, words strung together in sweet delirium.

She, too, has fallen, and she stays not because she wants to but because she has no more reasons to run. Her relief, solemn and blazing with light, a crystalline mask upon her face, fills me with a rage so strong that I suddenly regret having thought of her trust as treasure.

She was meant to be my daydream, my haunting and my freedom, but I now understand that such burdens cannot be forsworn in graceful silence.

Greed calls for me.

Greed for damning, long awaited answers, for a way out, for knowledge of his name and how it felt to hear it spoken by the spring of her voice. Greed for skin instead of golden-veined marble, and a face that I can learn to recognize. I want it all and then some. I want the Madame’s feathered hat and lace-trimmed gloves, her ribbons set aflame, her favourite record cracked into pieces that glimmer like abandoned stars upon the ground.

And I have never wanted something this badly.

The girl is like a mirror when I lean over her. She shows me my truths, and she smiles, mocking, like I should have known better.

Suddenly, hating her no longer feels like a defiance. It is an obligation.

Her soul is warm when I reach for it, her conscience light, her heart as fragile as a dove’s broken wing. There is no swarm of voices for me to push through. To claim means to destroy, and the ruins of one’s being can only be shattered once.

In her surrender, she is welcoming. She does not stop me, not even when her subconscious is enveloped in darkness. I conjure new meanings for her senses, formulate hallucinations of my own design, just for her, because I know she deserves to be haunted the same way she has haunted me. I let her chew her own fingernails off, make her bite so hard into her tongue that I know my first well spoken words will come out red and tasting of copper.

Still, she smiles. She smiles and it drives me mad. Patience be damned, I steal the breath from her lungs, I forbid her to scream, and as the window of my chamber turns from water to mist, I am struck by a force so tainting that my focus falters and I almost snap the girl’s neck.

There is a pair of eyes staring right at me, maybe even through me, and I am suddenly deprived of all consciousness or understanding. I have no control over my movements, as if I am also a statue, although, at the moment, I cannot comprehend why that thought came to me in the first place.

I feel lost, and uncertain, terrified of accidentally losing myself if I don’t keep a strong enough hold on my sanity.

The fear unnerves me.

I consider its weight, let it linger over me. Then I forget about it entirely.

I don’t know where I am.

And then-

And then; A sharp-edged, unexpected clarity.

I am consumed by the recollection of travels on a cart, when the sun is golden and its company short-lasting. I remember the scent of apples rotting amongst dead leaves, a calloused hand upon my own. It points on a map, and a faded voice lets me know we’re getting closer. Closer to what or whom, I do not know, but I lean into this figment of wander and carefully cradle each precious enigma.

The person goes silent, but their shoulder gently presses against mine; Somehow, their presence makes me feel -and there is no other word for it- it makes me feel enough.

The trip seems to lack a destination, the evening stretches on, but I feel like this is the only place I was ever meant to belong in. My clouded mind demands no explanation as to why, and all I know is that I want to stay, with my head laying on this stranger’s shoulder and our fingers intertwined, leaving everything that’s sinister and wrong behind but never truly disappearing. And though fear still follows us, we are not running away.

No, we are merely existing, content with our losses and courageously fighting the temptation to look back.

I realize that I will never regret leaving as much as not returning.

Consciousness begins to slip away once more, and I am carried into peaceful slumber by the lullaby of an autumn wind in my ears. My companion lets go of my hand and speaks words as bittersweet as a final goodbye.

“Sleep, Aggie. We’re almost there.”

Almost.

Aggie, we’re almost there.

Aggie.

Agatha.

My prison is no more.

In the place of its window stands a mirror, and for the first time, I face it from the other side.

There is no glorious victory to be displayed within the abrupt silence of the museum; reality won’t slow its course for me. Still, the universe seems to have somehow twisted. My breaths feel lighter. I need to maintain a steady step, for I am no longer a wisp of shadow from another’s torn past. I am permanent and irreparable. Ashen flesh, cindered bone.

I reach for the mirror, taking in the sound of rain, and I find the glass cold, a wall of ice under the mutilated fingers of my new form. My cage. Though it remains gilded, it has been sealed shut.

“Surely, you knew,” I whisper, for whatever fragment of her that is left behind to hear, “surely you won’t hate me for this.”

I lean into my reflection, bring our foreheads together. Though my eyes are closed, I can feel her staring at me, waiting in stillness. If only I had even the smallest semblance of shame or guilt to spare.

“I will give you a new reason to draw breath,” I say, thinking of her strange persistence to wander amongst dead things, “I will live through you, and I will not forget. Not of him, not of any of your sacrifices. This, at least, I owe you, as both compensation and punishment.”

I allow her a few more minutes in the light. Time is no longer an obstacle.

The museum is unusually quiet. Its blooms have withered away, like fall has come early, persistent and merciless. Summer has faded, and so has the warmth in the storm.

The girl is crying now, mournful of her life that has been stolen by a creature she hoped to be saved by. Her tears do not trouble me; they are but a sign of my new existence. My face is being caressed by mortal sorrow and finally, finally, every feature has a story that feels true.

I have her tired eyes, the flush of her cheeks, the paleness of her lips that hardly made her any less beautiful. I have seen an abundance of miseries, felt the rush of blood that leaves you red-skinned and lightheaded, I have kissed Death at the mouth. It might have been through wondrous hallucination, but I have come to know the tales of this face, and now it is my own as much as it used to be hers. No doubt or remorse should be wasted upon this.

I turn away from the mirror and there she stands, the traitorous hourglass in her hands. Even in another’s body, it seems that I still long for her praise.

The Madame studies me for a long moment, expectant, and I suddenly notice the ribbons that are still wrapped around my wrist. I make my way to her in furious, hurried steps, and let her take them back. I want nothing of hers. Not anymore.

The front door waits for me, so does the world, naïve in its balance, but before I even consider getting closer, my hands find the phonograph and the overly cherished record that plays on; With one clumsy movement, I hold it up and snap it in half against my knee. Well, I think, smug and -admittedly- quite stupid, this song died more gloriously than it had lived.

I dust my hands off, my palms scratched by the shattered pieces of what used to be music now littering the floors, my patience more intact than I have ever known it to be.

The Madame steps over the mess, as if to escort me to the door. It is only right, I suppose. She was my way in, and she shall be my way out.

She holds my hand as we walk across the narrow hallways, and I barely acknowledge the lace glove that she slips into my grasp. Like another ice window turned portal, the doorframe stands tall before me, and I tremble as I step past it.

Treasures await, all of them stolen. And now I know; it never mattered.

Part of me expected a challenge like the one in my dream of autumn travels and bruised apples. But the need to look back doesn’t come.

I let Agatha sleep.

There is no one I wish to say goodbye to.

It is a gruesome work of art like no other, this world of theirs.

Beautiful. Unchanging.

I was so used to an existence spent in decay that I never came to know life when humanity was whole and unscathed. Has there ever been a time when it was so?

I learned to call myself Aggie. I like the name, even when the sound of it awakens something torturous in me, an ache that makes me cry. Melancholy is woven into my very core, and yet I cannot feel it. How strange, how horrible, to only be able to mourn out of selfishness.

I have roamed the streets of a hundred cities; the road of my dream remains but a fragment of a reality left untouched. There are no apples on the trees. All that is left is wrinkled fruits that rot against your tongue, their taste so bitter that it rivals true poison. I cannot recall the last time I held a map in my hands. They have no place to lead you to, not anymore. It is better to try and forget that there is more of this purgatory, somewhere close by, waiting. Endlessness, as I understand it, is a detestable thing.

Is this why you gifted me an autumn, Agatha?

The question is agony, and like the torment of a thunderstorm, it strikes without mercy.

It leads me back to the museum, and I spend hours standing at the front door. Boarded up and silent as it is, it makes me feel as though it has never guarded the life that I know still exists behind these stone walls.

It had surprised me to see the sign. It hangs over my head now, creaking as the harsh wind ruthlessly beats it. The name, written in silver letters, has faded with time, rendering the existence of the sign useless. But from the moment I first read it, I hadn’t been able to forget. The words are a constellation, burning like the brightest of dawns in the sky of my mind.

She is mentioned first, but we are also there, right beside her, as it had always been.

Madame Skymourne’s museum for abandoned memories of the martyred.

I never knew her name.

I had never considered myself abandoned either, but it would be nonsensical of me to deny it. One can only own a memory for so long. We are either forgotten or left behind, and the second death is the one that hurts the most. It’s worse because we stay alive throughout it and, unlike the mortals that foolishly created us, we remember it all.

At first, I didn’t wish to perceive the human whose life I had permanently marked, nor did I care to; not until Agatha came looking, at least. All I knew was that a piece of history bound in bloodshed and burned down cities was an unwanted piece, for who could ever live remembering deaths as deplorably ugly as the ones I signified? Whose conscious, steady mind would accept to be exposed to the terrors of war, over and over again?

The truth of my being is a burden that cannot be easily passed on.

I am a man with a broken arm and a blood-stained hat, paralyzed from the waist down and watching as a little girl is taken away from the arms of her mother. I listen as she screams for her gods, as her pretty red hair is sloppily cut by a pair of rusty scissors that pokes and prods at her skull. I too, scream at the sky, when one of her eyes is ripped out of its socket and another blade is brought down to one of her ears. This is the symphony of war, and we all sing the same tune.

I am a man with the knowledge of my best friend sitting in her room back at the orphanage, the reminder of an engagement that she doesn’t want and the promise to take her away from this abyss still warm and beating like a drum in my mind.

I am a man that must return, even if it means losing myself in the same fire that brought our home to the ground. The heavens are set ablaze and painted red, and my sweet Agatha must already be waiting for me up there.

The steel of my pistol is cold in my grasp, even colder against my temple.

Sleep, Aggie, I think, hoping she hears me, We’re almost there.

“I am that memory,” I breathe into the autumn wind, my eyes filled with Agatha’s tears, “Everything that he has seen, I will continue to exist as.”

That is my purpose.

There once was a lost soldier, a weakened soul, a war struck boy guided solely by human sentiment. His poor heart ached for a girl that bloomed amongst the ruins, a girl that dared to search for him, and that instead found me.

Horrid, she called me, and still she took my hand.

For she had known, sooner than I had, that my power grows in viciousness, and it is both massacre and gentle downfall, a force that holds no mercy.

There was a girl that lived to die, and the ending that I offered her, this dreaded cure, bears a ruthless resemblance to love; She makes you hunt for Her salvation.

But unlike love, She does not lie.

Pretty things, eternal though they seem, still wither; it is in their deaths that I persist. I was not born in a kind world, and thus I have no kindness to spare. I am cursed, human-born, but I deserve to be everlasting. With a vulnerable soul to reign over, I owe no more apologies for it.

Because even when all beauty fades, I shall remain.

Harsh.

Untainted.

No longer forgotten.