bad stitches

[04.28.2023]

Crotalus dropped his hand and Ursur flinched. But he took his palm back, just shrugged and walked away, feather still between the cross-promise fingers of his other hand. “I’ll stitch it back in, later, if you’d like. That one’s up to you.” He smiled, soft, the bad sort of way. And he left him there, making a too good promise. Taking a very bad lie. 

Ursur stood still with wings slumped far down his sides, not quite waiting for something, as Crotalus stopped and grabbed the other feather from the ground and stuffed it into his belt. For safe keeping. Still flaunting that promise between those fingers. And Ursur watched him walk away, those feathers now either an ode or an offering in his name.

“Yeah, okay,” he said and it got very quiet, muffled under Crotalus grinning to himself and clicking those heels. Stupid pride. Stupid places.

“Of course you will,” he did turn around a few steps down, and Ursur watched again, why else. He met his eyes and just standing there, waiting, what else. Crotalus smiled, and in a reverse fall, sweeping that promised feather through the air, flicking of the wrist. And he kissed it so gentle as his excuses and his pardon, in that ode and offering. A melodrama. But in his other hand, he was now holding something else from his pocket that he must have taken out that he really somehow hadn’t noticed that he must have been reaching for out of focus that must have been there that was suddenly–something Ursur could not make out, but in the way his hand was poised, now spitting evident–

“n-NO!”

He did not move and he froze in the flame. There was no flight and there was no fight. And that tight-held promise burned against the lighter, slow and hot. Until he let go. Melting bioplastic wax falling and drifting. Leaving the inorganic smell of decomposition in ugly, ugly fire. Ursur stared blankly as his feather melted away so easy, far too late. Shut his eyes tight for a few seconds, and he opened them again to the smoldered and ashed but Crotalus gone. It was a mess, and there was no going back, not like that.

In the near distance was the click of the spring in his step, down some hall, but he’d come back. Just like every time he’d find out what he already knew, again again again. 

“That’s what you get, my dear!” Crotalus sang out, somewhere in that half-empty half-full complex, through all the concrete. “That’s what you get.”

Stitches in his chest where it hurt. But the adrenaline was there, now, on accident and impulse and against his will. The sudden, uncalled for smiling when no one was looking, staring at the long corridor ahead. Piecing out, weaving together for whatever feathers he had left. But mostly for the shaved plastics he had reclaimed. After losing little pieces, falling over nothing. Those times now sitting on the bathtub edge with shaking hands, biting down and stitching in. The feather was almost unrecognizable when he looked back down. Though, he smiled to the side, just like him, since for now his headache was gone, for a little while, at least. He tried not to but laughed to himself in that sideways way, just for him, and with very much nowhere to go. 

So he followed after–maybe it was for that last feather, maybe it was for the lighter.

[05.01.2023]

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I’VE STOKED THE FLAMES AND I LOVE IT.

I’m glad that the workload was quite light Saturday–I had the chance to write the first draft entirely while sitting at the microscope (when I should have been staring at the occasionally-fluorescent void).
I was intending to write something much more concise, but I love my boys and I apparently could not stop short.

I miss writing, and it’s finally coming back to me, or I’m coming back to it, and so I actually have a use for a blog once again. I’ll be compiling all M3 things here in one convenient rabbit hole place. I’ll also be uploading older, but recent, works.
Anyways, it’s time to bring my boys, and all the others that I rarely write or draw, to life.

I actually killed Crotalus (well, technically Ursur did) for quite a few literal years, and he was sure enough dead for those few years (well, except for when he haunted Ursur as a vivid hallucination). I’m not sure why I was suddenly so moved to revive him in the past two months, but the story is far better this way. And I like to draw Ursur crying. So it all works out.
Very curious to see if I’ll write any vignettes from his perspective.

And in another note, I’m hoping to figure out a better blog theme so images are larger.

Until then,
Koel out.