the music and medicine you needed for comforting
Oh comely, I will be with you when you lose your breath,
Chasing the only meaningful memory you thought you had left.
With some pretty, bright and bubbly terrible scene
That was doing her thing on your chest
But oh comely,
It isn't as pretty as you'd like to guess
In your memory, you're drunk on your autonomy
It doesn't mean anything at all
--
Mona Dahl was certainly an odd person to turn to for comfort. She'd tried wrapping herself in a sheet like some damask screen goddess, but really, she was just a leggy kid. Mona was just barely long enough in the limb and arched enough in the hip that the sight of her, lipsticked and smoking on the edge of Aden Brande's bed, made a sight by which someone watching overhead (say hello to the angels) could tilt their head thoughtfully, squinch up their brow, evaluate her, evaluate him, calculate their respective ages and say well, I guess it's okay.
The ghostwhite curtains of the bedroom were drawn, loosely, shut; the colorless winter sky over the park outside just barely gave the impression of sunset. It was not yet dark enough, not yet late enough for Brande's eyes to be seen luminescing, for the light to throw raw, jagged shadows among the sinews of his body, to vitalize that Sefirot tattoo into something that looked less like cool ink and more like ten gazing devil's eyes strung among the branches of a tree.
All of your friends are all letting you blow
Bristling and ugly, bursting with fruits falling out from the holes
Of some pretty, bright, and bubbly friend
You could need to say comforting things in your ear
But oh, comely,
There isn't such one friend that you could find here
Eurydice wasn't anywhere around, and Brande wasn't quite sure where she was. It was only the most wholly appropriate ending, of course, that the first sign of her developing the autonomy he desired would be for her to leave.
He smoked with Mona, who couldn't help staring at him, the way the Christ artifact in the church commands attention, even when you know it's just a piece of plaster. Gilt-tongued god with the opiated tongue; she liked the way it stung, liked the saffron scent of his breath.
"I knew you'd wanna see me again, Daddy-O," says Mona. She hadn't, should the lord be accounting, been sure at all. In fact, she'd been terrified, but Mona Dahl was nothing if not a great pretender (to another girl's throne?)
The low purr the alchemist made might have been a noise of agreement, of fatigue, of contentment, of distraction, or all of the above, as if an offering whispered by many voices.
Say what you want to say
Hang for your hollow ways
Moving your mouth to pull out
All your miracles aimed for me.
"Are you one of those guys who just fucks when he's in a bad mood?" Mona wanted to know. The way she asked, you'd think she did this a whole lot. Yeah, she was good at this, Brande reflected as he often did regarding her, glancing her way briefly when she said the dirty word, wetly. She wanted him to do it again, and he knew she did, and she knew he knew, and yet neither of them moved, yet.
"Sometimes," said Brande, and the way he smiled at her was loose, thoughtless, like a coal guttering out in a brazier. Lonesome.
She was still looking at him like that, and he shifted, in place, for the moment distinctly unsettled by his own impulse, by the queer little yawning ache, leaden empty, that opened up in his breastbone, the way it stung suddenly how blackhaired Mona's scent swam up into the back of his lungs.
"C'mere," he told her, hoarsely, and it was unlike him to ask.
--
Thunderous sparks from the dark of the stadiums,
The music and medicine you needed for comforting
So make all your fat fleshy fingers to moving,
And pluck all your silly strings, bend all your notes for me.
Soft, silly music is meaningful magical,
The movements were beautiful, all in your ovaries
All of them milking with green fleshy flowers,
While powerful pistons were sugary sweet machines
Smelling of semen all under the garden
Was all you were needing
When you still believed in me
