Promenade; Elevator
One of many, the concubine's bare feet pressed into the wood of the deck, her toes in search of awakening. She had arrived in a very different guise, and every instinct told her to turn and flee. But instinct only lasted a moment, replaced by something deeper that clung to her bones and sucked at the meat and marrow that was her being. She looked down, unsurprised to find herself garbed in sin. She knew that she should feel shame. She knew that heat should burn her cheeks and send rivulets of degradation down the sides of her pale, exposed neck. But she felt only one thing, and that one thing was wrong.
Her hair was onyx, and it moved on the sea breeze like something with obscenely longboned fingers. Her smooth and silken hair reached out and grabbed passersby, the work of the devils and demons that she belonged to and pleasured. She was one of many, and she took a step forward on cold feet that were inked with whorls and decorations made with thin needles tipped with indigo and coal. She was alabaster skin, cool to the touch and marble that gave and curved and promised disgusting things. The white of her shift peeked from beneath black at one shoulder, and she did nothing to tuck it beneath the gauzy black that worshiped at her bare toes. She was a dip of cleavage, a thing made for sin and relegated to that dark harem that smelled of charred flesh and human decay.
Her lashes were soot and ash, long and overdefined, and her lips were pout puckered. She was made this way, created this way from rivers of forgetting and woe and lamentation. All these things were inherent to who she was in the waking world, and they belonged to her here. She looked down at her clothing with the lingering ghost of dread, and she smoothed her pale and deathly hands over the bones that contained the ache beneath that gauze of black. Transparent nearly, and pale flesh and provocativeness beneath. It was her last attempt at fighting, that splay and press of fingers at her breastbone.
Her inhibition fled, carried away by the deadman's ferry, and she continued forward and wished for the concerns that filled her still lungs with breath and gifted her with humanity. Yet her chest remained unmoving, and she entered the elevator in search of quickening. The serpentine strands atop her head reached for the open elevator doors, beckoning and promising with a hiss and a whisper.
"Look."
"Are not we fit for God?"
"Are not we fit for you?"
"Allow us."
Black eyes wide and whiteless, the sylphlike concubine pressed fingers to the elevator's buttons. Home was down, where she had been forged. This lofty cleanliness was not for her kind.