Re: Acta est fabula, plaudite!
The teeth were are real as the aurulent ribbon on the wantonly displayed pale skin of her wrist. Don't look there, that was what the quiet country seaside village said. Don't look at hems or ankles, at wrists or necklines, and the silly girl had believed them once. But the rules were all pretense, and the withered girl in the black knew that now. Oh, but, no. She wasn't withered now. Dead, she wouldn't want the apple picker thinking the skin beneath her eyes sunken in and only sockets left behind. She was in the coffin, but she'd been dead for years and years, and she wouldn't be in the box forever. There would be time for the haberdasher and bespoke dressmaker to open their shops for her, and now she would wear yellow ribbons boldly around her bare waist, and no one would judge her with eyes gone rheumy with hypocrisy.
Dead wasn't interested in staying in her box, silly boy.
His feet tangled, and he ran, the apple thief. In the pew, the decaying girl laughed and laughed, and no one told her to shush. The sardines, they were all faceless mourners, and the only people who had stood at her grave were quiet and somber, the stone-faced figures in the front row who could have been dead themselves for all they moved or wailed or lamented. But the girl, she laughed, and then she sighed with a child's new boredom as she slumped back against the pew.
Silly, apple picker. She wanted to feast, and you were just a morsel. She waved her defiantly bare fingers at the church door and the wavy boy, that yellow fluttering at her wrist, and the dream ended in a cloud of gravedust.