Re: Le Memory Emporium
The calibration of this body from her own was faint displacement of the second hand on a clock, an imprecision of a second's tick out of tock. It was gearwork that wound in ways she didn't, she thumbed the callous that ran across the pads of her fingers and did even hum in the ways she sang, a cacophony of silence and an absence of echoes when she looked inside for the thrushing beat of her own pulse.
She wanted to forget everything. She wanted herself and nothing that came in bottles that promised Lethe's tears and baptismal innocence, a blank page to bleed the ink across. She would ruin it anyway. She always had.
She rolled one hip against the counter and she laughed broken derision in his face, unsubtle sweet on her breath. "It's mine tonight," but perhaps her mind only lived inside the cage of her own bones, her own breath? Perhaps her mind without it would dissipate like foam on the surface of the sea?
The rhetoric of renewal was not hers. Sacrifice she'd sketched out on floorboards with sand and she'd read every summoning she could find in books before her time. She knew blood and she knew power, and the knife tacky with tape but gleaming rolled into the bite of her palm. Blood dripped viscous and bright on the counter.