possum kingdom
Hers was an intense, unmistakable presence at the lakehouse: the smell of (white, white petals?) rampant wild flowers, an addict crawl of night-blooming jasmine, and the sixth sense that one has encroached upon a thing of particular exquisiteness, of rarity.
An aching testament to the human spirit and its struggle, the transmutation of it toward something greater, she had been ill-equipped as a small lost child coming up in Chicago's projects where oppressively tiny bedrooms hid a family's mistakes underneath a clot of heroin, a sicker version of love, and pillowcases that did nothing to blot out the screams when hush-hush depredations became the memories that give chase only at night. Having employed nothing but her wit, one natural talent, and pulchritude, she escalated from emancipation to rock star to killer to empress with a hunger and a consuming ambition that had not been rivaled since the vis major, the rise of Cleopatra VII.
She had the loneliest (or the fiercest), soul-bruised stare—whisper-soft veins of contusion blue twining around violent violet blooms, intensely doelike, a dominion of ridiculously thick lashes that spread their velvet black darkness over the haunting, unshakable white of her new baby's skin (untouched snow, born-again virgins.) Untouchable, unspeakable things about her (within her, deep down.) A malleable, adaptable quality that promised the parts of her that had been broken could never be broken again, though she was never softer than when she was torn asunder at the sleek, lace-licked thighs by a man who understood that sometimes faster meant harder, and that I can't means make me.
All the things she could call hers had been earned through blood, sweat, tears, and more blood. Always blood.
Often she moved through the grounds as she pleased, visiting its secret places, dainty seed pearls scattered to hardwood floors or within the shallows of grass as an older blackhaired man put her on his puppet strings—and she performed, thankful for the motion no matter how perverse. Said nothing of the devil cousin or his retreat consort, the irritating painter, or the hidden matron unless he did and avoided the shadows that seemed thicker than all the rest. Sylvie spent her days with dolls and pop-up picture books and crayons, and Lucian sometimes even did less than the usual baby would do. At the lakehouse, she was equal parts mother and lover though most of her hours were devotedly spent with Marius Vega in order to remind him just why he didn't need anything else but the wet warmth between her thighs, her lilting murmur in his ear.
(She even caught him once in the kitchen, pouring over another woman's casserole, and waited with the patience of a sociopath until he retired from the room wherein she dumped each dish into the trash from the refrigerator, just enough violence applied to crack glass. Suspended by a magnet on the refrigerator's front, she scrawled out in succinct letters upon a piece of stationary: Dear Shannon, Keep cooking for my man and I'll fucking kill your stupid ass. Love, Jill.)
There was a moment, just one, where she had seen Severin alone. Coming down one of the scattered hallways, freshly rumped from a quick hard screw with his master, she had been as soundless on bare feet as he was on his shoes until turning a corner had them almost colliding, blind to the approach of the other. But she'd slid back quick, too quick, a diaphanous muslin flutter on moist pale skin, red swollen mouth tender with shock and (what, what, Jill Ann?), unconsciously parted while her spine pressed itself to the wall. Immediate. He might have even caught a violet-tinged glimmer before the lashes swept low as a child's; self-protective? Guarded? Only she kept close to the wall for another step, two, until they could keep moving in the opposite direction wordlessly (and wisely so.)
A few hours later, though, she had received a phone call. While she'd been visibly reluctant to leave, she did: his scent on her skin, his man in the driver's seat next to her, and nothing to do but stare out the window in order to keep the levee from breaking.
