L E N A
reaching as I sink down into light

Rejection, acerbic and abrasive, resonated. The filly’s glacial stance was enough to cement the reeling conjecture of rebuff, spurning the beneficence of the swan’s candor. Oh, she knew this pain, recognized this old companion of the dust, ash and earth. I remember you, a ghostly, spider sensation across my nape, spinning lies in my ears and twisting abuse in my eyes. I had wished to never see you again. Is it my weakness now, to relive the phantoms of youth? Like a cool, cruel knife, it pierced, slashed, and severed with a chilling, glacial caress, incised and toiled with a forlorn, puncturing nuance. The nymph was au courant with the feeling, the reeling, the slicing, crushing sentiments of a world she hoped had been lost to her, in nefarious nightmares, arduous agonies and bestial banes that no longer existed. But the tremulous wake was upon her anew, horrors that lingered in her blood, heinously, ruthlessly, tangled with other childish wonders and juvenile torments, billowing and pervading the senses of her intrepid entity. A monstrous shadow, it plucked at warmth, snatched at tenderness, cackled at affability, drifting and drenching with the sordid calamity of presaged tortures, reliving the wretched portals of another time, another place. Scalding at her seams, the bitter, rancorous notions of worthlessness scraped, tore, ripped, bit, clawed at her lungs, at her heart, at her mind, until the anguish seemed nothing more than a discordant echo; the siren calls of prior threats, previous perils, preceding menaces. She remembered begging for forgiveness, recalled the fierce, blinding stings, the subsequent desolation, the carved misery laced and lanced into her fragmented carcass. And now – now incited torture clung to her armaments, the collection of fortitude, resilience and courage she’d gathered along the primrose path, ominously, sinisterly, promised to peel away the precious shards and slivers of her valiant core. It burned and scorned, melted and screeched, a strident, cacophonous tenor, singing petulant, resentful chords, provocations she couldn’t hope to match, couldn’t long to conceive. What have I done to earn your disdain again? What have I done to inspire your ire once more? Don’t tear me down, not when I’ve finally become strong.

But because she was formidable, mighty, resolute and potent, she didn’t quaver, shudder or tremble. She smiled.

She ignored the toiling foils, the seething tortures, the heathenous trappings screaming in her ears, drew from collapse of yesteryear and sculpted radiance in the aching, gnawing fractiousness. The smoking, stinging lacerations were discarded with an enlightened grin, the savage, ferocious tidings were shunned with a warm, honeyed gaze, and the puissance of her ethereal power flashed against the looming, affecting memories – they hovered, but didn’t touch, taint or stain the ethereal quality of her composure, her own version of divine vengeance. While her mind reeled, her portal remained pristine, immaculate, crown hardly tipping, tiara hardly slipping. The stalwart convictions beat swiftly at her heart, fluttered like a tender bird, elegantly incensed, fluidly postured in her benevolent form, returning the soft touch of the sovereign with a smooth bump to his spotted neck. And the filly, the child that stirred so many poignant, painful memories in her cranium, received the same beam, the same twinkle from her soul, bestowing an unaffected nuance while inwardly she struggled to maintain the laureled poise, come away little lamb, come away, out of the darkness and into the light. Perhaps this girl, this scion of snow and ice, despised her, loathed her, but Lena would never act so rashly, so heinously, upon one she didn’t know. Soothingly, she reached into her soul and pulled on the taffeta strings, postured a dulcet, swinging melody from her lips – no ill will, no strife, no acrimony for a youth that had bewildered her senses, consumed her mind with traces of old pain, old horror. “A pleasure, Snö.” But, the child would not get what she wanted – if she wished for Lena to flee, to rush away into the nocturnal trappings, then she had underestimated the vehemence of the sylph. Instead, she recalled the soft croons, the silken threads, mused in her same jovial disposition, stubbornly refusing to recoil from a child’s brazen, petulant impulses. “Would you like to play a game? We can get your father to join.” She laughed again, high and lilting, sweet and warm, and tried desperately to leave no traces of her sadness, of her layered heartache.