💾 Archived View for anjune.lol › gmi › juliewardeni.gmi captured on 2023-07-10 at 13:33:47. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-01-29)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Some would give anything for a bed inside. They’d put out their own fires for hot chocolate and a blanket. Within, they sit shaking on bunkbeds, pace the bare corridors, chase green salads with rust-laced low-fat tap water. They'll skip off to bed hungry again, their tattered white nightgowns trailing showers of phantom fireflies. Too sharp and shrill for a symphony, on the verge of falling to pieces.
The warden, though, is solid─a big woman with a butcher's face, leather-clad. She stands in the doorframe, drops my luggage onto the curb, and that is that.
“But...”, I squeak and hate my voice so much I shut up.
(Clack, Clack, nags the sliding door; we're in the way.)
“But nothing, dear. Look.”
Her heavy hand reaches back into the murk within, pulls into the foreground one scrawny wisp of a girl. Gingerly she tries to hide behind the bigger woman─but each beat of her flutterbird-heart pushes her light outward, sending faint warden-shadows dancing on the pavement. I wonder if they ever use her as a battery.
“Look,” repeats the warden. “This is Julie. Thin you may be, but do you make music?” And she manhandles the girl half out the door and, with an arm proud and strong, twirls her like a spinning top. Julie's spindly limbs sing in the wind she makes!
I feel clumsy. I do not shine in my darkness, nor do I sing.
“That's right. So what were you thinking, waltzing in here?”
Julie looks like she's about to throw up. I wave at her, with a wink and never too broken nor too sensible for a joke. Her lips crack into the flicker of a smile, shy and more than a little embarrassed. It almost reaches her eyes.