#I finally have meds again and am transitioning to less hectic work stuff so maybe I'll actually be able to put more in concerted effort

[msmacabre310]

I'm going to use this as proof of life (and proof I am actually working on things lol).

One is from my Encantober (Encantember? Look, time isn't real anymore, okay?) fic Simple Pleasures. The other is from a different (much longer) project that I'm trying to edit into a coherent enough shape to start posting hopefully before the end of January, called Children of Wax:

Simple Pleasures

He hovered in her doorway, stopping himself each time he almost crossed the threshold to come in. It had been so long since he had been in her room – not since she was a child, actually – and it had somehow escaped his notice that he had yet to step foot inside it since leaving the walls.

She lay buried in what he at first mistook for pillows, but closer inspection revealed heaps of stuffed animals, a massive mountain of things too soft to be crushed and too light to be burdensome. If they could cushion her head then so, too, could they cushion his awkward attempts at starting a conversation he didn't know how to have.

Children of Wax

His mother's desperation permeated the space, Bruno with no way to clear it. No rituals or superstitions frightened this spirit from their home, so dedicated was it in its purpose. He was certain his family faulted him for his failure to exorcise it.

He found Abuela within an arm's reach everywhere he looked. Cramped though they were in the Guzmáns’ smaller house, this was purposeful, an insistence to close the space between them. And physically, he never shied away. Bruno clung to her like dew to grass, always returning her grip when she reached for him. Some part of him hoped this was the problem of it all, that they could revive their failing plant if only he could make up for ten years' worth of those little touches that were the soil in which loving relationships thrived.

Yet no matter how often they hugged, or clasped hands, or ghosted kisses to one another's cheeks: the distance never softened. He'd hoped the space between them was only as thick as the walls that kept them apart all these years, but he found instead that it was even wider than the decade itself. The more he fought to close it, the more sense he got of its vast reality. It never grew wider, but rather informed him, once again, that his understanding was too small.

*****

Weeks passed as he tried to map out this trench, following the river to its mouth, searching for the first moment he began to pull apart from his mother. This was the wrong question; a reflection of his poor understanding of the distance he still felt between them even when wrapped in her arms. To truly know a void, one needed to understand what should fill out its space, but Bruno couldn’t even tell where the space was in the first place. Someone who had never seen a shadow before saw only holes. In his quest to fill them, Bruno searched for earth instead of light.

*****

The triplets had all slept in the nursery before their fifth birthday – Casita knew best that parents and children needed their own spaces – but his mother always let him sneak under her covers when nightmares kept him awake. He trusted her in totality, believing as all children did that the shield of her arms encircling him was the only protection he ever needed. But as he fought his way through this chasm, mind alight with that gold in her eyes, he realized: after he opened his own door, he never again troubled his mother's in the middle of the night.

*****

He fought the urge to fault her, her reasoning clear and, worst of all, heartbreaking. Yet it clung to him like a burn to skin. It needed to be peeled off in agonizing layers, freshened daily, to even attempt to create a scar.

Bruno's harm was through no lack of love. Instead, an abundance of it poured straight onto his skin until it bore through to bone. Its ceaseless heat stifled the generation of his own warmth, air wicking it away from the open wound.

The same closeness with which Abuela held her family was what seared its flesh. To nourish was to perish, his mother struggling always to disentangle the two. After all, for fifty years, she had proof flickering in her bedroom window that both coexisting as one was what kept them safe.

***(skipping approx ~a chapter between these sections)***

Most of his fiftieth birthday passed with relative ease. The burden of carrying a birthday all on his own had been lifted, and at last he was granted permission to divvy up a single day between three people, so none of them got too weighed down with the responsibility of doing it alone. Each time he ducked under a fluttering banner that read "¡FELIZ CUMPLEAÑOS A LOS TRILLIZOS!" the anxiety constricting his chest eased a little more. By now, nearly the entire family could tell how much their good-intentioned efforts to squeeze a decade into mere days had suffocated him without their meaning to. However, Bruno found that this understanding had not distributed itself equally amongst the Madrigals: some felt his anxiety so acutely that it might as well have been theirs in the first place, while others were aware of it peripherally at best.

'Others' being Abuela, that is.

"Bruno?" She still held his name fragile in her mouth, relearning the shape of it. "¿Por qué no vienes afuera conmigo? Your friends and family are looking for you."

He skimmed past the implication, said with no hint of irony whatsoever, that he had friends. And not just any friends, but ones who knew him so little that they had to look for him. Anyone who knew Bruno at all would have known they could find him here, huddled in a small alcove near his temporary room in the Guzmán house, neatly tucked behind a potted plant that Isabela and Mirabel had casually insisted on moving into the hallway a week after the Guzmáns had taken them in. It offered him the perfect vantage point from which to watch the world float by beneath him without being disturbed.

"I'm... okay," he fumbled. He pulled a leaf closer to his face, to conceal himself from the person who already knew he was there, but began to pick it apart instead. "I - I - I already got ten whole birthdays. In ten days! And it's – ha, it's their first birthday in a year! I think Julieta and Pepa deserve a little attention now, too."

"It's their first birthday with you in ten." A disapproving crease settled between her brows. "And they don't deserve any attention from you?"

"No!" He jolted up, barely saving the plant from toppling over. "I mean – yes! They – of course they deserve my attention!" Without the leaves to shield him, he and Abuela made eye contact in full force. He'd had no time to prepare for it, and he instinctively converted the brunt of it into a glancing blow by curling in on himself. This had nothing to do with Abuela and everything to do with Abuela: he flinched.

"Bruni- Bruno." She clipped the "-ito" off its end like trimmed feathers off the wings of a bird. Its absence robbed his name of all the tenderness and grace she had meant to add to it, making it drop out of her mouth with no way to cushion its fall. 

"Lo siento," he mumbled, averting his eyes from her wounded gaze and ducking past her. "Te veré fuera de Casita."

Worry that she once again was driving away her son froze Abuela’s hand in midair before she could catch his arm. “Bruno!”

He didn’t stop, but he did pause just long enough to turn toward her before he thought better of it and froze.

“I’m sorry for –” His eyes darted to the plant, the alcove, the spot where a branch had been trimmed away so he could see others better through the leaves. “I’ll make sure nobody sees next time.”

As is customary, light came of its own accord. For all his time trying to map their distance, he only caught glimpse of its outline when he turned his head away from her gaze. Abandoning her to the realization that she still had yet to fully understand her son, he wondered: when was the first time they had looked into one another's eyes and seen someone they were afraid to know there?

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Work in Progress Wednesday

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