#hesterbeck

[dsbarrick]

Forgot this was on the way! The epic is complete #mailday #harrowcounty #horror #horrorcomics #hardcover #libraryedition @cullenbunn @mistertylercrook #hesterbeck @darkhorsecomics #comics https://www.instagram.com/p/B4ikPRUnFN3/?igshid=ul7gzch8moki

[citysicker-blog1]

silence so loud it deafens .

ABSTRACT PROMPTS.  //  accepting !

AND THE EARTH SAYS :  dead girl, corpse girl, what will it take for you to give up ?

the earth crawls in your ears, catches in your nose. oh, you know this. being submerged, breathing in cotton or water or dirt. sharp desperation  /  the sharp scent of dirt in the air. you know. you knew. trembling like tassels in your empty house, disconsolate on your bedsheets. that was yours. this is another girl’s prison.

all you know now is this. YOU ARE ALIVE. somehow, unbreathing  /  unbeating, here beneath the earth. pebbles press against your open eyes. something shifts, and then you are aware of everything shifting, everythingeverything, things that need to breathe and things that don’t.

THE EARTH SAYS :  make me a god of your hands and knees and pray until you forget your name. you forget your name, here  /  beneath the soil of harrow, in your mother’s arms, where the ugly thing in your chest turns to soil and seeps out between your ribs. if you close your eyes you can almost pretend you don’t see every line of your mother’s face, cheek to cheek. 

you forget you forget you for  /  get. and the gut-horror, her rotting eyes in unfathomable hollows. HESTER BECK. HESTERBECK. HESTERHESTER. your mother said kammi and you looked at yourself in the mirror with your little brows furrowed, over her shoulder where your father stood, and no one beside him.

harrowed to your bones, you claw  /  but the worms don’t give. they crawl in your mouth, in your ears and noise, squirm against your open eyes. claw but the soil don’t give, claw but if no one hears your nails against stones are you really clawing ?  your hands not your hands, your eyes not your eyes, all of you and nothing left to give.

YOUR MOTHER IS HERE AND SHE DOESN’T HEAR YOU EITHER. your hand tender on her shriveled cheek, your cracked nails against her jawbone. if you tore her apart, like this, would you find the heart of her ?  the heart of yourself ?

YOU WANTED PROOF AND YOU GOT IT. you find yourself in an embrace you cannot shake, as though her arms have grown like ribs around you. your mother’s hand in yours, her peeling nails, the glass-sharp knuckles. and are you happy ?  are you any less alone ?  are you not in the dark, gagging on worms, cockroaches, woodlice ?  on your own heartbeat ?

i.   close your eyes and try to imagine a world where there is light, where the sun glitters off every glass panel above you, where you hold the champagne glass to the chandelier light, watching it reflect off your city. the splash of sun in puddles in the gutters, oil in rainbows on the streets, your eyes in the mirror.

ii.   wear your dresses low, wrap your furs around your arms so they won’t stifle your throat. keep your chin up. keep your eyes  /  cold, like shards of pale ice.

iii.   and somewhere above you, a sister, your image, a girl who wears emmy not like oversized mink but as a mark of pride. i am a girl, she wants to tell you, just a girl, stronger than anything you have ever imagined. somewhere above you the girl calls a corpse from the mud and drags you into it. you are screaming, pleading, emmyemmyemmy. you have known terror like this before but that doesn’t make it any easier.

you are untouchable, says the girl in the mirror. you are the most powerful thing alive. girl  /  witch. girl  /  corpse. does it matter which ?

THE EARTH SAYS :  speak and i will silence you. breathe  /  and i will silence you. you have been dead since you woke to find your mother  /  holding a pillow to your mouth and nose. and is this mother, her fingers in yours, her reeking breath, not another form  /  of betrayal ?  the woman who pulled you down into the mud, whose cold hands took your arms and swept a terror you have never known through the most secret parts of you. forget breathing  /  forget a world where you could see the sun  /  forget, despite sleeping on top of your covers long into autumn, being warm.

this, the woman who held your hands in dreams, who you could almost pretend had guided you through your magic when you had no one to hold onto. oh, what is a mother, but someone who wants to kill you ?  what is a mother but a pyre ?  someone who wants to hold you down and drown you ?  you spend eighteen years imagining a mother you only see in dreams and when you meet her, the stench of her rotting, nothing of the long-haired woman in white, you know why you would rather take her name than your own.

oh, you could claw your way into the light, but the light is just as scary. you cannot imagine a world where you are not this afraid, where you are not choking on it. the silence  /  the shuffling of worms.

you open your mouth, your eyes, in the dark.