They/she, 30, lazy writer. Here's to sigils in coffee creamer and half read books about magic. I write short stories about subverting destiny and being funnier than the bad guy.
Prompt: “How are they?” – “The same as before.” He looked up at the woman approaching him. “Their soulmate died, my Lady. They may never make a full recovery.”
*****
Lissy dies when they’re in the middle of a strategy meeting. They’re focused, desperate, because they know that somewhere within their troops (she hadn’t told them where, probably so they couldn’t pull them back) was their love, their life.
Their soulmate.
They’re pushing a figure representing a troop forwards when it happens.
Pain lights in their midsection, hot and furious like someone had placed the sun in their gut. They’re screaming, clawing at themselves as sensation washes away to black.
In the last moment before they fade, they know Lissy is dead.
OW
You are born with the name of your enemy on one wrist and the name of your soulmate on the other. When you meet them for the first time, the name appears. They’re both the same person.
It’s a destiny of self-destruction printed out across Reva’s wrists, one she’s known since she was a kid even without the physical evidence. She tries to be better, tries to clean up her act, tries to fall in love with all those little things that good southern girls ought to fall in love with.
Instead, Reva spends her childhood on the roof of her mother’s house, boots slipping across narrow wooden beams as she climbs down to where her friends are waiting. She knows the way her heart beats when her foot slips intimately–she never replaces the shaky rung in the ladder. She loves the adrenaline and the fear and the hope that this time, this time things are going to be okay.
Reva wanders out of class and across fields in her Sunday best, not caring about the way the pollen stains the white. She finds girls with mascara smudges under their eyes and some boys with eyeliner embedded in their lashes and she teaches them about the growing seasons and the hole in the fence surrounding the quarry.
She climbs onto the back of a motorcycle when she’s sixteen and isn’t seen for seven months. Her mother doesn’t report her missing and it’s not special, really, when she comes back.
She’s loud and wild and if this were any other story, a misunderstood boy would be in love with her. Maybe her hair would be dyed pink instead of brown, maybe she’d blow bubbles instead of smoke, maybe she’d have thoughtful things to say that’d make someone’s life not seem so shitty.
But this isn’t that type of story. No one’s misunderstood when there’s nothing to understand and she’s never gone out of her way to be deep or thoughtful or meaningful. She doesn’t like those boys who sit behind her and stare at her bra straps and she certainly doesn’t like those boys her mama says will make a good husband one day.
It’s a joke, talk of a good husband. See, she’s got destruction in every line of her body, neck to collarbone to the planes of her stomach. Plenty of people whisper about the plagues that’ll appear on her wrist and that’s how, even before the names appear, Reva knows.
What Reva loves is going to kill her and there’s not much to do about that.