61. Used to Be

Used to Be

Rose

My pater is in his cups already and coins leftover from my coemptio cover the table. I realize now what a fortune Tristan gave him. How much was for me and how much was for silence?

He needn’t have bothered. Bottles of full strength sapa litter the floor, their thin metallic coating making it look like our domus is full of fallen stars. Maybe it is. Pater’s dreams, my mater’s life, my future.

“Where’s Daisy?” I demand, not able to muster the usual respect. What could he do to me, now that it’s all been done?

“Ha,” Pater scoffs. “She’s filling in for you, you ungrateful meretrix !”

I shove past him, knowing if my nose wasn’t shattered he’d smell like sour wine and sweat. Perhaps the scent of wood would temper it, showing he’d actually worked this clipse. When I reach the room where my sister and I grew in each other’s hearts, it’s empty. Something shifts in me, my bones grinding, ribs rearranging.

“Where’s Daisy?” I demand, shaking him. His head lolls on his broad shoulders and he glares at me.

“That husband of yours came for the meat he paid for,” he scoffs. “We owed him a wife and he didn’t have a wife.”

The shifting turns to quakes, and the world tilts beneath me. The suns shatter into a million shards, like the glasses Tristan shattered at my feet. Neptune’s tides rise from the Maero to drown and deafen every nerve inside of me.

“Tristan came for her?” I whisper.

“That disrespectful chit didn’t even come himself,” Pater says, as if he even remembers.

I’m already running, my feet splitting and bleeding on the cobblestones as I race back to the Domus Aurea, back to the garbage chute I’d barely survived.

Praying. Crying. Pleading.

“He came for the meat he paid for,” Pater said. Meat.

Goats.

Virgins, whores, or corpses.

That’s all we are to Tristan, after everything.

My side aches, my feet bleed, but now that I’m here I can’t look. I pace blindly, flies swarming me.

Finally, I gather the courage to see what I already know is there.

And I scream.

I don’t know how no one hears me. I scream with every fiber of my soul as I heave my beautiful, kind, dead sister from the trash chute.

I scream as I drag her to the Maero to wipe the trash and the fluid and the blood from her golden hair and skin.

I scream for the hours it takes to drag her body to the edge of town, where I find an abandoned domus with a lake, and dig with my bare hands until my nails shatter and my fingertips bleed.

I scream over her grave until my throat is so ragged that nothing comes out.

And in the end, all that’s left are the jagged pieces of who I used to be.