Work Text:
Knees scraped by the rough, dirty ground, she crawls under a half-collapsed bookshelf, the dark and rotting wood upheld only by a desk, and she feels for paper that will not fall apart at the brush of her fingertips. Her hands sink through covers devoured by bugs; damp pages crumble under her touch. Her forehead hits the table. She stills, waits for the structure to collapse over her, then returns to her quest when it does not. Later, a bruise—more purple than her long washed-out dress—will bloom on her skin, though she knows no pain, only this ringing thump, the shock echoing in her ears, the passing thought that her skull must, certainly, be harder than any of the wooden furniture haunting the place, their slow decay contrasting with the ever-solid walls, the silence and heaviness of implacable stone.
She grasps manuscripts not yet destroyed by time, holding together through years of neglect, and deposits them behind her, rummaging through loose pages and torn scrolls to salvage what remains. When she crawls back out, she dusts her dress as well as she can and checks her shortened hair for cobwebs, fingers running quickly through curls before she takes the few books gathered during her morning search. In place of the door stands empty space, all the doors in the courtyard, left to molder against the wall. In the beginning, she wondered if they had been torn from their hinges already, or if he had been the one to throw them outside. She does not wonder anymore.
She walks through deserted rooms, among ruins of tables and shelves, rubble from the ceiling scattered on the floor. On her left, the old entrance, unused since the beams rotted and the roof collapsed. He enters and leaves through the broken windows now, and so does she when she goes to the courtyard. There are no more glass shards in the window frames; he removed them all after the night she held one in her fist, warm blood dripping down her forearm, fingers numb, Philomela heady and alive for the first time since the first shedding of blood—there have been many since then, she counts the months through the relief of waking to dark stains in her underwear, but none like those first twin violations, slash of the knife through clothes and tongue.
Her room is neither the biggest nor the one that had seen most use. It is tucked in the eastern corner of the building, between larger rooms, but it is the one she lingers in the most. It is the only place she bothers removing the rubble and dust from. Every afternoon, she cleans the floor as well as she can, knowing he might trample the stones with his dirtied boots that very evening.
High on the wall are two arched windows, through which only the sun can enter, dappling the floor with light, shining over her desk, that old and low table pushed against the corner farthest from the entrance, papers scattered all over it and under it as well, a heap of impenetrable knowledge at which he does not spare a glance—what does he care how she busies herself when he is away, she in rooms full of books written in an unknown language, in a long-abandoned library falling to ruins, in a forest stretching to the horizon and further, in a country foreign to her.
She places her finds on the table and sits cross-legged on the floor in front of it, thumbing through a first manuscript. Letters dance on the page, their shapes familiar after weeks of staring at them until her vision blurs or he interrupts her, words like motives, her gaze following their outline fluidly but unable to discern their meaning. There are hours to waste, every day, and they are better spent staring at the undecipherable than drowning in sorrow.
What she knows: the exact arrangement of the library, the sound of his boots on the grass, the two conifers and the few bushes in the courtyard, the sound of his boots on the floor, the wall encircling the courtyard and the heavy, locked door opening to the forest, how he throws clothes on the floor carelessly but keeps his blades away from her, the empty sky, his knife, the rare cries of lone birds, his face, how the space between her sister and herself seems infinite, his voice, her loneliness. His language, she does not know, though she is unveiling it piece by piece; how it sounds in his mouth when he talks to himself, what it looks like on paper, swirls of ink pretty in their meaninglessness, how the words are longer than in hers though he speaks them rough and fast, how there are enough characters in each written word for its system to be an alphabet rather than a syllabary, how some motives repeat so often they ought to be the most used sounds but she cannot guess which is what, how at least two sounds that slip out of his throat are some she had never heard before.
Walled in silence, she turns to paper. She tears pages full of unreachable text from their binding. She puts them down on the floor carefully, a gesture belying her frustration. The covers, stiff and thick, she arranges together to add to her work; manuscript covers stuck together with glue improvised out of pine resin, unfolding into a larger canvas—mismatched shades from different books, some bleached by the sun, all of them old yet solid. A background to her fresco.
Back to the pages and scrolls, the endless disappointment of brushing against the surface of language and being met with emptiness, the blank stare of a stranger. Words remain indomitable. To face them, she has only her hands, her teeth. She selects a page with a harmonious disposition of paragraphs, and she rips it. She shapes words into pictures, meticulously. She disregards attempt after attempt, abandons them on the floor to be swept away later. Patterns emerge; she makes meaning out of the unknown. The flower crown she wore at the wedding, clumsily assembled. A ship. At times, her fingers fumble and she brings the paper to her silenced mouth, tears at it with her incisors. The sword. Paper rips too far, and images stay shapeless. A page meets her with stubborn refusal to bend to her will; she tries again. There is a message to form.
Her hands call, Sister.
When her fingers begin to cramp, she steps back from maker to observer. She eats dried fruits she does not know the name of. There are not many provisions left. He will come back soon, with food and water, with the voice and hands of one who knows power. Tonight, perhaps.
For now, she follows a line on the manuscript with her index, stares at words until she has their letters memorized and knows she can project them on the inside of her eyelids, on the ceiling, on his face, seeing nothing but the words, becoming the words, slipping their foreign shape on and turning into something unpredictable, something new.